Marshall Forum on Transatlantic Affairs - One Day Down

September 28th, 2007 • Marshall Memorial Fellowship
Tags: German-Marshall-Fund, Marshall Memorial Fellowship

We had a great first full day of panels and sessions for the Marshall Forum on Transatlantic Affairs.  Speakers today included some great folks like former CIA Director Jim Woolsey and German Ambassador Klaus Scharioth.
Yesterday, we had a phenomenal opening dinner at the New World of Coke and had an outstanding and moving keynote from Jackson Kelly.

We haven’t really had too many issues (so far) although we had one speaker not show up today because of last minute commitments (can’t say who but it was for a good reason).

As always, pictures are being fairly regularly posted into my flickr account here.  Descriptions and tags will follow in the future when I get time.  That means way after the conference has ended and I’ve recovered…

Marshall Forum on Transatlantic Affairs

September 27th, 2007 • Marshall Memorial Fellowship

For the next few days I’m going to be knee deep in the execution of the Marshall Forum on Transatlantic Relations. We’ve got a lot of great speakers lined up and a lot of fabulous venues for the conference. Because of my responsibilities, I may not be able to blog during the conference but I’m hoping to keep a Flickr set updated with current going-ons. The Flickr set I’ve setup for the conference is here.

Randal Kirk on Venture Capital

September 23rd, 2007 • Business, Venture Capital
Tags: Venture Capital

This is an interesting (and correct) view on virtually all venture capitalists from billionaire Randal Kirk (emphasis is mine) from Forbes.com:

For Kirk it was sweet proof of his simple but sound slogan: If you like something, you should want more of it, and if you don’t like it, you should get rid of it. New River never traded equity for VC dollars, nor would Kirk have let it. The presence of a venture capitalist behind a startup is, he says, “a contraindication of success.”

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LinkedOut - pruning my network

September 9th, 2007 • Technology
Tags: LinkedIn

I’ve been taking a hard look at the social networks I belong to lately. Specifically I’ve been looking at the people I’m linked to on LinkedIn. I used to think that the greatest value of LinkedIn would come from promiscuous linking. That is linking to anyone and everyone you can regardless of how well you know them. My thinking was that people would have an easier time of getting a hold of me if there were more possible avenues of access (if you use LinkedIn, you’ll understand what I mean by this). There is a large group of people who believe in this paradigm and continue to grow their networks in the hopes, it seems, to connect to everyone in the world and create a two degree separation between everyone on the planet.

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