Dennis Devlin is Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) at Brandeis University. I met Dennis a few years ago when he had the same role at Thomson Corporation. It has always struck me that a better title for Dennis would be Chief Common Sense Officer. I recently heard Dennis give a talk and wanted to share a few of his thoughts.

As CISO at a university, his group offers a "Digital Self-Defence" class. One key tenet he tries to impart is that information (or photos, videos etc) that you put on the web is like a tattoo: easier to put on display than to remove.

I have previously heard the people part of the technology equation called wetware (as in, "the problem is not in the hardware, and not in the software, it's in the wetware"). Dennis, however, uses a much more pleasant term, and a thought-provoking one, too (pun intended): know-ware. I think I much prefer to be know-ware than wetware!

I also particularly like the analogy that Dennis provides us to think about security

Security is like the brakes on your car; the function is to slow your car down, but the purpose is to allow you to go fast.

Finally, in terms of information systems security, Dennis noted that a system is secure when it does exactly what it is supposed to do, and nothing more! (It strikes me this is a good definition of quality as well as security.) Here is my take on his visual:

I have an occasional series of blog postings I call my VC:VC series in which I compare my venture cyclist and venture capital worlds. The venture cyclist in me is involved both in cycling and in the non-profit world ... so this gives me plenty of scope for interesting comparisons.

For today's note, I don't have to do any work ... I refer you to a great post on the TEDfellows blog entitled In Social Enterprise force yourself to be an entrepreneur first. The VC:VC relevance is obvious from the title. The writer, Peter Haas, lists 10 rules including

• Clearly define what you do and stick with it
• It costs more than you expect, get more than you need

It is not a long article - and worth the read.

The federal stimulus bill provides nearly $20 billion in incentives for physicians, hospitals and other healthcare providers to adopt electronic medical records as long as they are used in a meaningful way.

The definition of "meaningful use" took a few months to even begin to crystalize (see this article from the AMA news service).

With thanks to Dr Danny Sands (@DrDannySands), check out this great definition!

I had a great bike ride with friends on Sunday morning. With the clocks changing in favor of an early start we duly set off at 8am (yes, you crack-pots of dawners, that's early!). After about seven miles I got a flat rear tire. We found the puncture - a single pinprick hole - in the tube, but could not find a corresponding problem inside the tire or the wheel rim. We duly put it down to rubber fatigue, put in the (only) spare tube, pumped up, and headed on. Three miles later I had a flat again, and with the same pinprick hole at the same position in the tire (relative to the valve). This time a group of us all searched for the cause - and could not find anything. We took the tire off completely, turned it inside out and looked at it under the glare of the beautiful fall sunlight. Nothing. Again we searched, and the wheel rim as well. Nothing.

Meanwhile I was also working with my trusty patch kit to repair the hole. We decided to replace the tube and hope for the best ... what was the alternative?

As I reseated the tube inside the tire, when I got to the patch on the tube, I noticed a small bump on the outside of the tire. It looked like a minor imperfection caused by wear, but I tried to rub it off, and in doing so flicked out a very small grain of glass. This was the size of the period at the end of this sentence. It was lodged on the outside of the tire, and must have been impinging through the inner wall onto the tube under pressure. Without the pressure (whether from the tube inflation or the weight on the road) it did not poke into the inside of the tire which is why we could neither see it nor feel it inside.

Happy we had found and solved the problem I finished refitting the tube. We used a $1 bill (thanks Sammy) as shield for extra protection for the patched tube inside the tire where the glass had been "just in case", and went on to enjoy the rest of the ride without incident. Thanks to the early start we arrived home at the normal time, rather than significantly late. As I look back on this ride I have the same warm feelings of enjoyment of the ride, the company, the wind and the sun as I have for most Sunday rides. Puncture? Two punctures? Nooo problem.

There is a lesson here ... probably some pithy version of "be more thorough looking for the cause the first time!" Another lesson is "enjoy". It is not about arriving, it's about travelling hopefully.

