Monthly Archives: July 2013

A Simple Writing Dream

Posted by Andy in Uncategorized

I had a ridiculous thought this morning that I’ll share for no particular reason.

We have thousands of Irish bands here in the U.S. I wonder if any of the ones like the ones I follow (Dropkick Murphy’s, Flogging Molly, the Blaggars, the Real McKenzies, etc…) ever actually make a tour of Ireland. And I wonder how well received they are when playing real Irish towns like Galway, Shannon, Rosscommon, etc…

I bet it would be a fun trip to journal and chronicle. What Irish Music fan wouldn’t want to read (and watch) the story of a U.S. based Irish band visiting the homeland for 7 days?

So if you have a Irish band and want to take me to Ireland with you to chronicle your tour, let me know.

Galway Music Pub
(Image Source: http://merlinandrebecca.blogspot.com/2012/11/the-galway-music-scene.html)

What the MLS Should Have Done on Wednesday

Posted by Andy in Marketing, Media, Soccer

I’m pretty sure I threw this idea out a few years ago, but apparently MLS Commissioner Don Garber isn’t a regular reader, so I’ll post a modified version again.

The day before and the day after the Major League Baseball All-Star Game are the only 2 days in the calendar that none of the major 4 sports leagues have a competitive game. If I was the MLS, I would use the day after the game to my full advantage. Every sports bar in America is starved for something to put on their screens. Every couch potato is stuck trying to choose between the Espys and a 30 for 30 marathon.

So I’d run 3 continuous hours of MLS coverage, with every team playing at basically the same time. The mechanics would look something like this:
– Game 1 starts at 8:00pm EST.
– Each game would start 10 minutes later.
– At your peak, you’d have 9 games running simultaneously, with the llast game starting just as the first game was in its final 15 minutes.
– You would be able to cut away Red Zone style to each goal, which would probably come every 5 to 10 minutes.
– You’d have 90 straight minutes of games in their final 10 minutes. 0-0 and 1-0 games are exciting in their dying embers, so you could have a lot of nail-biting finishes to entertain the average sports fan who doesn’t usually watch soccer.
– By 11:30 Eastern, people would have watched a lot of good finishes, seen a lot of highlights, seen fans in 9 different stadiums, and received at least a little education about what makes people like soccer.

You’re missing a great chance MLS? What do you think? What is there to lose?
Lamar Listening

Join Me at the TechCrunch Meetup Thursday

Posted by Andy in Entrepreneurism, Seattle, Startups

The next version of the Techcrunch Meetups + Pitch-Off is headed to Seattle this Thursday. Besides the fun and frivolity of your typical Seattle tech event, a few lucky entrepreneurs will be pitching their businesses to a group of TC judges. These entrepreneurs will have one minute to explain why “their start-up is awesome.” Since all the products will be in stealth or private beta, we may see some companies we haven’t heard of before.

Details:
Thursday, July 18
ShowBox at the Market
1426 1st Ave‎nue
Seattle, WA 98101
6 PM – 10 PM

See you there.

The Fanciful Vision of a Combined US and Mexican Professional League

Posted by Andy in Soccer, Sports

So here’s an idea that will never work…

My friend Luke is a supporter of the Mexican National Team. He brought up a great point – Both the USMNT and El Tri get screwed because everyone else in Concacaf stinks. Sure, every once in awhile Honduras or Costa Rica may beat the US or Mexico, but really, our fellow confederation mates are the equivalent of Iceland and Liectenstien.

Luke’s point is that it’s up to the US and Mexico to improve the quality of the other countries. Without quality competition, we’re almost assuredly headed out in the round of 16 every World Cup – maybe the round of 8 if we get lucky and the wrong team wins another one of the Groups. But when the rubber meets the road, we just don’t see enough quality competition to beat Brazil, Spain, Italy, Germany, Portugal or Argentina. We’d be considered underdogs to France, England, Russia, Uruguay and Japan.

So how can we improve Honduras, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Panama, etc… so that they can provide worthy competition throughout the cycle?

