This weekend Scott and Elaine had their first public piano performance during a recital for the Canada Music Week. Scott, who is 6 years old, started playing piano just over a year ago, in October 2013. Elaine (5 years old) tried piano for a few weeks last year but she was too young and started again this summer, so she now has about 4-5 months of piano experience.

They have lessons once a week (next to all their other extracurricular classes and their daily homework), but practice at least 30 minutes at home every day, with Grace as their substitute teacher.

The kids liked to dress up for the event and were not nervous at all. The only one who seemed to be nervous was Grace!

After their performance they got some flowers from us and they were really proud of that. On Saturday Scott and Elaine will have their next piano recital, so they are studying hard on another piece this week.

Links to their performance on YouTube: Elaine’s piano recital and Scott’s piano recital

Embedded videos of their performance:

My Silvercar at the Opus One winery in Napa Valley

About a year ago I wrote about my very positive experience with car rental company Silvercar. Last week I used them again in San Francisco and I still love their cars and their disruptive business model. I am just surprised that not more people know about them and use them, therefore another blog post to spread the word. And no, I am not getting paid for this of course!

Silvercar is a US based rental car company that only has Audi A4 Quattro cars in its fleet (although that will change soon, I heard they will add Audi Q5s as well). All cars are exactly the same and are silver colored, hence the name. Pricing is competitive, at $89 per day during weekdays and $69 per day during weekends (in SFO, other airports may have different prices). But what really sets them apart from the competition is the experience and the extras that are all for free.

At San Francisco airport lines are generally quite long at the traditional car rental companies. For Silvercar there are no lines, after you made a reservation you just open the Silvercar mobile app when you arrive at the airport and click on the button to indicate that you have arrived. A Silvercar representative then picks you up from the rental car terminal and drives you to the Silvercar location (a 5 minute drive). There you can choose a car, you open the door by scanning the car’s QR code with your phone and off you go. No waiting in line, no filling out of forms and no upselling of insurance or other unnecessary add-ons.

But that’s not all, because the Silvercars are all extremely well equipped. Every car has a great navigation system built in (honestly, it’s much better than the system in my Porsche or Mercedes-Benz), which is free. So no $25 per day for an old-fashioned GPS that some car companies are trying to sell you. Each car has a toll tracking device, meaning that you can take the Fastrack lane at toll gates (very handy around San Francisco), and they will bill you automatically for this. All cars are also equipped with Sirius XM satellite radio, so you are not forced to listen to FM radio stations full of advertising and dumb presenters. Of course you can also play your phone’s music or podcasts through bluetooth. And the cars have built-in wifi, so you don’t have to use expensive data plans if you use a non-US phone or want to check your mails on your laptop. No other car rental company offers this and certainly not for free.

When you get back after your trip you just park the Audi at Silvercar and they automatically detect how full the tank is (with a sensor), so no need to fill it up when you are in a hurry to get to the airport. They will charge you regular gas prices, no huge mark-up like many car rental companies do (Silvercar just adds a $5 fee to fill it up). Unfortunately they do not bring you back to the airport in your own car anymore, you now need to take a shuttle bus (that left straight away after I got on, so no waiting for other passengers). At SFO they charge you an additional $20 for that, but it’s a mandatory airport transportation fee so it seems they can’t get around that.

My experience with Silvercar is excellent and I would advise everybody to use them when they are in San Francisco or at one of the other airports out of which they operate (currently Los Angeles, Dallas, Austin, Miami, Denver and Phoenix, with more locations being added over the next months). Silvercar just closed its $14 million Series B round (in total they raised $31.5 million), so I think you’ll hear a lot more from them in the future!

Even though there is hardly any snow yet on the North shore mountains, today both Cypress and Grouse Mountain opened their new ski seasons. Because I have a season ticket for Cypress Mountain I decided to drive the 20 minutes from our home to the ski area to check it out.

The weather has been fantastic over the past days. Since I came back from San Francisco on Tuesday I have only seen blue skies, but it has been quite cold. On Friday morning it was -5 Celsius in Vancouver, with maximum temperatures around +5 Celsius during the day. That means that it was freezing the whole day in the ski areas (Cypress base station is at 3000 ft, about 900 meters), which is perfect for artificial snow making.

When I arrived at Cypress I saw that only 2 chair lifts were open, and a total of just 3 downhill ski runs. Not a lot, but good enough for an hour of skiing.

One advantage of skiing at Cypress Mountain is that it’s normally very quiet and there are hardly any lines at the lifts. Even today it was not very busy, the longest I had to wait was less than 5 minutes. Most Vancouver locals wait until there is a lot more snow before they start waxing their skis, and today the majority of the people on the slopes actually seemed to be Chinese (I heard a lot of Mandarin around me while in line for the lift).

