The Cell Phone Buffer Zone

So I was in my automobile stopped at a red light looking at the car next to me. I noticed the driver of the automobile next to mine had her head tilted slightly forward as if her gaze were fixed on a point near the bottom of her steering wheel. I have recently noticed a lot of driver heads tilting slightly forward...and this tilting seems to be growing as a percentage of total driver heads. It used to be that at most stop lights driver heads sort of gazed in a daydream at some object in the distance.

It then dawned on me that the driver heads were fiddling with their cell phones. There are many applications for cell phones and an increasing number of ways to spend your time with one...in addition to calls....you can email...text message...and cruise the Internet...all while driving. It also seems to me that this head tilting is causing traffic to move more slowly...drivers are distracted by their head tilting and tend to require more time to press on their accelerators when the traffic light changes from red to green. It also seems to me that the tilted head has a tendency while his car is in motion to keep his foot near or on the brake more frequently....providing a physical buffer zone between himself and other traffic.....while his head is tilted down...I am pretty sure this is happening...

So here is the theory....I feel like I am seeing fewer automotive accidents in my home town (Houston) and that this trend may be connected to everyone driving around with a little buffer zone around them. The graphic below reflects the incidence of fatalities in Harris County between the period 2001 and 2005 (per 100,000 residents). Guess what....the population of residents is going up, the absolute number of traffic fatalities is going down...and thus the rate of fatalities per 100,000 residents is going down year after year.

Did we suddenly decide to become safer drivers...I doubt it...We Houstonians are not very defensive drivers. Are vehicles safer than they used to be?...Yes. Can this account for the repeated declines in fatalities since 2001? At least some of it...

Something is causing a sustained decrease in annual rate of automotive fatalities...the contrarian in me wonders if it has something to do with the cell-phone buffer zone. Wouldn't that be phenomenal?


Hey man...I need my space...

How to Figure Out if You Want to Invest

Board Meetings for venture-backed companies are built around powerpoint presentations. In the very early stages of any investment cycle these presentations are filled with a lot of information about product development, market positioning, new initiatives, etc. It is a very wide range of information and it seems like every Company (no matter which one) likes to prepare a presentation with about forty pages. Creation of these slide decks must be very time consuming on their authors. Investors listen patiently as each page is reviewed.

As time passes, one of two things generally happens: (a) the presentations seem to stay around forty pages or (b) they shrink to around eleven pages. What is going on? What does this represent?

Several yeas ago I was attending graduation ceremonies of a prominent Virginia University. We were outdoors at a post-ceremony picnic and I was standing among several academics. A young girl with a bread basket offered bread sticks to attendees and each of us declined. She took on a very sad facial expression. In reaction, I had a puzzled look on my face which prompted one of the academics to comment (he was an economics professor)…”In a capitalist society we pride ourselves on our ability to sell…she is sad because she had no takers…” This young lady was about 8 years old and had already been infected with the trappings of the US version of the free market system…..yikes. This obviously stayed with me.

Once sales start to take off at an early-stage company…the slide deck starts to shrink…sales is all we (venture investors) want to talk about. If you show me a forty-page Board presentation (and hide the sales figures) I have a pretty good idea of where this company stands. If you tell me how many forty-page presentations in a row the Board has seen…I have a good sense of what my anxiety level should be given the current length of my investment…I start to get queasy when I see too many of these.…...We all want the eleven-page presentation that rarely speaks of anything other than current bookings, pipeline, sales process, territorial expansion, new customers, new markets, etc. This type of Board meeting lasts about forty-five minutes.

So next time you are trying to figure out if you are wanting to invest in a venture fund…ask the general partner what the average number of pages is in Board Presentations across his existing portfolio…this should tell you how he is doing…if the average is “thirty-eight” and the fund is several years old…run away…