FORGET PARIS: Well, just this once. Remember: There’s much more to Europe than the big capitals. · 778 days ago by Andreas W Gerdes
Malta: Where Ulysses Meets Perry Como
Here’s a quick quiz: Is the Mediterranean island nation of Malta (a) the home nesting place of Bogart’s famous falcon; (b) the source of an exotic breed of cat; or© headquarters for the Knights of Malta, who for centuries launched crusades against the infidel du jour ? Strictly speaking, the answer is “all of the above”. But last winter, when I fled south to escape Northern Europe’s chills and urban blahs, I found that the real answer is: (d) a cluster of three tiny and colorful islands with a balmy climate, dramatic coast and an immense cultural heritage.
In history, as in real estate, location is everything. Although tourists think of the Mediterranean as a playground awash in wine, sun and romance, the Maltese have always considered it as a risky neighborhood. The country’s strategic location at the dangerous intersection of Europe, Africa and the Middle East has made the main island of Malta (and its sister islands Gozo and Comino) one of history’s great takeover targets – starting in 800 B.C., when the Phoenicians arrived, and continuing through World War II, when Hitler’s bombers pounced its ports. The guestbook would also include Queen Victoria who annexed Malta to the Crown for 150 years until its independence in 1964, and Saint Paul, whose ship ran aground there in A.D. 60 and whose unexpected arrival began Malta’s strongly Catholic tradition. (The arrival is commemorated every February on the St. Paul’s Shipwreck Day national holiday.)
Malta’s best-known visitors were the Knights of the Order of St. John, or Knights of Malta, the warrior-aristocrats who defended the faith from 1530 until Napoleon threw them out in 1798. Their massive fortifications remain intact today, ready for the next Turkish siege, and make Malta a Camelot of walled towns, castles and moats straight out of a child’s picture book.
Valletta, Malta’s fortress capital, juts into the sea like a mighty warship hewn from honey-colored limestone, its decks packed with Sicilian baroque churches and Renaissance-era mansions. Valletta proved a great place for strolling. Its main drag, Republic Street, runs straight through town from the walled City Gate to the massive seafront fortress of St. Elmo, along the way passing St. John’s Co-Cathedral, completed in 1577, where the knights sought divine assistance before setting out on their crusades. Behind a deceptively bland facade, the cathedral blazes with warmth and colour, from its gilt ceiling and altar to a floor completely paved with tomb covers of brilliantly inlaid red, green and yellow marble. And, adding to all this luster, two superb Caravaggios – “The Beheading of St. John the Baptist,” which many consider his greatest masterpiece, and “St. Jerome”. Both were painted in 1608, during the artist’s brief stay in Malta as a fugitive from Roman justice.
Farther down Republic Street on Great Siege Square stands the Palace of the Grand Masters of the Knights of Malta, who lived here in appropriately grand style, amid tapestries and magnificent trompe l’oeil paintings. The palace is now both the home of the Maltese president and the seat of parliament, a feat of cohabitation unthinkable in Washington but eminently workable in sunny, laid-back Malta.
Another favorite walk circled Valletta’s massive walls. From the parapets, panoramic views of the capital’s huge Grand Harbour unfolded, revealing a teeming nautical pageant of cruise liners, warships and sailboats. Far below I spotted the luzzu, Malta’s traditional fishing boats, brilliantly striped in reds, greens and blues, and still bearing the painted eyes in the prow that the ancient Phoenicians thought would ward off evil spirits. Deep inside the walls, I visited the meticulously preserved Lascaris War Rooms, the World War II complex of underground control centers and apartments where, surrounded by the operations room’s giant maps, history buffs would find it easy to visualize Eisenhower and Montgomery charting their crusade to liberate Italy.
Late in the afternoon I’d often join Valletta’s ritual passeggiata, a daily pageant of street life with the hubbub and haggling reminiscent of Palermo and other southern European cities with historical Arab ties. But, wandering through Valletta’s crowded streets, I also heard from open doorways the half-forgotten voices of Doris Day and Frankie Laine – my first clue that, along with its Camelot architecture, Malta is also a Mediterranean Brigadoon, a rap-free zone where Perry Como is probably still in the Top 40 and the family jalopy might be one of the elderly Morrises, Rileys or Ford Prefects that still trundle along Maltese roads.
My personal Eisenhower Nostalgia Award, went to Valletta’s bus depot just outside the city gate, a wonderland of vintage urban transport where torpedo-shaped coaches of the 1950s Buick school of design – tail fins, ersatz portholes and such painted-on mottoes as “Baby Think Twice” and “Above the Law” – set forth to crisscross the island with cheap and surprisingly reliable service.
One of these wheeled artifacts, a bilious green Leyland bearing the wildly optimistic “Born to Fly” took me beyond Valletta’s urban sprawl to the ancient and undisturbed village of Mdina. Although Mdina thrived under the Phoenicians and then the Ro-mans, its narrow and silent streets are lined with Sicilian baroque palaces and churches that date from the 18th-century heyday of the knights. In the morning sunlight, Mdina’s palaces, with intricately carved facades and doorways that would seem cold and formal in granite, literally exuded a golden glow from their limestone walls. My stroll down Villegaignon Street led from a town gate protected by fierce stone lions past walled palaces with colorful bal-conies to Archbishop’s Square, where Mdina’s ornate baroque cathedral coexists uneasily with a curlicued Victorian mansion carved in stone. And, at the end of my walk, an unexpected reward – tea and scones at the tiny outdoor cafe high on Mdina’s city walls, complete with splendid views of a green and ancient countryside dotted with small towns and stone farmhouses.
At the port of Cirkewwa I hopped another Smithsonian candidate, the good ship Xlendi, the creaky ferry to Gozo, Malta’s neighbor and sister island. Along the way, we passed tiny Comino, Malta’s third island, named for the cumin plants that once flourished there but now deserted except for a few dive camps and a hotel. During the voyage, I got an earful from Arthur, a retiree from Gozo with an attitude about those uppity folks in Valletta, who regularly dismiss the Gozitans as country bumpkins. According to Arthur, “over on Malta they see us as a bunch of rubes, but we’re the ones with all the scenery and the terrific lifestyle.”
I don’t know about the hayseed part, but Arthur is dead right about the scenery and lifestyle. Less than 30 minutes from Malta by ferry, Gozo is a very different world whose green fields and rolling hills exude antiquity and harbor a rustic lifestyle that is slowly receding as its ancient farm cottages are gentrifled by Young Upwardly Mobile Maltese, inevitably known as “yummies” by the locals.
An eerie sense of the ancient Mediterranean world of myths and shadows is palpable everywhere on Gozo, but nowhere more than at Ggantija, the Stonehenge-like temple complex erected to honor the Earth Mother some 5600 years ago, a thousand years before Egypt’s better-known pyramids. Even though Ggantija is now surrounded by peaceful meadows of wildflowers and bougainvillea, and visiting Maltese preschoolers play amid its massive limestone slabs, with only a little imagination I could conjure up the suffering involved in erecting these Stone Age cathedrals. The fire-blackened altars also hint of much more tangible human sacrifices to long-forgotten deities.
Ancient history was also made in a cave overlooking the large and semideserted beach at Ramla Bay. Here, according to Homer’s “Odyssey”, the nymph Calypso kept Ulysses her prisoner of love for seven years. Aside from its memories of history’s earliest recorded stalking, Ramla Bay proved just the place for an impromptu picnic of hobz, Malta’s sensationally crusty and chewy peasant bread, and hunks of gbejniet, the rich local version of chevre.
