My job is pretty cool. I get to spend time picking the brains of some of the planet’s smartest and most successful entrepreneurs—and invariably, I’m asking them to talk about the one thing they care about most passionately, their startup and/or its technology.
Even if I weren’t doing something I care about passionately myself—helping to build a new kind of journalism startup—their excitement would rub off on me. How could it not, for anyone who believes that entrepreneurs drive innovation, and that innovation drives economic growth and holds the hope of solving some of the world’s biggest problems?
My agenda yesterday—Thursday, September 15, 2011—included a fairly typical mix of meetings and interviews with local tech-community members. The only unusual thing was that I wound up eating lunch twice. Maybe I didn’t get to grapple with big topics like unemployment or global warming, but I did get to have in-depth talks with about a dozen different people about their businesses. That material will find its way into dozens of different stories down the road, some right away, some months from now.
Here’s how my day went—minus (most of) the boring minutiae. Cue the ticking-digital-clock sound from 24.
7:00 am Get up. Make coffee. Fire up Flipboard on the iPad to see what the other tech blogs are saying today. Check e-mail. There are 72 new messages since I zeroed out the inbox the night before.
8:43 am Publish the daily deals roundup.
8:50 am Update the Pier 38 eviction story from Wednesday with added details that came in overnight.
9:00 am Study up on the StoryWorld Conference and Expo and MindJet for meetings later today.
9:26 am Publish Steve Blank’s latest essay, cross-posted from his personal blog, about Silicon Valley’s pay-it-forward culture.
9:50 am Take Rhody—to me, perhaps the most important member of the San Francisco innovation community—out for a walk.
10:00 am Jean-Marie Hullot, president and CEO of Fotopedia and former CTO of Apple’s Application Division, arrives for an interview, along with Christophe Daligault, Fotopedia’s senior vice president of global business. I can’t say yet what we talked about, but it was extremely cool.
11:34 am Walk from Xconomy San Francisco’s Potrero Hill headquarters to Warm Planet Bikes at 4th and King to pick up bicycle. (I highly recommend them. They fixed my bent rear wheel for $54.)
12:10 pm Bike to Pier 38. Meet Gus Weber, entrepreneur-in-residence at Polaris Venture Partners, at Dogpatch Labs. Walk to Momo for lunch. Discuss the Pier 38 situation. Dogpatch, like the rest of the pier’s tenants, must move out by September 30 by order of
