Pete's August 2021 update
Sick Pete and sick beats. It's getting funky in here. (Open a window.)
August started crammed in with strangers at Startup Weekend Ōtepoti, and finished in a 2-person bubble in Level 3 lockdown at midnight last night. A reminder for me to appreciate what I have. To take time to notice good things, even the little things.
Highlights and Insights
Startups supported this month: 11 one-on-ones. There was a pretty intense period where I evaluated 49 startup pitches in 5 days. The 49th one was for an MBA team, and it was 11pm my time, and I may have been less measured in my delivery than my best self. But one of the team reached out later and said “feedback was awesome - just the bluntness we needed!” which was nice. Monash Accelerator kicked off last week so I’m advising 5+ teams there for the next few months.
Book progress: some! Sent out two newsletters, and in the middle of the next one. A bit over 2,000 words written. The days are getting longer so I should be getting up early at least once a week to write. (When I’m not sick.) I did wonder if my subject line would get this one sent to spam… How to get rich, quick insights with discovery interviews
I got sick. Getting a COVID test in NZ is challenging. Generally, navigating the health system here is a challenge we never expected. But for a COVID test, between a poorly-designed website making it hard to find where I could get tested, testing being delegated to GPs who don’t take casual patients, a sudden Level 4 lockdown, my appointment being cancelled, and the healthline hanging up on me after waiting on hold for 20 minutes, I very nearly gave up. Had I not been pretty damned scared about having COVID I wouldn’t have bothered — and that’s not a good outcome when the only way you’ll know COVID is in the community is if people get tested when they’re sick. On the plus side, the nurse took my blood-oxygen reading and temperature, both normal, and that was some reassurance while I was waiting for my result. (Negative, btw.)
I got sick because we took a long weekend in Wellington to visit friends and eat things, and collect some new and interesting pathogens. When I take time off and relax that’s often when I get sick, anyway. (A few weeks before a big holiday I try to have a long weekend, so that I can relax and get sick then, instead.) But yeah, we visited about a dozen places every day, and then a few hours after we got home to Dunedin they discovered the first case in the latest COVID outbreak. Enough time has passed to know that we dodged a bullet.
My workplate is chock full and varied! Monash Accelerator is up and running now, with me helping with operations and facilitation and EIRing. The innovation lab is ramping up. I was asked last-minute to teach a couple of weeks at USYD. And BlueChilli / North Sydney Innovation Network projects are boiling away. This is all pretty much the opposite of what I’d expected to happen this year, which was that things would slow down, drop off, and I’d fill my time writing and quietly growing anxious about what came next.
I had two suggestions of albums to listen to, both of which are just the entryway to deep rabbit holes. By The Way (Red Hot Chili Peppers) was a few albums after a stopped listening to RHCP, so it was interesting to catch up on what I’d missed. Carry Fire was new to me, though Robert Plant’s name is familiar from Led Zeppelin. A really cool sound, and I can see myself working my way back to the 70s to start from the beginning. (Oh wow, actually late 60s.) See also the Japanese funk mixtape linked in Read/Watch/Listen.
Requests
Take a few minutes to write down the things that are going right for you, and be grateful for them. Tell the people around you what you appreciate about them and what they’re doing.
Coming up
Pitching workshop for Startup Dunedin’s Audacious cohort.
Vaccination, Part 1
Read / watch / listen
[Read: 8 minutes] Say Cheese! How Bad Photography Has Changed Our Definition of Good Pictures. That the definition of a “good photograph” is not something I had ever thought about. Like author Kim Beil, I had internalised the usual advice about thirds, but not otherwise reflected on it. This article is a brief overview, with examples — e.g. lens flare was an amateur mistake that was adopted by fashion photographers to lend authenticity — and makes me want to read the whole book.
[Read: 4 minutes] The Best Pickup Lines I’ve Heard. A couple of good ones, but the main reason I like this post is the writing style, full of Top Gun-esque navy pilot metaphors and phrasing. “Still, with the grace of a C-130, you move across the room and reach your cruising altitude. Time to target: t minus 10 seconds.” And this quote: “If you’re not living on the edge, you’re taking up too much space.”
[Watch: 16 minutes or less] Trevor Noah riffing on various subjects in between recording segments on The Daily Show. This was back in the day when late night talkshows were recorded in studios, with an audience. Weird. I really enjoy the change in tone these shows have developed over the past year, which brings more of an improv energy — and more joy — than the slick, polished product they were putting out before.
[Listen: mixtape] The YouTube algorithm reset when I moved to NZ, but it’s getting to know me again. This 60s-70s Japanese Instrumental Cinema Funk Breaks & Beats mixtape makes me feel like a badass mothershutyourmouth.
[Long read] “I thought about how the Segway was an elegant work of genius when what the world really needed was a good-enough piece of crap.” This is an incredible history of the Segway from the guy who sold the book proposal that got leaked and sparked all the hype. He re-tells the whole story as a way of answering the question: was it my fault that the Segway failed?
[Read: 10 minutes] Why is English spelling so weird and unpredictable? Because of the timing of the invention of the printing press. Like the article above, this article is a gateway into interesting concepts that I barely know anything about — like the Great Vowel Shift (which I encountered when learning Icelandic). The users of the new technology — the typesetters — had to create their own rules for spelling, which led to the mess we have today.
"Other spellings arose, and were then cemented through the power exerted by the visual shape of similar words. The existence of would and should, for example, brought about the spelling of could. Would and should were once pronounced with the ‘l’ sound, as they were the past-tense forms of will and shall. Could, however, was never pronounced with an ‘l’; it was the past tense of can. Could was coude or cuthe. Then the visual power of would and should attracted could to their side. … Could is a modal verb, same as would and should. There was no explicit intention to make them look the same, but the frequency of their appearance nudged them toward ending up that way."
“Peer into their insides (they glow)
With all the precious metals we dug up for
Circuit boards and spaceships
My fluorescent gods I've waited for this”— Freelance Whales, Aeolus