My tour of Gozo ended with a Felliniesque experience high on the citadel of Victoria, Gozo’s capital, where from the ramparts I watched the Stars and Stripes gallantly from houses named “God Bless America” and “Old Glory” by nostalgic Gozitans returned home to retire after years in the United States.
A final cultural note: English is one of Malta’s two official languages, which is good news for foreigners, because the other, Maltese, is an exotic mix that reflects perfectly the rich history of these tiny islands. So unless you have a working knowledge of ancient Phoenician and Arabic, plus a smattering of Italian and Sicilian dialect and English, you are never going to wow anyone with your Maltese. On the other hand, where else can you hear “That’s Amore” booming from a car stereo?
William B. Whitman, a former diplomat who now lives in Washington, is the author of “Virginia Wines and Wineries,” to be published by Casco this year.
WAYS & MEANS
GETTING THERE:
Lufthansa flies from Washington Dulles to Malta via Frankfurt for $1,036 round trip, Swissair via Zurich for $976, both with restrictions.
GETTING AROUND:
The hourly ferries between Cirkewwa and Mgarr cost $4.55 per adult, $11 per car; call the Gozo Channel Co., ++356 243964.
WHERE TO STAY:
Tops in Valletta is the Phoenicia (The Mall, Floriana, telephone ++356 225241, fax ++356 235254), a stately veteran with first-class service. Rooms start at about $150 double. Others are the Castille (Castille Square, telephone ++356 243677, fax ++356 243679) and the Osborne (50 South Street, telephone ++356 243656, fax ++356 232120), both about $70 to $80 double, breakfast included.
Gozo’s possibilities are limited, but one of them is probably Malta’s top hotel, Ta Cenc (telephone ++356 556819, fax ++356 558199), an Italian-run hideaway with its own beach cliffs and nature preserve; guests can stay in rooms, small villas or trulli, the conical Apulian houses, with rates starting at about $145 double. Other Gozo possibilities include the L-Mgarr (telephone ++356 560455, fax ++356 557589, starting at about $85 double) and Patrick’s (12 Xlendi Seafront, telephone ++356 562951, $40 to $80).
WHERE TO EAT:
Valletta’s restaurant choices are limited. My favorite was the Carriage at 22/5 Valletta Building, South Street, with an Italian spin to its international menu; dinner is about $50 for two. The Pappagall (Melita Street) is all Italian, while Caffe Cordina (244 Republic Street), outdoors on Republic Square, serves up ftira, which are salade Nicoise sandwiches on that terrific Maltese bread. Both run less than $15 per person.
Valletta’s seafront suburbs offer a lively social scene, with such restaurants as Maroya (Tigne Seafront, Sliema) and San Giuliano (St. Julian’s Bay), both specializing in grilled fish and in the $30 to $40 range, wine included.
On Gozo, the Ta Cenc restaurant is top-notch, but the much more modest Gesther’s (8 September Avenue), in the village of Xaghra, is a good place to sample Maltese cuisine. About $30 for two, wine included.
INFORMATION:
Malta National Tourist Office, 350 Fifth Ave., Suite 4412, New York, N.Y. 10118, ++1 212 695 9520
published in International Herald Tribune on 9 March 1997
The new york lifestyle - heading for the hills · 843 days ago by Andreas W Gerdes
New Yorkers are trading the overcrowded, overpriced Hamptons for the simpler pleasures of the Catskills. For very little cash, you can have acres of land, pastoral views—and maybe even a model next door . By Shyama Patel
Easy Living :
At their Roscoe retreat, Anne Slowey and Rodger Fairey entertain on the porch.
Brian Doben )
Bovina, New York, has never had a drugstore, let alone a dry cleaner. Its only restaurant closed last summer. But this summer, Bovina has buzz. Around town—hell, around all of Delaware County—phones are ringing with the news: Brad and Jennifer are buying 300 acres, the old Carter farm! They’ve got every contractor in the area onboard. And then: When they actually get here, will they want to hang out with us?
Until recently, the Catskills were best known for crumbling resort hotels and a series of local ski hills—Hunter, Windham, and Belleayre—that draw busloads of day-trippers during the winter. But these days, as FOR SALE signs dot every other rambling dairy farm, big new houses crop up on newly cleared mountaintops, and Two Old Tarts does a brisk trade in almond croissants at the farmer’s market, it’s become clear that these sleepy, charmingly shabby environs are being rediscovered. Yes, by people like the Aniston-Pitts, but also by people like you, tired of summer shares and East End beach traffic, and itching to actually own a weekend house.
Take Jared Paul Stern. On a rainy summer Friday, the Post’s “Nightcrawler” is not working the phones or trying to figure out what he’s wearing to the evening’s shindig at Soho House. As is his new norm, Stern is at home in Greene County, where his girlfriend, Ruth Gutman, is teaching him the joys of making brownies from a box. Though “we can’t do plumbing,” says Stern, in the year since they closed on their three-bedroom cottage they’ve learned to do just about everything else. They’ve built bookcases, upholstered furniture, rewired vintage chandeliers, and painted the dining room to match an orange Hermès shopping bag. Around the house, there are photographs of the years the couple spent renting, testing the waters from the South Shore of Long Island to New Canaan, Connecticut. “We loved Bellport,” says Ruth. “But it was too expensive.”
They finally bought in Oak Hill, paying about $200,000 for four acres and a 2,500-square-foot fixer-upper. It’s a place where the most exciting group to join is the 12 Tribes, a local hippie cult. Which is not to say there’s nothing to do here: Stern has been known to head into town to pick up vintage postcards or take in some donkey basketball. “It’s the Catskills version of Bridgehampton Polo,” he says. “But a lot more entertaining—it’s not just about swilling champagne and kissing up to Jason Binn.”
It’s the old Hamptons lifestyle without the new Hamptons scene, claims this generation of homesteaders—though there’s certainly no shortage of beautiful people. Kirsty Hume and Donovan Leitch set up house in Woodstock. Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke bought a farm by her parents in Woodstock. Robert De Niro is here, as are Yoko Ono and The Sopranos’ Steve Buscemi and Edie Falco. Kelsey Grammer lives in Andes, and he’s just about everywhere (“He even goes to the A&P like everyone else,” says one local). Since Chandra North moved to Stone Ridge, she’s made new friends, had a baby, and learned to cross-country ski. “I like the beach as much as anyone,” she insists. “But I can’t deal with sitting in traffic for five hours.”
Even Giselle and her Yorkie have found time for sojourns in the mountains between fashion shoots and trips to Brazil. “My boyfriend was talking to her once, and she was like, ‘Now, where is your house? And how do you get there? And do you have a car?’ ” recalls Jed Root, a photographers’ agent who weekends in one of the area’s legendary homes, a twenties concrete castle on 40 acres in Palenville that he bought two years ago for about $375,000. “The next time we saw her, she was like, ‘Oh, hey, I bought a house near Woodstock and a Toyota 4Runner.’ ”
When you’ve grown accustomed to pooling funds for a $40,000 summer rental, there’s serious sticker shock in seeing a house that can be all yours with a $20,000 down payment. A three-bedroom pad on at least ten acres with a swim pond, a barn, and paddocks, 100 miles or so from the city, costs about half what you’d pay for a one-bedroom in Manhattan.
And for those jaded by celebrity-packed store openings and P. Diddy sightings, two dress-down days a week are refreshing. “The last thing I want is to go out on weekends and put on makeup,” says “Page Six” reporter Paula Froelich, who recently bought a one-bedroom cottage on four acres in Lexington for $60,000 (when friends come to visit, they stay at the $25-a-night Lexington Inn). “I bought in the Catskills because (angel) it’s affordable, (b) there’s more than one fucking road that goes there, and© no one wears Jimmy Choos.” And this from someone who’s best friends with Lizzie Grubman.
