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The machine pictured here is a Sony XDCAM EX, a 1080p tapeless HD camcorder.  It is a so-called “prosumer” model that lists for $7800.  I bought a pair of these cameras (new in the box) at the beginning of July to use for shooting this summer’s Startup Tour.  Many video professionals think these are the best HD camcorders you can buy for under $20,000.  The video is stunning — clearly network-quality or, indeed, feature film-quality.

If only they both worked.

The cameras came from  Abel Cinetech in New York City and we paid about $14,000 for the pair. The cameras worked fine for a few weeks until one froze-up in Boulder, CO.  We couldn’t get the camera to boot.  We sent it in for repair and Sony checked it into their system on 8/4. I spoke to one of their reps a few days later and was told they were waiting for parts but the camera would probably be repaired by the end of the next week.

I called that Friday and was told the parts were in and the camera was being repaired — and that I should call again in a few days. So I called back Tuesday, then Wednesday when we were in Portland and was told essentially the same thing again — they were working on it and it would be a few more days.

I called again this past Monday and was told that they needed more parts from Israel which they were expecting sometime around September 16th. The guy I spoke to was very direct and said that considering the last time they ordered parts they came in a few days late, as well as factoring in repair time — I was looking at it being ready a few days after the 16th.

At this point I started asking for a replacement, explaining that this was a new camera and that we had already spent so much on rentals (this camera rents for $100 per day).  My priority was getting it back ASAP, which  could be achieved by having it replaced. The guy suggested I speak to a manager and it might be possible to get a replacement.

I spoke to a manager named Sylvia on Tuesday of last week who said that they don’t have loaner cameras in the service department, but that it might be able to arrange something with another department. Silvia said she’d talk to the engineers and get back with me later that day. I haven’t heard from her since… In fact, I asked for her direct number at the end of the call and she declined, saying that she was going to send me an email with all of her contact info…. That never arrived either.

I suspect Sylvia isn’t a manager at all, but rather some support rep they put on the phone to appease me.

So I contacted my salesman at Abel as well as the sales manager. They both have been working with Sony, but all I have so far from them is a promise made to them by Sony that the shipping of the part to the service facility would be ‘expedited.’ They are still working on the situation, however and I’m told they will get back to me.

Although this is a warranty repair and thus free, I asked if I could perhaps, for a fee, have the repair expedited. All they could offer was that warranty repairs were given priority anyway, and that if I included a note with the camera requesting expedited repair perhaps they would do so if they had time. I included such a letter detailing how important the camera was to the production and requesting expedited repair.

At no point did Sony contact me about the status of the repair, even when it was delayed. Also, at no point did anyone at Sony offer an apology, even when I expressed to several people just how displeased I was.

These are great cameras when they work, but when they don’t work they are simply $7,800 bricks.  Sony clearly doesn’t care about its prosumer customers.  Interestingly you can get customer support on the weekend for Sony’s cheapest consumer camcorder but not for this baby.

Tell a friend.  Tell them that Sony makes fine prosumer camcorders but doesn’t support them worth a damn.  Tell them that Sylvia is a liar.  Tell them to expect to pay $3000 to rent a $7000 replacement camera if they need a repair.

And tell them to do what I probably should have done in the first place, which was stick with Panasonic. 

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Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen filed suit this week against a litany of Internet companies claiming they had violated patents awarded years ago to Allen’s now-defunct Interval Research. Many writers, including one passing himself off as me, claimed this made Allen a so-called “patent troll. ”

I don’t think that is the case.

Patent trolls are individuals or companies that habitually sue others over obscure patents. While the Interval patents generally are obscure, that doesn’t make them invalid. And the fact that Allen and then-partner Dave Liddle paid $100 million for the basic research behind those patents, well that hardly sounds like troll behavior.

If Paul Allen actually were a patent troll. he would have sued in South Texas, where all the whopping patent judgements are handed-down, not in Seattle.

Suing in Seattle is bad trollmanship.

What we have here is a guy who may be the 37th richest person in the world, but he used to be the second-richest. He’s pledged to give away his fortune and maybe wants more to give. In short, I don’t see a problem with these legal actions.

That doesn’t mean, however, that Allen will prevail. The odds are against him. While Interval developed upwards of 300 patents, that isn’t like the thousands of patents now controlled by Nathan Myrhvold’s company, Intellectual Ventures. Myrvold has acquired baskets of patents creating a strategic mass of IP and an associated legal team he can use to bludgeon almost any company into cross-licensing. Allen has no such depth (or power).

