Suleman Ali

In Life, STUFF HAPPENS.  An incredible number of people preclude some awesome possibilities simply by not believing.  Smart people.  Confident, smart people.

In life, STUFF HAPPENS!  You get the brilliant, hot girl.  You get into Princeton.  He asks you to marry him.  Your kids turn out beautiful and a little more self-aware and arrogant than you can remember yourself at that age.  That idea you had about underwear that makes your butt look good IS BRILLIANT.  If you ran with it, you could get rich and be on CNBC whenever you want.  Whenever you want.

Not everything pans out.  But that's ok; it's not suppose to!  You're suppose to kill it sometimes and get fucked others.

Everyone you admire believed.  Everyone you admire believed.  So should you.  Start now god damn it.

My favorite commencement address ever.

Ugh.  This makes me too angry to comment on!

Enough said!  Though I wish the graphic wasn't Tommy Edison clutching his microscope with one hand, writing with his left, and staring leeringly at the ribbonned blonde 1/3 his age.

Xipto is this week's Startup of the Week.  Check it out here:  xipto.com.  Xipto figured out that there's only one place humans aren't being served ads: while waiting for your friend to pick up your phone call.  And they've decided to fix this hair on fire problem, enabling you to force your friends to listen to ads before getting to talk to you.  Oh, and if you're exteremely popular, you might just be able to make a living off getting people to call you.

Here's what makes Xipto fabulous:

• The name.  When you hear someone utter "Xipto" for the first time, you know exactly what the website does.  What's more, you immediatley know how to spell it.  And you thought YouTube was a good name.
• It's got the best revenue model in the whole wide world: advertising.  Oh, and the advertising is targetted, brand advertising that drives offline behavior.
• It's viral.  As soon as you figure out what's happening when you hear this ad, you're going to commend your friend and ask them how you can do it too!
• Best of all, it's dependent on cooperation from Mobile Operators to function.  Because Mobile Operators have historically been nimble and cooperative, this is a sustainable competitive advantage and a barrier to entry for competitors.
• Enterprise!  I hope their strategy is to penetrate the enterprise quickly after they've achieved critical mass in the consumer space.  I'd love to hear targetted ads when I'm calling Verizon.

 Next on the product roadmap?  Talking urinal ads.

If you have a startup that you think should be our Startup of the Week, email us!

The video speaks for itself.

Via TechCrunch.

My friend and hero, Dave Williams, told me that when search engines first emerged, people wondered about the long term sustainability of them.  Why oh why would anyone need a search engine?  They'd just figure out the handful of websites they liked, bookmark them, and go to them directly.

You're reading my blog?  You're awesome.  So awesome, you should buy yourself an Amazon Kindle.  Click here to buy it.

I've had the Kindle for a couple weeks and, so far, I love it.  Here's why:

• It's expensive.  When you spend that much money on something, you're going to use it.  And if, like me, you can't force yourself to read, spending $400 on anything will guilt you into using it.  Even if that means reading books!
• Sample Chapters. The first chapter or two of every Kindle book can be downloaded for free. So far, I've been too much a cheapwad to buy a single book, but I have read the Samples of about 10 books.  This is awesome.  I feel like I'm getting away with something.
• The Kindle is Barnes & Nobles in your Pocket.  Amazon has done a wonderful job making it easy to browse books.  By bestsellers, by category, by books you'd like.
• Sketches of famous literary figures.  When you lock the Kindle, the sketch of a random literary figure appears.  Just like the Barnes & Nobles shopping bags.  I sincerely hope an Engineer on the Kindle team conceived this idea and got a fat bonus for it!
• Books are going to be free.  Shhh. Don't tell the book publishers.  I was slightly shocked that I had to pay to buy books.  Somone in eastern Europe will figure out how to crack the DRM and create a peer to peer file sharing network for Kindle editions of books!!
• Capitalism at work.  I kind of love Amazon.  Jeff Bezos and co. get excited about almost every consumer oriented business and decide to enter it.  They compete with Netflix, Apple, eBay.  Usually, they have no competitive advantage when entering one of thse businesses.  This time around, they do! 
  
  • Amazon owns books.  And understand books.  And their customers go to Amazon to buy them.
  • Bezos and Steve Jobs hang out together.  Bezos must have pulled a Mark Pincus and asked Jobs all about how he designs and manufactures iPods and iPhones.  Or more likely, Steve probably can't shut up about it!  Bezos put this learned knowledge to play with the Kindle.  Other eBook manufacturers (Microsoft, Sony), clearly don't talk to Jobs.
  • Once you own a Kindle, you can only buy books from Amazon.  This lockin is great for Amazon.
• Oh, and the device itself is actually awesome.  It's sleek and beautiful.  You can download books people tell you about instantly.  You really can read 10 books at once without losing track of where you are in each book.  And the eInk is way easier on the eyes than computer screens.

