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Shark Tales-- and A Question

QUESTION: WHEN ENCOUNTERING ONE OR SEVERAL SHARKS IN THE OPEN OCEAN, ARE YOU SAFER AS A SNORKELER OR AS A SCUBA DIVER?

   

Assume that you are not in immediate danger in either scenario described below, then consider the implications of each:

SCENARIO A:  You are scuba diving at 60 feet and have 30 minutes of air left in your tank before it's time to go up for your safety stop.  You are 15 minutes into a 45 minute dive.  A white-tip reef shark approaches you (and your buddy).  You are feeling calm, but you do have to eventually go up to the surface.  You have no weapons. The shark does not leave.  It slowly circles you at a distance that feels OK, but...

SCENARIO B: You are snorkeling above a reef in about 30 feet of water.  Coral formations are variable.  Your boat is 30 yards away.  Swimming to shore is not an option due to the coral that surrounds you.  A pair of grey reef sharks pass you by, then turn around and stay within 30 yards of you.  You are armed with a rusty bolt of a spear gun and a rubber hose slingshot to propel it.

If the sharks get aggressive, are you safer as a snorkeler or as a scuba diver?

In my view, since I recently experienced both scenarios on the same day, I felt less nervous as a scuba diver because I mistakenly considered myself to be on a more equal footing with the sharks.  However, as I've considered this further, it strikes me that, if a close encounter at 60 feet did turn into more than a mutual look-see, the probability of equipment malfunction caused by user stress, a panic-induced emergency ascent, or other "limited-resources-under-water" type problems could put the scuba diver in dire straits.  Having said that, I can't remember hearing of a scuba diver being attacked by sharks unless they were chumming the water and asking for trouble, whereas we always hear of surfer/snorkeler it-looked-like-a-tasty-seal attacks.

What do you pick as the safer place to be? On the surface in Scenario B or Down Under in Scenario A?

   

   

 

Baseball and Boardrooms-- Billy Beane Joins NetSuite as an Independent Director

Ezra Roizen's Roizen Report column in Always On featured a story today about the Oakland A's Billy Beane joining the board of NetSuite.  Ezra called me last week to see if I had any thoughts as to how Beane's contribution as a director of  NetSuite could be maximized, given the following description of management's expectations for Beane from Netsuite's CEO Zach Nelson:

When I asked NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson about why Billy Beane would make a great board member at this point in the company's development, he had three main reasons.

First, according to Zach, the essence of the challenge for NetSuite is in getting organizations to change how they think about their information systems. SaaS requires re-thinking some pretty widely held and deeply ingrained beliefs about the way corporate information systems should work. As a leading "tipper" of sacred cows, Beane will provide valuable insights into both how to help organizations think differently about the way they manage their businesses, and the importance of questioning conventional wisdom.

The second reason why Zach is excited about Beane's participation on the NetSuite board is his ability to help NetSuite's customers understand what it means to run a company "by the numbers." Beane's use of statistics and metrics in organizational decision making has been central to Beane's success with the Oakland A's. According to Zach, once implemented by its customers, NetSuite's solutions open up a previously hidden world of numbers and data. He's hoping that Beane will assist NetSuite in helping its customers learn more quickly how to leverage that new-found knowledge.

The third reason is what gave me the idea for the title of this post. Zach said that the core of NetSuite's customer base consists of middle-market enterprises, often competing against Fortune 500 companies. They're the Oakland A's of business up against the New York Yankees in their fields. Zach's hope is that Beane can help NetSuite's customers understand the essence of how to take on and beat the big guys—how to punch above their weight.

To dig a little deeper into what it takes to be a world-class board member of a new venture, I put a call into Pascal Levensohn, Founder and Managing Director of Levensohn Venture Partners. Few people have put more thought into the question of startup boards than Pascal, who chairs the Working Group on Director Accountability and Board Effectiveness—a VC industry group of 22 professionals and academics that reads like a "who's who" of Silicon Valley. ...

My response in the article focuses on reconciling management's expectations with the realities of board service. The most interesting thing to me about Zach Nelson's description of why Billy Beane was invited to join the board is that his expectations have little to do with the service that Beane is most likely to be called upon to render as an independent director.

The actual basic responsibilities of private company independent directors differ from idealized versions of the celebrity director's power to charm the outside world and be a rainmaker for the company.  This does not minimize Billy Beane's ability to have a strong impact on the company-- as long as his expectations are properly managed up front with regard to the time commitment and the actual business and legal requirements involved with board service. 

More on this when we release "A Simple Guide to the Basic Responsibilities of VC-Backed Company Directors" in the next few days.

   

Sky Blogging

I am connected to the Internet while flying from Munich to San Francisco on a Lufthansa flight, and while I do enjoy quiet time, I also enjoy being able to blog from 36,000 feet on my way back home. I don't know how long this airplane connection has been going, but it is a great thing!

My family and I just concluded our summer holiday, which began with a week's stay in Israel in conjunction with two speeches that I gave at the 2006 Israel Venture Association conference in Tel Aviv.  We left Israel 48 hours prior to the Gilad Shalit abduction and have been following the sequence of escalating violence with a feeling of great sadness for all.

I tried to stay off the web for much of the trip, with limited success.  Wi-Fi connectivity abounds throughout Europe, as do Internet cafes, and my kids are as compelled to IM with their buddies as I am to avoid coming back to a mountain of unanswered emails-- latest SPAM count 1300+. 

I did have the chance to take more time than usual to think about some posts and let them evolve a bit before posting-- in particular about recent thoughts I have had on religious pluralism and fundamentalism after leaving Israel.

And of course there was the World Cup-- watching the Azurros go all the way from various locations in Italy was a great experience-- nothing beats good timing.