Category Archives: Uncategorized

(Community Matters) I wasn’t able to make last night’s swearing in ceremony but am very happy for friends/new & returning council members Lee Leffingwell, Randi Shade & Laura Morrison. Randi & Laura round out an excellent group of council members.

Of course, we’ll miss Betty Dunkerley a great deal. There’s a reception at City Hall today at 4pm to honor Betty. And, friends are organizing a thank you gala and debt retirement party at the Headliners on August 6. Sponsors are giving $300. Tickets will cost $50. Please feel free to contact me or Cis Myers if you’d like to participate.

(Community Matters) Steven and I are producing two of our friend’s (Michael Mitchell’s) plays, Highway Home & Them. Austin & New York award-winning director, Katie Pearl will direct. The two short plays will be presented as Two Fountains and open Nov 29 at the Salvage Vanguard Theatre.

Katie directed a workship of Michael’s Highway Home at one of his last UT classes in the Spring. She loved it, we loved it and several weeks before any awareness that Michael had cancer we talked about producing the show. Given the situation today, we’ve timed the production to coincide with the end of Michael’s 6 months of chemo (kinda an exciting light at the end of the tunnel for him, his family and friends). We’re raising the $25,000 production costs from family, friends and sponsors of the arts, so that we can designate all box office proceeds to two nonprofits, the Lance Armstrong Foundation (for Austin patient navigation) and Fuse Box, an important Austin arts festival . Sponsorships qualify as charitable contributions through the ABPorter.org Fund at the Austin Community Foundation. More here

(Community Matters) Yesterday was a terrific and productive day. Always a great day when get to spend most of it with enthusiastic, committed entrepreneurs. Breakfast with my friend/author/speaker, Thom Singer. We were eating at Galaxy Cafe on West Lynn where ran into several other friends including newly elected council member Randi Shade, Paint Texas Blue entrepreneur Alexa Wesner having breakfast with political gurus Mark Harkrider and Wyeth Wiedman. [Regret that we’re unable to be at Alexa’s big do on Saturday. Expect they’ll bust the $1mm mark for D campaigns. We’ll be celebrating a dear friend’s 75th with lots of friends and their family]

Second breakfast with Marion Cimbala who’s running the breast cancer services project for the Entrepreneurs Foundation. Good progress on our current projects (though admittedly never as quick as I’d like): patient mapping, patient navigation, food & nutrition project, bike ride for breast cancer services and a web portal for regional breast cancer organizations.

Lunch over an Austin Community Foundation board meeting. Our investments committee (which I chair) presented on our $105mm investments portfolio, our plans for changes in management and the investment policy and won approval to move a portion of our fixed income assets to Sage Advisory Services. I’ve learned a lot about Sage Advisory over the last couple of months. They’re an outstanding operation; I recommend them for core & core-plus fixed income strategies.

Afternoon Obama campaign related meeting with political entrepreneur, David Kobierowski. He’s one of the three who, with Ian Davis, launched Texans for Obama and the Obama Book Club. Very enthusiastic about raising more money for the campaign, so we met to brainstorm & strategize.

An especially wonderful meeting with arts/social entrepreneur, Ron Berry, founder of Fuse Box Festival, Refraction Arts and a local actor. Steven and I adore Ron and the festival he’s created. It’s already an extraordinary asset for Austin. We wanted him to know we’re here to help grow his festival in any way he’d find helpful.

Finally, dinner with one of our former MBA students and his business partner who traveled down from Dallas so we could review their start-up business plan and offer ideas. Interesting nugget and potentially super opportunities. We felt good about the feedback we were able to offer. Hope they did too.

(Community Matters) It just keeps getting better and better – of course, many say polls don’t count until after Labor Day.

FiveThirtyEight.com

(Community Matters) On Feb 23 I sold my General Motors stock at $24/share citing Vice Chairman Bob Lutz’s comment that global warming is “a total crock of shit” as a sign that the company was managed by idiots. Today GM closed at $13/share. It’s dropped nearly 50% ytd. So glad he’s a vocal idiot.

(Community Matters) Yesterday evening, I joined Amanda Chiampi, Michael Kellerman, Craig Davis, Patricia Buchholtz and other residents of Chestnut Commons for a residents block party/dinner celebrating the opening of the third and final phase. These single family units built condo style on the former Featherlite tract have attracted a very cool, crowd of overwhelmingly 20- & 30-something nonprofit professionals, state workers, marketers, UT staff members and other young professionals. And, it is creating a fund of over $1mm for affordable housing projects in Central East Austin. (hmm, I had a picture of the 50+ folks under the tent having dinner. I shouldn’t delete after emailing to myself.)

(Community Matters) Kudos to George Brant who won the Keene Award and $50,000 for his play, Elephant’s Graveyard, which I reviewed here. George had previously won the Austin Theatre’s Critics Award for this play.

(Community Matters) Robert Torian in NYC visiting Paul Daigle, and of course, no coincidence he was there for this year’s Broadway Bares.

This was Broadway Bares’ 18th year and they raised over $800k to help fund services for those with AIDS. It’s an annual benefit of the Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS group. Charles Santos ran their Dancers Responding to AIDS program.

(Community Matters) Today would have been Tom Henderson’s 59th birthday. Thinking of you today especially, Tom.

(Community Matters) Not sure if this is the race responsible for all the fun, laughing riders cruising through the hood, but does sound like fun.

(Community Matters) I don’t have a position on this since I haven’t read enough. I do wonder, however, if we ought not “save our oil” for the days it’s even more scarce and expensive. Given that we (as a nation) have borrowed so much against the younger generations’ futures, shouldn’t we at least leave them this asset, undepleted? Seems the technology will be better for extracting it environmentally safely if that’s an issue as well.

(Community Matters) I missed the VF issue on the Ecuadoran lawsuit against Chevron. As we went around the table, I asked Hailey Rudy to tell us about her new job in Ecuador. She’s working for the team of plantiffs’ attorneys in Quito and this week met Pablo Fajardo. Pablo and the lawsuit are an extraordinary story. If you don’t know, you’d like to.

Snow’s BBQ, Kreuz’s sides (plus their ribs – still the best) and a salad from Bastrop’s Farmer’s Market. Michael earlier mentioned that reading about yesterday’s food trip reminded him of me on Salt Spring Island – so true. I would spend half the day driving between farms, purchasing whatever was ready to pick or recently caught or slaughtered, then the rest of the day cooking. I’ll admit, it’s easier without the cooking part and naps are always a good thing 🙂

Dinner guests included Kristi & Scott Eckert, Carla & Jack McDonald, Hailey (kirk’s oldest daughter) & Kirk Rudy, Crystal & Mark Strama and Jodi & Fred Zipp. We promised each other last night was off-the-record, so I won’t recant the other conversations. It was midnight before anyone stirred from the table, so a good night in our book.