I’ve been buried on the home front so I thought I’d post this video to give you something to do while I ponder my thoughts for my next post. Hope you enjoy.

I’ve come to appreciate the old “it takes a village to raise a child” adage a bit more the past couple of weeks and have spent some time pondering it in depth.  While it may ultimately prove to be the philosopher in me (one of my degrees), I’m finding the old adage true in both my personal and professional lives these days so I thought I’d touch on it here.

While my pregnant wife has been out on bed rest, I’ve been wearing a few extra hats in an attempt to maintain our son’s “continuity of life / schedule” and that of our household and realized just how many responsibilities and duties need to be accounted for to raise a child.  It’s not that I haven’t thought about them before…it’s just that I now have a new appreciation for them and have had countless late night hours to consider all the things that need to get done on a daily basis.  All of this thinking has carried over in my professional life as well as I’ve also been thinking about all the things that need to get done to “raise a start-up”.  In short, it also takes a village to raise a start-up.

There are numerous things that need to get done to take a start-up from inception to liquidity event and it seems to me that the best start-ups have found a way to leverage the “village elders” in a way that their competitors are either unable or unwilling to do.  Sure, there are those rare occasions where one or more of the founders possess the multitude of non-overlapping skill sets and expertise to raise their start-ups but those situations are few and far in between in my experience.  So what skill sets or village elders are needed?  Well, the short list I’ve come up with is as follows: the creative visionary, the brilliant strategist, the detail-oriented operational guru, the legal eagle, the Jedi master of sales, the experienced investor, and a passionate set of villagers to buy what you’re selling.  So embrace your villages!!!

Well, I survived my wife’s 1st week of proscribed bed rest thanks, in large part, to my “professional mobility” and frequently found myself counting my blessings…which leads me to this post.  Is professional mobility a blessing or a curse?  I suppose it helps to define “professional mobility” first.  For me, it is the ability to work anytime from anywhere and is achieved thanks to the nature of venture capital and some combination of technology/communication devices (e.g. cell phone, Blackberry, and/or laptop with wireless data connection and service).  I first became truly “mobile” in 2000 and have been so ever since (except where culture or logistics dictated that I be somewhere in person).  While I first considered my mobility a blessing thanks to a new ability to get work done from somewhere other than my then bland cubicle at Intel, it quickly evolved into somewhat of a curse as I found myself working 18-20 hour days on most days… just because I could… and it seemed others were too so why shouldn’t I.

I eventually learned to go “off the grid” for at least small periods of time and set boundaries otherwise such that my professional mobility curse reverted back into a blessing.  So, my question to those of you who read this post: is professional mobility a blessing or a curse…and why?  For me, it is now clearly a blessing and has allowed me balance work & life efficiently and I can never see going back to the way it was.