Maison Fleury

In the movie Frankenstein , based on Mary Shelley’s novel, Dr. Frankenstein attempts to create human life by sewing together disparate body parts. Only, none of it works until there is an electric storm, whose lightning bolt gives off the spark of life . Parallels can be found in the quest to build a successful startup, and in the relation between the surgical systems approach and what I’ll call, for a lack of better terminology, “the spark.” A systems person wants neither drama, nor surprises. Skilled professionals in the start-up business optimize, customize (and improvise) a foundation of systems that worked well for them in the past--whether in sales structure, HR, finance, executive recruitment tactics, R&D, marketing etc. To make those systems work they look for teams with proven track records in the field. And, with a bit of luck, all this may be imbued with the spark —that rare zeitgeisty combination of the right idea, the right people, the right time. A company could be a ...

Techno-Fetichisme 1 & 2: House and Techno Ok on a different note, I would like to introduce, Techno-Fetichisme, the podcast . Both first issues, TF1 and TF2 are about 25 minutes long. I use Ableton Live as the mixing software although works are studio mixes. I mix stuff from 20 years ago with techno from yesterday or "Bacalao" like the spaniards used to call the music coming out of the UK and the little Baleric islands of Eivissa and Majorca as if it was fresh fish. Back to Mac Oh, and now is the time to admit it: I went back to mac. I am publishing the podcast on web.mac.com. What can I say? Those who know me will understand. The new imacs are really sick and I can't wait to get mine touch enabled with one of those glass screens like on the iPhone. Look at me, I am pitiful. I guess seeing all the guys at the laptop battle, performing with Live on macs, without glitches was enough for me to change my mind. The mind is not so strong and the flesh is weaker. I am loving...

Nathalie has been nagging me for some time to recommend the movie "24hour party people" . It is the story of Tony Wilson, who founded the mythical label "Factory Records" in the 80's (Joy Division, New Order, Happy Mondays). His club in Manchester, callled the "Hacienda" helped spur the birth of acid house and the subsequent electronic music revolution. The story plot always reminded me of JBoss, in a way. It could have been the way people got attracted to the same energy, the same project. It felt right. As they show in the movie, it may have been just 10 guys listening to the yet unknown "Sex Pistols" in a mostly empty room, it didn't matter, they knew they were part of something special. The part that always haunted me at JBoss was the sobering lessons about copyright and how not to build a business around it. "The artist has the right to fuck off!" was a contract clause written in blood and beer on a pub napkin framed in th...

One of the fringe benefits of co-founding a company is giving yourself any job title you want. By the time the company was big enough to hire other people to do things like setting up trainings, billing/accounts payable, legal review et al., I had settled on Director of Communications. While the only thing I've ever been able to convince anybody to pay me for in my professional life has been writing, my interviewing experiences, when we first moved to the San Francisco Bay area in 1997, convinced me that PR was not for me. The founder of one boutique tech agency asked me a series of validating questions along the lines of “Do you have many friends,” and, as I became progressively more self-conscious, she concluded “it’s obvious you are very ill-at-ease”--a doubtful prognosis, I imagine, of my ability to handle journalists. My other interview was with a manager for a white shoe, pre-March 2000 “We-only-work-for-equity-thank-you-very-much,” plus enough retainer to keep its female sta...

Not that these two clowns need any plug since they are number one at the box office , beating Bourne, but if you haven't seen it, treat yourself and go see it. I went a first time with JBoss friends on the day it came out. I saw it again with Nathalie yesterday, and she liked it. It doubles nicely as a date movie! So go. You have no excuses. If you liked Knocked Up (Bill is there :) and/or Harold and Kumar go to Whitecastle (I was there) and even, if you haven't seen any of the two, just go see it this is outrageously funny. Be ready for out of control teen sex humor along the lines of the girl: "I am soooo wet!" the boy: "Yes, they said that would happen in Health class". marcf

Since I have retired from "real" life, apart from taking care of the kids in the evenings, one of my main interests has become keeping up with what is going on in the financial markets and the economy. Nathalie got me subscriptions to the "Financial Times" every day and "Barron's" on the weekends. It is kind of my homework. So right now, guys in the financial world are complaining about an "information overload". Yup, that is right, our friends in the financial markets are looking forward to a week of vacation, after a very tumultuous month of August, to "make sense of it all and catch up on reading" as one journalist put it. Basically no one seems to really know what the fuck is going on and where it will all end up. So where it beging is the implosion of the sub-prime debt markets. Turns out $250B of $10T is at risk in subprime mortgage loans or 2.5% of the total amount. So a fraction of people cannot pay their mortgage. They ...

As my children returned to school last week, I felt the need to share some advice with my sister whose oldest child just started kindergarten: “Don’t be fooled about that homework your daughter comes home with. It’s not her homework, it’s your homework." I don’t know if it was the eighties or just my parents, but they had a very laissez-faire approach to homework and grades. As long as my sister and I didn’t dip below B-/C+, the typical response to a lackluster grade on our report cards was “Did you try?” Or “Did you do your best?” to which we inevitably answered “Yes, I sure did,” translated to “I sure did try real hard to open that book,” and “I did the best I could considering I didn’t open it…” Never having had real homework until third grade myself, and not having bothered to do any of it until fourth or fifth grade, having children in a school program where they feel the need to send you two or three email updates a day, where each of my children comes home with a notebook ...