Feliz cumpleanos para mi

Un muy feliz cumpleaños para mi este año. Me encuentra en Buenos Aires

raro mí estómago

Me siento un poco enfermo. No sé, a veces cuando viajo internacionalmente, mi estómago se pone molestado. Y aunque ya volví de Brasil hace 10 dias o algo así, sigo un poco menos que ideal.

Trato tomar un poco de vino a calmar la tormenta adentro. Hasta ahora, no funciona...o funciona pero solo por un rato.

chau, capital federal

Hoy me mudo a la provincia de Buenos Aires. O sea, seré bonarense, supongo. capital, te voy a extrañar.

que los cumplas feliz

Un muy feliz cumpleaños para. Estoy en los Buenos Aires de Argentina. Y sí eso es medio chiste. No sé que sea gracioso porque el humor es distinto en otro idioma.

voy a la escuela

Hago el gran comienzo a aprender el idioma. Vemos como me pasa. Por fin encontré una escuela.

Un año mas

Otro año ya me pasó. ya esta. me siento un poco viejo.

El numero se cambia

No soy joven mas. O así me parece a mí. Dale. ¿Que puedo hacer?

hace cuatro años

Oye! Hace cuatro años y terminaba mis estudios en la facultad. y que hice...verdad no parece tanto. siempre una idea nueva, pero ninguna funcionó. odié la facultad de derecho, es un error total. casi empecé negocios, y sí comenze con una, pero sin mucho éxito. ya soy consultador, pero ya no me gusta tanto. mas o menos me mentian. me dijeron que había muchíssimo trabajo y por eso yo tuviera muchas oportunidades a avanzar. supongo que ellos tenían la ilusíon que trabajo venía. pero no vino. y que desastre para mí porque la única razón estar en esta consultadora es un avanzo mas rapído.

Medellin Colombia

Quizas que me mude a Colombia? ¿Que le parece a usted? El tema de usted y tú me asusta, de verdad.

bueno

el puesto cuarto, si señor. que puedo decir. cumpleaños.

"Eboys"by Randall Stross Review

240, 297

[in progress]

Confessions of a Venture Capitalist -- Ruthann Quindlen

I just finished "Confessions of a Venture Capitalist: Inside the High-Stakes World of Start-up Financing" by Ruthann Quindlen. My reaction: uh, ok.

Who was the target market for this book? It's not really a primer in pitching to venture capitalists, though it pretends to be at times.

It's not a memoir, though she talks about her self in quite a few chapters.

It's not really an in-depth case study to the point where you really feel like you are provoked to think.

I wasn't impressed. Quindlen is probably a great venture capitalist. Indeed, she talked about lots of her own successful deals (despite a foreward/introduction claiming that she would only talk about the unsuccessful ones). But what did I take away from this book? Very little.

If I just wanted general info on venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, how they think, etc, there are better resources.

This book should have been published in blog form. All of those cute little two page vigniettes would have been very interesting in a blog.

FSBO Madison

the New York Times:

Across the country, the National Association of Realtors and the 6 percent commission that most of its members charge to sell a house are under assault by government officials, consumer advocates, lawyers and ambitious entrepreneurs. But the most effective challenge so far emanates from a spare bedroom in the modest home here of Christie Miller.

Ms. Miller, 38, a former social worker who favors fuzzy slippers, and her cousin, Mary Clare Murphy, 51, operate what real estate professionals believe to be the largest for-sale-by-owner Web site in the country.

They have turned Madison, a city of 208,000 known for its liberal politics, into one of the most active for-sale-by-owner markets in the country. And their success suggests that, in challenging the Realtor association's dominance of home sales, they may have hit on a winning formula that has eluded many other upstarts. Their site, FsboMadison.com (pronounced FIZZ-boh) holds a nearly 20 percent share of the Dane County market for residential real estate listings.

The site, which charges just $150 to list a home and throws in a teal blue yard sign, draws more Internet traffic than the traditional multiple listing service controlled by real estate agents.

Madison is home to the University of Wisconsin and a city where the percentage of residents who graduated from college is twice the national level. It is also a hotbed of antibusiness sentiment, which turns out to be the perfect place for a free-market real estate revolution. Bucking the system is a civic pastime here.

Elsewhere, the Justice Department, free-market scholars, plaintiffs' lawyers and countless entrepreneurs are vowing to make real estate more competitive and to bring down sales commissions. To do that, they advocate forcing the Realtors' association to share control of its established listing services. Those critics seem to view the listings as an unassailable monopoly.

And who can blame them? Those 800-plus local listing services, controlled by local branches of the Realtors' association, help dole out about $60 billion a year in commissions to real estate agents and the firms that employ them. Despite numerous attacks, the association has been remarkably successful to date at protecting its turf. Through lobbying, litigation and legislation, the Realtors' group has managed to keep control of the crucial listings.

Ms. Miller and Ms. Murphy, however, built a separate and alternative listing service - a parallel market, much like the Nasdaq, which rose in recent decades to challenge the New York Stock Exchange's dominance and sparked competition that eventually reduced transaction costs for all stock investors.

The price competition is startling. FsboMadison listed about 2,000 homes in 2005 and said that about 72 percent of its listings sell. If those 1,440 houses averaged $200,000 per sale, the real estate commissions under the 6 percent system would have been about $17.3 million. Ms. Miller and Ms. Murphy collected about $300,000.

...

William A. Black, a lawyer for the Wisconsin Department of Regulation and Licensing, says he does not think consumers who bypass real estate agents are missing much. "The majority of residential transactions are very simple: 99 percent can be done without a broker. And the 1 percent screwed up - the broker couldn't have prevented it."