Who says the tech world has no soul?

With a tip of the hat to Omar Gallaga at NPR's AllTech blog, check out these three very short videos. The first is of 1000 Vodafone cell phones playing Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture in response to orchestrated text messages, and the others are the "making of", parts one and two.

There is general confusion about the difference between an organization's vision, mission, long term goals, long term plans, strategy and even tactics. My approach is to acknowledge that different people use these terms in different ways but, in any given specific planning process, to require that we agree to arbitrary but shared definitions. I have, for many years, used a great working definition of strategy as "the decisions about how we will apply resources to objectives".

A strategic planning process starts with (or generates) a vision and mission, agrees on long term objectives, and identifies the resources available. It then makes decisions about how to apply resources to the objectives.

This is never as clean a process as it sounds, but working with explicit (if forced) definitions about each of these elements, really helps.

However, I now want to revise my definition, perhaps only subtly, having seen the TED Talk by Bjorn Lomborg, on setting global priorities.


In this talk he suggests that before you decide where to spend resources, you should know the cost-benefit ratio for the possible solutions. He notes that if there are a dozen key global problems, the decisions on where to spend the money should first be informed by the cost-effectiveness of the solutions, and not the size or even "importance" of the problem alone. This requires some agreement on a standardized notion of costs and, especially, benefits. In Lomborg's case he is looking at lives saved, or possibly QALYs. For a corporation, the costs and benefits are likely entirely financial, but at any given time one metric (e.g., revenue growth) may be more or less important than any other (e.g., profitability, or return on net assets). Ideally all the benefits of achieving each objective can be measured uniformly (for easy comparison) so you can show a dollar cost figure per unit of objective-achieving benefit.

Lomborg's examples are very clear (whether or not they are fashionable), and it makes sense to me to add this to my thinking about strategy ... considering the proposed approaches to achieving the objectives being considered, and the cost-benefit ratios of each - before deciding on resource allocation.

The telephone, mainframe computers, microprocessor chips, and PC software industries have all spawned companies displaying enough monopolistic behavior to warrant penalties from the trust busters.

In England, the competition regulator used to be called the Monopolies Commission and one of my favorite comedic lines (attributed here to Nigel Rees) is "why is there only one Monopolies Commission?" Now we see the US and EU anti-trust authorities fighting over these issues, we wonder why there isn't just one!

For reasons about to become clear let me share this chart from a March '09 Fortune Magazine article which shows the adoption rate of new technology. (As Raif Barbaros pointed out, the Facebook comparison itself is misleading: Facebook is free, you have to pay for the others.)

Resolving the chain of reasoning connecting these two topics... I would love to see a chart showing the number of years from the introduction of a technology to the first investigation by competition regulators. I leave that as an exercise for the reader!

And, what, you might be asking, is the proximate cause for juxtaposing these thoughts? Just a few months after I noted cloud computing (Feb '09) as a new trend in our industry, the Economist newspaper has an editorial and feature article on the competition authorities starting to poke around the clouds. I bet this is a record!

With a tip of my hat to my wife and her colleague who brought this to my attention, and to the several websites who use the diagram, I bring you the latest knowledge about the genetic pre-dispositions encoded in the Y-chromosome (which we all remember is the male determining chromosome).

This summer I had the privilege of being a mentor at the Techstars Boston inaugural program.

Techstars is a bootcamp for first time entrepreneurs and their startups. Participants apply and are chosen from the pool during the winter or spring. The program operated this year from May to September and participants worked in shared space in Central Square, Cambridge for the duration. As well as the benefits of learning together on the run, and the able full time leadership of Shawn Broderick, the startups had access to a large number of mentors with diverse backgrounds (entrepreneurs, investors, technology experts, marketing experts etc). Many of the mentors presented material on a huge range of subjects relevant to the group, and provided one-on-one coaching and advice to a subset of the startups.

