From Invention to Startup

I spoke this week as part of the From Invention to Startup lecture series produced by the University of Washington's Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship. My topic was bootstrapping a company with SBIR grants. Slides from the talk are available here. There is also video. If that doesn't work, my slides are also available here.

MLS Cup

Sven, Aki, Sven's friend Simon, and I all got to see our first national championship: the MLS Cup at Qwest field. This was a birthday present for Sven. It was pretty much uniformly fantastic, and a close-fought, interesting game.

It would have been more fun to cheer the Sounders (and we did cheer them a bit anyway) but it was still a great game, and RSL deserved their win. Obviously the boys had a great time.






Thanks for the great tix, Jane! Happy birthday, Sven.

Strength in What Remains

There aren't any breezy books about genocide. There are such books that are worth reading, however, and Strength in What Remains is one of them. Tracy Kidder tells the story of Deo, who had the misfortune to endure the genocidal violence in both Burundi and Rwanda.

Such an experience damages the individual in a seemingly endless variety of ways. The remarkable thing about Deo is the ways he was unchanged. Who he is, what he values, and even his life goals are essentially unchanged by a vicious catastrophe that changed everything around him. This is a story about the most terrible human actions, but also about the inner strength of one remarkable individual.