City people coming to the Catskills is certainly nothing new. The New York State Legislature declared the mountains “forever wild” in 1894 and created the Catskill Park. Now the region is unofficially defined by county lines—anything in Sullivan, Ulster, Delaware, or Greene counts.
Brian Doben)There’s a country setting here for practically everyone: densely forested mountains with panoramic views; farmland on the western fringes of the park, where parcels run to the hundreds of acres; bustling historic towns on the banks of the Hudson. While you may not be able to plunge into the ocean before breakfast, you can rock-climb in the Shawangunks, hike up Kaaterskill Falls, bike around the massive reservoirs, or take a dip in your very own spring-fed pond. You can also just sit on your deck with a gin-and-tonic, gazing out at the horizon. As for the bugs, don’t believe lowlander hype: Mayflies are gone by mid-June, and it’s generally too windy in the mountains for mosquitoes.
The best part is, there is no off-season. This is New York ski country, after all.
The Catskills became popular as a summer destination in the early nineteenth century, when New Yorkers looking for fresh air—and Hudson River School painters looking for inspiration—shlepped by boat and coach to Greene County’s first hilltop hotel, the Catskill Mountain House. Still known to many as the Borscht Belt, the area became a haven for immigrant groups in the late nineteenth century, when the Ulster & Delaware railroad line started service from Kingston through Phoenicia and into Delaware and Greene counties. As the visitors became more prosperous, the accommodations grew more lavish: The original Catskill Mountain House grew to 300 rooms, the Grand Hotel in Highmount had 418, and the last of the lot—the Hotel Kaaterskill—had a staggering 800. By the twenties, however, the hotels had fallen into disrepair, and eventually the U&D went out of business. In the post-Depression years, the Catskills became home to countless Dirty Dancing–style bungalow communities. This was the era of old-school stand-up comedians like Henny Youngman, Shecky Greene, and Milton Berle, and family vacations that lasted all summer.
Since the seventies, the region has been in a slump. There have been efforts to revive it, most notably in the eighties, when brokers were pushing the Catskills to the city’s gay community as a sort of Fire Island–in–the–mountains. While this sold a handful of ski houses, the impact on the economy was minimal. Granted, there have always been pockets of serious money in the area, most famously in the exclusive Beaverkill Valley, Laurence Rockefeller’s old trout-fishing preserve between Roscoe and the Pepacton Reservoir, which has now been parceled off to wealthy New Yorkers (Amanda Burden owns in Beaverkill; so does Dan Rather). And, of course, there’s always been money in Woodstock.
Woodstock took off in 1903, when Ralph Radcliffe Whitehead and his wife, Jane Byrd McCall, purchased a 1,500-acre area of land near the village, built a handful of humble Arts and Crafts cottages, and created the area’s first artists’ colony. Visitors included Thomas Mann, Isadora Duncan, Helen Hayes, and Bob Dylan, who lived here in the sixties. The original “Byrdcliffe” homes are now the ultimate in rich-hippie chic. Sharon Gannon and David Life, owners of Jivamukti Yoga Center, bought theirs four years ago. “Byrdcliffe is a historical monument,” explains Gannon. “Starbucks can’t come in here, McDonald’s can’t come in here. And,” she says proudly, “we have a satsang.” A satsang? “It’s a Sanskrit term: a community of like-minded people who believe that awakening is possible.”
But many would argue that Woodstock’s already had its awakening: It has gift shops, and fudge shops, and ice-cream parlors, and an organic supermarket; it has the Bear, the area’s “only decent restaurant,” as Lois Freedman, director of operations at Jean Georges, puts it (she has a house in nearby West Saugerties). Two weeks ago, David Bowie picked up a 60-acre mountaintop spread here for a cool $1.2 million—a bargain compared with East Hampton, but far more than most recent converts are willing to pay.
The current invasion kicked off in the mid-nineties, as the East End of Long Island exploded with movie stars, VIP lists, and $30 cover charges. Randy Florke, a former model with Iowa-farm-boy good looks and a fondness for fixer-uppers, set up house in Sullivan County and opened a real-estate agency in the West Village called the Rural Connection. Papered with almost absurdly cheap listings (a $13,000 shack on two acres, for instance), the agency’s windows quickly became something of a spectacle in a neighborhood where would-be renters battle over $2,000-a-month studios. Florke sold to dozens of his Manhattan neighbors, who have colonized the back roads of Jeffersonville and Livingston Manor, opening ever more cute little B&Bs and antiques shops. His average price is now $250,000.
Soon, the influx, though slow to start, was under way, beginning on the park’s southern borders, from High Falls, on the banks of the Hudson, all the way west to Roscoe, and then creeping north to tiny hamlets above the park—places with no fancy stores or restaurants to speak of, but something much more valuable: acreage.
‘We’ve done 95 percent of the work ourselves,” says Michelle Beck of the five-bedroom Roxbury farmhouse she’s decorated with a “Lucky Charms theme—blue moons, yellow diamonds . . . ” Michelle and her husband, George Wieser, a cinematographer, discovered the six-acre property in 1997, on a joyride in their 1969 Chevelle convertible. “We’d stop in farm towns, and just for the kick we’d have Realtors take us to houses,” she recalls. Two months after they discovered Delaware County, they closed on the house for $106,000. “For the first few years, we ran it as a mini-B&B,” says Beck. “Anyone could come up unannounced, and we’d put them to work.”
Most of the steals up here need renovating. When Jill Goldring and Aki Davis were looking, they saw plenty of places with questionable potential, from a cottage in Mount Tremper inhabited by an incontinent pot-bellied pig (the real-estate agent kept saying, “Oh, don’t worry, the smell will come out,” says Goldring, rolling her eyes) to a nineteenth-century farmhouse with an actual stream running through the basement. So when their vintage Porsche wound its way up a long wooded driveway to a wedge-shaped modernist gem overlooking the Pepacton reservoir, Goldring, an advertising executive, and Davis, a photographer, made an offer the same day. “It was completely turnkey,” she remembers. The house came equipped with everything from the Nakashima table and rare Jacobsen light fixtures in the dining area to the vintage flatware in the kitchen drawer. “The owners left us this note saying ‘The sheets are clean and the beds have been made,’ ” says Goldring. “They left the food in the pantry!” And in spite of near-total isolation (they own about 35 acres, and New York City owns practically everything around them, thanks to the watershed), they’re getting to know the neighbors. “We’re having dinner with these people we met in Kingston last summer,” Goldring says, sitting on her deck one hazy country evening. “They’re Porsche people.”
When you consider what many of these newcomers do during the week—they’re artists, journalists, fashion stylists, photographers, architects, advertising executives, and so on—it’s tempting to compare the Catskills to the bohemian pre-L.I.E. Hamptons of the sixties, when Bridgehampton and beyond drew a flock of similarly stylish young artists and writers. And the fact is, many of the hip new arrivals were once Hamptons people. “They used to take it for granted that they would end up with a house in the Hamptons,” says Carmon Deen, a broker at Ron Guichard Realty, who has sold countless homes to newly married young professionals in the past two years. “But then it becomes clear to them that they are not going to end up owning there, and this becomes a viable option.” He pauses and thinks a little longer. “To be honest,” he says slowly, “I’m beginning to wonder how there can be anyone left in Sag Harbor.”