Techstars originated in Boulder a few years ago under the visionary leadership of David Cohen and Brad Feld. Through Bill Warner's equally visionary leadership here in the Boston area, David and Brad were convinced that this was the right place for the first geographic expansion of the program.

As a mentor I got to spend time with a few of the companies and enjoyed it immensely. Although I work with startups all the time, this experience was the pure essence of young-entrepreneur and young-startup. Through the summer the teams developed their plans, their technologies and their pitches, and at the end they presented to a room full of investors at the Microsoft New England Research and Development Center (yes, NERD Center) right after Labor Day.

Here is a brief paragraph and a link for each of the 2009 Boston companies. A couple already have some early funding, and I know of a few more also now deep in discussions with angel or VC investors. Congratulations to them all!

• AccelGolf offers mobile and online apps that empower 30,000 golfers today to improve their game via personalized content.
• AmpIdea is helping new parents by creating valuable services through a web-enabled baby monitor.
• Baydin is is a zero-effort collaboration catalyst that uses email context to take the burden of searching for information off of employees.
• HaveMyShift is an online marketplace for hourly workers to trade their shifts, allowing them to create the best work schedule for themselves and their employer.
• LangoLab is the most entertaining way to learn a foreign language.
• Localytics provides a real-time analytics platform for mobile applications. Provides iPhone, BlackBerry and Android developers with the deepest user insights available to help them make smarter business decisions.
• oneforty is the Twitter outfitter. It's the Twitter apps and services marketplace that helps you get the most value from Twitter.
• Sensobi is Personal Relationship Management for today's mobile professional. Sensobi turns your contacts into relationships.
• TempMine is an online temporary staffing marketplace that finds better jobs for temps, higher quality temps for employers, and new business for agencies.

There was a thought-provoking article by David Goldhill in the September 2009 Atlantic Magazine with his suggestions about how to fix the US health care system. One of his key suggestions was to provide price or cost transparency to consumers of health care services. He noted that, crazily, consumers don't know how much stuff costs, and that some hospitals and medical offices refuse even to provide such information ahead of time.

Interestingly, I spoke to a friend last week who mentioned that his wife is a physician (working at a hospital) and, tellingly, even she doesn't know the price or cost of the treatments she recommends and delivers.

Although obvious the moment I heard it, given this crazy health care system, this is shocking. It seems that medical school never touched on these issues, and certainly her employer sees no need to share such information with the physicians. Hmmm...

Whether or not your insurance will pay your medical bills, perhaps we should all start asking our physicians about costs and prices in advance. Just as Goldhill suggested, a stronger cost consciousness for both providers and patients will itself drive new patterns of thinking, and maybe even behavior, too.

Wall Street is governed by only two emotions: fear and greed. When greed goes bust, fear takes over. After being scared long enough, greed returns. This week saw a seven IPOs scheduled, the most in two years according to Reuters. A year ago fear was the new greed... I fear that greed is now the new fear.

Venture Capital and High Tech also only have fear and greed in our emotional palette, and guess which one is driving a $1 billion dollar valuation for Twitter ... the company with no revenue model.

So, thank goodness for some sanity: a clear-headed strategy by the folks at collaboration software company 37Signals has lead to a valuation of $100 billion because of a "group of investors who have agreed to purchase 0.000000001% of the company in exchange for $1." (Tip of the hat to Jared Rosoff for pointing me at this one.)

"And that's the way it is."

This week sees the Jewish new year festival of Rosh Hashanah. We are offered four new years in the Jewish calendar (look 'em up) plus we get Jan 1 as well. This offers a plethora of opportunities for new starts, and so here I am, back on my blog.