He’s just trying to turn lemons from lemonade.

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A friend of mine has been in an epic struggle with his mortgage processor and his experience tells us a lot about the state of IT. It started in October of last year when my friend met with his loan processor (Bank of America) to inquire about a loan modification. The loan is actually owned by Freddie Mac. He turned-in all the required paperwork and followed up with an income statement when requested two weeks later.  The meeting took many hours mainly because all of the original documents were imaged and put into his electronic file. In late December he was told that his modification was completed, given a new mortgage payment and told to wait on the paperwork.

Nothing happened.

Fast forward to September and guess what?  He has had to restart the process three times now. Exactly why the process broke no one can determine. So three times he sent in his tax returns, bank information, income information and forms totaling over 100 pages only to have them disappear, again and again.  Each time the process was a little different but the end result was the same — nothing. Process improvement at work yet no change in outcome.

What’s wrong with this picture?  I see two possibilities: 1) a conspiracy theory in which nobody actually gets loan modifications, and: 2) that the IT systems are broken.  At this point normally I would illustrate a series of events that may or not involve Steve Jobs, reactions to new federal regulations, cost accounting, breaking federal laws, or perhaps even Bill Gates.

But for something entirely different — I vote for IT as the culprit. My guess is they just do not have the IT systems in place to process the applications and then modify the loans while following federal law. B of A may claim to have such systems, they may even think they have such systems, but my friend’s experience involved lots of banker eye-rolling but nobody saying “Well this has never happened before.”

It happens all the time.

And I’d say it sucks to be their customer.

These types of issues have plagued business and it’s customers since IT was an infant in punch cards.  It might be a B of A issue, but more likely it is an issue between B of A and Freddie Mac, with Freddie probably screwing-up yet not really caring enough to fix anything.

The reason this has risen to the top of the pile right now is because I see it as a basic issue at almost every company I visit.  Companies either have it – IT that is – or they don’t.  Some outfits will make it based on duct tape and bailing wired systems. But in the end — often literally the end — this has to be one of the top reasons for failure of any business.

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A maverick is an un-branded range cow or steer. It is also the name used for sports teams at Minnesota State University — Mankato. That’s where the Cringely Startup Tour stopped recently to visit Maverick Software Consulting and find out where’s the beef. This Maverick (the consulting company) has come up with an amazing business model for software consulting services — one that employs American programmers yet meets or beats the cost of using programmers in India or China. But it is much more than just a price-competitive service: Maverick Software Consulting also gives prospective technical employers a newer and better way to directly recruit good programmers.

Maverick was founded by Martin Hebig and Chuck Sherwood, both former Mankato students. As computer science students in the 1990s, both men worked part time for a partnership between IBM and the University. Mankato provided office space on campus and hired students to work for IBM testing the then-new OS/400 operating system. The students gained real work experience while IBM got its testing done for less money.

It was a good program that ran for several years, but then the faculty sponsor retired and with him went those IBM jobs.

“I always thought it was a great idea, ” Hebig recalled during our visit. “I wanted to figure out a way to get something like that rolling again. I had been seeing more and more companies sending work offshore when the idea came to me: why couldn’t we set up an office close to the University, hire students, train them and have the students do the same work that was being sent offshore? We could price the work about the same or a little cheaper, students would be in the same time zone and the company could hire the students when they graduate.

“I contacted one of my clients I had worked with as an independent consultant and they liked the idea. We worked out the details and opened our first office at Minnesota State University – Mankato. Four years later Maverick has a total of four offices (the other are the University of Minnesota, University of Wisconsin – Madison, and Iowa State University) and 74 student employees.”

This isn’t rocket science. The students are testing software, recording bugs, and doing middleware development mainly for a single client — Thomson Reuters. Reuters, in turn, has gone on to hire as full time employees more than 90 percent of the Maverick student consultants as they graduate.

Each consultant works approximately 20 hours per week during the academic year and 40 hours per week in the summer making $10-13 per hour. That amounts to an average 3000-hour tryout over two years for the would-be Reuters programmers. No wonder the company hires so many of them, because with that much exposure Reuters truly knows what it is getting.

Maverick isn’t hugely profitable but it is profitable… and has been since its first week of operation. Required capital has been minimal. Turnover is minimal, too, because these are often the best-paying student jobs on campus.