“We spent quite a few summers on Long Island—in Bridgehampton, Shelter Island, one on the North Fork,” says Michelle Sanders, accessories director at Vogue. “Then last summer, we rented in Woodstock. It was definitely more our speed, but it still wasn’t rural enough.” Sanders and her husband, Derek, an architect with Can Resources, eventually moved farther west, landing in a barn on twelve acres just outside Roxbury, which they bought in December for about $150,000, gutted, and are renovating so extensively that they have yet to spend the night in it. Despite its raw form, the 8,000-square-foot structure is already an impressive pastiche of the new and the old, of downtown loft and backwoods barn. “It would be impossible to find something this size in Long Island,” says Michelle.
Anne Slowey, fashion-news director at Elle, doesn’t miss the Hamptons, either. Five years ago, she paid just over $200,000 for a 1926 hunting lodge called, rather appropriately, Windfall. The five-bedroom cottage is on 60 acres outside Roscoe. “When we first started going out to the beach, we’d ride our bikes everywhere and see flocks and flocks of geese flying over the cornfields,” she remembers of the twelve summers she and her husband, architect Rodger Fairey, rented in Southampton. “But then it turned into a boardwalk; it was like Brighton Beach. People were aggressive and rude. It’s like that Joni Mitchell song,” she says. “ ‘They paved Paradise.’ ”
Take a Peak: Michelle and Derek Sanders on their Roxbury spread. Brian Doben)Upstate, it takes Slowey a full hour round-trip to buy her Sunday Times, but she relishes the lack of amenities. “There’s no designer anything in this town,” she says happily. “These people carry shotguns and fishing poles.” Plus, she points out, “every farm is a boutique farm. Someone sells maple syrup, another sells fresh eggs, another has beautiful flowers.” And while there’s nowhere to be seen, there’s plenty to look at: “I have fawns who sleep in my yard and coyotes who come out to eat them.”
Living among the coyotes is not for everyone. Matthew Lee and Ted Lee, South Carolina–bred brothers who make a living writing about southern foods, prefer the more urban nature of the northeastern Catskills. Their new pad is a three-bedroom house in Coxsackie, an eighteenth-century mercantile town on the Hudson River. They bought it last spring for $140,000. “After dreaming of farmland, we realized that the country setting we most wanted wasn’t dark and quiet when the sun went down,” says Matthew. “At some point, that’ll be appealing, but now it’s more important just to have a manageable 0.2-acre plot and access to more fun: food, booze—and we’re 50 yards from the free boat ramp.”
The Catskills offer endless opportunities to plan your dream house—the Lee brothers are saving for a new slate roof, Anne Slowey is importing a load of seventeenth-century French stone for her bathroom, Jared Paul Stern wants a swimming pool sometime in the near future (though, to be fair, “not a big one”)—but there’s no arguing that they are remote. What the Catskills don’t have is a ready-made sense of community—for weekenders, at least.
In an area where local families count the histories of their friendships in generations, not years, there’s not a lot of mingling between the old and the new. Look past the euphoria that the recent economic growth has created among the contractors and the real-estate brokers, and it’s clear that for many of the people who live and work in the Catskills, the swarms of shiny European cars are about as welcome as the deluge of water that flooded dozens of towns to create the area’s reservoirs in the fifties.
Every day, between stories on the local high-school sports stars and the latest DWI offenders, the Catskill Mountain News tells of yet another territorial squabble between those who want to keep the wilderness unspoiled and those who want to profit from it: There was the fight in Andes over replacing individual septic tanks with a town sewer system (good for the watershed protection efforts, but bad for local business since a sewer’s capacity limits growth). Then there’s the puppeteer–house painter from the Green Party—a weekender favorite—winning the mayoral race in New Paltz. In Gardiner, there’s the “Save the Gunks” effort to prevent a developer from subdividing the 2,700-acre Awosting Reserve into plots for 349 luxury homes.
And then there is the mother of all conflicts: For the past four years, there’s been a dispute over the future of Highmount. Dean Gitter, owner of the $500-a-night Emerson Spa in Shandaken, followed a New Age guru to the Catskills before any of the recent arrivals and had the foresight to buy himself half a mountain, not to mention the local water supply. Now he’d like to turn his property into an 1,800-acre golf course with several more expensive lodgings. While the contractors and shop owners who would profit from the tourist traffic are all for it, weekenders who crave privacy—and locals who fear a population boom—are not. “It’ll take eight years to build,” says Peter DiModica, Shandaken town supervisor and owner of a small antiques shop in Pine Hill. “And between 600 and 900 workers. People from all over the country will be doing the work, putting pressure on housing and increasing rents for people who live here.”
It’s that fear of being priced out of the area that makes some locals suspicious of newcomers. Toni Perretta, a former cosmetics executive who now runs a popular restaurant called That Certain Something, found this out the hard way when she moved to Fleischmanns in 1996. “When I got here, I noticed that the established communities had more activities,” she remembers. “So I organized a Fleischmanns Field Day. It was designed to be cultural. We got Herb, who trains falcons and hawks; we had storytellers; I had a line caller and a square dance.” But Fleischmanns, named after the margarine family who built the stately Victorians that line Main Street, is a quiet little town that had been in decline since the forties, and her new neighbors didn’t want to play along.
“Field Day was one of the worst experiences I’ve had up here,” says Perretta. “There were rumors that this was a get-rich-quick scheme for a city girl, and no one showed up. I think that they wanted to discourage me. People who were born here, they’re concerned by, say, what’s happened in Woodstock. They’re afraid they won’t be able to afford to live here.”
On the first dry day of the summer, the weekly farmers’ market at the Round Barn in Halcottsville hums with vendors hawking everything from farm-raised lamb chops to handmade note cards, and smartly dressed weekenders pick their dinners from artfully arranged mounds of radishes, new potatoes, and tomatoes.
Dominic Michel, who works for the nonprofit educational organization Prep for Prep in Manhattan, takes a swig of fresh strawberry juice as he surveys the scene. “My family’s been coming to Roxbury for 40 years,” he says. “See that house over there? When I was a kid, my friend lived in it, and he’d have to chase the cows into the barn before he went to school. I always get a kick out of coming here because I think of Richard and those cows.”
Already, cows in the Catskills seem to be headed the way of the potato farms in Long Island—driven into extinction by rising land values. “We’ve all had to diversify,” says Barbara Hill, a former dairy farmer who’s now presiding over her family’s maple-syrup booth. “I just saw in the paper today that the 25-years-ago prices for milk were the same as they are today.” She eyes a group of venture capitalists in designer sunglasses who are checking out her $3 bags of maple sugar. “The maple prices aren’t the same—that’s for sure!”
Neither are the land values—particularly in Greene and Delaware counties, where asking prices have gone up at least 20 percent in the past year. Witness a massive, McMansion-ish hilltop spread that a contractor built for himself near Margaretville: It sold last year for about $750,000; the new owner is now trying to flip it for $1.25 million.
Widespread price inflation is making homesteaders wonder if they’re going to want to live here in twenty years—or whether the landscape will be spoiled by suburban sprawl. “Every week, I speak to another person who’s getting a house in the Catskills,” says Raina Penchansky, publicity director for Coach (she and her husband bought in Margaretville last fall). “But it’ll never be the Hamptons. There aren’t as many homes, and there’s tons of land. They’ll never be able to build like that.”
She’s got a point: Delaware, Greene, Ulster, and Sullivan counties encompass an area of 4,200 square miles; the South Fork of Long Island is about 150 (in fact, all of Long Island covers 1,700 square miles). So while you and your friends may all be moving to the boonies, learning to weed gardens and to maneuver the kind of all-wheel-drive wagons you used to think were just for soccer moms, it’s unlikely you’ll be bumping into one another when you get there.
