July 2008:

In an effort to split out a couple of different interests, going forward, this site [Taylor Davidson Photography, Travel & Culture] will remain focused on photography, travel and cultural musings, and all business, entrepreneurship and innovation thoughts will be posted at Unstructured Thoughts.

After nearly a year, today I’m recombining the interests. Here’s the details:

• Unstructured Ventures, my site about my business and consulting endeavors, is not going away. All the old posts will stay on this blog, but going forward I’ll be writing everything on the Taylor Davidson site.
• All the “Unstructured Thoughts” posts will be in the Innovation & Entrepreneurship category.
• The RSS feed, email subscription and Twitter link bot will still work; if you’re reading this through RSS or email do not change anything to continue to get the same Unstructured Thoughts posts. Click here to get the full details on how to follow the sites and categories by RSS, email and Twitter.
• If you want to search for posts across both sites, I created a new search page to make it a little easier (especially for me).

Why am I doing this?

• I’m combining the blogs to find a better way to link interests rather than divide them into different silos; frankly I’m finding it harder to truly separate the interests and conversations.
• Depending on the ranking or measurement metric you prefer, this blog is one of the top 30 to 100 blogs about venture capital, which I find somewhat odd since it’s increasingly less about venture capital and more about the broader world of entrepreneurship and innovation. Combining this with my photography blog (oddly, one of top 20 to 100 blogs about photography in its own right) should be an interesting experiment.
• And honestly, simpler is better…

This will be brief because there isn’t much to say; after 16,278 miles and 152 days, the “Drive-By” road trip is done.

Check out the road trip’s page and map to get the full details on the trip, stories from the cities and people I visited, recaps of my expenses and links to photos along the way.

What’s next? I’m working on it; suffice it to say, I’ll be thinking about how to turn small ideas and big ideals into big projects, leaning into fears, exploring the “periphery of simplicity” through attempts at complex thought, making the real world smaller, venturing close and afar, incubating lives, exploring the marginal costs to privacy, “doing the dishes”, testing my risk tolerance, strengthening loose ties and attempting to create serendipity. And, of course, doing work and having fun.

Drop me a line if you’ve got ideas…

Toronto, Ontario and environs

• Michael Lewkowitz (@igniter): thanks for the warm invitation, the welcoming heart and the open mind. Solidifying online relationships and making loose ties strong are always fun…
• Chris Golda (@golda): thanks for taking the time to meet again; every time we meet I become a bigger believer in Backtype.
• Joseph Dee (@Josephdee), Ryan Coleman (@ryancoleman), Peter Flaschner (@flashlight), Tim Scollick (@timsco): thanks for sharing so much of your time and thoughts; a broad range of skills, areas of interests and insights; looking forward to continuing the conversations…
• Patrick Keenan (@interfaced): your vision and forward-thinking around creating systems to organize collaboration and engagement are amazing; small things can lead to big, and I’m looking forward to seeing The Movement in action.
• David Crow (@davidcrow): thanks for sharing your time, deep thoughts and pragmatic point of view about fostering entrepreneurship and Toronto’s opportunity to become a “startup hub”. Looking forward to seeing Toronto take the next step forward…
• Jay Goldman (@jaygoldman): thank you for a wonderful afternoon conversation about demand generation, the use of data in design decisions, the opportunity of open data and the role of mystery and magic in marketing. Looking forward to another wandering conversation in the future… (and thanks to Mark MacLeod (@startupCFO) for “introducing” Jay and I, in a way, through his network for Startup CFOs).
• Andre Gaulin (@fuzzz): great running into you again after SXSW, and congrats for your new-found joy.
• Allyson Hewitt: thanks for sharing your deep knowledge about social entrepreneurship; helping people solve issues and tackle ideals is an admirable and important component to reframing capitalism, I’m interested to see what the social innovation group at MaRS will be able to do in the future.
• Leila Boujnane (@leilaboujnane): thank you for your honest, frank, deeply insightful viewpoints on creating and running companies, risk, creating experiences, and taking control of one’s future; if I could only remember and act on all the advice you gave me…

New York, NY

• Jeremy Yuricek (@jyuricek) and Ana Yuricek (@ayuricek): for keeping me offline and focusing on reality, as always.

