Gotham Gal

The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer

I finished The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer a few weeks ago but I keep thinking about it.  The book is a novel for my generation.

The book focuses on a group of people who meet at camp as teenagers in the 70s.  A camp with a bend towards the arts that has kids from all walks of life.  There are a few kids that are on financial aid at this camp and some of them are part of the group that calls themselves "The Interestings". 

We follow this group of friends from camp in to their mid-50's.  Each of their lives go through what all of our lives go through, a series of ups and downs.  You get to know each individual character in depth.  We read about the first bout of AIDS, the conversations that take place about feminism that will be different from the past generation, the gay friends who come out of the closet, having kids that grow up and go to college, autism, how some friends have incredible success and others do not, being abused as a child, sexual attraction and even different work habits.  The book combines all the things that I have witnessed over my life.

What has stayed with me is that how each of their lives took a different path based on who they are, the baggage they carry, their expectations and perceptions of each other and each of their relationships with themselves and each other.  Who you become based on all the luggage you carry or who you do not become is really interesting when you take a step back and look at it from a birds eye view. 

I highly recommend this book.  An American novel.

Tech and the City

The first time I met Alessandro Piol, the author of Tech and the City: The Making of New Yorks Start-up Community was probably 18 years ago.  Fred took me and the kids ( Jessica and Emily were the only two around then ) to Esther Dysons conference in Arizona.  I was truly an at home Mom at that point.  It was a memorable trip.  Emily literally fell asleep in her tuna fish salad and Fred caught her head right in the knick of time.  I saw Bill Gates who happened to be wearing an old stained Polo shirt with polyester shorts, tube socks and Wallabe shoes.  I also got to meet Alessandro and his wife.  It was my indoctrination into the beginnings of the tech world. 

Of course I went on to join the tech community working with Jason Calacanis at Silicon Alley Reporter and the rest is history.  I was delighted when Alessandro and Maria Teresa Cometto (co-author) asked if he could come by to interview me about what the history of the tech community.  Fred was their first interview and I was the last. 

The book is worth reading.  Some of the information in there has already changed which is kind of fitting considering they have written about technology.  Chris Dixon is no longer living and investing as an angel in NYC but in SF working as a VC for Andreessen Horowitz.  Yet Alessandro captures the essense of the explosion of the tech industry in NYC in the mid-90s to the unfortunate implosion and the eventual rebuilding of the industry which we now call Web 2.0. 

Aaron Cohen is teaching the history of the Internet to kids at NYU.  Alessandro has put the information down on paper (per se) for everyone else and I for one am glad to see that he did.

Lean In

I read Sheryl Sandberg's book, Lean In, Work, Women and the Will to Lead this week.  I am not a huge fan of the saying lean in.  To me what she is basically saying is don't sell yourself short. 

There are a lot of thoughts rumbling around my brain after reading the book.  This book is a manifesto for anyone, man or woman.  Sandberg has done a great job at providing advice paired with stories from own personal experiences.  The book is thoughtful and honest.  She makes no apologies for the life she has led and is completely transparent in regards to where she sits in the world of top executives and the most successful people.   She has been driven since she came out of the womb.  I appreciate that. 

It is harder for women, bottom line.  There are many reasons for that and I do hope that for each generation it gets easier.  It is the desire for both genders to have an interest in breaking perceived notions of roles.  Certainly a man can change a diaper, buy groceries or do laundry as easy as a woman can.  On the other hand a woman can certainly run a company, rule the world and write code as easily as a man can. 

The one big take away from the book is something I talked about three years ago at the first Womens Entrepreneur Festival is that woman need to be champions of each other.  Whatever decisiosn we make in our lives are our own.  As women we tend to question if we made the right choice even when it comes to buying a pair of shoes.  Perhaps that is the reason we judge each other so harshly because we are questioning our own decisions.  Women who stay home, women who work full time, women who work part-time, women who don't have children, women who have chidldren, women who go into non-profits, women who go into profits...whatever it is we should be respectful and applaud the decisions that one makes for herself. 

Sandberg has reached a level that few women have gone before.  She is giving candid advice about the lessons she learned to get there.  Regardless of where you are in your life or what you strive for there are lessons to be learned.  As women we should applaud that she wrote this book. Regardless if you like the book or not the take away should be about embracing other women and the road that we are traveling down.  Sandberg has put her stake in the ground that as women we can all hope that the next generation will have a less rocky road because of it. 

Startup Life by Brad Feld and Amy Batchelor

If any two people should know about startup life it would be Amy and Brad.  Brad has been involved with the tech industry for decades and his wife Amy has been too.  Together they have written a book filled with stories, advice, trials and tribulations of relationships, the upsides and downsides of being an entrepreneur and how to survive and more importantly how to thrive. 

