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Cole & Frank Pepe

Best pizza - and middle child - ever!

 

Remembering Jen Linn: Without Fear, Anything is Possible

Today started like most other days.

I woke at 5:30 AM. Did a little email. I woke the kids. Made them a smoothie. I spoke to a buddy in Chicago about the normal stuff – kids, Buddy Media, deals and the markets.

I headed to the Meatpacking District to meet a colleague in the Starbucks in the Google building. And on my way out, I looked at my phone -- 2 missed calls and an email that punched me in the gut, “It is with a heavy heart and the deepest sadness that I write to let you know that Jen passed away this morning.”

I called Kass immediately. My anchor in every way sat in her office sobbing. Uncontrollably.

I zombie-walked toward my office.  I just wanted to see Kass.  To say hi to George in the front lobby.  To sit at my desk.  To feel normal.

12 rounds of chemotherapy.  Six surgeries.  More stomachaches and pain than any of us could even imagine.

Sick was Jen Linn’s normal. Death just a mindset, and not a scientific certitude. An inconvenient truth that could be delayed, conquered and even bent. And most of all, never feared.

“I will be a living role model to others,” she wrote on her site YouFearless.com, “that without fear, anything is possible.”

Anything, we all thought, including creating a cure to kick her own cancer. The comeback story for the ages.

It’s not a crazy idea, after all, for those of us born in the '70s.  I remember watching the news that John Hinckley, Jr.’s bullet stopped an inch from President Reagan’s heart!

Magic Johnson announced he was HIV positive. A speedy death sentence for sure.  That didn’t stop him from playing in an All-Star Game and winning a gold medal with the Dream Team. Twenty years later, he’s still alive, looking better than ever.

Jen never hid that she had cancer. But she roared, with all her passion, that cancer didn’t have her.  And to make sure we all heard her now and forever, she launched Cycle for Survival, an organization that will continue to be a major contributor to wiping out cancer.

Millions of patients suffer from “rare” cancers like the one Jen had.  They get little attention and even fewer research dollars.  The term “rare,” however, is a misnomer as these cancers account for about 50% of all diagnoses and include leukemia, melanoma, pancreatic, brain, and all pediatric cancers.

Cycle for Survival is growing like a tech startup doubling the money raised to attack rare cancers each year. And cyclers have grown from a few hundred teams to more than 4,500 cyclers worldwide. In total, Jen’s baby has raised $9 million for direct cancer research and I expect next year’s event to double that number once again.

Cycle for Survival has helped shrink the time it takes to get trial cancer treatments from research lab to patients down to 18 months from 5 years. Keeping the best researchers in the lab and out of the fundraising process is critical to getting to “no” faster so we can eventually get to “yes, we have a cure.”

Jen created Cycle for Survival, but she was so much more. She spent her last few months writing for WebMD, helping other cancer patients and caretakers live better lives. She was a sought-after motivational speaker. As recently as May she keynoted the American Airlines’ Women in Aviation Conference in Dallas. 

Jen is and will forever be one of Kass and my true inspirations. She taught us how to live purposefully in the most darkest of times. How to innovate when the stakes were the highest. How to treat others with kindness when kindness had been all but beaten out of you.  How to dream big.  Live bigger.  And that without fear, anything is possible.

Help me carry Jen’s mission forward. Donate to Cycle for Survival today in Jen’s honor. Get involved. Get your company involved. I think we all can agree that the world would be a better place if cancer wasn’t taking many of our most promising and inspirational people away from us way too early.

Here's a video of Jen's visit to Buddy Media.

Jen Goodman Linn of Cycle For Survival visits Buddy Media HQ from Buddy Media on Vimeo.

 

From My Friends at Build-A-Bear

Big thanks to my client, Build-A-Bear, for the custom LazerBear. This
joins the Bear Mitzvah as the second stuffed bear I've ever owned.

Clarence Clemons - If the Big Man Can Die, So Can I

Pure Bob ... Enjoy! Signup for his letters below.

If the Big Man can die, so can I.

Bruce Springsteen hasn't written a hit in years.  But we go to the show to remember.  Who we once were.  When we had hope, when we believed, when we still had hair, when we were skinny.

Danny Federici was bad enough.  Then again, there's been some change in the group.  David Sancious used to play in the E Street Band.  And Max wasn't the original drummer.  And Nils Lofgren broke through with Neil Young.  And Miami Steve left and then came back.

But there's no Springsteen without Bruce.

And there's really no E Street Band without Clarence Clemons.

Not only was the Big Man on the cover of "Born To Run", the breakthrough album, he signified that Bruce was something different, not a me-too act.  Springsteen might have been labeled a Dylan wannabe, but when they finally turned up the band on the second record, and Landau enriched the sound on the third, the music was as far away from Dylan as Asbury Park is from Hibbing.

I bought that first album.  And as good as "It's Hard To Be A Saint In The City" was, "Spirit In The Night" was the keeper.  Because of the sax.

And "Rosalita" was the keeper on the follow-up album.  For the same reason.  The explosion of pure joy.  When Bruce sings about the record company giving him a big advance you feel like it happened to a member of your family, you're not envious in a twenty first century way, wondering how come you haven't gotten yours, but thrilled that someone you know has made it.

And then came "Born To Run".  If you'd been following at this point, the sax was not a surprise.  It was an integral part of the group.