Buy the Farm
Just a sample of what you can get and for how much
Wawarsing, Ulster County
The house: 1890s Colonial with wraparound porch. Six bedrooms. Two baths. 2,700 square feet.
The land: Seven acres. Mountain views.
Agent: Flemming Realty (845-687-4451).
Price: $300,000
Lake Huntington, Sullivan County
The house: Renovated 1920s farmhouse. Hardwood floors. Spacious living area. Three bedrooms. Two baths. 1,700 square feet.
Property: Ten acres. Barn. Fruit trees.
Agent: Malek Properties (845-794-3336).
Price: $170,000
Lexington, Greene County
The house: 1850s farmhouse. Needs work. Seven bedrooms. One bath. Minutes to Windham and Hunter. Separate guesthouse.
The land: 119 acres. Forest and fields. Barn.
Agent: Coldwell Banker (845-586-3321).
Price: $299,000
East Meredith, Delaware County
The house: 1850s Greek Revival. Three bedrooms. Two baths. Chef’s kitchen. Completely upgraded with high-end fittings.
The land: 60 acres. Total privacy. Stables.
Agent: Ron Guichard (845-676-3600).
Price: $425,000
here is the link
Some American History For YOU · 879 days ago by Andreas W Gerdes
July 2, 2006
Celebrating July 2
10 Days That Changed History
By ADAM GOODHEART
IT’S a badly kept secret among scholars of American history that nothing much really happened on Thursday, July 4, 1776.
Although this date is emblazoned on the Declaration, the Colonies had actually voted for independence two days earlier; the document wasn’t signed until a month later. When John Adams predicted that the “great anniversary festival” would be celebrated forever, from one end of the continent to the other, he was talking about July 2.
Indeed, the dates that truly made a difference aren’t always the ones we know by heart; frequently, they’ve languished in dusty oblivion. The 10 days that follow — obscure as some are — changed American history. (In some cases, they are notable for what didn’t happen rather than what did.)
This list is quirky rather than comprehensive, and readers may want to continue the parlor game on their own. But while historians may argue endlessly about causes and effects — many even question the idea that any single day can alter the course of human events — these examples show that destiny can turn on a slender pivot, and that history often occurs when nobody is watching.
Anyway, happy Second of July.
JUNE 8, 1610: A Lord’s Landfall
Three years after its founding, the Virginia Colony was a failure. A few dozen starving settlers packed some meager possessions and sailed from Jamestown on June 7, headed back toward England. The next morning, to their surprise, they spotted a fleet coming toward them, carrying a new governor, Lord De La Warr, and a year’s worth of supplies.
If not for his appearance, Virginia might have gone the way of so many lost colonies. What is now the Southeastern United States could well have ended up in the French or Dutch empires. Tobacco might never have become a cash crop, and the first African slaves would not have arrived in 1619.
OCT. 17, 1777: Victory Along the Hudson
If one date should truly get credit for securing America’s independence, it is when the British general John Burgoyne surrendered at Saratoga.
The battle’s significance was more diplomatic than military: shortly after news reached Paris, the French king decided to enter the war on the American side. “If the French alliance and funding hadn’t come through at that moment, it’s hard to say how much longer we could have held out,” says Stacy Schiff, author of “A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France and the Birth of America.” The American Revolution might have gone down in history as a brief provincial uprising, and the Declaration of Independence as a nice idea.
JUNE 20, 1790: Jefferson’s Dinner Party
On this evening, Thomas Jefferson invited Alexander Hamilton and James Madison to dinner at his rented house on Maiden Lane in Lower Manhattan. In the course of the night, Jefferson recalled, they brokered one of the great political deals in American history. Under the terms of the arrangement, the national capital would be situated on the Potomac, and the federal government would agree to take on the enormous war debts of the 13 states.
Had that meal never taken place, New York might still be the nation’s capital. But even more important, the primacy of the central government might never have been established, says Ron Chernow, the Hamilton biographer. “The assumption of state debts was the most powerful bonding mechanism of the new Union,” he says. “Without it, we would have had a far more decentralized federal system.”
APRIL 19, 1802: Mosquitos Win the West
Events that change America don’t always occur within our borders. Consider the spring of 1802. Napoleon had sent a formidable army under his brother-in-law, General Charles Leclerc, to quell the rebellion of former slaves in Haiti.
On April 19, Leclerc reported to Napoleon that the rainy season had arrived, and his troops were falling ill. By the end of the year, almost the whole French force, including Leclerc himself, were dead of mosquito-borne yellow fever.
When Napoleon realized his reconquest had failed, he abandoned hopes of a New World empire, and decided to sell the Louisiana Territory to the United States.
“Across a huge section of the American heartland, from New Orleans up through Montana, they ought to build statues to Toussaint L’Ouverture and the other heroes of the Haitian Revolution,” says Ted Widmer, director of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.
JAN. 12, 1848: An Ill-Advised Speech
His timing couldn’t have been worse: With the Mexican War almost won, a freshman congressman rose to deliver a blistering attack on President Polk and his “half-insane” aggressive militarism. Almost from the moment he sat down again, the political career of Representative Abraham Lincoln seemed doomed by the antiwar stand he had taken just when most Americans were preparing their victory celebrations.
Yet that speech saved Lincoln. “It cast him into the political wilderness,” says Joshua Wolf Shenk, the author of “Lincoln’s Melancholy.” This insulated him during the politically treacherous years of the early 1850’s — when Americans divided bitterly over slavery — and positioned him to emerge as a national leader on the eve of the Civil War. Lincoln’s early faux pas also taught him to be a pragmatist, not just a moralist. “If he had been successful in the 1840’s, the Lincoln of history — the Lincoln who saved the Union — would never have existed,” Mr. Shenk says.
APRIL 16, 1902: The Movies
Motion pictures seemed destined to become a passing fad. Only a few years after Edison’s first crude newsreels were screened — mostly in penny arcades, alongside carnival games and other cheap attractions, the novelty had worn off, and Americans were flocking back to live vaudeville.
Then, in spring 1902, Thomas L. Tally opened his Electric Theater in Los Angeles, a radical new venture devoted to movies and other high-tech devices of the era, like audio recordings.
“Tally was the first person to offer a modern multimedia entertainment experience to the American public,” says the film historian Marc Wanamaker. Before long, his successful movie palace produced imitators nationally, which would become known as “nickelodeons.” America’s love affair with the moving image — from the silver screen to YouTube — would endure after all.
FEB. 15, 1933: The Wobbly Chair
It should have been an easy shot: five rounds at 25 feet. But the gunman, Giuseppe Zangara, an anarchist, lost his balance atop a wobbly chair, and instead of hitting President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt, he fatally wounded the mayor of Chicago, who was shaking hands with F.D.R.
Had Roosevelt been assassinated, his conservative Texas running mate, John Nance Garner, would most likely have come to power. “The New Deal, the move toward internationalism — these would never have happened,” says Alan Brinkley of Columbia University. “It would have changed the history of the world in the 20th century. I don’t think the Kennedy assassination changed things as much as Roosevelt’s would have.”
MARCH 2, 1955: Almost a Heroine
When a brave young African-American woman was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Ala., bus, local and national civil rights leaders rallied to her cause. Claudette Colvin, 15, seemed poised to become an icon of the struggle against segregation. But then, shortly after her March 2 arrest, she became pregnant. The movement’s leaders decided that an unwed teenage mother would not make a suitable symbol, so they pursued a legal case with another volunteer: Rosa Parks.
