Kelly Smith | Made in Seattle

I love to watch my fellow local Seattle entreprenuers leave the nests of their employers and try to start their own companies. I especially love it when it appears to be working. I’ve followed the guys over at Robot Co-op and now I’ve been reading that Findory is cash flow positive. I don’t know Greg Linden personally but I’m a supporter nonetheless. This is a small town and I suspect at some point we’ll cross paths but even if we never meet I wish the best for these guys because its a great concept that’s unique AND useful.

We made a small investment in a our new English friend Peter Cooper who developed FeedDigest. (By the way, FeedDigest is what powers the publishing of all my latest bookmarks at the bottom of this page). He recently turned me on to AllPeers.com – a simple, persistent buddy list in the browser. Initially, interaction with those buddies will be limited to discovering and sharing files – If you choose to, you can share any file on your network with one or more of your friends. They will be able to see what files you choose to share (even getting an RSS feed of new files you include), and with a single click download it to their own hard drive.

Various things like this have been tried before and are being tried now (Kasayka) but that’s a good thing because it’s STILL too hard to share images and files withing a closed group. I still use an FTP client, upload to a webserver and then email people the link around. It works for me but I am fully aware that this is not a mainstream solution.

I don’t know if there is a business model for any of these efforts besides acquisition but its the functionality we need and, as a diehard Firefox user I welcome such tools.

So some of you know I’ve been a big fan of 21 year old Englishman Alex Tew. He started milliondollarhomepage back in September. His goal was to raise $1 million “for college” and he set out to do it selling pixel ads. Guess what? It’s January and he’s auctioning off his final 1,000 pixels on eBay. Total bid as of 10:15pm today? $23,900.

I’ve watched this site since Alex made his first $1,000. It just goes to show that there ARE still original ideas left in the world. How many attitude-laden software execs, Microsoft cronies, or bullish stock traders made a million bucks in 5 months? A few for sure. But not many. And I doubt any of them are 21 years old.

Stay humble. Stay creative. Dream big.

I just love to watch stuff like this happen.

Well for the last 7 years or so a big group of us have gone to Whistler BC for the holidays. This year, we went to Sun Valley Idaho along with Tom Hughes, Jessica Jensen, Cerbert Noonan, Tyler Davidson and his wife Henriette Holst. Making up for the pitiful snowfall we saw here in the Northwest last year, I am pleased to report that we got DUMPED on and the skiing was amazing. As you can see, in spite of the storms we did manage to catch a sunny day too.
Trish and I met a lot of new friends and we do hope we’ll be able to keep in touch with many of you. It would be difficult to pin down the most memorable moment. Perhaps it was skiing through the trees back in the bowls. Perhaps it was the long lunch up at the roundhouse with 5 bottles of wine Perhaps it was the nude snow-angels on the back patio. Perhaps it was the New Year’s celebration itself at the Maffei residence. While I’d been to Sun Valley for mountain biking during the summer months this was my first time skiing there and I was really taken by the relatively modest liftlines, the charm of the old roundhouse and the history and legacy of the place. While I’d say Whistler still has areas that offer trickier terrain and steeper steeps Sun Valley has a real sense of community that it’s developed over the decades. It’s a new favorite for sure. The photos are posted here.