I was a first-time marathoner in 2012 and I found Hal Higdon's site very useful. http://www.halhigdon.com/
FWIW, training for a marathon isn't too complicated. Start at least 18 weeks beforehand. Run about 10-11 miles during the week and do one long run on the weekend, building up to 20 miles two weeks before your race.
I did 4 marathons, 200lb guy with 5hr finish times. 3 Marine Corps and 1 Big Sur. I enjoyed each and every race, except my first. but I would take that painful race again anytime.
Tip for back-to-back marathons: Based on my experience, two back-to-back is a killer. I would NEVER enjoy NYC after running chicago, if chicago is going to be your first. Again.. this is my experience and I would never do it. But some people are driven and they are able to do it.
For Training: HalHigdon is best and simple.. The way I do every time is, take 18 wk plan, and stretch it to 36 weeks.. that way, each week is repeated twice.
As you have lot of time (you might think ;), make sure you include Weight Training and Speed Training. Helps a lot.
AJ Forsythe explains that in the story: "That was a function of being in college. It was an underhand toss to a roommate—‘Hey, the phone’s for you’—and the ceiling fan intercepted it."
pg briefed Xconomy on the changes this morning, and the interesting part to me was the feeling that too many failing YC startups were feuding internally over the extra cash. He said such disputes have been taking up more than half of Jessica's time recently. Now startups will have less money to argue over.
I think Twitter is more like a protocol than a website; and frankly it's too important at this point to be left in the hands of Twitter Inc. I'd love to see a serious discussion about making it a community-owned standard on the same level with TCP/IP or SMTP. But I guess that could never happen in a free-enterprise-obsessed world -- unless, perhaps, Twitter proved itself to be such a bad steward that its users demanded some kind of "nationalization."
> I think Twitter is more like a protocol than a website; and frankly it's too important at this point to be left in the hands of Twitter Inc.
Yeah, what we really need is the same people who run the Department of Motor Vehicles and the Post Office to take it away from the filthy profit-seekers who created it.
Steve and his people tell me that an e-book version coming later this year, probably iBooks first then Kindle (which is harder because of the formatting limitations in ePub).
You can't question either Eric Ries's or Steve Blank's chops as entrepreneurs. Read this piece we did at Xconomy, which includes the story of how Steve and Eric met and influenced one another: http://www.xconomy.com/san-francisco/2011/07/06/eric-ries-th...
Nice write-up, but their history/bio still doesn't give me any proof of their success in the startup world, outside of marketing lean startup stuff to other entrepreneurs, ironically. Taking advice from failed entrepreneurs is dangerous and a waste of time, I think.
I do think is Steve Blank is more legit, but not because he did multiple companies - if you worked on several venture-backed companies throughout your life but they all went nowhere, you must suck as an entrepreneur. I just looked up Epiphany and this answers my question, he founded it, did $71.5M in revenue, and it IPO'd, so Blank definitely knows what he's talking about: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epiphany,_Inc.
IMVU on the other thand had good traction and Eric Ries was VP of Engineering there, but what's happened to it since? Just looking it up on crunchbase: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/imvu - no big exit/big numbers or anything special like Epiphany?
And here's his LinkedIn profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/eries - it just doesn't show any blockbuster results as an entrepreneur, just a lot of advising/marketing/blogging.
That's part of what made Lean Startup frustrating. I know that Ries is the 'real deal', but the book ended up feeling like empty calories to me. Some good ideas, but all kind of vague.
I'm a journalist for one of the publications listed in Cision. (I'm San Francisco/Silicon Valley editor at Xconomy.) Cision is a fine company, but if I were an entrepreneur at a cash-strapped company I would never pay $2500 for a list of media contacts.
A much better (and cheaper) strategy is to read the publications that follow your industry, figure out which reporters at those publications write about your niche most often, and contact them directly with a quick summary of your company and its latest news. Most publication's websites list reporters' email addresses, or at the very least provide an address for story tips. Of course, maybe digging up this information counts as "spending countless hours," but I don't think a media strategy has to be so time-consuming. Whatever your company is working on, there are probably only five to 10 journalists who will know enough about your field to do an accurate, thoughtful story. Figure out who they are and target them directly.
By the way, my address is wroush at xconomy dot com.
Thanks for the thoughtful comment. I'm not an expert of PR at all, and when it comes to PR and press, it sounds more like a dark-art than science. So it's good to know that you can obtain these infos through other means than purchasing an expensive db.
If these infos are publicly available, what can benefit more startups people is to have a free db which crawled all the public listings. I'll do some more research into this.
Maybe I overdramatized. My point in the opening of the piece was that in the dominant Silicon Valley mythology, building a "lifestyle" company is seen as a less macho and ambitious path than building a VC-backed company that has a shot at making its founders and investors mega-rich.
> in the dominant Silicon Valley mythology, building a "lifestyle" company is seen as a less macho and ambitious path than building a VC-backed company
To be fair, I think this is not so much about the common mythology in the valley. It's more about how the valley PR sites most commonly talk about.
There's so many bad companies in the tech scene, that we often look at the VC/angel scene as the filter for whats worth looking at.
I'd argue (as a creator a lifestyle business) that there are even more uninteresting startups with that fall into the lifestyle label - by that I mean not very pressworthy - not that its a bad business. The companies that are trying to do big things, usually require capital and that often comes with getting press and attention.
It's also important to note that most "lifestyle" companies aren't really startups anyway.. more small businesses... and they aren't the type of companies that need VC in the first place.
But as soon as any lifestyle business becomes successful, they get a ton of praise. Especially on HN. Just like any acquisition or exit.
That's a nice piece by the Merc -- glad they discovered you guys! Congrats Brett. It's just too bad so many journalists start by default with the "how this new thing is NOT Facebook" angle. I'm guilty of it myself, of course.
FWIW, training for a marathon isn't too complicated. Start at least 18 weeks beforehand. Run about 10-11 miles during the week and do one long run on the weekend, building up to 20 miles two weeks before your race.