No I never left the building, I was just busy working in the basement

My friend and European VC blogger Fred Destin made an amusing comment in one of his blog entries: Jeff Clavier has left the building, following a discussion I had had with Rick Segal at StartupCamp in the midst of the three sessions I led that day. I basically told Rick that I was in need of recapturing part of my life/time and blogging - both reading and writing - had been the elected victim. So yes, and I have to apologize to my readers, I had largely left the building because of a number of (good) things going on with my portfolio companies and my own business. And my reading had been limited to a few feeds (TechCrunch, GigaOm, VentureBeat, PaidContent) integrated in my Netvibes home page, providing me with the key info regarding my industry.

So thanks to all having emailed me, or blogged, about their concerns: all is well, just incredibly busy with my work, investing and then working with my companies, as well as spending a lot of time speaking at, and attending, conferences. Just as a reference point, four of my investments officially launched their service in the past 10 days.

Oh yeah, and when you are busy and try and make so many things at the same time, you f..k up, like I did last week: I was getting out of my car - on the phone with a company, typing an email (on the phone) to another, and picked up my bag which was in the trunk of my car. In said bag, which was open because I got a call as I was taking something off of it and forgot to close it, my 3 month old MacBook Pro - which flew off the bag to implode on the floor of the parking lot of my office. Fixing the Mac would have cost about $1,500 so decided to get the brand new MacBook Pro for just a bit more money: faster, larger disk and most importantly: it does not burn your b...s when you are using the machine on your lap. The only downside is that Apple seems to have changed the keyboard which now has a very bizarre touch when you type, and makes an annoying squeeky noise.

Comments

[Thierry_BEZIER]

no pictures of the exploded laptop? it would have been a blast on flickr!

[Tom Cole]

Jeff, your wit and wisdom will be missed (at least in the blogosphere; I'm sure I'll see you around plenty!).