Catch up on all the stories, photographs and details of the “Drive-By” road trip.

Knoxville, TN

• Alex Lavidge (@alexlavidge): thank you for really expanding my mind about the the nature of community design and triple-bottom-line economic, political and social policies; I’m excited to see you and Knoxville Overground (@overground) continue to build an entrepreneurial community in Knoxville.

  Thanks to Sean Tario (@eurotario) for introducing us; I’m looking forward to seeing how both achieve great things in Knoxville and Santa Cruz.

Richmond, VA

• Hank Heyming (@hankheyming): thanks for sharing of bit of your deep knowledge of the law behind venture capital and private equity with me and educating me on a couple key points; lawyers that also advise on business strategy, travel the world and help run companies are far too scarce…

Washington, DC / Northern VA

• Matt Jacobson: thank you for taking the time to meet and share your thoughts on the early-stage investing industry; I’m looking forward to seeing Launchbox Digital’s next class of startups.

Philadelphia, PA

• Valeria Maltoni (@conversationage): thanks for sharing your time and extensive thoughts and knowledge about marketing, PR and communications; you truly are a “conversation agent”.

  Also, thanks for introducing me to Skip Shuda and Chris Guillebeau (@chrisguillebeau); Chris’s passion for living “an unconventional life” and for helping people create their own lives is seriously worth digging into.

• Skip Shuda (@skipshoe): thanks for a great conversation; similar to Alex, you really stretched my mind on some foundational structures for understanding change, thinking and humanity; oddly we never even discussed integrated marketing or the lessons you’ve learned as an entrepreneur: another day, hopefully.
• Steve Barsh (@sbarsh): thank you for taking part of your busy day to talk about current trends in entrepreneurship and venture capital and to share some of the lessons you have learned over the years.

  I’m looking forward to seeing DreamIt Ventures’s (@DreamitVentures) next class of entrepreneurs create some great companies this summer. With your help, I’m sure they will take the right steps toward success.

• Jim and Beth Lutz: thanks for helping bring a little bit of normality to my life…

More thanks to come from Toronto and NYC in the near future…

Continuing the recap on the “Drive-By” road trip: I know it’s been awhile since I last posted an update on my travels other than how frugally I’ve lived, so I wanted to take the time to thank the people who have shared their time, knowledge, wisdom and help along the way.

Yes, it’s been over a month since SXSW and the rest of that world has moved on from the SXSW fishbowl to the next meme, and while I won’t spend much time talking about the event itself, I did want to thank a couple people for making the experience great; events come and go but people endure.

Therefore, I want to give thanks to:

• Chris Schultz (@cschultz): for thoughts, encouragement and help; and for leading a great Tribe and throwing a really great, sincere, fun party…
• Jessica Rohloff (@jessNOLA), Matt Tritico (@tritico), Andrew Larimer (@andrewlarimer), Tiffany Starnes (@TiffanyStarnes), Adele Tiblier (@adeletiblier), Damian LaManna (@dalamanna), AJ Robert (@ajrobert), Gerard Ramos (@gerardramos), Josh Ellzey (@JoshLZ) and the rest of the Net2No crew (@Net2No): thanks for sharing your spirit, soul and your house with me, I’m already looking forward to my next trip to New Orleans…
• Nicholas Tolson (@jtnt): for always pushing me to create (and for bailing me out)…
• Jay Cuthrell (@qthrul): for being the ever-present voice of reason…
• Clint Schaff (@clintschaff): for bringing a great, positive spirit and realness to the biz and for sharing a truly great week…
• Mike Bonifer (@bonifer): for bringing interesting, unexpected experiences and joy everytime we meet…
• Alan Patrick (@freecloud): for the deep conversations and great introductions to Alexander Grunsteidl and Benjamin Ellis (@benjaminellis) and the Digital Mission; I’m looking forward to making it to London soon…
• Kyra Reed (@kyrareed): for being a great guide through SXSW Music and letting me be a part of your whirlwind for a week, and also for introducing me to Marjorie Kase (@marjoriekase) and re-introducing me to Ryan Swagar (@ryanswagar).
• Will Dearman (@wtd): for reaching out and starting a very interesting discussion on financial markets; looking forward to continuing to share ideas….
• Kristian Andersen (@kristianindy), Andrew Donoho and David Bailey (@dbailey): for engaging during the core conversation I led and really raising the level of the discussion.




