From the Laptop of Jeremy Irish

My daughter loves to sit on my shoulders when we walk places. Occasionally when we enter buildings I am asked to put my daughter down. I'm fine with it since I know there's a whisper of "liability protection" in the air.

On Saturday we were entering Centurylink Field for a Sounders game when one of the employees checking bags asked for me to put down my child "for her safety." As parents, we decide what is considered safe and what isn't. If the stadium wants to protect themselves from liability by requiring children to be removed from their parents shoulders, that's fine. They should just be honest about it.

If you are reading this today, you aren't participating in the National Day of Unplugging. Good for you.

Here's the reason: By indicating you have to unplug, you are admitting you have a problem with managing your time online, because using the internet isn't a problem.

It's like saying that you should refrain from reading for the next 24 hours. Unless you have a voratious reading problem distracting you from, say, a nice dinner with your spouse ("Sorry honey, I can't talk with you right now. I'm just finishing the next chapter in The Hunger Games")

Instead of unplugging from the Internet, you should consider ways that you can use the Internet in moderation, such as turning off your phone during social engagements and time with family so you can stay in the moment with your friends and loved ones. There's no need to unplug for 24 hours. Just consider how you can turn off your phone or step away from the Internet more often.

If you need to unplug from the Internet for 24 hours to realize that you can, than I won't blame you for trying to shock your system to stop the addiction. But for the rest of us that use the Internet in moderation, we don't need a special day to unplug.

In anticipation of Leap Day, we're working out how and when to calculate the number of geocachers out logging caches for the one year in four when you can go geocaching for 366 days.

The first part of getting the real time statistics was to determine when the calendar day starts. A surprise to me, there are not 24 timezones, but 26!

That's GMT+14 in Kiribati.

In other words, to start tracking finds on Leap Day we'll have to start tracking at 2am Pacific time on the 28th, and stop tracking the day on March 1st at 4am Seattle time. Since Seattle is on GMT-8 there are still 4 hours left on the clock before we count Leap Day over, resulting in a 50 hour calendar day.

If school was invented from scratch today, with the technology now available, what would it look like?

We're seeing teaching reinvented through the Khan Academy, TED talks, M.I.T.x, and a very brilliant idea, flipped classrooms. Lectures are being recorded and replayed outside the universities that created them. Classrooms of the future will be to reinforce the lessons that were viewed for homework.

It makes sense to have students learn from the best teachers, and use classroom time to reinforce those lessons. And if lessons could be stack ranked you could get the best curriculum that money doesn't have to buy.

I look forward to seeing how these new sites and programs evolve.

I don't support SOPA, or PIPA or dogs sleeping on sofas. But it turns out Wikipedia decided to black out the english version of their web site because they really, really don't support them.

As a result, I didn't have access Wikipedia for a full 24 hours, and that turned out to be a good thing.

What I realized is that I was using Wikipedia as a crutch instead of doing my own research, which is pretty much what I used to do in school with Encyclopedia Britannica (or at least the volumes we owned from picking them up at the grocery store every so often. I did a lot of reports on subjects that started with P, for example, not owning every volume).

So, like when the power went out of my house, I had to get out of my comfort zone and do things a little different. I found new web sites to get the answers I needed (and the communities around those subjects), and actually found differing opinions on the subject that weren't relegated to a discuss page. In other cases I came to my own conclusions doing my own research, instead of relying on the expert on Wikipedia - who frankly ends up to be the one with the most time on their hands to edit the topic.

So thanks Wikipedia for going dark. It helped to decentralize information and made me smarter. I'm not sure if I plan to go back to you as often as I used to.

Everyone will eventually have their own operating system running in the cloud.

If you look at computers over the years, computing power has moved like a pendulum from a centralized infrastructure to a distributed one, then back again. This is usually based on the cost of computing power, cost and accessibility.

Internet access has been the same way. Before Internet Service Providers there was AOL. Eventually this centralized infrastructure for content was replaced by billions of web pages and millions of web servers. Now content has shifted back to centralized social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

I propose that the majority of what we do with our personal computers will soon move to the cloud, just like enterprise systems are today. Everyone will have their own server running in the cloud, storing their data, their email and their social graph.

How will this happen? A company will create a layer on top of cloud computing platforms like Azure or Amazon’s EC2 that supports a one click installation of a personal OS in the cloud. This will happen when cloud computing becomes affordable enough that a mainstream customer (or an early adopter) finds value in having an always available, always running operating system with very little (if no) maintenance.