Since last writing the summer has passed. It has been a full one, including nearly 1000 miles of cycling, mostly spread over weekly 40 mile rides with friends. I have also participated in my fourth Hazon NY Jewish Environmental Bike Ride. Hazon is the leading environmental group in the US Jewish community, working in areas of education, action and advocacy to make environmental concerns important in the community, and to make the Jewish voice important to the environmental movement. This year we are proud to be one of two key partners representing the Jewish community at a global conference of world religions, on the environment, organized by the Alliance of Religions and Conservation in the UK. In other examples of our work this year, Hazon’s CSA program at sites around the USA has put nearly $1m of purchasing power into local organic farms, and we have been participating in new programs supporting bike lane construction in New York City. Please consider supporting my fundraising for Hazon.

For those interested, we have an Israel Bike Ride coming up in November - places still available - and a new Bike Ride in the California Bay Area sometime in Spring 2010. Watch this space!

The traditional food for Rosh Hashanah is honey, the reason for which is the symbolism evoked with the traditional greeting with which I will close ... wishing you a Happy and Sweet New Year!

Hazon has a wonderful program for creating Jewish CSAs [farm share programs] including help with finding a farmer and other logistics. The Hazon program incorporates a significant amount of Jewish learning and programs for the entire family. This program, Tuv Ha’aretz (meaning both "good of the land" and "good for the land"), is now accepting applications for the 2010 season. Details can be found here.

Many synagogues and JCCs around the country are running these programs, but none yet in the Boston area. In some communities multiple synagogues are working together (some across denominational boundaries) to host a CSA.

Please consider this for your community. Pass it along to your JCC director, your Rabbi or other leader.

Sometimes I love being wrong. Fifteen months ago, here, I suggested that by 2018 the cost of obtaining a complete human genetic sequence would decline to the $1,000 level (the first one cost $3 billion).

Now, reading this MSN article, I see the true cost of a genetic sequence has already dropped to around $5,000 (look near the bottom of page 2 for this tidbit). The $1,000 sequence is now within sight, probably by the end of next year I have to guess, and possibly sooner. At this price point we will reach the tipping point, and there will be a flood of genetic data entering our healthcare system, and this can only be helpful. As reported in The Times of London, for example, DNA scan could cut cost of insurance - even if results kept secret.

We should remember that this is not yet a straight line to perfect diagnostics and treatments, because (as I reported in April) the connection between specific genes and disease is becoming less clear right now, not more. However, the availability of massive amounts of genotype data (genetic sequences) linked with phenotype data (what is happening to these bodies, as recorded in EMRs) will likely change medicine more rapidly over the next 10 years than over the last 50.

The incidentalome looms larger than ever.

I recently read Brian Greene’s The Fabric of the Cosmos, in which Greene describes, in lay and non-mathematical terms the major themes of physics and cosmology. Catapulting from the classical physics of Newton, Maxwell etc, Greene launches first into relativity, then quantum mechanics and on into inflationary cosmology and string theory. His style is engaging, even entertaining, and, nonetheless, very informative. I even know why the physicists of the Large Hadron Collider in Europe are chasing after the Higg’s Boson and what it is, more or less.

As a cyclist, all this has direct and immediate consequences. For example, and with a tip of the hat to Douglas Adams, if we live in an 11 dimensional universe should a bicycle have more wheels?

My favorite diversion born of these considerations tells me that as well as the health benefits of cycling, the relativistic effects of riding are also keeping me younger than any stationary types. This is based on Einstein’s theory of relativity which notes that the clock of someone travelling at speed will run slower than the clock of someone stationary. I posited this when out cycling with friends on Sunday, cleverly within earshot of Kenny Breuer, a professor at Brown University, and a regular in our Sunday morning cycling group. Sure enough he rose to the bait.

On one leg (or two wheels), he suggested the following approximation, to within an order of magnitude (meaning we are only using numbers that start with a 1 and have some number of zeros – like ten, a thousand, a billion, or a tenth or a thousandth etc). As an example, and introducing scientific notation for very large and very small numbers, the speed of light is 3E+08 meters per second (spoken three times ten to the eight, or three times ten to the eighth power). This is the notation for three times the number 1 with 8 zeros, which equals 3x100,000,000 or 300,000,000 m/s. To within an order of magnitude, this is simplified(!) to 1E+08 (we ignore the 3 altogether as you are about to see).