• Sam Huleatt (@squasher98) and Marc Vermut (@mvermut): to each for showing up and making the time to meet in person after previously meeting online; I apologize to both for not having more time at SXSW but looking forward to continuing the conversations…
• Jay Goldman (@jaygoldman) and Peter Flaschner (@flashlight): for always popping up in the right places…
• Phil Coffman (@philcoffman): thanks for being open to reconnections and giving me some good tips on SXSW; a passing tweet between Phil and Andrew Shepherd (@andrewshepherd) made me wonder if it was the same Phil I used to know from high school in London; another example of the beauty of serendipity.
• Nate DiNiro (@unclenate) and Lyell Petersen (@93octane) for creating the #notatsxsw and #sxsworphan “communities” to keep people honest about the existence of a greater world outside of SXSW. Lyell is one of the first people to really teach me about using Twitter for fun, and for that, he’s one of the biggest reasons I’m still on Twitter. Hmm.
• Jack Hollingsworth (@photojack): thanks for taking the time to meet a nobody; Jack reached out to me after reading a couple of posts I wrote about the changing business models in the photography industry; Jack is hosting Photographer Makeover in Austin, June 1-4, if you’re interested in getting deep advice on the future of the photography industry from a range of progressive professional photographers and industry veterans.

  And lastly,

• Ethan Bauley (@ethanbauley): because it all comes back to you in one way or another…

More thanks to come from Knoxville, Richmond, Washington DC, Philadelphia, Toronto and NYC in the near future…

Time to refresh the expenses behind the Drive-By Road Trip last reported on Feb 14th; below are the expenses behind the full “first loop” of the trip from Virginia to California and back to Virginia from Nov 30th to March 31st.

Again, this might be a bit too transparent, but c’est la vie…

Want to see the entire details? View the entire spreadsheet via HTML or Excel XLS.

Highlights:

• $47

  Yes, $47 per day. How? Great friends and simple, frugal living.

  $20 in “rent”? 33 nights in hotels, 47 nights in hostels (mainly SF and Austin), 31 nights with friends and 11 nights camped out in the outdoors.

  $21 in livin’? That breaks into $9 a day on food and eating out, $6 on entertainment and the rest on automobile, phone and general life expenses.

  Adding in car and medical insurance ups the overall to $51 a day. Still not bad.

  Full details are available via HTML or Excel XLS.

  But it comes with a price: no big purchases, no clothes, computers, electronic gadgets or the “stuff” we spend most of our time acquiring. But it also comes with a certain peace of mind and soul: “what we own ends up owning us”, and by removing stimuli and focusing on true needs rather than wants, we can re-focus on people, relationships and experiences.

  When people ask me what the trip has been about, I often explain it in different terms, but it always comes down to people. Brad Feld might have explained the core idea best: Great entrepreneurs believe in karma.

  That’s what it’s about. That kind of life isn’t expensive, but it’s certainly rich.

• 13,074 miles in 122 days.

  Compared to 2007′s road trip, this time I took more than twice the number of days to drive about 300 more miles, leaving more time to explore, experience and savor an area. I spent 46 days in California, primarily along the coast from San Francisco to Los Angeles, and 30 days in Texas, primarily in Austin for SXSW.

  Favorite places? New Orleans (check out Sloane Berrent‘s moving ode to NOLA), Durango and Austin; Reno and San Francisco are draws for very different reasons; the rest of the places I visited I just haven’t explored enough to love quite yet.

  I played different games along the trip, giving odes to cities, completing scavenger hunts and sending postcards to people for finding easter eggs in posts and responding to tweets and Facebook status messages. I still don’t have a great social media plan, but I’m having fun working on it along the way.

  Have an idea for a game to play? Drop me a line…

• And yes, I am working along the way. In addition to my strategy and finance consulting work, I’ve been continuing to dig into models for economic and entrepreneurial community development; the depth of knowledge contained in early idea-stage and seed-stage advisors, investors and entrepreneurs across the US is impressive, but we all still have a lot of work to do to spread knowledge and best practices. The Building Entrepreneurial Communities panel at SXSW (led by Frank Gruber, Peter Corbett and Nick O’Neill) was a start, but we’re still scratching the surface of a larger discussion around the strategies and tactics involved in building entrepreneurial communities and local economic development.

