Google can’t answer the following query for me:

What channel is the Redskins game on tonight?

To be fair, SIRI doesn’t know either…what’s up with that?

It’s 2015 and you’re telling me that there’s not a single piece of indexed content on the web that didn’t have this information? It’s a pretty simple question and for me it makes a strong case for why we’re seeing so many Americans “cut the cord”. 

I don’t actually care what channel the game is on because I don’t know what the channels are. When I was a kid there were only three channels – four, seven, and nine…and sometimes twenty, but only if we could get good reception with the rabbit ears.  Now…well who even knows how many channels I’m paying for.

The way in which we search for TV content should be identical to the way we search for…well…everything else. By time, topic, keyword, category, reviews and ratings and…wait there was one more…LOCATION 🙂

Hey SIRI, put on the Skins game

That should definitely be a thing.  Someday. Until then….

Happy Channel Surfing!

The CEO’s of Sprint and T-Mobile have been sniping at each other on twitter for the better part of the last month. Here’s the latest shot over the bow.

pic.twitter.com/XOeHG0O5sp

— MarceloClaure (@marceloclaure) August 18, 2015

I find it all a little bit unsavory. Everyone’s a hero behind a keyboard, but few people have the fortitude to call-out challengers face-to-face. Back in my day people settled things the old fashioned way…on-air on CNBC 🙂

http://cnb.cx/1iakIEv

Life was beautiful, and the sun shone every day.

Happy Debating!

You know what sucks…living in a totalitarian war-torn country facing the constant threat of death, starvation, or worse.

But you know what also kinds sucks, having to go fetch my wallet and plug a credit card number into a browser EVERY time I need to make an online purchase.

<sarcasm>My life is so hard</sarcasm>

I just think that we’re long overdue for a Macbook with a fingerprint reader and Apple Pay integration. Aside from the general inconvenience of having to type in a credit card number, shipping address, billing address, etc. it’s safer and more secure.

The whole concept of the credit card is outdated and antiquated. In the last 30 years, the only major advancement in credit card technology was the magnetic strip reader at the POS. I still remember cashiers running my mom’s credit card through the carbon copy “slider” – which by the way are still sold and in production! You can even buy one on amazon

Someday we’ll look back and laugh at how we used to carry around plastic cards with magnetic strips as a form of payment. And someday we’ll shake our heads and wonder how we ever got by without self-driving Uber cars. Until then…happy driving and happy shopping.

I don’t get sick very often. Once, maybe twice a year. It’s been 14 months since the last time I was sick. I remember, because I had a date and I had already rescheduled on her twice. I don’t believe in getting sick. It seems completely unnecessary and inappropriate once you’ve reached adulthood. My immune system should be aces by now. It’s had 38 years of practice plus 2.5 million years of human evolution. Nonetheless, a simple cold-virus causes a respiratory tract infection which then knocks me on my ass for 72 hours.

I’m still not running at 100%. Mostly it’s just the cough. I feel fine, but it’s one of those wretched chest heaving coughs that makes people stare at you like you’ve just been bitten by a zombie…or that you might be from Maryland. Call it a known manufacturing defect. I sneeze really loud and my coughs sound like I might only have five hours to live.

The worst part is knowing there’s nothing I can do to speed up the healing process. My mom always asks me, have you taken any cough medicine? Which one? I tell her yes, I’ve taken all of them, but Dextromethorphan (that’s the DM you see on the bottles), doesn’t really do much except helps to suppress the cough so you can sleep at night. Sometimes I think the only reason for taking cough medicine is so that people around you feel better. After all, no one wants to hear you cough.

Soup, tea, and sleep. Oh and I sometimes think Vitamins might help, but I really have scientific evidence to back that up. So here I sit at the blurry edge of sickness and health. Not quite sick but not quite healthy. Life sure would be simpler if I was a zombie. Zombies don’t get sick,  or fear rejection, or worry about climate change. They just want to eat brains.

I watch too many zombie movies.

Super Bowl weekend is upon us. So let’s make some predictions.

1. Puppy Bowl will be as awesome as ever.
2. The Super Bowl Ads will underwhelm. I’ve already watched most of them and so far…meh.
3. Katy Perry’s halftime performance will be interrupted by breaking coverage of Aaron Hernandez’s daring escape from prison and into University of Phoenix Stadium where he will hold Tom Brady hostage until someone answers his questions about deflategate.
4. Patriots win in a blowout. History has shown that only Eli Manning can stop Tom Brady in a Superbowl.

Happy Super Bowl-ing!

There’s an old saying that goes: “The bigger they are…” – I forget the rest 😉

I was just speaking with a co-worker about how companies like McDonald’s and Samsung – once the vanguard of their industries – have suddenly come crashing down, hit the ground, went through the ground, kept going, and then took a left turn in Albuquerque. Meanwhile across town, Apple sets a world record for most profitable quarter EVER and Shake Shack prepares for a highly anticipated IPO.