That switch, says the historian Douglas Brinkley, created a delay that allowed Martin Luther King Jr. to emerge as a leader. He most likely would not have led the bus boycott if it had occurred in the spring instead of the following winter. “He might have ended up as just another Montgomery preacher,” Professor Brinkley says.
SEPT. 18, 1957: Revolt of the Nerds
Fed up with their boss, eight lab workers walked off the job on this day in Mountain View, Calif. Their employer, William Shockley, had decided not to continue research into silicon-based semiconductors; frustrated, they decided to undertake the work on their own. The researchers — who would become known as “the traitorous eight” — went on to invent the microprocessor (and to found Intel, among other companies). “Sept. 18 was the birth date of Silicon Valley, of the electronics industry and of the entire digital age,” says Mr. Shockley’s biographer, Joel Shurkin.
AUG. 20, 1998: Just Missed
With most Americans absorbed by the Monica Lewinsky affair, relatively few paid much attention when the United States fired some 60 cruise missiles at Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan. Most public debate centered on whether President Clinton had ordered the strike to deflect attention from his domestic troubles.
Although the details of that day remain in dispute, some accounts suggest that the attack may have missed killing Osama bin Laden by as little as an hour. How that would have changed America — and the world — may be revealed, in time, by the history that is still unfolding.
Adam Goodheart is director of the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience at Washington College.
a great perspective to the arts in our life · 895 days ago by Andreas W Gerdes
“The arts have helped mankind deal with reality since stories were told round the fire and we drew on cave walls. The arts help us to exercise our emotions. We are surrounded by art and overwhelmed by our emotions.
From the pictures children have drawn for us, the poetry, the songs, and banners, to the concerts, the plays, and the operas that we have been invited to attend – use the arts to heal your heart.
....” – words from a fire fighter who survived 9/11
the above text I got today from an artist in NYC. a great perspective to the arts in our life.
enjoy collecting art I felt in love with since age 16 – currently I am exploring a concept to add value to the contemporary art market. let me know if you are open to talk about it and exchange views and insights – I am.
Comment [1]
The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn · 895 days ago by Andreas W Gerdes
(This essay is derived from a talk at the 2006 Startup School.)
The startups we’ve funded so far are pretty quick, but they seem quicker to learn some lessons than others. I think it’s because some things about startups are kind of counterintuitive.
We’ve now invested in enough companies that I’ve learned a trick for determining which points are the counterintuitive ones: they’re the ones I have to keep repeating.
So I’m going to number these points, and maybe with future startups I’ll be able to pull off a form of Huffman coding. I’ll make them all read this, and then instead of nagging them in detail, I’ll just be able to say: number four!
1. Release Early.
The thing I probably repeat most is this recipe for a startup: get a version 1 out fast, then improve it based on users’ reactions.
By “release early” I don’t mean you should release something full of bugs, but that you should release something minimal. Users hate bugs, but they don’t seem to mind a minimal version 1, if there’s more coming soon.
There are several reasons it pays to get version 1 done fast. One is that this is simply the right way to write software, whether for a startup or not. I’ve been repeating that since 1993, and I haven’t seen much since to contradict it. I’ve seen a lot of startups die because they were too slow to release stuff, and none because they were too quick. [1]
One of the things that will surprise you if you build something popular is that you won’t know your users. Reddit now has almost half a million unique visitors a month. Who are all those people? They have no idea. No web startup does. And since you don’t know your users, it’s dangerous to guess what they’ll like. Better to release something and let them tell you.
Wufoo took this to heart and released their form-builder before the underlying database. You can’t even drive the thing yet, but 83,000 people came to sit in the driver’s seat and hold the steering wheel. And Wufoo got valuable feedback from it: Linux users complained they used too much Flash, so they rewrote their software not to. If they’d waited to release everything at once, they wouldn’t have discovered this problem till it was more deeply wired in.
Even if you had no users, it would still be important to release quickly, because for a startup the initial release acts as a shakedown cruise. If anything major is broken—if the idea’s no good, for example, or the founders hate one another—the stress of getting that first version out will expose it. And if you have such problems you want to find them early.
Perhaps the most important reason to release early, though, is that it makes you work harder. When you’re working on something that isn’t released, problems are intriguing. In something that’s out there, problems are alarming. There is a lot more urgency once you release. And I think that’s precisely why people put it off. They know they’ll have to work a lot harder once they do. [2]
2. Keep Pumping Out Features.
Of course, “release early” has a second component, without which it would be bad advice. If you’re going to start with something that doesn’t do much, you better improve it fast.
What I find myself repeating is “pump out features.” And this rule isn’t just for the initial stages. This is something all startups should do for as long as they want to be considered startups.
I don’t mean, of course, that you should make your application ever more complex. By “feature” I mean one unit of hacking—one quantum of making users’ lives better.
As with exercise, improvements beget improvements. If you run every day, you’ll probably feel like running tomorrow. But if you skip running for a couple weeks, it will be an effort to drag yourself out. So it is with hacking: the more ideas you implement, the more ideas you’ll have. You should make your system better at least in some small way every day or two.
This is not just a good way to get development done; it is also a form of marketing. Users love a site that’s constantly improving. In fact, users expect a site to improve. Imagine if you visited a site that seemed very good, and then returned two months later and not one thing had changed. Wouldn’t it start to seem lame? [3]
They’ll like you even better when you improve in response to their comments, because customers are used to companies ignoring them. If you’re the rare exception—a company that actually listens—you’ll generate fanatical loyalty. You won’t need to advertise, because your users will do it for you.
This seems obvious too, so why do I have to keep repeating it? I think the problem here is that people get used to how things are. Once a product gets past the stage where it has glaring flaws, you start to get used to it, and gradually whatever features it happens to have become its identity. For example, I doubt many people at Yahoo (or Google for that matter) realized how much better web mail could be till Paul Buchheit showed them.
I think the solution is to assume that anything you’ve made is far short of what it could be. Force yourself, as a sort of intellectual exercise, to keep thinking of improvements. Ok, sure, what you have is perfect. But if you had to change something, what would it be?
If your product seems finished, there are two possible explanations: (a) it is finished, or (b) you lack imagination. Experience suggests (b) is a thousand times more likely.
3. Make Users Happy.
Improving constantly is an instance of a more general rule: make users happy. One thing all startups have in common is that they can’t force anyone to do anything. They can’t force anyone to use their software, and they can’t force anyone to do deals with them. A startup has to sing for its supper. That’s why the successful ones make great things. They have to, or die.
When you’re running a startup you feel like a little bit of debris blown about by powerful winds. The most powerful wind is users. They can either catch you and loft you up into the sky, as they did with Google, or leave you flat on the pavement, as they do with most startups. Users are a fickle wind, but more powerful than any other. If they take you up, no competitor can keep you down.
As a little piece of debris, the rational thing for you to do is not to lie flat, but to curl yourself into a shape the wind will catch.
I like the wind metaphor because it reminds you how impersonal the stream of traffic is. The vast majority of people who visit your site will be casual visitors. It’s them you have to design your site for. The people who really care will find what they want by themselves.
The median visitor will arrive with their finger poised on the Back button. Think about your own experience: most links you follow lead to something lame. Anyone who has used the web for more than a couple weeks has been trained to click on Back after following a link. So your site has to say “Wait! Don’t click on Back. This site isn’t lame. Look at this, for example.”
There are two things you have to do to make people pause. The most important is to explain, as concisely as possible, what the hell your site is about. How often have you visited a site that seemed to assume you already knew what they did? For example, the corporate site that says the company makes
enterprise content management solutions for business that enable organizations to unify people, content and processes to minimize business risk, accelerate time-to-value and sustain lower total cost of ownership.