The easiest answer is to make sure their best players have a top league to play in. Now it’s been well documented why the Mexican League and MLS can never be TOP leagues. But…what if Mexico and the U.S. combined for ONE league? Could that be a TOP league?

Now before you come up with all the obvious reasons that this would never work, indulge me for 5 minutes and play along. Ignore all the limitations and just imagine the possibilities.

Here’s the loose format Luke and I sketched out on the back of our beer cups:

  • Start in 2015 with two leagues, a Premier League and a Championship League.  The top 10 teams from each league start in the Premier League. The rest from each play in the Championship.
  • Each season, the bottom 2 U.S. and bottom 2 Mexican teams in the Premier league get switched out with the top 2 of each from the Championship. (We have to do it this way to avoid rampant cheating at the end of seasons, as well as to keep it fairly balanced.)
  • We flip to the international schedule that the rest of the world uses – August to May. You can schedule the U.S. teams on long road trips into Mexico during the November, December, January months. (There are actually great tourism opportunities along with this – why wouldn’t someone who lives in a northern city like Seattle want to travel around Mexico in late December for some sun and soccer?)
  • Mexico would get to shed their ridiculous 2 season system.
  • A league featuring teams in New York, LA, Seattle, Mexico City, Guadalajara, etc… would generate solid TV revenue.
  • The extra TV revenue would help recruit the best players from other Concacaf nations. We’d start to recognize some of the players that we see more often on the international stage. These players would have bigger roles than the’d have in ortugal or France or a European League like that.
  • The U.S. vs U.S. rivalries can be kept in tournaments like the U.S. Open Cup which now would have more importance.

I get that there are 200 reasons why it can’t work, and you need revenue sharing for all 38 teams which would be a nightmare. And I know scheduling would not be easy (though it’s not that easy now either.) But from a pure fan perspective, I really like the idea of a league where watching a game featuring National team members is the rule, not an exception.

Any thoughts?

Maps of where the teams in each league are now:


MLS


Mexican_League

The Media and the Zimmerman Case

Posted by Andy in Media

I can be a little bit of a news junkie.  When I get in the right mindset, I want to dive into all the things going on in the world and try to connect them together. And right now there is a lot of interesting stuff going on: Edward Snowden, the NSA, Immigration reform, The rebellion in Egypt, continued turmoil in Syria, U.S. frustration with Afghanistan’s President, Obamacare, US fiscal issues and more.

However, if you do nothing but watch U.S. cable TV news, you would not know any of this. CNN, HLN and MSNBC have decided that the George Zimmerman case is Hurricane Katrina, the Cuban Missle Crisis, OJ Simpson and the Boston Bombers all rolled into one.

At best, the news media is being lazy and trying to find the cheapest and easiest story to focus on during the summer doldrums. Stick up a live feed, call some talking head lawyers who are dying for 15 minutes of fame and put the control room on auto-pilot.

If you want to get cynical or conspiratorial, then you could say the media is trying to manufacture a race riot. Make sure everyone has a chance to make an opinion on whether Zimmerman is guilty or innocent, create a huge buildup to the decision, prep everyone with talking points on how there’s no way he should be judged as innocent, and then stick cameras everywhere you think a mini-riot may occur to capture people yelling those talking points.  Then publicize the mini-riot so that it looks bigger and builds more momentum.  Now you have real news.

Surprisingly, there’s one network not engaging in the Zimmerman summer telethon – Fox News. Pessimistically, maybe they see that being the only network not televising wall to wall live coverage of a boring courtroom gives them a chance to push their agenda out to people who usually skip over them on the dial. Optimistically, maybe they are the only network that has their “A” team working during July and realize the Zimmerman trial is only as interesting as a 2007 episode of Law and Order. We don’t get a lot of chances to to say this, so I will admit, ‘Well done, Fox News.”