What this means for us is that we will have the ability to have our own decentralized, customized Facebook, Twitter, and data storage.  We will want this because we want control of our data, our social network and our online persona. By owning our own OS in the cloud we can decide how information is presented to us, what features we want, and how we want to share our own information.

If there was a Facebook or Twitter killer, this would be it.

(I know what some of you may be thinking. ChromeOS is an OS for the cloud today. But it is restrictive since it only creates a platform for Google’s cloud solutions.)

Looking back after 10 years, I decided to jot down a few reasons why you should bootstrap your business instead of finding an investor. The biggest benefit is that you have an infinite runway - you will never be forced to "exit" by selling your company or going public. The biggest drawback is that you have to eat what you kill from day one.

• You are less than 6’ tall – According to the book Blink, the average man is 5’9” tall. While only 3.9% of adult men are 6’2”, 30% of Fortune 500 CEOs were 6’2 or taller. If you are vertically challenged it may be easier to bootstrap instead of raising money. I'm 5' 8" tall.
• You don’t have status – If you don’t have the right pedigree, such as education, notable former employer, run your own business before, or if you are a relative unknown in the industry you are targeting, you are a high risk for any investor. Prove yourself by bootstrapping yourself.
• You are not willing to ask for money – This can be surprisingly hard for some folks, like me, who want to raise capital for their business.
• Valuations are low – If you don’t expect to get a good value for your idea, build out your idea until valuations are higher. Most investors want traction. If you have traction, why would you need to raise money?
• You have at least one co-founder – Running a bootstrapped company is hard. Running it on your own is close to impossible.  A co-founder helps support you and keep you centered. Three, like at Groundspeak, is optimal since there is always the opportunity for a tie-breaker when there is conflict in the business. There will always be conflict in the business.
• You worked with your co-founders before – Optimally you have worked with your co-founders in the past and understand their work ethic. Going into business with your friends doesn’t give you an insight into how they work in a business environment. The co-founders of Groundspeak worked together before running the company.
• You have everything you need – You have the skills and partners to make the business work without additional support
• You have no young children – When kids enter the picture you need to mitigate risk and, depending on your parenting style, won’t have the time to dedicate your sweat equity into the business. When we started Groundspeak, we didn't have kids.
• Your co-founder is your spouse – I have heard more than once that investors don’t put money into business run by married couples. Too many investors have been burned by a divorce. I wouldn’t recommend starting a business with your spouse at all, but if you do you should bootstrap your business. It’s likely your only option.

Are you a powerboater or a sailor?

Powerboaters focus on a location and motor directly towards the goal, while sailors use the wind and “tack” back and forth to the goal, only occasionally pointing directly towards it.

I find that entrepreneurs tend to sail, since you often have to change direction based on the current weather conditions. Sometimes the wind is blowing in the wrong direction but you can slowly make progress, and sometimes the wind is in your sails.

If you work on goals like a powerboater in business you’ll likely run out of gas.

Over the past year I have taken advantage of local deals through several different Groupon sites (Groupon, Tipper, Living Social). You can't resist, especially when they are for locations you already frequent. It feels like the deals are too good to be true so you have to buy into them.

Well, they are too good to be true.

There are already many articles about this, but most merchants don't do the math and realize how much they are really losing on these deals. The coupon customers are also unlikely to offer you repeat business. But as a merchant you become popular. More people walk through your door. It feels successful. You feel successful.

This was exactly how the dot com bubble went. Deals were everywhere, everything was free and there was no business model (except to be snapped up by a larger company, or go public). Your web site received a lot of traffic so it felt successful. And by this measurement you were successful. So money flowed and companies blossomed. Until they didn't.

There's a point where this bubble will burst, so get your coupon purchases in now. I am.

This is the first time I was ever offended to receive cash in the mail.

A few days ago, via FedEx, I received a package that contained a $50 bill (which is not illegal) and information from a Crestcom franchise providing management skills training. Although I wasn't obligated to take a 3 minute call to discuss their services, the franchise called repeatedly over the next few days to speak with me. I finally took the call, and explained I had no interest in the service before I had to suffer through the pitch. The response? Thanks for your time and please send back the money.

WTF?

Don't expect that I should be obligated to talk to you if you send me money. It even makes me less likely to want to do business with you. It's just flat out creepy. But to have the gall to ask for the money back after I took the call? That's just sleazy.

So JH, if you read this, I'm donating the cash to a geocaching program at DonorsChoose.org since I have no obligation to give it back.