An established company may get away with such an opaque description, but no startup can. A startup should be able to explain in one or two sentences exactly what it does. [4] And not just to users. You need this for everyone: investors, acquirers, partners, reporters, potential employees, and even current employees. You probably shouldn’t even start a company to do something that can’t be described compellingly in one or two sentences.
The other thing I repeat is to give people everything you’ve got, right away. If you have something impressive, try to put it on the front page, because that’s the only one most visitors will see. Though indeed there’s a paradox here: the more you push the good stuff toward the front, the more likely visitors are to explore further. [5]
In the best case these two suggestions get combined: you tell visitors what your site is about by showing them. One of the standard pieces of advice in fiction writing is “show, don’t tell.” Don’t say that a character’s angry; have him grind his teeth, or break his pencil in half. Nothing will explain what your site does so well as using it.
The industry term here is “conversion.” The job of your site is to convert casual visitors into users—whatever your definition of a user is. You can measure this in your growth rate. Either your site is catching on, or it isn’t, and you must know which. If you have decent growth, you’ll win in the end, no matter how obscure you are now. And if you don’t, you need to fix something.
4. Fear the Right Things.
Another thing I find myself saying a lot is “don’t worry.” Actually, it’s more often “don’t worry about this; worry about that instead.” Startups are right to be paranoid, but they sometimes fear the wrong things.
Most visible disasters are not so alarming as they seem. Disasters are normal in a startup: a founder quits, you discover a patent that covers what you’re doing, your servers keep crashing, you run into an insoluble technical problem, you have to change your name, a deal falls through—these are all par for the course. They won’t kill you unless you let them.
Nor will most competitors. A lot of startups worry “what if Google builds something like us?” Actually big companies are not the ones you have to worry about—not even Google. The people at Google are smart, but no smarter than you; they’re not as motivated, because Google is not going to go out of business if this one product fails; and even at Google they have a lot of bureaucracy to slow them down.
What you should fear, as a startup, is not the established players, but other startups you don’t know exist yet. They’re way more dangerous than Google because, like you, they’re cornered animals.
Looking just at existing competitors can give you a false sense of security. You should compete against what someone else could be doing, not just what you can see people doing. A corollary is that you shouldn’t relax just because you have no visible competitors yet. No matter what your idea, there’s someone else out there working on the same thing.
That’s the downside of it being easier to start a startup: more people are doing it. But I disagree with Caterina Fake when she says that makes this a bad time to start a startup. More people are starting startups, but not as many more as could. Most college graduates still think they have to get a job. The average person can’t ignore something that’s been beaten into their head since they were three just because serving web pages recently got a lot cheaper.
And in any case, competitors are not the biggest threat. Way more startups hose themselves than get crushed by competitors. There are a lot of ways to do it, but the three main ones are internal disputes, inertia, and ignoring users. Each is, by itself, enough to kill you. But if I had to pick the worst, it would be ignoring users. If you want a recipe for a startup that’s going to die, here it is: a couple of founders who have some great idea they know everyone is going to love, and that’s what they’re going to build, no matter what.
Almost everyone’s initial plan is broken. If companies stuck to their initial plans, Microsoft would be selling programming languages, and Apple would be selling printed circuit boards. In both cases their customers told them what their business should be—and they were smart enough to listen.
As Richard Feynman said, the imagination of nature is greater than the imagination of man. You’ll find more interesting things by looking at the world than you could ever produce just by thinking. This principle is very powerful. It’s why the best abstract painting still falls short of Leonardo, for example. And it applies to startups too. No idea for a product could ever be so clever as the ones you can discover by smashing a beam of prototypes into a beam of users.
5. Commitment Is a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy.
I now have enough experience with startups to be able to say what the most important quality is in a startup founder, and it’s not what you might think. The most important quality in a startup founder is determination. Not intelligence—determination.
This is a little depressing. I’d like to believe Viaweb succeeded because we were smart, not merely determined. A lot of people in the startup world want to believe that. Not just founders, but investors too. They like the idea of inhabiting a world ruled by intelligence. And you can tell they really believe this, because it affects their investment decisions.
Time after time VCs invest in startups founded by eminent professors. This may work in biotech, where a lot of startups simply commercialize existing research, but in software you want to invest in students, not professors. Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google were all founded by people who dropped out of school to do it. What students lack in experience they more than make up in dedication.
Of course, if you want to get rich, it’s not enough merely to be determined. You have to be smart too, right? I’d like to think so, but I’ve had an experience that convinced me otherwise: I spent several years living in New York.
You can lose quite a lot in the brains department and it won’t kill you. But lose even a little bit in the commitment department, and that will kill you very rapidly.
Running a startup is like walking on your hands: it’s possible, but it requires extraordinary effort. If an ordinary employee were asked to do the things a startup founder has to, he’d be very indignant. Imagine if you were hired at some big company, and in addition to writing software ten times faster than you’d ever had to before, they expected you to answer support calls, administer the servers, design the web site, cold-call customers, find the company office space, and go out and get everyone lunch.
And to do all this not in the calm, womb-like atmosphere of a big company, but against a backdrop of constant disasters. That’s the part that really demands determination. In a startup, there’s always some disaster happening. So if you’re the least bit inclined to find an excuse to quit, there’s always one right there.
But if you lack commitment, chances are it will have been hurting you long before you actually quit. Everyone who deals with startups knows how important commitment is, so if they sense you’re ambivalent, they won’t give you much attention. If you lack commitment, you’ll just find that for some mysterious reason good things happen to your competitors but not to you. If you lack commitment, it will seem to you that you’re unlucky.
Whereas if you’re determined to stick around, people will pay attention to you, because odds are they’ll have to deal with you later. You’re a local, not just a tourist, so everyone has to come to terms with you.
At Y Combinator we sometimes mistakenly fund teams who have the attitude that they’re going to give this startup thing a shot for three months, and if something great happens, they’ll stick with it—“something great” meaning either that someone wants to buy them or invest millions of dollars in them. But if this is your attitude, “something great” is very unlikely to happen to you, because both acquirers and investors judge you by your level of commitment.
If an acquirer thinks you’re going to stick around no matter what, they’ll be more likely to buy you, because if they don’t and you stick around, you’ll probably grow, your price will go up, and they’ll be left wishing they’d bought you earlier. Ditto for investors. What really motivates investors, even big VCs, is not the hope of good returns, but the fear of missing out. [6] So if you make it clear you’re going to succeed no matter what, and the only reason you need them is to make it happen a little faster, you’re much more likely to get money.
You can’t fake this. The only way to convince everyone that you’re ready to fight to the death is actually to be ready to.
You have to be the right kind of determined, though. I carefully chose the word determined rather than stubborn, because stubbornness is a disastrous quality in a startup. You have to be determined, but flexible, like a running back. A successful running back doesn’t just put his head down and try to run through people. He improvises: if someone appears in front of him, he runs around them; if someone tries to grab him, he spins out of their grip; he’ll even run in the wrong direction briefly if that will help. The one thing he’ll never do is stand still. [7]
6. There Is Always Room.
I was talking recently to a startup founder about whether it might be good to add a social component to their software. He said he didn’t think so, because the whole social thing was tapped out. Really? So in a hundred years the only social networking sites will be the Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, and Del.icio.us? Not likely.
There is always room for new stuff. At every point in history, even the darkest bits of the dark ages, people were discovering things that made everyone say “why didn’t anyone think of that before?” We know this continued to be true up till 2004, when the Facebook was founded—though strictly speaking someone else did think of that.
