What’s up with the acronyms? As if we don’t encounter enough acronyms in our daily lives. I was exposed to the world of acronyms when I joined my current organization. I was trying to read some of the reports just to get myself familiar with the work they do and oh boy, I felt like I have to learn a new language that I need a dictionary by my side! Anyway, it’s pretty common in the corporate world to use acronyms. We are so called very busy people and we don’t have time to write/type words in full. I think this culture got into most organizations that people sometimes tend to apply acronyms to almost all the words. Once Elon Musk told off his employees via email to not use acronyms unnecessarily.
Anyway, this post is not about acronyms. It just suddenly occurred in my mind given the title of the post.
Just to be clear, NYT means New York Times and AVC means a venture capitalist.
As usual, every Friday-Sunday morning, I would read the black and white NYT paper. Call me old-fashioned, but I feel that the news on paper are less fake and the type of news I read are not influenced by (1) machine that ‘intelligently’ knows the kind of news I should read and (2) society based on the number of times the news are repost. I get to read a more widely-spread spectrum of news, although I have to admit I do not miss the word Trump in almost every page I turn in the main and business section. He is everywhere, dominating and consuming people’s lives. Seriously?
So as I was flipping the business section, I encountered an article about the co-founder of Lending Club (one of the pioneers in fintech world and the first to use Facebook applications back in 2006), Renaud Laplanche who was recently ousted by the board as he violated the company’s business practices. He has a lot of guts though, he rebounded back and started a new company, Upgrade which could potentially be the main competitor of Lending Club. What got me interested is the fact that the same venture capital which backed up Lending Club is also financing Upgrade, which shows that they have a lot of faith with Renaud Laplanche. Did they just forget and forgive the unethical act Renaud performed in Lending Club?
So I decided to dig up further about the venture capital. It’s called Union Square Ventures and the founder is Fred Wilson. I am honestly amazed by his accomplishments, both in work and life. The thing that I liked most about him is that despite his busy hectic schedule, he still has time to blog, every single day, without fail, since the birth of his blog in Sep 2003. The blog is called AVC. I suppose he came out with the name as he planned to devote his writings about his life as a venture capitalist. I have read more than 30 of his posts.
It got me thinking, why can’t I do the same? He has more responsibilities than me and yet he can blog everyday. I have always wanted to blog, I used to during my undergrad, then it got less frequent as I started working and eventually stopped. Partly because I got caught up with work, partly also because I didn’t know what to write about. I didn’t want to just talk about my daily lives, I wanted to offer more. But my life then was mostly about work and I couldn’t talk about it specifically due to confidentiality reasons, so the idea just died, eventhough I had so many thoughts running in my mind.
However, after reading one of Fred’s post about the stuffs he writes on his blog, most of the time, he too wanted to talk about what consumed his mind such as his portfolios but couldn’t. Yet, he did blog everyday. How he managed to share his thoughts/ideas/experiences without relating explicitly to his work, inspires me.
Hence this very first post of mine. I am inspired. I hope I am able to write something everyday. There are so many things that I want to talk about actually. If only there is a machine that could read all the thoughts in my mind and pen it down here. Now that’s not going to appear anytime in the near future. So till then, I just have to force myself.
Till my next post, which is tomorrow.
Dayana Omar 