Alternative listing services would need to reach a combined 50 percent to 60 percent of a market to topple a multiple listing service, Steve Murray, an industry consultant, guessed.

That is what David B. Zwiefelhofer, Webmaster for FsboMadison, would like to see, and he constantly encourages Ms. Miller and Ms. Murphy to expand. "I think this is the one place in the country where FSBO could overtake" the multiple listing service, he said.

His clients, not surprisingly for a social worker and a nurse, are embarrassed by their success, Mr. Zwiefelhofer said. "It bugs me to no end," he said. "The Web site still looks like it was designed by some high school student five years ago."

This is the future. The 6% that realtors have been raking in is what economists call "economic rent." And it's a bad thing. Economic rent is basically when consumers are paying more than they should be because of a lack of competition.

Real estate agents simply collect more than they should, and somehow the market hasn't yet adjusted. But it will.

Sometimes, luck is good.

I find this totally unconvincing:

Richard Rainwater doesn't want to sound like a kook. But he's about as worried as a happily married guy with more than $2 billion and a home in Pebble Beach can get. Americans are "in the kind of trouble people shouldn't find themselves in," he says. He's just wary about being the one to sound the alarm.

Rainwater is something of a behind-the-scenes type—at least as far as alpha-male billionaires go. He counts President Bush as a personal friend but dislikes politics, and frankly, when he gets worked up, he says some pretty far-out things that could easily be taken out of context. Such as: An economic tsunami is about to hit the global economy as the world runs out of oil. Or a coalition of communist and Islamic states may decide to stop selling their precious crude to Americans any day now. Or food shortages may soon hit the U.S. Or he read on a blog last night that there's this one gargantuan chunk of ice sitting on a precipice in Antarctica that, if it falls off, will raise sea levels worldwide by two feet—and it's getting closer to the edge.... And then he'll interrupt himself: "Look, I'm not predicting anything," he'll say. "That's when you get a little kooky-sounding."

Rainwater is no crackpot. But you don't get to be a multibillionaire investor—one who's more than doubled his net worth in a decade—through incremental gains on little stock trades. You have to push way past conventional thinking, test the boundaries of chaos, see events in a bigger context. You have to look at all the scenarios, from "A to friggin' Z," as he says, and not be afraid to focus on Z. Only when you've vacuumed up as much information as possible and you know the world is at a major inflection point do you put a hell of a lot of money behind your conviction.

Such insights have allowed Rainwater to turn moments of cataclysm into gigantic paydays before. In the mid-1990s he saw panic selling in Houston real estate and bought some 15 million square feet; now the properties are selling for three times his purchase price. In the late '90s, when oil seemed plentiful and its price had fallen to the low teens, he bet hundreds of millions—by investing in oil stocks and futures—that it would rise. A billion dollars later, that move is still paying off. "Most people invest and then sit around worrying what the next blowup will be," he says. "I do the opposite. I wait for the blowup, then invest."

The next blowup, however, looms so large that it scares and confuses him. For the past few months he's been holed up in hard-core research mode—reading books, academic studies, and, yes, blogs. Every morning he rises before dawn at one of his houses in Texas or South Carolina or California (he actually owns a piece of Pebble Beach Resorts) and spends four or five hours reading sites like LifeAftertheOilCrash.net or DieOff.org, obsessively following links and sifting through data. How worried is he? He has some $500 million of his $2.5 billion fortune in cash, more than ever before. "I'm long oil and I'm liquid," he says. "I've put myself in a position that if the end of the world came tomorrow I'd kind of be prepared." He's also ready to move fast if he spots an opening.

Very smart people often do very foolish things. Quite frankly, I think this guy is about to jump off the deep end. I'd love to explain to him why, but I know he wouldn't believe me anyway.

Furthermore, just because someone has made a couple billion doesn't mean that his gambles were made for the right reasons. Later in the article, it appears that Rainwater got lucky on his 94-95 oil and gas gamble. It certainly doesn't sound like he gambled for the right reasons.

People always underestimate the role of luck in success. Luck is a huge, huge part of success. This guy has put himself in the position where luck would make him very wealthy, and congratulations to him.

I think he's about to put himself in the position where luck will make him very UNwealthy. I hope he saves a few million to live on.

Trying to bring it back, yo:
I think I may start writing here again.

I haven't started any businesses lately, but I've kept the dream alive. It will happen one day. Right now I'm trying to decide whether to stay in law school or try to do something entrepreneurial right now. Law school will always be there, but the opportunity to start something unencumbered by wife and family may not.

But I think I may just start writing about whatever is going on in life. It'll be good for me to write occasionally, and their should be some business talk as well.

**In case you didn't catch it, the reference is from some show back in the early 90s. In Living Colour, maybe? Yo no se.

Something that amuses me -- Budweiser Select

This blog is still 18th in Yahoo for Budweiser Select. It probably wouldn't take much work at all to be top 10.

11 months

Eleven months since I posted. That's a long time.

Not much has changed, except that I pay more in tuition now.

Como arena en el vaso de la hora

así son los dias de nuestras vidas. Se pasó de nuevo.

yikes

I moved and forgot about my blog.

More Budweiser Select

I've been posting on Budweiser Select a few times now.

As I predicted, Budweiser Select is being tagged as a low carb beer, even though Budweiser (or Anheuser Busch, rather) isn't marketing it as a low carb beer. They have Michelob Ultra for that already.

Edit several years later: actually, they were sorta marketing it as a lowcarb beer, they just didn't seem to be clear on it at first.