Revenge of the Packaging Vent A Thon - From Left Field.

Posted on July 6th, 2007 by Zach.
Categories: General, Systems of the World.

This is a slightly different vent about packaging, but have you ever noticed how hard it is to come out of a “to-go” food situation without three bags, fifteen forks, enough napkins to get mustard off all the mouths in Rhode Island, the sandwich you ordered wrapped in four layers of paper, and various coupons for future use?

Every time I go out to grab lunch from the office these days I come away with four pounds of packaging - to say nothing of the places that pack all of the above into a lovely Styrofoam box. So sweet, I will be throwing that away in about 3 seconds…

But this is not the messed up part, what concerns me most is that when I tell them I don’t want the (bag, napkins, silverware, etc) I feel guilty, like they might feel insulted somehow.

What is that about! Holy crap I have packaging guilt!

This is the weirdest reaction to potential trash I can imagine. Do I really feel they might be insulted? Really?

Whatever - most of the folks behind the counter just look confused. They have just put together about 10,000 sandwiches and packaged them in a perfect system of fluidity. And here I come screwing up the process: He really doesn’t want the napkins? Maybe I will give them to him anyway, just in case. They are as screwed up as I am at that moment.

At least we are in this thing together.

I know, I know, I should be putting last nights stir fry in Tupperware and bringing it from home - Saving money, packaging, and being super enviro.

It doesn’t happen.

First off, I live alone and rarely cook in general. In my situation I actually think cooking is more consumptive (Spoiler Alert: Here comes a rationale for my own behavior, I bet most of you can hardly wait). When I buy vegetables, I end up throwing half of them out as they slowly rot in my fridge. Also I definitely am using less packaging in my current state than buying food and cooking. I just am; being recycling obsessed, I basically have to take out the trash at home every two weeks - and that is usually a small shopping bag sized situation.

And even after that justification, the reality is that I hate eating leftovers at lunchtime - maybe more than Josh Dorfman hates recycling. Also, if I don’t get out of the office at lunch - interact with a couple of people, maybe walk to the river near my office for a second - I lose it.

Does anyone else feel bad not taking the packaging, or am I the only stupid kid doing this? I have no solution for any of this, I am just looking for outside validation.

Maybe I can bring my own plate and the restaurants can just load up the meal. How would that be? You want to see confused? Show up with your own plate at your favorite to-go food option.

While we are on this subject there is a new phenomenon in my nieghborhood in takeout (Again, don’t send me any email about my eating behaviors, I know they are messed up, I don’t need reminding). Many of the foods that used to come in the Styrofoam, now come in a slightly cheaper, but still solid version of Tupperware. At first I was very excited by this change, deeming it a fairly promising step. It has successfully supplied me with all the food storage vessels I could possibly want in my life. This must be killing Glad, RubberMaid, and anyone else who makes this stuff.

But now I am on the fence realizing that all this stuff still gets thrown away in most circumstances. I kind of hope it can be recycled, but because I use mine all the time and don’t throw it away, I am not actually sure this is true.

So do you use yours, or does it get chucked just like the white foam things? Do people recycle it? What up with this?

…And end rant.

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The Startup Addiction Defined

Posted on April 13th, 2007 by Zach.
Categories: General.

I was asked recently what it takes to start a company. Having no idea really, I had to think about it for a bit. What exactly had we been through recently with Reware? In the end I really couldn’t give a good answer, but here are some thoughts that come up when people asked things like this.

Someone once told me that every start up takes at least 3 years to even remotely feel like a normal business. You know - semi-regular paychecks, some pretense of business infrastructure, and that always elusive concept; cash flow.

Every new entrepreneur says the same thing when they get advice like this: “Yeah, but we are going to do it differently”. “It will go faster with us. “This idea is the killer app”. And on it goes. Typically you say this for about three years, until such time as the company takes off, or crashes in a horrible ball of flame taking your oh so fragile ego with it.

High stakes poker this stuff, and yet that is the appeal. The idea of going to the same workplace to do the same job day in and day out is too unfathomable for most startup junkies. I let you in on a little secret: essentially entrepreneurs are lazy. Not in the “lay on the couch and do nothing” sort of way. No, it is a more deceptive laziness - One where you work way too many hours and feel like there are not enough hours in the day to finish what you need to do. See? So Lazy.

OK so maybe that doesn’t exactly jibe, but here’s the thing: The startup is a project, not a job. It has a beginning, middle, and most importantly – a finish. When we started Reware for example, I am pretty sure I had my own project finish in mind. I didn’t know what that point was exactly, I just knew that I always have a notion that this is not forever. That there will be other adventures, other companies, other projects to come.