We start with noting that we are travelling at 10 meters per second (a kilometer every 100 seconds or a mile in three minutes is a grossly optimistic approximation, but is accurate to within an order of magnitude). The speed of light, as we noted, approximates to 1E+08 m/s. Hence we are travelling at 1E-07 of the speed of light. (The negative number means this has 7 zeros before the 1 – meaning we are travelling at 0.0000001 times the speed of light).

Kenny assures me the relativistic effects are the square of the fractional speed, so the relativity impact is the square of 1E-07, meaning 1E-14. If we are riding at this speed for three hours, then this is approximately 10,000 seconds (or 1E+04 seconds). Hence the change in our clock, compared to someone stationary, is 1E+04 times 1E-14 or 1E-10 seconds. This is one tenth of a nanosecond, and as anyone who works in computers knows, nanoseconds add up. One thousand nanoseconds is a millisecond, and everyone notices when there are more than a few milliseconds of delay on a Skype video call.

I know the approximations overstate the results (the speed of light is faster, we are travelling slower), but being able to do the simple exponent-of-ten math while cycling makes up for the lost accuracy with warm feelings of satisfaction.

I was hoping Wolfram Alpha would be able to provide a complete schematic for confirming this calculation, and I typed in relativistic effects on time of travelling at 14 mph for 3 hours. Unfortunately it did not understand me. Surely this kind of thing is a commonplace(!)

With thanks to Gregg Stern, who brought this to my attention:

Boston By Bike at Night -- Midnight 'til dawn

Saturday, August 8, 2009
Twenty First Annual Tour of Architectural and Historic Sites
Meet at 11:15pm in front of Trinity Church in Copley Square

Bring a bicycle with a light and wear something reflective; helmet recommended.
RAIN OR SHINE (moonlight, that is)!
Commemorative T-shirts available.

Bring something for breakfast Sunday in Christopher Columbus Park.
**Please bring a spare inner tube that fits your tires.**

Sponsored by the Back Bay Midnight Pedalers

My friend and Harvard Business School Professor Paul Gompers once suggested the best definition I have yet heard for entrepreneurship. Management, he states, is the optimization of resources; entrepreneurship is the optimization of opportunity.

This is explored further in a recent HBS blog posting MBAs vs. Entrepreneurs: Who Has the Right Stuff for Tough Times? In this posting, Professor Saras Sarasvathy, is quoted as noting that MBAs (managers) live by the creed To the extent that we can predict the future, we can control it. Entrepreneurs, on the other hand, live by the obverse: To the extent that we can control the future, we do not need to predict it.


In the non-profit world, even predicting the future is no sure path to controlling it (although I am not entirely sure it works in the corporate world either). At Hazon we have both under-estimated and over-estimated income from various sources every year (especially this year), and it is only through the imaginative marshaling of opportunities that we have continued to expand our reach and influence.

I saw a write up of friend and venture capitalist colleague Jo Tango today in Xconomy. Worth a read if you are following the people in the Boston VC community.

On recent rides I have been pondering some of the psychology of cycling (cycology??).

I mostly ride with groups, sometimes just two or three of us, but on Monday I rode with 10. I have been thinking about the psychology of being at the back, or the front, or the middle of the group. Often I am at the back of the group of riders because I ride with stronger cyclists and I am much slower uphill. I tend to do fine on flats and downhills but the uphills, since I am on a recumbent, bring me back to the back.

I want to emphasize that I love riding, and that I am actually pretty relaxed by now about all these issues. I would say that "happy to be riding" is my experience about 99% of the time by now ... however, the not-so-relaxed feelings come and go, and here they are for all to analyze!

