The Fanciful Vision of a Combined US and Mexican Professional League

Posted by Andy in Soccer, Sports July 14, 2013

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:

The Media and the Zimmerman Case

Posted by Andy in Media July 11, 2013

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 July 10, 2013

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 July 9, 2013

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:

“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.
“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.
“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?

May (and Almost June) in Review

Posted by Andy in Uncategorized June 22, 2013

I’m getting really bad at keeping this up to date. Here’s what you missed if you haven’t been following along with the 15 second blurbs on Facebook and Twitter. And yes I’m breaking bog rules by not including links or photos. I’m just happy to have 10 free minutes on a sunny coffee shop deck to bang this out.

If you didn’t catch the US Soccer game vs Panama at Century Link on June 11, you really missed out on a great experience. At least 40,000 fans made their way into the stadium. You really have to wonder why the Mariners and Major League Baseball didn’t try to move the Astros/Mariners game up to 12:40 for a business person special. I mean, with all those out of towners visiting Seattle for the day, some percentage would have started their festivities at the baseball field. You certainly would have drawn more than the estimated 3,500 fans you got trying to compete with a once every 40 year occurrence. I still haven’t sorted any of the 450 pics I took, but you can see them all here.
Congrats to all of my former students who took home prizes in the UW Business Plan Competition in May (links to come.) ZGirls featured former MKTG 555 student Libby Ludlow, and iHome3D featured former student Nelson Huang. Alvaro Jimenez and Dave Knight put in strong perfromance as well with Elemental Hotels and a host of the folks from the TMMBA class went on to the final 32 and 16. Big winner was Alan Luo from MKTG 555’s Team Happy Back, whose BPC team Pure Blue Technologies won the whole shibang. Nice work guys.
If you haven’t made it to a Seattle Tech Meetup yet, I would mix it into your networking event rotation. It has start-up flavor, but isn’t 100% focused on start-ups. So there’s a nice mix of people. Red and Brett do a great job mixing in networking time, short presentations, good speakers, great sponsors and free food and drink. Check the next one out.
On a side note, the seat belt law is stupid. I’ve never been in an accident, am stopped at a light, take off my seat belt to reach back to the back seat and grab something out of my bag, when all of a sudden State Patrol Officer Snoopy Brains drives by. Forget the fact that he nearly causes his own traffic incident for parking his patrol car in the middle of the road waiting for the light to change, and forget the fact that by the time he pulls me over my seat belt is back on. The guy still writes up a ticket. Seriously WSP – 20 years and no accidents and like one speeding ticket 15 years ago. I have health insurance. Is the state budget in such bad shape that you need to be searching for seat belt offenders, and not even let me explain the situation? He tried to give me a ticket for lack of insurance because I was pulling up the cards on my phone and he didn’t want to wait for me to find them. Annoying.

More stuff is coming in the next few weeks. So come back soon.

Random Thoughts and Things Left Unsaid – April 2013 Edition

Posted by Andy in Uncategorized May 2, 2013

Life was a little too busy in April, and I have a bunch of half-finished blog posts to show for it. Rather than try to finish them, here were my thoughts for the month, in no particular order.

Thanks to Art Thiel of SportsPress Northwest for letting me write about my trip to the Colorado Rapids v Sounders game on 4/20. I didn’t think it was a very good article on my part so I didn’t promote it. But for any writer, being published is being published. So thanks, Art.
Seriously – the construction on Aurora makes it impossible to get to work from Wallingford to Queen Anne. Just hopeless.
I have a new irrational addiction to broccoli. Here are two awesome recipes that are super easy to make. Parmesan Roasted Broccoli and Brilliant Sauteed Broccoli.
Poor Mariners. Man. What a shame. Is there any answer here?
The fact that the Sounders have struggled mightily in the first two months of the season, and I still have no doubt that they’ll make the playoffs, shows there’s something wrong with the length of the MLS schedule.

