For many years, while on Wall Street, I published my newsletter SoundBytes. Although blogs did not formally exist, it was written like a blog post with lots of personal references and comments on society in addition to analysis of technology trends and stock opinions. Looking back, we had numerous calls that have proven prescient and a few (most of which I won’t mention) that were not as strong. A few examples of posts that appeared in the mid- to late-1990s, include:

• Predicting that music, photography, software and books would move from physical distribution to bytes (sold and downloaded through the web);

• Predicting that the killer apps for hand held devices (then PDAs) would be email and music;

• Telling people that true quality bagels should not be toasted! and

• Suggesting that someone should acquire Seagate as its ownership of Veritas stock was about equal in value to the company’s market cap.

Of these, all happened but unfortunately I couldn’t slow the trend of toasting bagels, even if they were fresh. I have been highly motivated to recreate what was then a newsletter, as a blog.

Before I get to that, a quick biographical update of life post-Wall Street. I left Credit Suisse to form a venture capital firm, Azure, in 2000, with Paul Ferris, Cameron Lester and Paul Weinstein. We have managed to persevere, and I’m still a General Partner with Azure today. I’m still happily married to my college sweetheart, Michelle but we now live in the San Francisco Bay area rather than on the east coast. But after 15 years here, I still retain my New York heritage – including my accent and sense of humor. I promised brevity so that’s it for now.

We needed to slightly change the URL name as I did not forecast the substantial increase in value of the SoundBytes.com and therefore let my ownership lapse. Fortunately, we were able to acquire SoundBytes2.com and this will be the URL for my blog.