Here are some of the feelings I experience at the back

1. fine: happy to blame the bike, happy to be relaxed, happy to be riding
2. guilt: don't want to hold the others back
3. frustration: wish my legs were stronger
4. happy: no-one behind me to crash into me as I slow down up hill
5. worry: am I lost? did I miss a turn-off?

When I am next to last, I feel

1. happy: at least I am not last
2. concerned: does the person behind me feel bad for being last? do they expect me to wait for them or do they prefer I don't wait for them? do I need to wait at the next turn-off so they don't get lost?
3. worried: will the person behind me crash into me as I slow down on an up hill?
4. frustrated: wish my legs were stronger (then I would be further up in the rankings)
5. happy: happy to be riding

When I am up at the front, I feel

1. happy: wahoo! I am at the front!
2. uh oh: will they pass me on an up-hill?
3. worried: am I lost? did I miss a turn?
4. pressured: am I holding them back?
5. happy: happy to be riding

All activities come with feelings; those are some of mine. I would love to hear yours.

One last thing ... why not join the Hazon NY Jewish Environmental Bike Ride on Labor Day weekend (and you don't have to be Jewish to join us - we always have a group of Muslim, Christian, Atheist and others). Register before Sunday and get a $50 discount on registration fees with the code "bikemonth". With short and long route options, this is a great event for anyone looking for a great retreat weekend, a diverse and optimistic weekend community and a rewarding physical challenge.

I am happy to answer questions (leave a comment), and there is a great network of cyclists of various abilities in NYC and also here in Boston with whom you can connect for riding partners during the summer as you train up. Prices go up after Sunday, so this is the weekend to register!

As I tweeted last month: Inverse Law of Usenet Bandwidth: The more interesting your life becomes, the less you post... and vice versa. Jorn Barger, 1994.

Usenet was pretty early version of what is now the web 2.0 world of user generated content. Today's simple corollary is: The more interesting your life becomes, the less you post [on blogs]... and vice versa. This leads to wondering whether the incentive (or reward) for blogging is gratification in boring moments...

There is a question about whether Twittering follows the same pattern. Many folks note that it is so easy to tweet that interesting lives lead to more tweeting. That is for another post.

This blog has been silent for over a week exactly because I have been busy on interesting things, mostly work related, mostly our just completed annual advisory committee meeting. I considered live-tweeting the event for about one nanosecond (talk about a breach of etiquette and career-ending adventure). An example tweet might have been "Partner X now telling LPs that deal Y is going to be worth $1b", and another example would be "Partner X now telling LPs that deal Y better show progress before June 30 or it will be shut down". Last night's dinner tweets would have been interesting too, but I can't even hint at those. You can see why the public twitterstream is not ideal for this kind of commentary!

I did want to mention a couple of interesting articles I gleaned from the twittersphere recently. One talks about the very obvious (to me) comment that even *free* will not get physicians to adopt electronic medical records - see this short post on e-patients. Secondly with an eye to my non-profit volunteer work, consider this WSJ blog post on how increasing the price of membership can increase memberships. In both cases the incentive structure is non-intuitive, or at least against the classical or conventional wisdom.

Incentive compensation (bonus plans) are amongst the most complicated parts of my life as a board member on startups. CEOs and their VPs generally have bonus plans approved by the board (or its compensation committee). It is a cliche that "you get what you pay for" and we have to be excruciatingly careful not to encourage unhelpful outcomes through an inadvertent side-effect of a bonus plan. If we offer a bonus for maintaining a healthy cash balance, the CEO might fire a bunch of people and reduce sales or service levels. If we focus on revenue we may encourage profligate spending and reduce our cash cushion. It gets worse from there. Even the seeming alignment around incentive stock options can lead to problems, and not just those seen on Wall Street.

Incentives in all these areas remain intriguing and annoying because they seem to amplify unexpected behavior as much as desired behavior. Despite the concerns and contradictions, or perhaps because of them, they remain a source of constant interest for me in my venture capital (and venture cyclist) work.