Energy

A conversation with Jam CEO Dani Grant about her journey from USV analyst to founder, cultivating curiosity, and building tools that make bug-fixing and team collaboration not just efficient but joyful.

Instead of just strengthening your weaknesses directly, look for ways to move them into your strengths column by changing how you approach them.

One of my favorite things about crypto is that, every so often, your conception of what it is changes. Bitcoin at first was “weird internet money” and then it was “a protocol” and then it was “digital gold”. Ethereum is “ICOs”, or maybe “DeFi”, or maybe “Web3”, or maybe all three, or maybe something...

This summer, we moved into a new house. Moving is a lot of work. As part of moving out of our old house, we got rid of a lot of junk that we had accumulated over the years. We ended up working with the amazing Dave O’Rourke of Spaceback. As Dave and I were loading… Continue reading

Last year around this time, I had a major medical scare which shook me pretty hard. The details don’t matter, but the takeaway was that afterwards I felt lucky to have not had a more serious problem, despite a bad situation that was totally avoidable. I dodged a bullet. It was a wake-up call. Last… ...

My son played in a baseball tournament this weekend. His team did well, and finished as the runner-up.  The team that beat them in the finals played really well, but more importantly, it was obvious that they had a strong culture of success. From the moment they walked on the field, they had a notic...

Last night I went to see RAIN, a Beatles tribute band, with my friend and neighbor Jeff.  If you haven’t been to one, tribute bands/shows are kind of odd: on the one hand, typically technically/musically perfect (the tribute band can play the entire catalog of the original band flawlessly); and on t...

My favorite baseball player is Brock Holt, and has been since his first season with the Red Sox back in 2013.  Here is me last month wearing my Holt jersey that I wear to every game (note the #26 that he started out with, before it was retired for Wade Boggs a few years ago… Continue reading

Today is the last day of September, and I’m happy and relieved to see it go. I’ve been holding my breath. September is a violent month.  That may seem like a ridiculous thing to say, but I think there’s some truth in it.  Something about the end of the summer and the abrupt change to… Continue readi...

In the world of startups and investing and ideas, things are always chaotic and fluid, and as such a key skill is to somehow cut through the noise and find focus.  That’s on a micro level, like what do I do for the next five minutes, and on the macro level, like am I (or… Continue reading

Last week, a friend passed away after a relatively brief but intense battle with lung cancer.  I didn’t know Paul well, but he was very close with a few of my very close friends, and I had spent enough time with him to understand that he was special: he had a light inside of him.   A… Continue readi...

(I’m writing this on the amtrak to NY as my computer quickly runs out of battery, and I have no charger, so this’ll be short…) Somehow, earlier this week, I came across Zenep Tufekci’s piece from last spring in the Atlantic on Social Media’s Small, Positive Role in Human Relationships.  I liked it, ...

Open data is a huge driver of innovation.  Traveling around NYC is better because the MTA opens up route, schedule and real-time data for people to build apps with.  Responding to natural disasters is easier when data is open and interoperable.  As we continue to collect more data about ourselves an...

Despite the extent to which I talk and think about car sharing and other newly possible. web-enabled modes of transportation, the truth is I still don’t use too many of them on a regular basis.  Need to work on that. It seems as though I need to travel to SF to get the urge to get around town in new...

This week we are out in Cape Cod with Frannie’s family, hanging out at the beach in Truro (where, incidentally, there was a shark attack a few weeks ago).  This week, we’re renting a different house than normal — it’s an old run-down house next door to the cottages where Fran’s family has vacationed...

Last night at 3am, our daughter Brieza started crying, Frannie and I woke up, and I couldn’t get back to sleep.  So I crawled over into my office and started surfing the web.  For about two hours, I wandered from thing to thing, and seemed to keep hitting gems, like this classic Paul Graham article ...

As I write this, I’m sitting on the platform at the Back Bay Amtrak station in Boston, waiting for the train to New York. At 9am (6 minutes ago), I got a text message prompting me to write a blog post today. It said “Get your blog on!  It’s a good thing”.  The text message,… Continue reading

I’ve been attending a lot of events lately, and one thing that keeps coming up for me is that the multi-day conference / workshop format is a bit broken. My main beef: by day two (or god forbid, day three) the audience has petered out and whatever energy was there on day one has been… Continue readi...

Today, we launched a redesign of the Carbon Tax Center website. The primary goal was to create a more impactful homepage that communicates CTC’s mission quickly and clearly. In doing so, we also reworked the site header (to remove distracting and unncessary graphics), and crispened up the typography...