In the mean, time here’s the All in the Ghetto video. I have watched this about seven times in the past two weeks and dig it every single time. It’s a hilarious reflection on a city’s cultural movements. It speaks colorfully to gentrification and the inevitable, natural rhythms of any area’s evolution.
This past Friday, I was lucky be part of This Week in Start-ups, created and hosted by Jason Calacanis. I was invited by Sesiri Pathirane, my machan (Sri Lankan term for “mate” or “bro”), who organized the selection of five Sri Lankan start-ups to pitch on the show. I had a great time and appreciated being involved.
In the episode, I gave hint at the rise of a Sri Lankan tech and entrepreneurial scene that Sesiri and I are calling Silicon Reef. The goal is to start a flow of development projects from all over the world into our Sri Lankan incubator anchored in Silicon Reef. It’s the start of something fun and worthwhile, and I’m excited to get it going with Sesiri.
I head down to Sri Lanka on May 29th until June 6th and will be in Colombo the first several nights before heading down to see my Aunties in Ja-Ela. The fine folks at the South Asian Mobile Conference have invited me to speak on May 30th on the topic of “The Future of Media.” I plan to give an overview on the changing landscape in media production, consumption, and marketing. I’ve been thinking about these topics pretty intensely at Topspin and will also be unveiling some new hypotheses and efforts that I’ll be pursuing to tackle the problems of demand generation for all the
worthy artists and creators in the world.
On May 31st at 6PM, Sesiri and I will be hosting a tech meet-up in Colombo. Facebook RSVP getting updated here. It’ll be nice to talk shop with fellow entrepreneurs and technologists. If you happen to be in Colombo during that time, please do reach out, and hopefully we can eat some Kottu Roti together.
Check out the start-ups on TWIST’s Sri Lanka edition and especially the one at the end called Let Go. I really enjoyed the premise of their app, which is intended to help people manage their negative emotions and get on the path to more happiness. It embodies concepts of Emotional Intelligence. Although EI has been around in some form or another for many years, I was introduced to it at Stanford via Daniel Goleman’s book Emotional Intelligence. I also read Goleman’s book Primal Leadership, after it was recommended by my old boss at Musicmatch, CoFounder Dennis Mudd. I found both books interesting and useful.
My friend Aaron Suplizio in Los Angeles reached out after hearing this week’s TWIST on a podcast, and he pointed me to another app that tracks and monitors your happiness. It was started out of Matt Killingsworth’s Harvard research project and is called Track your Happiness. After Aaron’s endorsement, I signed up, answered 10 min worth of life oriented questions, and have just started the process. I’m very interested to see how I’ll fare with the service. I hope I can stick with it and become a better person. Either way, I love the purpose and am inspired to see such good intention grounded in a rigorous approach.
Looking forward to meeting more of the tech community and fellow entrepreneurs in Sri Lanka. It’s great to see the potential and participate in the birth of Silicon Reef. Enjoy the show below!
Nazlee and I took photos of street art around our neighborhood in Shoreditch London, and I uploaded them into Flickr. I will look back fondly at my time in Shoreditch. It’s certainly one of the most creative places I’ve ever lived in, and I bet it’s one of the more vibrant, colorful, electric, and interesting neighborhoods in the world. London represent.
I saw this video for the first time last weekend and was transported back to early times in my life when California first made my heart race. I’m a sappy sucker when it comes to finger pluckin’ guitar-ing of one my childhood anthems. Here are some of the all-time rock and rollers, Led Zeppelin with one of my earliest and fondest battle cries, Going to California. It’s from their Earls Court show from 1975.
My childhood obsession of California started when I was four years old visiting San Francisco for the first time. Some of my oldest memories are from that California adventure. I remember having such giddy fun standing up in the back-seat as my dad drove down “the crooked street in the world.” Man, so much joy for a little kid. I almost convinced my parents to ride down it again, but they told me that up next was “the steepest road in the world” and then drove down some random steep hill in San Francisco. It all blew my young mind so I didn’t care that they probably made that last bit up. Although, I wouldn’t doubt some of the steepest driving hills are in San Francisco.
It will be nice to return to California from London where I’ve been living for the past 2 and a half years. I made my first, fateful move to California in 1998 to start living my life in the ways I had always envisioned. It was a heartfelt culmination of listening and dreaming to that Led Zep tune. Born in Sri Lanka and living my first years mostly in the Washington, DC area suburbs of Bethesda and Potomac Maryland, I could only imagine the California that I had read about in John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, and Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool Aid Acid Test. These tales spoke of the human journey to find meaning, abundance, love, and happiness, while enduring and reeling from the challenges that lie in these pursuits. As a child of the 80’s, much of the popular culture in LA was delivered in packaged slices to our TV’s and mailboxes. Looking back now, I shamelessly devoured them all as I was hungry for scenes of people enjoying a life filled with music, artistry, beach fun, and the great outdoors. California is a diverse place with it’s oceans, deserts, snow capped mountains, bays, and metropolises. It’s not always rosy of course. There’s the good, the bad, and the ugly as in most places, but even warnings of catastrophic Californian earth quakes did little to faze my mission to one day live and play in the golden promise land. All I could think about was the sunshine states’s glorious natural splendors, utopian weather, ceaseless adventure, entrepreneurial opportunity, and warm beautiful people. These feelings were overwhelming and undeniable, and they gave me a future to look forward to in my young life. Now that I’m returning to California, I’m getting that warm familiar sense of a brightened spirit. I have a feeling there’ll be much excitement and personal growth ahead.
Thanks to Sean Adams for turning me onto The Ballad by New Look. As soon as I started digging the song, which was pretty much immediately, I shared it on Twitter and facebook. By that time though, I had forgotten how I was introduced to the
track. I would have given props to Sean if I recalled him at the time. I think Sean ultimately saw the “Like” in my facebook feed and reached out to share the love of the band. It was then I remembered discovering it through his feed.
We’re in a fascinating time when it comes to consuming and promoting media. I feel that link from Sean was worth more to me than just any music recommendation. That song has given me a good amount of unquantifiable joy. We can measure my behavior to this song in terms of plays, 5 star rating, frequency play ratios, etc. but I think there’s other untapped utility in this song for me as a fan. I have surplus value, because I have essentially payed nothing for it in Spotify and Soundcloud streams (hallelujah to these monster services). I’m willing to spend more money to support New Look and will likely do so immediately if I didn’t have to hunt for a suitable exchange of goods or services. For a primed fan like me, it would be ideal to see ways to engage with or buy direct from the artist in either Spotify or Soundcloud. I would be able to express my gratitude and restore the balance by buying a ticket to a show, a premium version of the song, or anything that inspires my eye. Anyone who knows what I do for a living may cry foul on potentially self-serving antics, but I speak the truth as a plain old music fan just like you. It’s about the music isn’t it? Well I’ll shut up then and give you a play of The Ballad by New Look: (thanks again to Sean!)
Back to the notion of being able to buy direct from these services: ultimately, it’s inevitable so you can count on Topspin working with our fellow music service brethren to create new ways to flow available funds back to artists. Good times ahead.