Coors Field, Denver

Denver is a great city. For that matter so is Boulder.
I want to thank Brett Greene from Fresh Consulting for hooking me up with some great meetings I was in Boulder. Check out these companies did you get a chance: Metzger and Associates, Room 214, Sendgrid. Also check out check out Galvanize
Did I mentioned the traffic yet? The one good thing is that a combination Siri and Aurora Bridge traffic gives me a lot of chance to write down – I mean talk down – blog posts.
It was mentioned to me that our softball team is now in its 20th year of competition, in which I played 18 of those years. That has to be some sort of record for Seattle amateur sports.
Right now I’m way past a month of no caffeine. All seems be going well, except for my new addiction to hot chocolate, which I fear is way more fattening than coffee.
And the Beat the Bridge Run is a few weeks. I might give it another shot this year despite being desperately out of shape. This could be the year my winning streak of getting across in time ends.
If there is a logic to how the parking works in lower Queen Anne, I haven’t been able to figure it out. Block by Block it changes – Four hour meters, two hour meters, two hours free, one hours free, unlimited free, carpool, and anything else. It makes no sense.
I’m an uncle again. How about that. Welcome to the world, Lyla Margaret Kline who was born May 1.
And the cycle of life continues, as today marks the day that my mom passed away 13 years ago. Hard to imagine it was that long ago.

Check the Top Right Corner…

Lessons From Launching New Products

Posted by Andy in Achievement, Marketing, Social Media April 2, 2013

We started toying around with the idea of Relaborate a little more than a year ago, in late 2011. In the beginning, we weren’t really sure what was going to happen with it, but everybody we talked to seemed to think it was a really cool idea.

These last months have been a great education in learning the differences between a “really cool idea” and “something that I immediately want to invest money in.”

There are a lot of hurdles to jump through to raise money. It’s not about the idea. It’s about being able to quantify an addressable market, convincing people your team is solid from top to bottom, and showing enough of the product that they can see the potential without criticizing the present MVP version.

It’s been a long and funny road, and I’m sure like any entrepreneurial organization, we’ve made some missteps along the way. But here we are in April 2013, with a brand new release of the product that we really think is starting to live up to the expectations we had when we first conceived it. And other people are saying nice things too.

So I guess my moral for this personal blog post is that it’s never just about the idea. Ideas are easy. People invest in execution. So if you have something that you’re sure will be a success, keep plugging away at it. Don’t expect to be rewarded for simply having an idea. The real effort is in taking that idea and making it something somebody else will understand and use.

They say there’s a very thin line between being an entrepreneur and simply being insane, and we probably straddled that line a few times in the recent months. After all, to start a new company you have to build something that no one else thinks is worth building, or they’d be doing it themselves. There’s something a little inherently nuts in that.

So if your reader of this blog, I expect you to run over to Relaborate.com and sign up for the trial of our new product. Read this blog and if you know me, I’m sure you’ll end up getting a discount (if you ask). Let your marketing people test it out, and if you end up bringing it in your organization, you know I’ll be the first one by you a round of drinks.

Tossing 15 Things a Day

Posted by Andy in Achievement, Human Behavior March 16, 2013

My friend Liz told me that she has a pact with herself. She throws away 15 things a day. It could be 15 pieces of paper, 15 paper clips or 5 shirts and 10 paper towels. It doesn’t matter. 15 things go into the trash (or charity bin).

She said it’s not that hard to do, and less painful than a whole day of spring cleaning.

By the end of the week, she’s tossed 105 things.
By the end of the month, 450.
By the end of the year, 5400.

Maybe I can’t do 15, maybe I can only start with 10. But I am going to start to do that today.

Traore’s Wunder-Strike, in 5 Frames

Posted by Andy in Personal, Sports March 13, 2013

Talk about threading the eye of the needle….Wow.

Traore's Strike – Sounders vs Tigres – March 12 2013 from aboyer

Andy Boyer

Personal Thoughts on Marketing, Sports and Tech

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