And the trip isn’t over. The Second Loop (name still TBD) will be through the northeast over April and May, primarily in DC, PA, NY, MA, NH, VT, MD, VA, TX and Ontario. I’d love to meet you (or other people you know), just drop me a line.

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More

• Click here to read the first summary of the expenses behind the trip covering Nov 30th to Feb 14th.

“Venture Capital for Long Tail Entrepreneurs” describes the need for a fundamentally different, economically viable model for creating and funding micro-businesses. Venture capital needs a new model to adapt to declining costs to start businesses, the impact of Generation Y and increased personal and corporate transparency and sharing.

• THIS IS NOT: “How to raise venture capital”, “How to fund your startup,” or “What is the right funding and operational model for a venture capital firm today.”
• INSTEAD: The future will be different than today; knowing that, what cultural, business, technological and political trends are “framing” our future?

Presentation and Talking Points
These slides won’t be shown at the SXSW Core Conversation itself, but will be available for anyone to view on their own devices in the room and at home.

Ten Frames (+1)

• A. Value is created at the edges, but captured at the hubs.
  B. The Long Tail has many edges ”and it better have a hub”.
• Broken or not, venture capital is ripe for creative destruction and reconstruction.
• Incubate people, not companies.

  “Lifestyle business” shouldn’t be a dirty word.

• Collaboration is a core competence.
• Companies are people.

  “Transparent lives” will create “transparent companies”.

• “Scaling people” is the untapped promise of the Internet.
• Creating context is more valuable than creating content.
• Social capital isn’t new, but everything about it is.
• Value (flow) is king.

  Value > Cash
  Flow > Stock

• “Passion allocation” is more important than asset allocation.

  Time, passion and attention are the most important costs of tomorrow’s economy.

• Generation Y isn’t waiting around.

  Conflicts create companies.

• Everyone is a futurist.

  Yet we’ll almost always be wrong.

Participate in the Backchannel
We all know the conversation is the most important part, but only a small part of the potential discussion will actually reach everyone in the room. Participate in the broader discussion in the comments below from SXSW and from home; I will answer all questions and dig into the backchannel after the “official” discussion ends.

Details

• “Venture Capital for Long Tail Entrepreneurs” Core Conversation on Sunday, March 15th at 3:30 PM in Hilton Room E.
• Short URL to this post: http://bit.ly/xxhRA
• Hashtag #SX09-682 to participate in the discussion on Twitter; admittedly, most people will simply use the #SXSW tag.
• Click here to read past writings and comments about the subject.

About Me

• I’m currently driving cross-country from Virginia to California (and back) meeting interesting entrepreneurs, investors, photographers and change agents. Check out the full details on the trip so far. And yes, I took all the pictures in the presentation.
• I write two blogs, Unstructured Thoughts (about business, entrepreneurship and innovation) and Taylor Davidson | Photography, Travel & Culture (about photography, photography business models, travel and more), and I love to interact and comment across the web.
• I’m easy to reach by email, phone or @tdavidson, and I’m easy to find on the web on my photography and business websites, LinkedIn, Facebook, Backtype and many more profiles across the web.

Influences & Thanks
Umair Haque, John Hagel, Kevin Kelly, Chris Anderson, Ethan Bauley (@ethanbauley), Alan Patrick (@freecloud), Michael Lewkowitz (@igniter), Chris Schultz (@cschultz), Mike Bonifer, Aaron Chua, Sean Tario and many, many more that have commented, provided their thoughts and added to the conversation.

