Entrepreneurial Love

Happily, more and more women are moving into the world of startups in Silicon Valley and San Francisco. I don't have firm statistics, but my eyes don't lie. It's still a white male-dominated domain, at the top of many companies, but the actual workforces are diverse in all the ways demographers like to categorize people.

One place to see this diversity is Google's campus, but it is true all over the valley. The main promise of the Internet -- the emergence of a democratized global interactive network -- depends on it.

The link I posted yesterday We Feel Fine is one important example of what our future could be like -- where we have tools that allow us to integrate our emotional lives with millions of others in real time.

As I have stated several times, I only became fully aware of how much my own emotions change moment to moment this past January, when it was explained to me in language I could understand. So I may be an emotional "baby." But it clearly is the case that whatever we may be feeling at any particular moment is shared by many others around us, though we may not recognize that with the conventional tools available to us.

That is what's changing. On We Feel Fine , you can see the correlation between your feelings and the weather, for example, or how they correspond with your gender, age, and location. It's a digital validation of whatever emotional state you may find yourself in. It may not be a panacea for loneliness, alienation, or isolation, but to me, at least, this site is a place that makes our world as a whole feel a little less lonely, alienated, and isolated...

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My 2nd, 5th and 6th graders walked to school this foggy morning with their new backpacks and lunch boxes and nervously excited faces. Julia's main focus seems to be on the news that one of her teachers hands out candy on field trips. Dylan and Aidan are worried about their homework loads.

So, summer is officially over and fall has begun. Tomorrow is Aidan's birthday. He'll turn 12. Having six kids means I have six birthdays a year that stand out from all others. One way to navigate through time is by anticipating upcoming birthdays. I've long since stopped anticipating my own; they come and go so rapidly now I can perhaps be forgiven for losing track of how old I apparently have become.

But as of tomorrow, time elapsed in terms of the six-birthday metric will jump from 67% to 83% of 2006. Only Julia's will remain...

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