The reason we don’t see the opportunities all around us is that we adjust to however things are, and assume that’s how things have to be. For example, it would seem crazy to most people to try to make a better search engine than Google. Surely that field, at least, is tapped out. Really? In a hundred years—or even twenty—are people still going to search for information using something like the current Google? Even Google probably doesn’t think that.
In particular, I don’t think there’s any limit to the number of startups. Sometimes you hear people saying “All these guys starting startups now are going to be disappointed. How many little startups are Google and Yahoo going to buy, after all?” That sounds cleverly skeptical, but I can prove it’s mistaken. No one proposes that there’s some limit to the number of people who can be employed in an economy consisting of big, slow-moving companies with a couple thousand people each. Why should there be any limit to the number who could be employed by small, fast-moving companies with ten each? It seems to me the only limit would be the number of people who want to work that hard.
The limit on the number of startups is not the number that can get acquired by Google and Yahoo—though it seems even that should be unlimited, if the startups were actually worth buying—but the amount of wealth that can be created. And I don’t think there’s any limit on that, except cosmological ones.
So for all practical purposes, there is no limit to the number of startups. Startups make wealth, which means they make things people want, and if there’s a limit on the number of things people want, we are nowhere near it. I still don’t even have a flying car.
7. Don’t Get Your Hopes Up.
This is another one I’ve been repeating since long before Y Combinator. It was practically the corporate motto at Viaweb.
Startup founders are naturally optimistic. They wouldn’t do it otherwise. But you should treat your optimism the way you’d treat the core of a nuclear reactor: as a source of power that’s also very dangerous. You have to build a shield around it, or it will fry you.
The shielding of a reactor is not uniform; the reactor would be useless if it were. It’s pierced in a few places to let pipes in. An optimism shield has to be pierced too. I think the place to draw the line is between what you expect of yourself, and what you expect of other people. It’s ok to be optimistic about what you can do, but assume the worst about machines and other people.
This is particularly necessary in a startup, because you tend to be pushing the limits of whatever you’re doing. So things don’t happen in the smooth, predictable way they do in the rest of the world. Things change suddenly, and usually for the worse.
Shielding your optimism is nowhere more important than with deals. If your startup is doing a deal, just assume it’s not going to happen. The VCs who say they’re going to invest in you aren’t. The company that says they’re going to buy you isn’t. The big customer who wants to use your system in their whole company won’t. Then if things work out you can be pleasantly surprised.
The reason I warn startups not to get their hopes up is not to save them from being disappointed when things fall through. It’s for a more practical reason: to prevent them from leaning their company against something that’s going to fall over, taking them with it.
For example, if someone says they want to invest in you, there’s a natural tendency to stop looking for other investors. That’s why people proposing deals seem so positive: they want you to stop looking. And you want to stop too, because doing deals is a pain. Raising money, in particular, is a huge time sink. So you have to consciously force yourself to keep looking.
Even if you ultimately do the first deal, it will be to your advantage to have kept looking, because you’ll get better terms. Deals are dynamic; unless you’re negotiating with someone unusually honest, there’s not a single point where you shake hands and the deal’s done. There are usually a lot of subsidiary questions to be cleared up after the handshake, and if the other side senses weakness—if they sense you need this deal—they will be very tempted to screw you in the details.
VCs and corp dev guys are professional negotiators. They’re trained to take advantage of weakness. [8] So while they’re often nice guys, they just can’t help it. And as pros they do this more than you. So don’t even try to bluff them. The only way a startup can have any leverage in a deal is genuinely not to need it. And if you don’t believe in a deal, you’ll be less likely to depend on it.
So I want to plant a hypnotic suggestion in your heads: when you hear someone say the words “we want to invest in you” or “we want to acquire you,” I want the following phrase to appear automatically in your head: don’t get your hopes up. Just continue running your company as if this deal didn’t exist. Nothing is more likely to make it close.
The way to succeed in a startup is to focus on the goal of getting lots of users, and keep walking swiftly toward it while investors and acquirers scurry alongside trying to wave money in your face.
Speed, not Money
The way I’ve described it, starting a startup sounds pretty stressful. It is. When I talk to the founders of the companies we’ve funded, they all say the same thing: I knew it would be hard, but I didn’t realize it would be this hard.
So why do it? It would be worth enduring a lot of pain and stress to do something grand or heroic, but just to make money? Is making money really that important?
No, not really. It seems ridiculous to me when people take business too seriously. I regard making money as a boring errand to be got out of the way as soon as possible. There is nothing grand or heroic about starting a startup per se.
So why do I spend so much time thinking about startups? I’ll tell you why. Economically, a startup is best seen not as a way to get rich, but as a way to work faster. You have to make a living, and a startup is a way to get that done quickly, instead of letting it drag on through your whole life. [9]
We take it for granted most of the time, but human life is fairly miraculous. It is also palpably short. You’re given this marvellous thing, and then poof, it’s taken away. You can see why people invent gods to explain it. But even to people who don’t believe in gods, life commands respect. There are times in most of our lives when the days go by in a blur, and almost everyone has a sense, when this happens, of wasting something precious. As Ben Franklin said, if you love life, don’t waste time, because time is what life is made of.
So no, there’s nothing particularly grand about making money. That’s not what makes startups worth the trouble. What’s important about startups is the speed. By compressing the dull but necessary task of making a living into the smallest possible time, you show respect for life, and there is something grand about that.
Notes
[1] Startups can die from releasing something full of bugs, and not fixing them fast enough, but I don’t know of any that died from releasing something stable but minimal very early, then promptly improving it.
[2] I know this is why I haven’t released Arc. The moment I do, I’ll have people nagging me for features.
[3] A web site is different from a book or movie or desktop application in this respect. Users judge a site not as a single snapshot, but as an animation with multiple frames. Of the two, I’d say the rate of improvement is more important to users than where you currently are.
[4] It should not always tell this to users, however. For example, MySpace is basically a replacement mall for mallrats. But it was wiser for them, initially, to pretend that the site was about bands.
[5] Similarly, don’t make users register to try your site. Maybe what you have is so valuable that visitors should gladly register to get at it. But they’ve been trained to expect the opposite. Most of the things they’ve tried on the web have sucked—and probably especially those that made them register.
[6] VCs have rational reasons for behaving this way. They don’t make their money (if they make money) off their median investments. In a typical fund, half the companies fail, most of the rest generate mediocre returns, and one or two “make the fund” by succeeding spectacularly. So if they miss just a few of the most promising opportunities, it could hose the whole fund.
[7] The attitude of a running back doesn’t translate to soccer. Though it looks great when a forward dribbles past multiple defenders, a player who persists in trying such things will do worse in the long term than one who passes.
[8] The reason Y Combinator never negotiates valuations is that we’re not professional negotiators, and don’t want to turn into them.
[9] There are two ways to do work you love: (a) to make money, then work on what you love, or (b) to get a job where you get paid to work on stuff you love. In practice the first phases of both consist mostly of unedifying schleps, and in (b) the second phase is less secure.
Thanks to Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, Beau Hartshorne, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.
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Welcome to my blog · 895 days ago by Andreas W Gerdes
please go to my profile link on the left navigation to know more about me.
If you have any great ideas and you would like to share with me, you can either send me an email or post your feedback via comment section of the my blog.
I will keep you updated with my recent work.
Thank you
Andreas W Gerdes
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Mervelder Hof · 896 days ago by Andreas W Gerdes
Mervelder Hof is a real estate in Horstmar, Germany. aims to provide information about the property, horstmar and its neighborhood – from the people and for the people.
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