Details: Sunday, March 15, 3:30 PM, Hilton Room E (tag #SX09-682)

A bit about meet me…

• I’m at SXSW in Austin, Texas this weekend (Friday 13th through Tuesday 17th). Drop me a line to meet me at the event or come to the “Venture Capital for Long Tail Entrepreneurs” Core Conversation on Sunday, March 15th at 3:30 PM in Hilton Room E (tag #SX09-682) to participate in the discussion. Check out the basic details on the core conversation on the public SXSW and my.SXSW sites.
• I’m currently driving cross-country from Virginia to California (and back) meeting interesting entrepreneurs, investors, photographers and change agents. Check out the full details on the trip so far.
• I’ve got a variety of interests and “frames”; business strategy, photography, innovation, entrepreneurship, financial modeling, nomad, perspective and hope.
• I write two blogs, Unstructured Thoughts (about business, entrepreneurship and innovation) and Taylor Davidson | Photography, Travel & Culture (about photography, photography business models, travel and more), and I love to interact and comment across the web.
• I’m easy to reach by email, phone or @tdavidson, and I’m easy to find on the web on my photography and business websites, LinkedIn, Facebook, Backtype and many more profiles across the web.

But more importantly, I’m looking forward to meeting everyone else, listening and learning.

Also
Want to enjoy SXSW? Chris Schultz (@cschultz) of Voodoo Ventures created a list of practical details on How to Rock SXSW.

Have fun…

Updated
The original title of this post was “Hello, I’m Taylor. (Meet me at SXSW)”

And then I realized it’s really not about me, and that I’m more interested in meeting you; and thus I changed the title to “Hello, I’m Taylor. (And I’d like to meet you at SXSW)”

I feel much better about that…

I’ve mentioned a couple times that I’ve been tracking my expenses during my current “Drive-By” road trip to meet interesting entrepreneurs, investors, photographers and “change agents” across the country.

A couple weeks ago I wrote about How to Live a Nomadic Lifestyle, primarily focusing on the attitude and approach to living a flexible, nomadic lifestyle. Jay Cuthrell and Joel Mark Witt have both reminded me about my earlier promises to release some expense details behind the trip, and so today, 77 completed days into the trip (Nov 30 to Feb 14), I’m releasing a pretty extensive amount of details about the trip, available for viewing, editing and downloading (CSV).

Highlights:

• Overall I’ve driven 9,079 miles over 77 days, for a median of 58 miles and an average of 118 per day (130 removing the 7 days I didn’t drive at all). That’s actually far less than I drove during my summer 2007 trip.
• The longest single-day drive was 687 miles.
• Expenses have averaged to $49 per day (not counting auto and medical insurance).
• Major expenses were “rent” at $18 per day, $10 per day in food and $7 in travel (gas).
• The most I spent in one day was $167 and the least was $0.
• I’ve spent 27 nights in hotels, 22 nights in hostels (in CA, LA and CO), 22 nights at friends’ places and 6 nights in campgrounds. [1]
• 46 of my 77 nights have been spent in California; I’ve spent just a single night in 6 states.
• I’ve been to Las Vegas on three separate trips, despite any strong liking of the city.
• I’ve gotten gas 36 times, washed my car 3 times, gotten 2 oil changes and made 7 trips to airports (none for me).
• I’ve gone to bars 29 times, been to parks (national and state) 14 times and been to 19 restaurants.

And there are a lot more in the details.

But more importantly, I’ve had fun.

Your chance to analyze the details.
Click here to access the editable sheet: it’s open for anyone to play with and create charts, graphs, visualizations, or to pick out embarrassing details: just add them to the “Charts” sheet (just click on the “Edit this page” link at the bottom of each sheet) or leave your thoughts in the comments below.

I’ll add any interesting graphics or charts that people create to the post.

What else would you like to know?
Drop questions in the comments if you want to know anything that isn’t in the spreadsheet: maybe I have actual data, maybe I don’t, but feel free to ask.

Why have I done this?
For starters, I’m an Excel geek. But more importantly, I wanted to show (with very hard data) that it is possible to live this way. I know few people will choose to travel or live like I do, but the goal isn’t to show my life as a blueprint for anyone but simply to open the mind and the eyes to the possibilities.

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The Google spreadsheet embedded below is locked for editing and only available to view. The editable version is available here.

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[1] Many of the hotel nights were spent at various Marriotts using points, thus the zero expense, if you’re wondering.

As I mentioned on my other blog, 2008 didn’t exactly turn out how I thought it would.

It was not the path I planned, but it’s the path that’s shaped me into who I am today and will be tomorrow.

I’m looking forward to 2009; I’m looking forward to our conversations, to sharing ideas and learning from you. I’m also excited to start executing on some very interesting projects.

What are you looking forward to in 2009? And how I can I help?