That is the startup addiction – work like crazy all day everyday, get to a point where the business is stable and plan to have much smarter, more organized, and reliable people run the thing. Maybe change your title from “Managing Partner” to “Creative Strategist”. Come in two days a week. Surf a lot. This is the dream that keeps you going. And it’s not the life of leisure that drives this, in fact that leisure is boring after about four days. No, it is the idea that the job or the project is done. That you worked like crazy to an end point. You achieved something. And then you took a much needed break.

This is a psychosis of some kind, I am not sure where it comes from, but there are some specific criteria of the disease:

Work can’t feel like work. It is part of everyday life, in my case the things I am reading at home pertain directly to the places I am traveling for quasi work/vacation hybrids, to the things I am doing in the office. It is the perfect combination of OCD and ADD, both obsessive and impatient, hyper-focused and scattered. I recently took a trip to Mexico where I did absolutely nothing related to work. A true vacation and it was wonderful – for about 4 days.

Denial. 90% of the work stinks, but the other 10% makes you forget that fact. Anyone who as ever been to sea for an extended amount of time knows this phenomenon. Most of the time at sea you are cold, wet, and tired. It’s that one sunset that is so beautiful it makes you tear up. That’s what puts you back out there again. Startups are no different, you forget the pain. I hear pregnancy has similar aspects, but I can’t actually attest to that. Maybe someone else can comment.

There is an inability to pace one’s self. I always wanted to be a teacher, and I think I was a pretty good one – for about 4 weeks. What I could never figure out was how modulate my energy level to last over a whole year, let alone a career. Not only that, but I didn’t want to. There is something fundamentally appealing about the project that swallows your life, and then lets you go surfing later. By the same token there is something horrifying about evenly paced work day in and day out. I just can’t do it. And this is why I leave teaching (one of the most difficult and important job on the planet, incidentally) to people more talented than myself.

In the end I don’t understand the point of work. I understand the value of projects that will fundamentally change the world and I can get into that idea, that is what drives everything else. But work everyday, just sounds horrible. Don’t get me wrong, I have friends for whom work is just a mechanism to do the other things they love. Work is not a calling, but a way to pay the bills, put food on the table. It enables the real passion for them - creation of art, travel, sailing, whatever. Work is just a means to an end, and I can respect that - even if I could never put in that kind of time.

No, give me something that swallows my whole life for three years. Give me something where I will be alternately swearing and whining because I am trying to make things happen that have never been done before, but I think they should be easier. Give me something that sucks my savings and credit down to nothing. Give me the chance to make the big change.

And this is called entrepreneurial. Or stupidity, they really are pretty hard to distinguish.

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Hello world - Take 3.

Posted on March 18th, 2007 by Zach.
Categories: General.

So TDP has been gone for a minute, but now we’re back - call it the third generation.

A little background:

For those of you who have tracked our evolution through the years may remember that we started as a small group in San Francisco in 1999. While the mission changed fundamentally a couple of years ago, we have always tried to keep true to the original concept - A little edgy, a little irreverent, avoid myopia as much as possible.

When we refocused in 2003, we really wanted to talk about the rising “Green Economy”. At that point the frenetic energy around renewable energy and sustainability had yet to rise to its current heights. Credit Al Gore, Rising Oil Costs, whatever you wish - the point is “Green” is everywhere you turn, and by this I mean The Oscars, WalMart, G freaking E! You can’t get more disparate than that. It is an exciting time, and there are a set of news sites that will come up on this blog again and again in the coming years: Grist, Treehugger, Renewable Energy Access, Greenwire. We love these sites, and we felt like didn’t need to compete for attention when they are all doing such good job representing the space.

Additionally, it felt like sustainability and the green revolution, was just one piece of a larger shift going. It was something we could see going on everywhere, in every facet of life. Yet I seem to struggle framing the whole picture for myself.

And with that we begin. I don’t have answers, just a gut feeling that something big is on the horizon. Bigger than any of us can even imagine. Treehugger and Grist, GE and WalMart, these are tangible examples of the shift. Friedman touches upon it, as does Gladwell. Add in Jared Diamond into the mix.

Architecture, Global Trade, Rising Population, the changing strategy of messaging around the environment, Pop-Culture - the shift is everywhere.

And all of it fits together somehow, I just am not sure how yet.

It is my hope that I can use this site to help explain this shift for myself, maybe bounce some ideas off people I respect and start to build a framework of the new order of things in the world - what is coming and what is here.

Thanks for checking in.

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