What I like least about the Kindle:

• Books you own in dead tree form. Amazon already sold me all these books. And, of course, I've not read most of them. I wish Amazon would give me Kindle versions of books I've bought from them in the last 6 months for free. This would make me incredibly happy. This would convert me to an active Kindle user immediately and likely make business sense (I'd probably buy more Kindle books in the long run). 
• I need to buy a Belkin case for it.  I suppose the Kindle shouldn't come with the case.  This way buyers can pick a case that matches their tastes.  But something about having to buy another thing from Belkin drives me nuts.
• Subscription service.  I wish I could pay $20/month and read any book on my Kindle.
• I'm going to drop it.  I almost wish I'd already dropped it and could move past my fears.
• It doesn't have WiFi.  Honestly, I haven't found this to be a problem in any way yet.  In fact, you can browse the internet through the 3G cell network for free.  But, nowadays, I want everything I have to come with WiFi.  Even my toiler.
• It should play videos.  Period.  I don't understand anything about technology, just make it work!

Buy an Amazon Kindle 2 Now.

Daily health seems rather intuitive to me.  Eat an apple and your vegetables.  They are from mother earth.  Excercise...move your legs and get the heart rate up; you feel euphoric afterwards. Don't eat more than a single stick of butter per day.  Dry your hair when it's cold outside.

Don't drink much Coca Cola; it makes you burp like Homer Simpson.

What isn't obvious?  But is effective?  Doing a headstand for 30 minutes daily?

I've had the good fortune of meeting and working with some incredibly successful entrepreneurs.  I find the best of them know that the aspiring entrepreneurs they interact with can be more successful than them.  The worst think they have a monopoly on good ideas and success.

Which one are you?

Dessert is yummy.  It should be a requisite part of every meal.  Certainly every dinner out and about on the town.

But somewhere along the line, dessert got broken.  I'm not sure who to blame, probably the French.  Their foreign policies ruin everything.  Whatever the cause, the world has changed and restaurants haven't kept up. 

Restaurant owners of New York, hear me now:

Dessert is no longer meant to be a 1000-calorie symphony of chocolate of varying colors and sweetness.  The gluttony is over!

Dessert is meant to cleanse your palette of the meat and cheese you just ate.  And to remind you that you’re human and it’s gooooooood to be human in 2009.  All without causing muffin tops.

Instead of charging me $10 for a the largest brownie this side of the Cascades, charge me $4 for a handful of delicious mints.  250 calories max.  I'll choose dessert every time!  And so will my legion of Twitter followers.

Alternatively, charge me $10 for dessert.  But make it a bowl of fresh fruit.  Fresh fruit is great.  It's light, it's sweet, it's healthy.  And it's kind of sexy because it says you care about what you put in your mouth.  What's sexier than that?  Tattoos?

Know of restaurants following my advice?  Tell me about it!  Are you a restaurantaur that needs my brilliant advice on how to run your restaurant?  Hit me up and know that I will work for food.

If you didn't just lose $8 billion dollars and if you've a bunch of cash sitting on the sidelines, you might just love this economic environment.  Cash is king again.  Suddenly every $1.00 buys you $1.40 of investment stuff.

You've got a $1.40, what do you buy? 

Every asset class looks hopeless: public securities are falling and will continue to fall.  GOOG looks cheap, but it will get even cheaper.  Residential real estate is dropping nearly as fast as public securities.  Already, homes are selling for below replacement cost throughout the country.  Commercial real estate, logically a laggard on the way down [ah, the benefit of long-term leases], needs to fall.  And will.  Lots of main street businesses, now full of high fixed costs from years of prosperity, will die because of compressed margins.

Buy only distressed assets.  If an asset doesn't have the word distressed before it, don't buy.  Wait till it does.  It likely will. 

Distressed simply means you have the seller over a barrell.  Well technically, it means the seller is bankrupt or on the way there.

In today's environment, companies are going bankrupt not because they can't extract value from their assets but because they paid too much for their assets.  This means the assets aren't dead; rather they throw off cash when you don't have debt service.  To compound the problem, there is no liquidity in the market.  This simply means all the money (to holdover sellers till better economic times return) and buyers (to buy assets) have disappeared.

When buying distressed, you pay less than 30 cents on the dollar.  This means you no longer need to pursue alternative investments (with 6x leverage) to get 20% IRR.

When they talk about the rich getting richer, I think they mean in times like these.

Cafe Tasia rocks my world.  It's one of my favorite places to eat in the East Village.  It's cheap, it's thai (my favorite type of food), it's authentic (well at least it makes my taste buds dance in a way that seems foreign to me), it's dimly lit and just a little bit romantic, and, for occasions when you're in the zone or without an umbrella on a rainy day, it delivers.  Perfect 4th date place.

My favorite?  Minced Chicken with Thai Basil.

Of course, Yakitori Taisho is pretty good as well.

I never thought I'd blog about a restaurant...but in this case, I couldn't resist!

