Self-Aggrandizement: Trading Places

A few months ago, I had lunch with my friend Daniel Adamson, who runs the very intriguing (to me, at least) Blue Funds. The company, in short, manages a family of mutual funds that invest in public companies that both 'act blue' (meet a list of social and environmental responsibility requirements) and 'give blue' (give at least 50% of their campaign contributions to democrat candidates). It turns out - both in historical back-testing, and the first year of actual investing - that these companies handily outperform the S&P. So, they're succeeding on sort of a triple bottom line.

Anyway, he spent lunch telling me about his company and what they have planned for the next year or so, and I told him about what we're doing at Cyan, the First Cut Film Series, and some bigger institutional financing things we're brewing up (both a tax-arb production fund, and a capital-protected distribution fund).

By the end of lunch, we both wanted leave our own companies to work for the other's. Which, it seems, happens almost every time I meet up with another young entrepreneur.

The reason, I think, is that entrepreneurs tend to thrive on hope, on possibility. We get excited about new ideas, about big-picture innovation. And when you're hearing about someone else's projects, all you have to think about is that fun, strategic, high-level stuff.

But then you go back to your own company, where you have to worry about cash-flow and execution and all of the detail that actually makes or breaks a company. Which, frankly, often sucks in the doing, the day to day.

I still haven't figured out a way to reconcile the two. But I have, at least, penciled in a few times a week for me to sit down and formally re-pitch myself Cyan's plans, the big-picture fun stuff that we're trying to achieve. It doesn't spare me the pain of executing, but it does, most of the time, get me re-excited about why I'm doing it in the first place.

Trading Places Filed Tuesday, November 13 2007.

Trading Places
Filed Tuesday, November 13 2007.