In full disclosure there is a piece written by both Fred and me in the book.  We are completely honest about the road of the startup tech industry.  I love how Brad and Amy reached out to many others to write about different topics in regards to startup life.  Everyone is pretty honest and transparent about their experience.

A worthy read.  Did I mention that we have been friends for years?  We met through this wonderful startup world that we live in.  A mixture of short stories so perfect for bedside reading.  You can buy it here...Startup Life

 

The Twelve Tribes Of Hattie by Ayana Mathis

The Twelve Tribes of Hattie is a written by Ayana Mathis, a first time novelist.  It is the story about the family of Hattie.  Hattie was part of the great migration north.  Hattie was 15 when she moved to Philadelphia from Georgia after she married a man who in the end gave her one disappointment after another.  Between the frustration in her marriage, the lack of cash and the many children she bore made Hattie a really cold unhappy woman.  The unhappiness that ran through her body bled into all of her childrens lives as we learn more about each of them over the course of the book. 

The part of this book that really sat with me is how Hattie had all those kids and the impact she had in their lives was obviously huge and so tragic.  She wasn't able to break the cycle of unhappiness.  Perhaps only a book but it made me think about how mothers are such role models to their children.  We of course are never perfect even though I do believe most of us try to be good parents to our kids.  Yet no matter what we do there is always going to be something we did wrong.  It's life.

My Mom was not exactly the warmest person when it came to our friends.  She just wanted to make sure that we were independent and didn't fall off the ladder.  If we did she would be there to prop us back up and then went along on her way.  It was who she was.  She felt she did her best and that was all we could ask for.  Her mother was not the warmest either and very much about herself.  I am not so sure my Mom broke the mold but certainly shifted it a little.  

This book had made me think more about motherhood.  It is a topic weighing heavily on my head these days.  When the kids are young Mothers are the primary focus of their childrens lives, when they are a little older and still under your roof they are still reliant on their Mothers.  As they grow older and have their own lives even though you are still the Mother, you are not part of the day to day.  It is a good thing but it is a transition for the Mother not for the kid.  

Funny enough, even Hattie's kids understood that many of the roads they traveled had to do with the Mother they had.  It is life and it is just something that I am thinking about.   

The Start-Up Chef

Maya Baratz and Hunter Walk decided to launch a cookbook filled with recipes from people in the tech industry.  They had this idea that they could create a great cookbook filled with recipes, stories and pictures from this community.  With the proceeds they could support charities aimed at childhood hunger.  Some of the charities include No Kid Hungry as well as families hit hard by #Sandy through the Rockaway Plate Lunch Project.  People were thrilled to share their recipes with them.  I know I was.

It is a great book, it is a gift of charity and who knows it could be a collectors item one day.  Make this cookbook one of the gifts you are going to buy for the friends and family on your holiday list. 

There are 75 recipes in the book from Dennis Crowley (Foursquare), Caroline Waxler (Internet Week), Elizabeth Spiers (New York Observer) and even my chocolate chip cookie recipe.

Buy The Startup Chef here

 

Windowfarms at the Natural History Museum

New York's American Museum of Natural History just opened their current exhibit called Our Global Kitchen.  It educates everyone who will see it about how we grow food, transport food, the future of food and even the issues that are facing us now with global warming and more.  A really great exhibit.

Windowfarms is the center of all of it.  I highly recommend you walk into the museum at the entrance on 79th and Columbus.  You will see a 100 foot by 100 foot window containing over 70 vertical windowfarms.  They are growing lettuce, herbs and other products.  They are all using organic soil with eight pots per column, hoses to keep the water circulating and LED grow lights ....and they are beautiful. 

There is also a group of windowfarms in the center of the exhibit upstairs.  I am a huge fan of Windowfarms and I am also an investor.  You can buy a windowfarm including a subscription to plants that will be delivered to your door.  There is a pretty active community online that talks about the food that they are growing.  At the museum there is a kale that I had never had before which was delicious.

If you are visiting NYC with your kids over the holidays or live in NYC with young kids, I highly recommend getting over to the American Museum of Natural History and seeing the exhibit...and of course check out the Windowfarms. 

The Way We Cook

I have been getting Saveur magazine since it hit the newstand.  I love the magazine.  In many ways, they were a little bit before their time.  The content is not only about food and recipes but communities and how food is part of each community.  People were not thinking like that 20 years ago. 

Savuer just came out with an absolutely beautiful book called The Way We Cook, Portraits of Home Cooks Around the World.  The book should sit on a coffee table where people can randomly thumb through the photos which are amazing.  A great gift for anyone...particularly yourself. 

