Do you think the wife and I drink much mate?

That's not even our peak. A few weeks ago we probably had two or three more bags.

2 year anniversary

A few days ago was my 2 year anniversary of arriving in Buenos Aires. Crazy.

3:10 to Yuma review

The wife and I watched 3:10 to Yuma tonight. Rarely does a movie build me up as much and then leave me feeling so unsatisfied. Despite being a bit over 2 hours, the movie flashed by quickly. It starts a little slow but after that it does a good job hitting you with suspense every few minutes. It doesn't overdo it, there's just enough action.

With all that said, you'd think I would agree with the very high 88% rating that the film received on Rotten Tomatoes. But...I don't. If you pushed me into making a binary decision, I guess I'd give it a thumbsup, I guess...but just barely. The story was just too surreal. This is a movie about real life! It turns on the moral dimension of one of the main characters...you have to give me something, anything to make me believe! I want to believe! But I couldn't. I didn't feel it when the scene happened, I just sat there saying, "that's so Hollywood." And analyzing the movie later, I see where the filmmakers tried to stick things in to make us believe it was possible. But not only did I viscerally reject it, intellectually I still think they didn't make their case.

I did spend a few minutes wondering if that was Gretchen Mol in the movie, and finally decided that if the actress wasn't Gretchen Mol 10 years after Rounders, it looked exactly like she would look.

How I Spent My Afternoon

Our house is extremely well-shaded. This is great in summer, but not so great in winter. Our house is cool year-round, which means that as we head into autumn it gets cold inside. So I wrapped myself in a blanket and headed to the sun.

And of course, you can tell why I came inside. Even wrapped in a blanket, it was kinda chilly once the shade crept up upon me. Even the mate stopped keeping me warm enough.




It was a fabulous afternoon; very peaceful. Reading about MBS/CDO/CDS for the CFA could not have happened in a better environment. Most of it isn't new to me, from reading stuff in the news over the past year, but it's still interesting. While reading, it re-occurred to me that most of the pundits' opinions that I read about the SEC's Goldman Sachs case is pretty puerile.

A couple other notes:

* It's amazing how many bugs there are. Within 5 minutes I had mosquitos, flies, locusts, spiders etc. It seemed to go away after a bit, but maybe I just got used to it.

* Not many people pass by, but since I am hidden inside my hedges it's hard not to overhear conversations. I heard a mother yelling at her kid as they walked down my street and an older married couple discussing their kid rather frankly.

* I was pretty immersed in my reading, but at one point I looked up and there was a cat about 10 yard from me in full-on hunting mode. Since there was nothing else around, he was clearly stalking me. It was mildly unnerving.

Writing up thoughts on an entrepreneurial failure

Applying for the VC analyst job has been bringing back memories of my own little startup: FSBOAustinTX.com. USV's operating thesis is that the internet is a paradigm changer in every facet of life. I agree. Take real estate, for example: as Americans -- and then the world -- fully migrate to the internet, real estate agents will probably become an endangered species. That was my epiphany in 2004 while doing real estate school online. So I decided to try and make it happen.

My landlord in Austin was from Madison, WI, and he suggested that we start an Austin version of fsbomadison.com. And so was born FSBOAustinTX.com. fsboMadison is a site that had started to sell the owner's house for sale by owner (FSBO) and then just kept growing organically because it had traffic, cost $200 and could save buyers and sellers thousands. It made six figures on Madison alone with a website that even its developer was ashamed of (he couldn't convince the owners to upgrade). The owners liked the idea of people using their idea, and we figured Austin was as similar to Madison as possible: state capitol, university town, crunchy liberals, high internet usage, etc. Downside was that some nationwide fsbo sites had started and there was already an attempt at a local FSBO site.

After we did a little bit of research, we weren't too concerned about the competition. The nationwide sites were non-starters who had no local presence and would never get the search engine traffic. The local site was non impressive.

We knew we'd have a problem with unrealistic prices. For reasons I do not understand, most FSBO "sellers" set the price way above market value. Here's an example of madeup but realistic numbers: the Smiths have a $200,000 house, which they try to sell FSBO at $220,000. After a couple months where it doesn't sell (duh!), they put it on the market for $205,000, and it eventually sells for $200,000. The owner and seller in this case each pay $6000 (3%) to real estate agents, making the effective house price 206,000, but the seller receives only 194,000. So they tried to sell FSBO at $26k more than they would actually take, when they might have been able to sell the house for $205k, made 11k more while the buyer would have paid $1k less. Argh...so irrational!

That is the background, here is my quick list of successes and failures.