McDonalds in particular leaves me scratching my head. Burgers, Fries, and Milkshakes. How do you screw that up? I could venture some theories but it really doesn’t matter.

In the end, I think we’re witnessing the cataclysmic decline of what was once an the icon of American Entrepreneurship, success, and capitalism.

Maybe it’s the millennials? Maybe something that big has to collapse under it’s own weight? Personally, I think they need to  bring back the McDLT.

“Keep the hot side hot and the cool side cool”

Words to live by.

I like to write. Writing relaxes me, it’s cathartic. So it’s puzzling to me why I can never seem to find more time in my day to post a blog. A sentence, a thought, or maybe just an emoji 😄

I suppose it’s human nature to postpone, procrastinate, and to put things off ’til later…then again maybe I’m just a lazy ass.

So let’s try and reboot and find the time to do the things that matter. There’s always time, just like there’s always an excuse. Everyone has a choice.

On Tuesday, I had the honor and opportunity to speak at Digital East 2014. Afterwards, several people congratulated me on the recent sale of my company and asked ‘How does it feel?’ It all happened so fast I never really had a chance to think about it, until now.

Leap: Interrupted

In the Spring of 2008 I decided that I wanted to pursue an MBA. So I quit my job, took the GMAT, and began the process of applying to MBA schools. It was a decision that surprised most of my friends and family, but the timing seemed right…right up until the moment the sub-prime financial crisis went thermonuclear. Suddenly an MBA didn’t seem like the wisest investment. Suddenly nothing seemed like the wisest investment. Day by day, I sat and watched as the market sank into the seventh layer of hell.

Miracle On The Hudson

By January, the economy – and stock market – had gone from bad to worse and from worse to Weird Al Yankovic (Even Worse). Then a funny thing happened on January 15, 2009. Still weighing my options, I turned on the TV that afternoon to learn that US Airways Flight 1549 made an emergency landing…on the Hudson river.

Later that evening, my big sister and I were texting back and forth about the miracle when she asked:

Carina: “How bad is it?”

Lenny: “Bad. Really bad”

Carina: “You need to go back to work”

Lenny: “Yeah, I do”

So I did as I was told and I went back to work as a Software/Business Intelligence Consultant. And for a few months things were good, but it wasn’t enough. I still had an itch that needed to be scratched. So in the midst of the worst economic recession since The Great Depression, I did what any insane person in my position would do…I quit my job (again) and started an iOS app consultancy.

Leap Then Look

In the beginning, it was just my co-founder and I and we ran the business out of his basement. Keep in mind that when we started the company, Blackberry phones outsold iPhones by a wide margin, barely anyone knew what Social Media was, and Netbooks were being hailed as ‘the next big thing’ in computing. In hindsight, we look like psychic geniuses. But the reality is, we had no idea where the market was going. We were just having fun building apps.

It was tough sledding the first year. There were a lot of nights where I thought we might not make it. But we kept grinding it out and eventually we were able to grow the business and then hire a third and then fourth employee. I think the turning point for us was when we realized that the basement bathroom situation could not support a fifth employee. It was starting to get gross downy here. In order to grow the business, we needed to find some real office space – which wasn’t exactly cheap in the Northern Virginia / DC Metro area. So we went out and signed a lease for a small office space. Looking back, it’s not as though we really had any other choice. At some point you have to push all-in or slowly bleed to death. So we pushed all-in, but I remember looking at the company’s bank account and realizing that unless we signed more clients, we only had enough money to run the business for another two months.

SaaS: My favorite palindrome

Slowly but surely we grew the company. We signed a couple of big clients, a few startups, sprinkled in some gov’t work, and by the end of year three, we had more than doubled the size of the company. From our first office we moved into a bigger office – and bigger bathrooms! Things were going well. So when Howard (an old boss) called and asked about acquiring my company, I was reluctant. But five weeks later we had been acquired by a Geo-Marketing SaaS startup.

The Leap Home

Since the acquisition a lot of my friends and family have asked (and wondered) why? On the surface, it wouldn’t appear as though my new home has a whole lot to do with ‘mobile’ or apps. They’re not wrong, but they’re not right either.

Consider this: Twitter began as Odeo, Starbucks began as a maker of espresso machines, and remember when IBM made computers?

“To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often” – Winston Churchill

Too often I run into people that have nothing more than an idea and they call themselves entrepreneurs. But that offends me because it means they want all of the reward and none of the risk. I think being an entrepreneur means having the courage and conviction to stand at the edge of space and leaping towards the earth. No net and no parachute.

How does it feel to have sold my company? … Not bad 🙂

Happy Pivoting!