Monthly Archives: October 2016

Startup

Startup Quotations

A fun image borrowed from yhponline.com on their UK Startups page

As I approach my fourth year of grinding it out in a startup biotech, I thought I would collect my favorite quotations of startups and productivity. As I read more about business and startups I keep finding new quotes that encapsulate the feeling of a startup, so I hope to add to this list as time goes on.

Move fast and break things. (attributed to Facebook, and humorously depicted on XKCD).

“A ‘startup’ is a company confused about: 1. what its product is, 2. who its customers are, 3. how to make money.” – Dave McClure of 500 Startups.

“The reality is, Silicon Valley capitalism is very simple:
Investors are people with more money than time.
Employees are people with more time than money.
Entrepreneurs are the seductive go-between.
Marketing is like sex: only losers pay for it.” – Antonio Garcia Martinez in Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley.

Done is better than perfect. (described as a Facebook slogan in Chaos Monkeys).

A good idea on Monday is better than a great idea on Friday. (not sure where I heard this one).

Build. Measure. Learn. (repeat).  – Eric Ries, The Lean Startup

Startups are an odd creature that I am still working on taming (assuming you can tame it!). The energy and speed are addictive, and despite all of the struggles, I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

-BZ

Design

Turkey Bowl

TB 2016 Logo
Every Thanksgiving our group of old high school buddies gets together and plays mud football. It started out as some good dirty fun playing tackle football on one of a handful of fields in Loomis. After the broken wrist incident of 2005, we switched to flag-football (as shown in the x-ray pictures in the 2006 invite). A few years older, we now live in the suburbs, but we continue our tradition and round up as many of the usual suspects for a game of Turkey Day football.

Here is a collection of the website and video invitations from 2002-2006. They started off as just basic image slideshows, then added in some music in 2004,  and a full blown video in 2005. The image quality started off pretty poor, because half of the pictures are crappy digital pictures of my 35mm prints, and the rest were probably my crappy digital camera in action! At some point we had enough significant others with cameras taking pictures, so the picture quality improved in the later years.

On that note- if you have any pictures from the old Turkey Bowl games, email me and I can share them with everyone.

2002: Turkey Bowl V

2003: Turkey Bowl VI

2004: Turkey Bowl VII (turn up your sound- and ignore the typo…)

2005: Turkey Bowl VIII

(if the video doesn’t embed, just watch it here)

2006: Turkey Bowl IX

This year marks the 19th consecutive year of playing mud football on Thanksgiving morning. It feels like we should definitely do something special for the 20th edition next year, but maybe we can organize something fun for Turkey Bowl XIX. Let me know if you have any thoughts and we can make something happen.

-BZ