Successes:

- Search engine rankings in competitive keywords. I taught myself search engine optimization and got the site into the first page of 'austin real estate' within 6 months, while ranking 1st in the niche keyword terms in the meantime. The frustrating part of this is that my business partner did not value this at all. I, on the other hand, view search engine rankings as absolutely vital for a business like this.

- The signs. One of the big reasons people still pay money to real estate agents is a recognizable sign. We made big, recognizable awesome signs and put them in yards. Getting brand recognition through your signs is almost as important as being able to get good search engine traffic.

-Launching. Hey, we dealt with our developer and got the sucker built. We pulled off some press (if I recall correctly), and at one point had a pretty full site in terms of listings. If it worked, it was very scaleable and we kept costs very low.

- A real estate agent tried to get us shut down for violating the law. He lost. My research kept us on 100% safe legal ground.

Failures:

- Not waiting enough time. In truth, this happened largely for personal reasons, because I broke up with the girl I was dating and wanted to get out of Austin. However, the next two reasons are why I didn't it wasn't just the girl...

- Team. Who you work with really matters. Executing poorly will ruin even the best strategy. As indicated above, my biz partner and I just didn't agree on some things that I never would have foreseen. Some of this was a fault of planning, certainly. But the team has to really be in synch in order to make it worth it.

- Never solved the overpricing problem. I still haven't really: I think the answer is just to establish the brand name, let the signs establish themselves, get some press and eventually let word of mouth take over. It is tough though, because in the beginning if homebuyers come to the site and see overpriced (and thus eventually stale) listings, they won't return. This is why it is so important to be hyper-local, with someone managing the signs and making sure the listings don't become stale in the local metro area.

- We were overanxious. To get listings on the site, we found existing FSBO sellers and let them list for free. But we still kept the list price of $200 on the site. That was a big mistake: we should have gambled on getting more users and more listings by offering it for free. Now, we got some advice from folks doing similar sites that this was the way to go, but I think we should have established the site as a big community resource and then started charging. After all, if we could have proved the site worked in getting a house in front of prospective buyers, $200 would be totally reasonable.

--------------------------------

Today FSBOAustinTX.com has zero listings. The site isn't even as good as when I was doing it, and it is 5 or 6 years later. If I go to Texas for an MBA (my planned safe school), I might try and buy the site and give it another go.

Would I ever do this idea again? As I indicated above, yes. I still think the basic idea has merit. While in some ways Craigslist fills this niche, it isn't local enough. I still think that someone could do this nationwide, but with hyper-local sites in each market. And in fact, I think that eventually something like this will happen, but it might be a long time.

It was fun trying to launch and build something. I'll probably do it again in my life, although temperamentally I am probably more built to be a venture capitalist: I would much prefer to take small company risks in a bunch of different companies (although the Dot Com bubble burst shows that there is always systemic risk) than take one big massive company risk that is a startup.

Applying for a VC analyst job

So I applied to for the analyst role at Union Square Ventures, an NYC venture fund made famous by A VC. It's been three days since they posted it, and already over 400 applications have come in for the two jobs combined. It's so crazy because 4 years ago when they did this only 30 people or so applied. If anything highlights how much the web has changed in those 4 years, this would be one of them. I'm assuming that most are not serious applications, but I'm still kicking myself for not applying when I read the post 4 years ago -- I just didn't want to go to New York. Now, moving to Manhattan for a couple of years sounds fun.

Even though it was like throwing a Hail Mary, I think it was a rewarding process. It forced me to think about what they want, what I want, where I'm going. I spent hours thinking about my application, which I think I'll be able to recycle into my business school applications assuming I don't get the job. Still I'm not going to give up hope yet, as I think I would be a good fit. They want someone who can do the due diligence, research and financial analysis required, but also someone who gets their investment theses and can provoke good discussions and add value to the decision making process.

I think my letter made a pretty good case that I can do that. Assuming that they read it, because they will probably filter a good percent of applicants based on the initial screen they get from LinkedIn (USV asked for LinkedIn profile and cover letter showing your web presence) that just shows your education and work experience. I guess we'll see how respected Rice is in the Northeast! Hmm, maybe I should be worried...

Might have to start on my (oft-discussed, much-neglected) novel again

I ended up reading Crichton's _Disclosure_ in about a 4 hour period and it almost makes me want to devote my life to being a novelist. Why? Because I'm shocked by how many discussions that book sparked. So many conversations and scenarios come nearly word-for-word from that book. Discussions from the teenage roundtable I did for the News Journal back in the day to Criminal Law in law school. As a novel, it was incredibly influential on pop culture. Reading it made me feel like I was surrounded by these sexual harassment discussions all over again.

The book is no literature masterpiece. But it consistently trickled down time-and-time again into pop culture discussions. Now that's impact.