It’s a model Maverick hopes it can bootstrap across the nation, eventually having an office at every school with 150 or more CS majors, generating with a single manager nearly $1 million in annual revenue per office.

That‘s several hundred potential offices and a lot of pizza.

So how do you protect this great lifestyle business? With yet another refreshing business idea — honesty.

“We understand that any company could try and do what we are doing, ” Hebig continued. “Because of this we have transparent finances with our clients. They know everything about our business (cost for office space, cost for T1 lines, cost for students and the margins that we make, etc.) We show them that we aren’t making a ton of money doing this and that it would be difficult to do it much cheaper. Plus, we bring our experience, training and automated process that makes us very efficient at what we do. ”

While Maverick looks only marginally profitable on paper, the business has no debt, is completely bootstrapped, is keeping dozens — eventually hundreds — of jobs in America. And if they can scale the business the way they think they can there’s nothing that says the founders won’t soon be paying themselves a bootload of money while remaining mavericks — unbranded.

I wrote a few days ago about the Intel anti-trust settlement with the Federal Trade Commission. Those words stand unchanged but some readers have asked for more so I have given the deal further thought and have what might be a better context in which to place it — Too Big to Fail. This isn’t “too big to fail” in the Bush/Obama big bank context in which failing and stupid institutions are saved at any cost to the public. Intel, in contrast, literally is too big to fail, at least right now.

Everything about the Intel/FTC settlement screams of one thing — Microsoft. Redmond’s multi-year nightmare with the FTC, DoJ, and the attorneys-general of several dozen states wasn’t lost on Intel, which is a more rational company and doesn’t want a Microsoft-like anti-trust experience. Both companies are guilty and both are paying something for that guilt, but Intel clearly wants to avoid the decade of pain and distraction suffered by Microsoft.

For the record, Intel admitted no wrong-doing in the settlement. But they also promised to specifically change their behavior.

What this settlement (and the previous one with AMD) does for Intel is clear the decks for future action. Now Intel can attack new market segments and be aggressive in existing market segments within the rules of the FTC deal.

Microsoft was paralyzed with the FTC breathing down its neck. Intel is not paralyzed.

Roughly $2 billion in payouts and Intel is a free bird — a rich free bird at that — having proved that crime does pay.

These settlements will effectively pay for themselves in two months at current Intel profit levels.

And as a result, Intel management bandwidth is now opened-up, hopefully not for more mischief.

Under the FTC deal Intel will open some patents to AMD and NVIDIA. This is healthy for Intel. If NVIDIA or AMD dies, Intel automatically becomes a monopoly subject to further regulation. So keeping NVIDIA and AMD alive and at least marginally healthy is in intel’s best interest. That’s an important take-away from this column: Intel needs AMD and NVIDIA.

Here’s the other big take-away: Intel has reached a scale on the cost equation where small volume companies can survive but not compete. AMD and NVIDIA survive by the grace of Intel, not despite it.

Intel’s latest gross profit margin is 65 percent!!! The company could easily cut prices and kill both AMD and NVIDIA. But Intel won’t do that. This realization ought to play an important part in AMD and NIVIDIA strategy. AMD gets that, but I think NVIDIA somehow doesn’t.

If NVIDIA and AMD maintain a few percentage points market share it is healthy for the entire ecosystem. Remember that as-is Intel is earning $3 billion per quarter. That’s Microsoft-scale money without the Microsoft-scale problems of a platform shift that risks leaving that company marooned.

This is all good news. So why hasn’t the market rewarded Intel with a big boost in its share price? Because conventional wisdom on Wall Street says that this freed-up management bandwidth will just help Intel launch another money-losing business. Remember the billions lost on Larrabee?

Conventional wisdom is often correct.

Vacancy at Hewlett-Packard

I’m sorry to have been so out of touch lately. The Startup Tour continues, of course, but this week I also have an Op-Ed article appearing in Sunday’s New York Times that I had to write. It is about Google and Verizon and may give a new perspective on recent events between the two companies. Look for it.

This week brought two other news events worthy of comment — Intel’s settlement with the Federal Trade Commission and Mark Hurd’s sudden departure as CEO from giant Hewlett-Packard.

The Intel story is almost as it is being presented in the trade and general press. Yes, Intel has promised in very specific ways to no longer be evil. No, Intel isn’t being made to give back the money it made as a result of being evil, so to a certain extent crime does pay. Of course some will say the money damages were in part covered by Intel’s recent $1.25 billion settlement with AMD, but the FTC also doesn’t generally impose fines. So if you happen to be guilty of anti-trust I guess it is better to be sued by the FTC than by the DoJ, which does impose fines.

