Home

What We Learned from Our Home Remodel – 20 Years Later

About 20 years ago we signed a contract to do a major remodel for our house, adding a second story and taking the house from  1,450 square feet to 2,900 square feet. We made some good decisions, we made some bad decisions, and we had some good luck. After 20 years, I have a better …

Business

Bad Product Design is Sapping My Will to Live

  It has been a bad week for product design in the Christensen household. FirstTech Credit Union Our credit union has been marketing their new iPhone app that will allow us to deposit checks remotely by taking a picture of them. What a great idea. I had a check that I wanted to deposit so …

Business

True University – A School for Startups

My new employer, PayNearMe, had an investment from True Ventures. One of the interesting programs True runs is a two day educational program once a year called True University. The 250 students at TrueU come from the 70+ startup companies that have had investment from True. There are 39 classes led by 52 instructors over the …

Home

Turn Your T-Shirts Into a Quilt

T-Shirt Quilt

Working in Silicon Valley for a couple of decades, you can accumulate quite a few t-shirts. I had shirts that lasted longer than the company did. I had shirts from companies like Momenta, Apple, Talk City and LiveWorld, not to mention project shirts like Amateur Traveler, eWorld, Newton, and that production of Joseph and the Technicolor …

technology

Intuitive Surgical – Robots are Cool

One thing that science fiction has taught us is that robots are cool… at least until they take over the world. But some robots are cooler than others. I had the opportunity recently to visit Intuitive Surgical with my alumni group from RPI. Intuitive Surgical is located here in Silicon Valley. They make surgical robots. …