Venture Adventure

Sam Butrous, who I met at the CMU Startup meetup on Monday, found this.

July, 1992. I was taking a race-engine design/build class. I can’t remember who gave the class, but he was a good friend of Roy Howell, the Chief Chemist for Redline Oil. Roy came and gave us a talk about oils, and then we went out to dinner (I want to say at the Peppermill, on DeAnza, but my memory could be failing me).

Before the web, we actually communicated this information through mail lists. This one went to the Wheel to Wheel mailing list, which is still in operation 16 years later.

It’s nice that the Vintage Triumph Register reformatted it in HTML, but they missed on the crude ASCII graphics. Ironically, I was racing a Triumph Spitfire 1300cc in F-Prod at the time.

Stuff that I wrote pre-web is turning up in searches.  The Internet really is The Archive!

I attended the CMU Alumni Startup Meetup yesterday at the District Wine Bar, in San Francisco.  As is typical for a geek oriented fest, no one realized that it was also an SF Giants game.  The District is located just a few blocks from PacHell ATT park, so the very convenient across the street parking garage was charging a $25 flat fee.  I dropped the coin rather than spending an hour circling the area trying to find cheaper parking (and in the 4Runner, it would probably cost me as much in gas anyway).

I met a lot of very nice folks there, although much less than the 52 that RSVPd.  Probably more like 25 or 30 people.  No women, and, as I didn’t see anyone else who graduated before 1990, I was probably the oldest one there.

Most of the people where dot-com folks, with a few others sprinkled in.  I met one software developer who sold his company, and now he and his friends manage and invest their personal funds.  They actively participate in their investments, so it’s more like a buy-in than an angel operation.

Another person was a died-in-the-wool New Yorker whose original company was purchased and moved to Florida, so he ended up there, and starting another company.  Not liking Florida (as almost anyone who’s spent time there learns to hate it), he moved to San Francisco last year, while still working remotely.

There were a bunch of youngsters, graduating after 2000, with one who’d just graduated (‘07).  Another ‘00 left Sun and took 9  months off, spending 6 months traveling the world, and was now looking for a job.

Unfortunately, I had to leave fairly early.