Either way, Intel got away with something and the graphics chip makers in particular should be pissed.

One area where I think the press has it wrong, however, is in its interpretation of Intel’s promise to preserve the PCI Express bus. Third-party graphics cards use this bus and the fear of those companies is that Intel will simply replace PCI Express with some incompatible bus, making the third-party GPU chips and boards obsolete in the process. Now with the new FTC agreement they are promised at least six years before Intel deep-six’s PCI Express.

If only it were that simple. What the agreement actually says is that Intel has to preserve PCI Express for six years but not that it can’t introduce a new — and incompatible — graphics bus.

And that’s exactly what Intel will do. They’ll keep PCI Express but then add a new bus that’s wider and faster and generally better all-around. Even a mediocre Intel GPU that works on the new bus will have more than a fighting chance against NVIDIA or ATi (AMD) cards that work only with the older bus.

Why doesn’t the FTC see this? Because when it comes to the technical internals, they are stupid.

And speaking of stupid, super-smart HP CEO Mark Hurd got the boot this past week for filing improper expense reports and hitting-on a marketing consultant. There is no doubt that Hurd is (was?) the best big PC company CEO of his generation, a true genius who brought HP back not from the brink as Steve Jobs did at Apple, but back a long way back to PC market dominance while Dell self-destructed in response. But Hurd also appears to have had few friends at HP or he could have ridden-out this boneheaded thing or at least held on a bit longer.

Brilliance combined with power can lead to isolation and eventually to arrogance.  Hurd was arrogant.

I recall being asked to make a film for HP in the early days of Hurd’s reign and the people I spoke with fairly high up in the company were afraid of the guy. And now he’s safely out of the way so HP can return to sleep if it chooses.

I’m not saying Hurd should have stayed, just that his departure probably was worth the 10 percent drop in market cap that followed the announcement of his resignation.

The best way for HP to recover from this is, of course, to find a CEO even better than Hurd. That’s exactly what they did the last time, when Hurd replaced the hapless Carly Fiorina.

It will be much harder this time for HP to do the same.

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An occasional reader of this column, whose son works at Intel and is also a reader, got an e-mail from his kid while on vacation the other morning saying, “Cringely is in Boulder so keep an eye out for him.” At that moment we were both in a campground and I was sleeping 30 feet away. It’s a small world. But while these moments keep happening to me and I keep meeting marvelous new friends as a result, I am constantly reminded, too, of how big the technology culture has become and how impersonal it can be. I was especially reminded of that this weekend reading about the DefCon 18 show in Las Vegas where GSM phones were hacked with gusto only a day after the Black Hat conference, held in the same hotel, turned ATM machines into hackable devices spouting $20 bills. Neither surprised me, but they felt too slick and facile compared to the hacks of old.

This weekend was DefCon 18, which received worldwide news coverage. At Def Con 1 (note the different spelling back then), held of course 17 years ago, all the news coverage was left to me, the only reporter to attend.

In those days there were no “independent computer security research organizations.” There were hackers, or more appropriately “crackers,” as they were then known.

Def Con was founded by a guy known back then only as “The Dark Tangent.” It was a computer criminal’s rave where — for reasons I could never quite understand — the cops were invited to watch. But that’s all gone, of course. The Dark Tangent can now legally drink at his own show, he picked up a real name along the way and even an MBA, so of course the show is now supposed to make money. They still play Spot the Fed, with the person who spots the Fed getting a t-shirt that says, “I spotted the Fed,” and the Fed who has been outed receiving a shirt that says, “I am a Fed.” It’s cute, but no longer clever.

DefCon 1 attracted around 150 hackers and crackers to the old Sands Hotel back before ConAir Flight 1 smashed it to bits for a movie. The year was 1993 and InfoWorld, where I worked in those days, wouldn’t pay my way, so I went on my own.

It was surreal. I knew I wasn’t in Kansas anymore when my cellphone rang in a session, setting-off four illegal scanners in the same room. As I left to take my call in the hallway I wondered why I bothered?

Note that — 17 years later — the big news from DefCon this week was GSM call hacking. There is nothing new.