Then there was the end of "Jungleland".  That lonely sax spoke of nothing so much as despair.  That's the flip side of rock and roll.  The exuberance and then the solitary feeling that you're Wall-E, alone in a city without heart, without hope.

And what do you do when you feel this way?  Put on a record!  It's the only thing that gets you through!

Springsteen changed with "Born In The U.S.A."  He tried to become what we didn't want him to be.  Everybody else's.

But he redeemed himself with "Tunnel Of Love".  Listen to the title track.  That's love, a ride on a roller coaster in the dark.

"Lucky Town" was the better album, but the title track of "Human Touch" was pure Bruce.  Anthemic without being meaningless.  Bruce was not Gene Simmons, he wasn't asking for your attention.

Ironically, that was Clarence's gig.  He could be everything the Boss was not.  Flamboyant.  A cheerleader.  Clarence could enjoy the success when Bruce could not.

But no longer.

Like Ian Hunter, we were shocked to find out how old Clarence Clemons was.  We think all our stars start out in garages and are on their way by twenty one.

But it takes others time to find their way.  Their life experiences enrich their music.  They're one step ahead of us.

Then they're gone.

It was bad enough he had a stroke.  Dick Clark had one of those, he may not speak well, but he's alive.  Same with Kirk Douglas, hell, he was on the Oscars.

As long as Clarence Clemons was alive so were our hopes and dreams.  On some level I'd just graduated from college, the E Street Band was on the stage at the Bottom Line, it was still a year away from "Born To Run", never mind law school, marriage and decay.

But then he died.

I found out the way you do now.  On my BlackBerry.

And the e-mail got me frantically searching.

There was a link to TMZ.  But I wouldn't believe it until a Twitter search confirmed it.

The Big Man had finally left the band.

Like Bill Murray said in "Stripes", one day Tito Puente's gonna die and you're gonna say you've been listening to him for years!

One day Clarence Clemons is gonna die and he won't be a secret.  We'll all say we've been listening to him for years.

It's sad.  For him.

And for us.

So put on a smile, let your freak flag fly, get behind the wheel of that convertible and floor it!

It's fucking great to be alive.  Seize the moment.

Clarence may die, but the music survives.

Crank it!


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VIDEO: My Mashable Connect Presentation in Orlando

I've been doing a ton of talking ... here's one of my favorites. It includes Andrew from Spinback as it was a day after we announced the acquisition.

"The Power of Deceptive Simplicity"

Tonite I have the pleasure of meeting my friend Shiv Singh for a drink and dinner. He’s one of the wise men of marketing with a firm grasp of digital marketing. He has sat on every side of the table, from business owner to agency lead to his current role as the chief digital honcho at PepsiCo Beverages North America.

We don’t spend much time together these days because of our busy schedules. So it makes our irregular meetings even more important.

Shiv thinks clearly. He communicates clearly. His light british accent makes him sound like one of the smartest guys in the room. The depth of his thinking proves that he actually is.

Last month, Shiv tweeted out a link to a Harvard Business Review story by productivity expert Tony Schwartz titled “The Power of Deceptive Simplicity.” I encourage you all the read it.

He defines “deceptive simplicity” as “ideas that may seem obvious at first blush, but whose accessibility turns out to be the product of rigorous thinking, skillful synthesizing, and a commitment to clarity.”

Our devices keep us connected at all times to all our social graphs, from our most immediate (our nuclear family) to our friends, coworkers, partners and those we share similar interests (now called the “interest graph.”) They also keep us disconnected, spending more and more time sitting next to each other focused on our small screens.

So in order to succeed, however you choose to define that at home and at work and with yourself, you need to turn off to turn on.

“To manage the storm around us, we need to quiet the storm inside ourselves,” Schwartz writes. “By doing that effectively, we can devote more attention to whatever we decide matters most.”

For me, this includes being uber focused at work and focusing on only the items that will drive the most value to the company, even if that means saying no to meetings and opportunities that look amazing on paper. Most recently, this has included turning down an invite to the G8 Summit in Paris as well as the CEO summit of one of our investors.

I really can only get a handful of substantive things done each day at work. In order to do that, I’ve had to let email pile up on occasion (and by occasion, I mean every day). And it means building a team that can scale with our business in the future as each of our senior management team members can only do a few things themselves (other than Kass, who can do so much more than anyone I have ever met).

It also means to create business models and business systems that are, on balance, easy to implement. For Buddy Media, that means focusing on what we do – we build software, we sell software and we support software. That’s it. Everything I think about, and everything my team should think about, should come back to whether or not this project helps us build a better product, sell it to more companies or create happier customers.

To be sure, simplicity in venture-backed business isn’t an oxymoron. But it sure is damn close.

At home, “deceptive simplicity” for me means doing a better job of turning off when I’m with the kids. It means spending time with just the people who refill Kass and my cup and not continue to drain it. And committing to the tradeoff -- I won’t be the one who is in the most meetings or out most nights at the industry events. But I will be trying to work smarter, more focused and more strategically than others.

Game on!

PHOTO: Wow. Kass Makes Cute Kids. Really!

PHOTO: Myles & Vivi Hotdog Eating Contest

 
 
 

VIDEO: Happy Mother's Day Kass!

Happy Mother's Day Kass! from Michael Lazerow on Vimeo.

Love This List! #3 Behind Facebook & Google!