Boom and Bust; Venture Book Launch

Aaron Cohen, who has been involved in the tech community since the mid-90s has found himself in a new role as a professor at NYU.  He is teaching about the tech industry.  He believes, as I do, that the importance of knowing how to computer program when you graduate college (at some level) is as important as being able to read a book.  It is about literacy of the times.  He is also teaching his students about the history of the tech community.  We have an industry that is not quite 20 years old in NYC where you have the leaders and early adapters able to tell the story to students when the story tellers aren’t even 60 years old. 

Gina Neff, University of Washington, MCC visiting scholar Aaron, INC@NYU director me and Danah Boyd, Research Assistant Professor, Media, Culture, and Communication all sat on the panel which was really created to launch Gina's book, Venture Labor. The conversation turned to the social aspect of the internet including the rise and fall of many of the early innovative companies.  We are seeing change again as consumers are moving to mobile from desktop.  Regardless, the net has always been a social place and that social aspect has been some of the key components in the growth of so many companies in the second stage of the web that we called web 2.0.

There were conversations about risk too.  Truth is, everything is a risk these days.  The jobs of the past where you could feel confident that you could hunker down for 30 years are evaporating.  You might even find your division close down at a large publically traded company such as IBM. 

I was there at the beginning working with Jason Calacanis as his first hire (although I was freelance).  We were the pinnacle of the industry in the mid-90’s because we were the tech industries media.  We wrote about each of the entrepreneurs and their companies.  We put on the events that created community and networking.  I brought in the revenues.  I also had 15 years of experience over everyone.  It was an amazing time and a story that should be written.  Gina wrote a great book and interviewed people who I have not seen since then but it is written for a college audience not beach reading.

I told one story that is only 15 years old and I will tell another one that keeps rattling around in my head in this blog post.  When AOL messenger was launched, I was at the Flatiron Partners office doing work.  A message popped up from Jason on my laptop as I was supposed to meet him in about 20 minutes for a meeting.  We went back and forth on the im and we both were almost gushing about how incredibly cool it was that we were just chatting away on this new medium.  It just wasn’t that long ago and now everyone walks down the street doing roughly the same thing with different tools on their mobile phones.

Here is the one story I did not bring up that night.  There were certainly conversations about when the bubble popped and how everything ceased for a few years.  Silicon Alley Reporter put on a huge parties in the day.  Most of them revolved around conferences we were putting on.  One particular night, we had an event after the Internet conference that Meckler had at the Javits Center.  It was at a place right near there that that has two floors one with a huge roof deck.  The place was packed with so many people, some I knew and others I had never seen.  The place looked like the height of the music industry in the 70’s.  Just too cool  I just felt like too much has happened too soon.  The amount that these companies were valuing themselves at was ridiculous.  We were creating superstars from geeks (although not such a bad thing for a role model).  I remember looking at the room and turning to Brian Cooper (who I have not seen in years) and saying, this doesn’t feel right.  This just can’t last.  You know what…it didn’t but it came back and it came back better. 

The End of Your Life Book Club, Will Schwalbe

This End of Your Life Book Club is a memoir by a son, Will Schwalbe, writing about the last two years of his mothers life as she was dying from pancreatic cancer.  The book is captivating on so many levels. 

His mother, Mary Ann, was an extraordinary person.  She was a humanitarian with a huge heart.  She was also a really good Mom.  She loved to read and in turn her children did too.  Together WIll and her read a host of books that they discussed over the course of her treatment.  Treatments which just kept her alive.  She knew she would never survive this cancer but she could hopefully stick around for awhile longer. 

I had read so many of the books that they read together so I really enjoyed the conversations and insight into each of these books.  Certainly you look at stories differently based on where you are in your life which made their conversations even more interesting.

What I really loved about the book is how the entire family continued to live knowing that their mother would not be there much longer.  She knew it and embraced it and believed life is for the living.  They were able to have closure and conversations.  Nobody writes about this or rarely talks about what is like to live with someone you know is slowly dying. 

No surprises that I kept thinking about my mother who died almost two years ago.  She was diagnosed with a mass in her brain on November 5th, 2010.  She had brain cancer that took over so quickly that she was gone 5 weeks after her diagnosis.  We did not have the time that Will had with his mother to remember moments, talk about topics that you need closure on or even discuss a book.  She couldn't think clearly.  Every day was a new fire drill. 

I envy that Will was able to spend that time with his Mom as she wound down her life.  Although way too soon for her and him but they could come to terms with it. 

It is really a beautiful book and one that is absolutely worth reading.