Monday, March 08, 2010

BusinessWeek Career/Business Pieces - Mar 15 issue

Some pretty interesting stuff from the Mar 15 issue of BusinessWeek... much of it around a common theme.



The first story that struck me as interesting was "What I Learned from My Dad"... a commentary by Peter Buffett following the much larger profile of his uber-investor father, Warren Buffett. The piece is actually excerpted from his forthcoming book "Life Is What You Make It: Find Your Own Path to Fulfillment" and tells the interesting tale of how the younger Buffett was staked with a roughly $90K inheritance at age 21... and used the money to fund making a go of it in the music field he loved.

Immediately following that in this BW issue was "And Google Begat..." about the Angel investing (no, not these kind of Angels) done by current and former Googlers. Pretty interesting stuff about the "next generation" impact Google wealth is having by helping fund tech startups such as Twitter, Tesla Motors and a host of smaller unknown (but, probably not always) ventures. The story was also noteworthy to me with mention of Truckee, CA based ex-Google guy Chris Sacca (his blog here). Granted, the town is what I noticed, but it was cool to read how Sacca came across one of his investments after posting a message on his Twitter account one Friday night asking if any startups were working late.

Finally, from this issue I liked "The Road to Reinvention" about career changes following personal setbacks. Specifically the one that got me (out of three vignettes) was that about Todd Morris... a 30 something tech sales guy who had an interest in a product category (security and surveillance gadgets), didn't see anyone dominating the field and up and created a now successful company, BrickHouse Security) in that space. Gotta be something to that idea of building a business around something you think valuable, but not already out there.

Three stories... one theme. Two guesses... that's right, building a career/investing in a business around something that interests you. Solid.