There were two high points for me at DefCon 1. First was the appearance of Dan Farmer, then head of data security for Sun Microsystems. Dressed all in black leather with flaming shoulder-length red hair and a groupie on each arm, Dan sat literally making-out in the back row until it was time for his presentation. But that presentation was far more entertaining than the smooching. In a series of rapid-fire slides Farmer showed dozens of ways in which crackers had attacked Sun’s network. He explained techniques that had failed at Sun but would probably have succeeded at most other companies. It was a master class in computer crime and his point, other than to prove that Dan was the smartest guy in the room, was to urge the crackers to at least be more original in their attacks!

But the best part of DefCon 1 was the battle between the kids and hotel security. Contrary to popular belief, breaking into Pentagon computer systems was not very lucrative, so many of the participants in that early DefCon did not have money for hotel rooms. The Dark Tangent handled this by renting the single large meeting room 24 hours per day so it could be used after hours for sleeping. Alas, someone forgot to explain this to the 6AM security shift at the Sands. Just as the hardy group of adventurers returned from a late-night break-in at the local telephone company substation, fresh security goons closed the meeting room and threw the kids out.

It is not a good idea to annoy a computer cracker, but it is a very bad idea to annoy a group of computer crackers bent on impressing each other.

The meeting reconvened at 9 or 10 with the topic suddenly changed to Revenge on the Sands. Gail Thackeray, then a U. S. Attorney from Arizona who at that moment had approximately half the room under indictment, rose to offer her services representing the kids against the hotel management.

Thackeray had been invited to speak by the very people she wanted to put in jail.  I told you this was surreal.

Adult assistance might be nice, but a potentially more satisfying alternative was offered by a group that had breached the hotel phone system, gained access to the computer network, obtained root level access to the VAX minicomputer that ran the Sands casino, and were ready at any moment to shut the sucker down. It came to a vote: accept Thackeray’s offer of assistance or shut down the casino.

There was no real contest: they voted to nuke the casino. Not one to be a party pooper, I voted with the majority.

Gail Thackeray, feeling her lawyer’s oats, was perfectly willing to be a party pooper, though. She explained with remarkable patience that opting en masse to commit a felony was a move that we might just want to reconsider, especially given the three strikes implications for some of the older participants.

We could accept her help or accept a date with the FBI that afternoon. The Sands (now the Venetian), which was ironically owned by the same folks who used to run Comdex, never knew how close it came to being dark.

It was a thrilling moment like you’d never see today. Everyone who was in that room shares a pirates’ bond. And though I can’t defend what we almost did, I don’t regret it.

And like the others, I wish Gail Thackeray had stayed in Arizona and we’d shut the sucker down.

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Update — Those who want to meet the Cringelys can come to Graphic.ly, an electronic Comic Book startup, at 1601 Pearl Street, Suite 200, Boulder, CO.  This is at 4PM on Saturday. If you can. please bring a small unwrapped toy for my kids to distribute at local hospitals and shelters.

And yes, I DID have the RV checked-out and serviced before we left Charleston.  Stuff happens.

Bob

That’s the catalytic converter from my RV.  It literally fell off when I hit a puddle during a rainstorm last week in St. Louis.  It dragged for a quarter mile or so before I got a clue there was something wrong.  When I took this picture I’d already found a piece of string and tied the cat to the door handle.  There was no similar piece of string for the tailpipe hanging out the other side of the bus.  It dragged the last mile to the RV park.

When anything goes wrong at an RV park, men instantly appear.  You never know their names, they just start to help.  It’s some Americana throwback that rubes like me find very useful.  In this case the samaritan wanted to go further than I did, though.

“Looks pretty bad,” he said. “Want to cut it off?”

“Cut it off?  How?”

“I’ve got tools.  Let me fire up my grinder and we’ll have that off in a jiff.”

I declined.

Later, when another camper came out to complain about my attempt to asphyxiate his kids with my generator exhaust, he said, “I know you.”

Remember my picture is on the side of the bus about 10 times life size.

“You’re from Plane Crazy.”

I sure didn’t see that one coming.

But if you live in or near Boulder, Colorado, know that the Cringely’s are coming and we’ll be around this weekend.

If someone can suggest a place to meet on Saturday afternoon we’ll do just that.  Remember to bring a toy for my kids to give away (not keep) and Mrs. Cringely will allow you to admire her muffins.

Can anybody suggest a good location?

