Lessons from Sandy

This is part of my Series on Mentorship.

The last few days in NYC have been harrowing and humbling for everyone, but especially for those living in low-lying areas. Many have lost their homes, many have seen valuable possessions destroyed, and tragically for some of the unluckiest- Sandy took their lives and the lives of loved-ones. The city will be digging-out of the carnage for months- there is widespread destruction to the whole infrastructure of this town. Once again New Yorkers' sense of security and well-being has been massively jarred.

One remarkable thing I think most everyone in the city has witnessed though was the quiet heroism of the nurses, doctors, firemen, police and others that literally kept the city from descending into total chaos and even more pronounced tragedy.

One particularly moving example for us all (pictured above from the Associated Press) was the specter of nurses manually breathing for babies being evacuated down nine flights of stairs from the neo-natal intensive care center when the back-up generators at NYU's Langone Hospital failed.  They literally pulled 20 of the most fragile and vulnerable human lives in this city from the abyss. And that was just one story among countless others that emerged over the last several days.

Once again, as was the case over a decade ago, it was the unheralded salt-of-the-earth folks whose grim heroics bore us up in some of the darkest hours New Yorkers have experienced. For these folks, it's just "what we do"- for the rest of us- we can only be awed and eternally grateful.

For the next post in this Mentorship Series, click here

Crowd-Sourceable Map of World's Entrepreneurial Ecosystem

This is part of my various Series on Venture Capital, Angel Investing and Entrepreneurial Culture.

As described in this recent post, this mapping project evolved from that late night a few months ago when I decided to first map-out the Silicon Alley early-stage investor ecosystem. I wanted to provide a resource for entrepreneurs wherein they would be able to actually see the entire venture ecosystem in one glance. Due to much encouragement and postive feedback, I eventually created maps for Boston and then for Silicon Valley. This was of course not enough. I wanted these maps to be interactive and eventually, crowdsourceable. That's when I reached out to my good buddy Shane Snow. As I've mentioned here before, he is a super-talented entrepreneur, hacker, designer and journalist extraordinaire who can basically do anything.

Well, after quite a bit of effort, I'm happy to say that today we're releasing the next iteration of all this. We've now created a crowdsourceable global map of what we hope will one day be the entire world's entrepreneurial ecosystem:

Click here for the global map.

(Or, you can click on the global map icon on the right-hand side of my blog's homepage to enter the map environment. You will find instructions for using the map there- it's very straightforward.)

So as this is the first pass we've made, we're really asking for your help in adding investors to the map, in correcting mistakes we've made (which are no doubt many) and the like. You will see tabs above the map for adding investors and adding firms respectively. The map is meant to be crowdsourced and will only be as good as the effort put into it, so please weigh in!

Future releases will go beyond venture, angel, corporate investors and accelerators. We will be trying to comprehensively cover as many facets of the entrepreneurial ecosystem as possible in an easy to use manner- all in one place.

Thanks in advance for your help!

For the next post in this Series click here.