It seems that there will be some rain by the end of this week, which likely means snow on the mountains, and I look forward to that. I am planning to ski at least 1-2 times a week over the next 5 months, so the more snow the better!

Every day I spend about 25 minutes driving to and from work, which is a great time to listen to podcasts. There are so many good podcasts available nowadays and it’s so easy to play them on car audio systems through your phone, that it’s surprising that not more people do this. For me podcasts are a way to relax (especially after work) and to learn new things. I don’t like to waste time during the day, so I prefer podcasts that are entertaining but also give me new ideas or teach me stuff.

This week I listened to episode 7 of StartUp, a fantastic new podcast series that follows a the first couple of months of a new start-up. Alex Blumberg (of among others ‘This American Life’ and ‘Planet Money’ fame, podcasts I also listen to regularly) decided to set up a podcasting company and record most of his conversations and thoughts during the start-up phase of the company. The result is one of the best podcast series I have ever listened to, so good that I decided to blog about it.

I have been involved with a large number of start-ups over the years, either as a (co-)founder, CEO, board member, advisor or investor. One thing I learned is that the first few months are always remarkably similar. You have the best business idea in the world (you think – but most start-ups eventually change their business model because it doesn’t work), you are super motivated to get it off the ground, you try to find a good name, you look for co-founders and early employees, you start raising funds and finally you release your first product.

This is what Alex captured on digital tape and put together in this 25-30 min/episode podcast. It’s great to hear how he grows from a super naive first-time entrepreneur to someone who starts to understand a little bit how the start-up world works in the later episodes. The podcast covers topics such as raising money and he even records the conversations he has with VCs (even some well-known ones), and how they react to his pitch.

Other topics he covers are how he finds his co-founder including the hilarious decision making process on who gets how many shares. I am glad they eventually solved that, because if I had been in the shoes of his eventual co-founder I would have probably walked off after Alex’ lowball offer. To be fair, Alex really had no clue about what it means to be a co-founder instead of an employee, and he mainly listened to friends who had no clue either.

Another interesting episode is the search for a name. The original name of American Podcasting Corporation is not good enough and the process they go through to find a name that everybody is happy with is very recognizable. It also shows that Alex is not a real business person but more of a creative: in the end he finally likes the name they come up with but after sleeping on it for a night he is not happy with the process they used to get the name. He wanted to change it because of that… That would drive me nuts as a co-founder, you often need creative people in your business but it’s not always easy to work with them.

When I started listening to the podcast I was 100% sure I would never consider investing in Alex’ venture, but after 5 episodes he almost convinced me to call him up and ask to join in the round. I started to like him and the way he talks about his business plans. I believe he could build an interesting business with his podcasts and I would have been willing to bet some private money on that. That is, until I heard his valuation. $10 million for a start-up that is just starting out seems very high to me, but they still managed to raise $1.5 million on it (incl. $200K from listeners in a crowdfunding episode!). Good for them, but I hope they will be able to raise subsequent rounds at such a hefty seed round valuation.

The company is certainly off to a good start, because this podcast is quickly becoming one of the more famous ones on iTunes and Soundcloud. If you are thinking about doing your own start-up this is a “must-listen-to” podcast. The same if you are a start-up investor who has never built a business from scratch him (or her)self.  If you just want to learn how a start-up works and about the problems entrepreneurs face in the early stage of their business venture, you should check this out. It’s well produced, very entertaining (even the ads are so good that you don’t want to skip them) and you’ll certainly learn a thing or two. The series is not finished yet, I hope Alex will keep on producing new StartUp episodes for a while.

A zombie attacking my car at Park Royal

This weekend it was Halloween again, and with 2 young kids that means lots of celebrations. The kids started the day with a Halloween Parade at school. In the late afternoon we went to the Park Royal shopping mall where many shops were handing out Trick-or-Treat candy. Scott and Elaine met many of their school friends and teachers there.

After a quick dinner at a Taiwanese restaurant we went on to King’s Avenue for trick-or-treating. We ended the evening in our street where the kids got a lot of candy from our neighbours as well. Scott and Elaine had a great time during Halloween and are now already talking about how they want to dress up next year. Below some pictures of the day.

Scott dressed up as an emperor, but he lost his crown sometime during the day

Elaine dressed up as her favorite Disney character Rapunzel, of course with a long hair braid

At school the kids started the day with a Halloween parade in which they had to tell the audience what costume they were wearing

Of course also our house was decorated for Halloween, both on the inside and the outside

Halloween decorations at home

Family picture with some friends in Park Royal. I went as King Tut and several people took pictures of me!

Trick-or-Treat on King’s Avenue

Trick-or-Treat on King’s Avenue, with amazing decorations at some of the houses

Despite the fact that it was pitch dark on the street, Scott and Elaine met several friends during the Trick-or-Treat

The partial result of trick-or-treating: a big bag of candy and other treats.