Venture Adventure

Fascinating story of Bill Caswell taking a craigslist junker car to 3rd place, racing against factory prepared $400,000 rally cars. Bill’s a true startup guy…

From Nicholas Bate: The Leadership Dozen

While I’m not a big Arrington/Tech Crunch fan, it’s nice to see Michael take on The Next Big Thing.

Money Quote:

Being a socialist is a great way to get laid in college but it’s no way to run a society.

Buried in this WaPo puff piece about Neel Kashkari is this gem:

In Washington, he used his BlackBerry to determine the bailout sum presented to Congress. His arithmetic: “We have $11 trillion residential mortgages, $3 trillion commercial mortgages. Total $14 trillion. Five percent of that is $700 billion. A nice round number.”

Looking back, he says, he is more confident about the two-by-sixes.

“Seven hundred billion was a number out of the air,” Kashkari recalls, wheeling toward the hex nuts and the bolts. “It was a political calculus. I said, ‘We don’t know how much is enough. We need as much as we can get [from Congress]. What about a trillion?’ ‘No way,’ Hank shook his head. I said, ‘Okay, what about 700 billion?’ We didn’t know if it would work. We had to project confidence, hold up the world. We couldn’t admit how scared we were, or how uncertain.”

WAPO: “Seven hundred billion was a number out of the air,” N. Kashkari – http://bit.ly/5AitzU