Category: 80percenttruestories
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Two Extremes
I was on a road trip with Max Levchin (Paypal founder) and we had a pair of meetings at the two extremes of personality. To lay some groundwork, Max is wildly introverted, an “academic” Jew more than a spiritual Jew, and struggles with his need for recognition and significance and his desire to be alone. […]
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Friend Request
Then there was the day the Yahoo! founder added me to his Messenger list…
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Get Dressed Up
I walked by a bar today that I had only been to once before, at 4 in the morning. For a wonderful run of four years I ran a magnificent event with my great friend Utkarsh Patel called “Get Dressed Up to Get Messed Up”. It was prom for adults (we told ourselves). It was […]
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Howard and Al
I just walked by the Paley Center for Media at 52nd and 5th and got a little nostalgic. Journey with me back to 1991, and the Paley Center is called The Museum of Television and Radio. I’ve somehow fallen into a friend group with three ladies of the MOTR — Diane Rosenberg (who I know […]
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Wow, that’s a pretty good job…
Dr. Tewell at Fifth Avenue Presbyterian was charismatic and demanding. He didn’t suffer the Sunday-only Presbyterian who ignored their duties of officium et pecuniae (service and donation), and so FAPC had a very active volunteer team. It wasn’t unusual for Dr. T to finish service with “we’re not leaving here until I have two more […]
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risk vs. uncertainty
I’ve had the thrill of a combination of successful and less-than-successful startup experiences. The first ended in a 9/11 accelerated total collapse in 2001. The 30 seconds on it are “we had a little piece of software that got downloaded about 25,000 times, and if you were on, let’s say Amazon, looking at the latest […]
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Albert from Little House on the Prairie
It was late Winter, 1990 and the job hunt was in full swing. I had just returned from a trip to NYC with a half dozen other fellas for a round of interviews at Salomon, Prudential Securities and Drexel Burnham Lambert. Yes, that Drexel. I did eventually get a job offer from Drexel, but it […]
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Dan Smith Guitar
My first guitar lessons came from an interesting New York creature named Dan Smith. He was giving lessons on the down-low in his apartment, so you couldn’t bring your own guitar and you weren’t supposed to hang around before/after your lesson. Dan was great. We learned by just playing songs and he navigated in-and-out of […]
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Trump II
Fast forward six years from my not-so-near brush with fame and I’m living in San Francisco and among other things doing a little freelance work for MTV on advertiser strategy in emerging categories. I’m in NY for the final readout to the top 20 MTV execs as part of a management retreat and, as you […]
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Trump + Lauer
There were a couple of different ways to get onto Season 2 contestant pipeline of The Apprentice. 1. Send in a video, 2. Wait in line at the Today Show and maybe participate in a quick competition, 3. Wait in line at open casting. My video was five minutes long and committed to VHS with […]