I'm sick of learning.  I'd be quite satisfied with not learning a single new thing for years.  That's because learning often gets in the way of doing.  And life is about doing, not learning.

Learning is great in your teens.  The same way idealism is great in your teens.  Twenties are about doing and translating that knowledge and idealism into impact.

I've felt this way for a while...reading Jack Cheng's blog post about learning made me want to get it out.

From Postsecret.com:

This market environment is bad.  Bad for everyone.  Not just this guy Sumner Redstone (I'm sorry but if you're named Sumner do you deserve to be a billionaire?).

I think it's also bad for entreprenuers.  I don't care what my hero what Paul Graham says.  Bad market environments mean the bar is higher and the margin for error reduced.  VCs begin to behave as if they're investing their own money.  Angel investors suddenly remember it is their own money.  Companies are less receptive to business development deals and partnerships (unless they can be justified on a cost-basis/improve the bottom line).  Exit opportunities shrink.  Acquirors don't have as much cash burning a hole in their pocket.  When an opportunity to exit does appear, acquirors care much more about price, driving your r.  The so called benefits (increase in the availability of talent, less competition, the necessity to forge your company in the crucible of bad times) don't make up for these drawbacks.

VCs adjust to this market.  And quickly.  They leverage the reduced demand for deals to drive down valuations.  They invest in later stage deals and reduce the number of seed stage deals.  Revenue and profitability (or a path thereto) are pivotal.  Because exit opportunities are reduced, venture capitalists reserve more capital for follow on rounds in existing portfolio companies.  This means they invest in fewer companies.  What a bunch of sheep.

Of course, life is short.  And big companies generally suck.  Do quit your job and start a company today.  Ian just did.

Come talk  to the Connectors Group, we'll help.  Or submit your business idea to Shot Put Ventures.

I love my friends.  They are reason enough to live (I was going to say raison d'être but I'm not that much a tool).  I absolutely hate aging but I do love accumulating these wonderful friendships with people along the way.

To date, I've been horrible at keeping in touch with them.  I think about them often but I don't just call them.  Jack Menzel and Juliet Hsu for example.  I long to know what they're up to now (Juliet must be at grad school building Arhictectural Marvels and Jack must be rooming with a strange Indian, Google man that he can't quite love the way he does Juliet).

I have friends that call me randomly.  And it's the greatest feeling in the world.  Not to mention effective.  Our relationships stand through years and across the continent.

I'm fixing this.  At least to some extent.  And I'm using a most efficient method: scheduled, monthly phone calls.  I'll set up a day and schedule whimsical conversations with everyone I love, back to back.  

This is not nearly as romantic as the random phone call.  And I know several of my friends will not be amused.  But I'm giving it a shot.  Have a better solution?  Do tell?

Sooooooooooooo, if you're a friend of mine that I've lost touch with, expect an email asking for a monthly conference call.  And know that I'm doing it because I care and want you to be a part of my life.  And if you don't, schedule a call with me!

In my spare time, I like to go to Compete.com and look up traffic patterns on random websites.  I spend more time doing this than you can imagine.  And I love it. 

I've clearly missed my calling as a quant guy on Wall Street.  Or simply counting and stacking small bills at a Bank of America banking center.

Anyhoo, here's my latest discovery: Evite traffic is up 41% over the last year.  Evite!  Can you believe it?

I'm surprised because Evite is now 10 years old!  It's a battle-scarred veteran of the first dot com bust and is continuing to grow and thrive 40% year over year today. 

I'm dying to know what features besides mobile integration they've added in the last 5 years.  The site looks the same as it always has.  Perhaps IAC is much more brilliant than I give them credit for or perhaps even they couldn't mess this one up.

More stats about Evite from here:

18 million registered users

Monthly Stats
10 MM unique visitors
156 MM monthly page views
500K events created monthly
17 MM invitations sent monthly

I prefer prose to poetry.  The rhythm and abstraction of poetry leave me wanting more.  But not poetry by Pablo Neruda.  It's filling.  And sometimes carnal.

Love Poems by Pablo Neruda is a must have.  Three that I love:

Always

Facing you
I am not jealous

Come with a man
at your back,
come with a hundred men in your hair,
come with a thousand men between your bosom and your feet,
filled with drowned men
that meets the furious sea,
the eternal foam, the weather.

Bring them all
where I wait for you:
we shall always be alone,
we shall always be, you and I,
alone upon the earth
to begin life.

The Queen

I have named you queen
There are taller ones than you, taller.
There are purer ones than you, purer.
There are lovelier ones than you, lovelier.

But you are the queen.

When you go through the streets
no one recognizes you.
No one sees your crystal crown, no one looks
at the carpet of red gold
that you tread as you pass,
the nonexistent carpet

And when you appear
all the river sound
in my body, bells
shake the sky,
and a hymn fills the world.

Only you and I,
only you and I, my love,
listen to it.

Sonnet XVII (I do not love you...)

I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way

than this: where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.