My Happy Place: New Florence

The New Florence. New Renaissance innovation blog was born in March 2005. Facebook had a different name then. No one had heard of the iPhone. Or SpaceX.  Or AWS. Honestly, I thought I would run out of material in a couple of years. After 6,500 posts, I can safely say I grossly miscalculated. If anything, innovation keeps accelerating.

Someone asked me if it took 15-20 minutes to write a post. He was off by a 10X factor. Much of the effort is in deciding what to profile. I note down everything interesting I read, I see on TV, I experience in my travels, I see in my advisory work. One in 5 finally makes it to a post. Then I find a couple of articles and videos to embed which provide different perspectives on the topic. Digitizing much of the content takes surprising amount of time. I used to go to Barnes and Noble once a month and run through a bunch of magazines and get ideas from them. Now I get them from over 50 magazines on Apple News, similar number of channels on YouTube TV and some direct subscriptions. The next challenge is to find as many non-paywall versions of the content to embed. Some of them annoyingly will not even let me access the full content even though I have paid for them via Apple or Google. Why would I burden my readers with those pubs?

In the last year, I have launched a whole bunch of video series (on the Deal Architect YouTube channel) and several travel posts on Instagram. I have been busy helping a CEO narrate a book, and work on several advisory projects. All that has reduced time for New Florence. But I carved out time for it in the last few weeks. 

And it has been a joyous time. I got to research the drones, the autonomous shuttles and other technology at the Tokyo Olympics. I have explored what Paris will offer at the 2024 games. I have seen Jeff Bezos pivot to space, Mark Zuckerberg to his vision of metaverse, and Elon Musk to domestic robots. I got to profile our trip to the sites and history of Wyoming and South Dakota. Much more coming.

In contrast, I see so many people continue to scare others about COVID or harp on woke stuff. Whatever. To me, the world moves forward when people deliver innovative products, amazing customer service and creative solutions to problems. They deserve to be profiled.

I chose the title of the blog 16 years ago because I thought Florence must have felt as vibrant and creative during the European Renaissance. I am even more convinced of that.

It is a great time to be alive!