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Anarchist Leader, Age 4

As we cross America on our Startup Tour there are any number of assumptions I’ve made about both new companies and child behavior that are being challenged. My kids are clearly anarchists and determined to topple me from power for one. As for the companies, I’m amazed over and over again how little money it can take to start a good business and how many founders find themselves running companies almost despite themselves. A good example of both lessons is Front Porch Forum (FPF) from Burlington, Vermont.

Here is part of my interview with FPF CEO Michael Wood-Lewis. I’ll be back to say more when he’s finished talking:

“My wife and I moved to Burlington, VT from the big city in the late 1990s looking for a small city with a great sense of community. We landed in a neighborhood known for just that kind of thing. But in 2000, after a couple years, we still had yet to connect with the neighbors.

“One evening at dinner, we wondered “whatever happened to neighbors welcoming new folks with a plate of fresh-baked cookies?” Two years and still no cookies!

“My wife is a public school teacher and take‐charge kind of gal, so she baked cookies and took them over to several neighbors, and, at my genius suggestion, she used china plates instead of paper so when they returned the plates, we could interact again (maybe they’d even bring over more cookies!). Well… we never saw the plates again. Not entirely true… we found one at a yard sale the next summer. At 25 cents it was a bargain.

“Now these neighbors were not -­ are not -­ bad folks. It’s just that everyone was so busy and cultural expectations have shifted in this generation. We were just strangers who lived next door. There’s no social contract there.

“So, our second attempt was to create an online forum for the neighborhood.

“We used fairly primitive tools to build it, and made fliers and dropped them in 400 front doors. In short order, 25, 50, 75 households signed up and people started using it. Over time, it became obvious that we had something worth sharing. And at the same time, 2006, I was leaving my job, so Valerie and I decided to launch Front Porch Forum, offering an enhanced version of what we had been doing in our one neighborhood, but now across 100+ neighborhoods in our region.

“Today, Front Porch Forum (FPF) serves 25 northwest Vermont towns and 18,000 households subscribe, including 45 percent of the state’s largest city. People use it for the simplest things, e.g., finding lost cats, borrowing ladders, recommending plumbers, reporting car break‐ins, organizing block parties, debating local politics, etc. But it’s all done with clearly identified nearby neighbors, so it has a magical effect of turning familiar strangers into real neighbors over time and gets people more engaged in local goings on. More than 90 percent report becoming more involved civically since signing up with FPF!”

Wow, what a story! (This is Bob again.) Here we have a 10 year-old startup that was six years old before the founders even began to think of it as a startup. It has taken almost no money, has really primitive technology (text-only e-mail with three ads at the top of every issue), yet has greater market penetration than the local daily newspaper whose owners like to think their media property is worth millions, right?

Front Porch Forum isn’t another Craigslist for two vital reasons: 1) each edition covers just a single neighborhood averaging 300 homes, and; unlike Craigslist, FPF forbids anonymity.  You are responsible for your words.

If only more Internet communication was that way.

There is a lot that could be improved about Front Porch Forum and I’m sure it will be, but the company’s strength has been its simplicity. No VC would wait six years to decided whether his investment was even an investment, yet — and here’s the clear lesson — that’s what it takes sometimes.

The tortoise doesn’t always win but he always finishes.

We’re well into our Startup Tour, visiting young companies so far in New York, Vermont, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Illinois, and Missouri.  Today we head to Kansas City and the Kauffman Foundation, one of our sponsors. That I’ve been slow to post the promised tour videos or write about these companies comes down to air conditioning failure, driving 4,000 miles, air conditioning failure (again), swiping a tree and tearing-off our retractable steps, air conditioning failure (yet again), and hitting a pothole so deep that our exhaust system literally fell off in the road.

Ah, the RV lifestyle!

We also learned a great truth about Travelocity when booking hotel rooms for the camera crew: did you know that when they take your money and promise you three rooms for two nights in St. Louis that promise means nothing? Sometimes those rooms turn out not to exist and the only recourse to being homeless in the rain at 11:30 PM is getting your money back in 12 business days.

But the startup companies we’ve visited so far has each been a joy and a surprise in a different way. I’ll start writing about those tonight as we finally get to rest for a couple days in Kansas City.

Or if you can’t wait for that and happen to be from Kansas City, drop by the Kauffman Foundation this afternoon at 3PM and meet us all for ice cream in the parking lot. And if you think to, please bring an unwrapped toy that my kids can take to local hospitals and homeless shelters. That’s their startup venture this summer.

See you at 3PM.

Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation‎
4801 Rockhill Road Kansas City, MO 64110
(816) 932-1000
kauffman.org‎