It disheartens me that the news has come to this.  3 networks, 2 owned by the same company, live televising a court case that doesn’t deserve it, simply because they are pushing a racial angle.  They’ve  monopolized the news airwaves and pushed away any of the national and global events that we should be thinking about, and instead, dumbed their viewership down and tried to create a race issue. I think it’s irresponsible at best, nefarious at worst.

The Importance of Habits

Posted by Andy in Uncategorized

I’m not breaking any new ground here, but I’m the latest convert to the importance of habits.

As I get older, I realize that my body and brain would like to spend more time on auto-pilot.  I tell them every morning what I want to do, and they respond with “Ok, sounds good” in that condescending way a teen-age responds when you ask them to run an errand. Then by the middle or end of the day, as I’m pleading with my brain and body to do the things we agreed upon, I discover they have taken the rest of the day off and I’m stuck in whatever pattern has been established for me after thousands of  hours or days of practice.

Thus, my renewed effort to create new habits. I find that the most successful people I know do things that make them better naturally – as if their body knows to do them. They don’t have to find time to get to the gym, they have to find time to meet you for a drink.  They don’t have to make a conscious decision to skip the fried chicken, they already have a turkey wrap sitting in front of them. It’s these little things that they do automatically that seem to give them the extra time and energy to do the really hard things.

So here are some habits that I’m going to spend July and August employing:

  • Meeting people who want to brainstorm for walks around Greenlake or down on the Waterfront, rather than for coffee or beers.
  • Getting to the gym every day.  Even if it’s for a 10 minute walk on a treadmill. Just getting there.
  • Picking 4 hours a day of computer time in which the email and IM is turned off.
  • Writing on the blog at least 100 words a day. Even if I only get those 100 words down, at least I’m 25% of the way to a 400 word essay.
  • Throw away 10 things per day.  I know my friend Liz Pearce does 15 per day, but I need to start somewhere.

Now there is a difference between rituals and habits.  I think a ritual is something you do at the same time every day, like getting to the gym at 6:00am.  I just want to start with habits. Maybe I’ll evolve to ritual.

So if I seem like I’m blowing you off for coffee to suggest a walk up and down 2nd Ave instead, don’t take it the wrong way. All I’m trying to do is build in some habits that make me healthier and more efficient. And that doesn’t mean I’m not going to meet you for happy hour.  It just means I’ll do so if I make it to the gym earlier.  We’ll see how it works out.

Ben Huh Discusses Laying Off 1/3 of His Team

Posted by Andy in Seattle, Startups

An interesting article ran in Inc Magazine this week about Ben Huh and the layoffs at Cheezburger a while back, “How I Live With Myself After Firing a Third of My Employees.”

At first it looks like it’s been written by Huh. But I read it and it sounded nothing like how the charismatic CEO speaks. Then I noticed that it was “written by Liz Welch, as told to her by Ben Huh.”

This fact made have contributed to the piece sounding self-serving to some. In fact, there was a mini-debate in a Private Facebook group I belong to about this very subject. Some people found the article in very poor taste, suggesting Ben’s attitude seemed to be, “Well too bad for everyone I fired, I don’t feel bad at all.” Having met Ben several times in the Seattle start-up scene, it struck me that this didn’t seem like it would be Ben’s general attitude at all. Even the people who were neutral on Ben’s comments seemed to think the piece came across staged, edited or worse.

I want to give Ben the benefit of the doubt here, since he didn’t write the piece. So we don’t know what was lost in translation or incorrectly quoted by Welch. But I took away a few points:

  1. “We were profitable until we took VC investment” = Don’t just spend money because you have money in the bank. You still have to make smart decisions.
  2. “The Board did not ask for this, it was my decision” = As CEO, you have to think about the 42 people you are keeping just as much as the 24 you let go. I made the mistake of growing too fast, I’ll take the blame.
  3. “To mitigate the risk of a leak, I called John Cook” = The info will get out anyway, so unless you want one of the folks who got laid off to pen an anonymous op-ed piece for Geekwire, call Geekwire first and give John the straight scoop.

What do you think about this article? Any comments? Was Ben wrong, or did the magazine just butcher the story?