Feel Your Heart Chakra

All mystery, all enigma and yet so simple. Yoga is the science of breath combined with the art of body movement all in one. Yoga, according to the sutras, "is the restriction of the fluctuations of consciousness." It is the totality of guidance about posture in the steady and comfortable. Only now has yoga been transformed into a wholesome, accessible regimen for health and well-being in the West. Here's some new positioning for Love Story Yoga, a new studio opening soon in San Francisco and nationwide. A new website is also in the works that helps practitioners learn the ancient art for opening their hearts or standing on their heads while listening to the soul. We are bringing yoga to the masses because in our modern era people need it the most. 

Win The Future

When a startup is just an idea and a few employees, it looks for seed-round funding. When it has a product that early adopters like or when it's run through its sed-round money it tries to raise an A round. Once the product catches on, it's time for a B round, and on the rounds go. Most VCs contemplating an investment in one of these early rounds consider the same factors. They just go down a checklist: monthly recurring revenue, founder with experience, good sales pipeline, X percert of month-over-month growth. VCs also pattern match: if kids are into Snapchat, fund things like it such as Yik Yak, Streetchat, ooVoo. Or, at a slightly deeper level, if two dropouts from Stanford's computer science PhD program created Google, fund more Stanford CSP dropouts, because they blend superior capacity with monetizable dissatisfaction.

However, venture capitalists with a knack for the 1,000x know that true innovation doesn't follow a pattern. The future is always stranger than we expect: mobile phones and the Internet, not flying cars. The biggest outcomes come when you break your previous mental model. The black-swan events of the past forty years – the PC, the router, the Internet, the iPhone – nobody had these around. So what's useful is having large ears. A great VC keeps his ears pricked for a disturbing story with the elements of a fairy tale. This tale begins in another age which happens to be the future, and features a hero harnessing magical technology to prevail. The tale ends in helping treasure chests for all, borne home on the unicorn's back.

Silicon valley, the fifteen-hundred-square miles 20 miles south of San Francisco was called Santa Clara valley until the rise of the microprocessors in the nineteen seventies. It remains a contested ground. Armies of startups attack every idea, with early employees – and sometimes even their lawyers and landlords – taking deferred compensation, in the hope that their options and warrants will pay off down the line. Yet workers' loyalty is not to a company or even to an idea but to the iterative promise of the region. NASDAQ is built on the efforts of thousands of people in the Valley and on the back of the iPhone and Android and GPS and battery technology and online credit-card payments all stacked together.

VCs give the Valley its continuity – and its ammunition. They are the arms merchants who can turn your crazy idea and your expendable youth into a team of coders and marketers with large size monitors. Apple and Microsoft got started with venture money so did Starbucks, Home Depot, Whole Foods Market and JetBlue. VCs made their key introductions and stole from every page of Sun Tzu to help the startups penetrate markets. And yet VCs maintain a zone of privacy around their activities. They tell strangers they're investors or work in technology, because in the Valley that valorizes the entrepreneur, they don't want to be seen as just the money.

Silicon Valley VCs are all techno-optimists. They have the belief that you can take a geography and remove all obstructions and have nothing but a free flow of capital and ideas, and that it's good, to creatively destroy everything that has gone before. The game in Silicon Valley is not ferocious intelligence or a contrarian investment thesis: everyone has that. It's not even wealth: anyone can have an idea and become the next Mark Zuckerberg. It's prescience. And then it's removing every obstacle to the ferocious clarity of your vision including incumbents, regulations, folkways, and people. The beauty of betting on risky technology is that you're sometimes proved right, eventually. Here's some new work for Inventus Partners upcoming event for Startup bridge in Palo Alto. For more information visit Inventuscap.com for their upcoming event that brings new tech startups with unbridled capital.

Boys Are Like Horses That Need To Be Run

Prodigious performances are not necessarily the result of “natural” psychological superiority: they’re often produced by players under the cultic influence of a parent or coach who provided them with preternatural certainty and self-belief. It isn’t always the positive side of this type of relationship that is relevant, though: by resisting the dominating couch potato influence, some players also develop the inner resources, commonly bred during lonely struggles, that they later call upon when alone on the tennis court. Perhaps today’s players are more sociable and have more disparate interests than those who came before them. We now live in a communicative culture; could this be a breeding ground for new generation of athletes and scholars? Athleticism builds character, a much needed mental and moral distinction in human beings to counteract the screens, negativity and narcissism pervasive in culture. It's always helpful to work out the kinks in the quadriceps and to clear out the lungs.

Adventures On The Sea

The half marathon on Monterey Bay brings nearly 11,000 runners including Olympians, Africans, Elite racers and regular fit citizens from around the globe to run their fastest for 13.1 miles along California's coastal seaside. The race is organized by the Big Sur International Marathon and encompasses a 3K "By the Bay Run" for children and 5K "Lighthouse Run." If you have trained hard–you now have the chance to pace yourself for a longer distance and win a coveted finisher medallion. My wife and I have participated in this race since it started in 2003. This year marks the second year my son has ran the 3K. This is one of the most gorgeous foot races in the Western world, with races taking place on different days such that parents and children can truly enjoy watching each other run. The highlight for me personally was witnessing my wife and son run their hearts out in the morning, and also seeing them cheer as I ran the 13.1 miler gulping in salt air oxygen and taking in breathtaking oceanic views the entire way. The Big Sur Half Marathon raises a significant amount for charities and non profit groups that help over 60 community groups in the Monterey county. My son is planning to run the 5K in 2017. A big thank you to all the volunteers for putting together this world class event and we shall see you again next year. 

Perfect Game: Tennis Up Close

Tennis is a combination of talent, persistence, style, unpredictability, poise and the outsized human heart. When the French would go to serve, they often said, Tenez!, the French word for “take it,” meaning “coming at you, heads up.” We preserve this custom of warning the opponent in our less lyrical way by stating the score just before we toss up the ball. It was the Italians who, having overheard the French make these sounds, began calling the game “ten-ez” by association. A lovely detail in that it suggests a scene, a Florentine ear at the fence or the entryway, listening. There's nothing the human spirit cannot do if the human being believes in themselves.