Wednesday, June 27, 2007
Irish road workers show how effective they can be
ah sure, ya can click the image to enlarge it, now.
Thursday, June 21, 2007
A Life Lesson from Itzhak Perlman
On Nov. 18, 1995, Itzhak Perlman, the violinist, came on stage to
give a concert at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center in New York City. If
you have ever been to a Perlman concert, you know that getting on stage is
no small achievement for him. He was stricken with polio as a child, and so
he has braces on both legs and walks with the aid of two crutches. To see
him walk across the stage one step at a time, painfully and slowly, is an
awesome sight.
He walks painfully, yet majestically, until he reaches his chair.
Then he sits down, slowly, puts his crutches on the floor, undoes the
clasps on his legs, tucks one foot back and extends the other foot
forward. Then he bends down and picks up the violin, puts it under
his chin, nods to the conductor and proceeds to play.
By now, the audience is used to this ritual. They sit quietly
while he makes his way across the stage to his chair. They remain
reverently silent while he undoes the clasps on his legs. They wait until
he is ready to play.
But this time, something went wrong. Just as he finished the first
few bars, one of the strings on his violin broke. You could hear it snap -
it went off like gunfire across the room. There was no mistaking what that
sound meant. There was no mistaking what he had to do. We figured that he
would have to get up, put on the clasps again, pick up the crutches and
limp his way off stage - to either find another violin or else find another
string for this one. But he didn't. Instead, he waited a moment, closed his
eyes and then signaled the conductor to begin again.
The orchestra began, and he played from where he had left off. And
he played with such passion and such power and such purity as they had
never heard before.
Of course, anyone knows that it is impossible to play a symphonic
work with just three strings. I know that, and you know that, but that
night Itzhak Perlman refused to know that.
You could see him modulating, changing, re-composing the piece in
his head. At one point, it sounded like he was de-tuning the strings to get
new sounds from them that they had never made before. When he finished,
there was an awesome silence in the room. And then people rose and cheered.
There was an extraordinary outburst of applause from every corner of the
auditorium. We were all on our feet, screaming and cheering, doing
everything we could to show how much we appreciated what he had done.
He smiled, wiped the sweat from this brow, raised his bow to quiet
us, and then he said - not boastfully, but in a quiet, pensive, reverent
tone - "You know, sometimes it is the artist's task to find out how much
music you can still make with what you have left."
What a powerful line that is. It has stayed in my mind ever since
I heard it. And who knows? Perhaps that is the definition of life - not
just for artists but for all of us. Here is a man who has prepared all his
life to make music on a violin of four strings, who, all of a sudden, in
the middle of a concert, finds himself with only three strings; so he makes
music with three strings, and the music he made that night with just three
strings was more beautiful, more sacred, more memorable, than any that he
had ever made before, when he had four strings.
So, perhaps our task in this shaky, fast-changing, bewildering
world in which we live is to make music, at first with all that we have,
and then, when that is no longer possible, to make music with what we have
left.
give a concert at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center in New York City. If
you have ever been to a Perlman concert, you know that getting on stage is
no small achievement for him. He was stricken with polio as a child, and so
he has braces on both legs and walks with the aid of two crutches. To see
him walk across the stage one step at a time, painfully and slowly, is an
awesome sight.
He walks painfully, yet majestically, until he reaches his chair.
Then he sits down, slowly, puts his crutches on the floor, undoes the
clasps on his legs, tucks one foot back and extends the other foot
forward. Then he bends down and picks up the violin, puts it under
his chin, nods to the conductor and proceeds to play.
By now, the audience is used to this ritual. They sit quietly
while he makes his way across the stage to his chair. They remain
reverently silent while he undoes the clasps on his legs. They wait until
he is ready to play.
But this time, something went wrong. Just as he finished the first
few bars, one of the strings on his violin broke. You could hear it snap -
it went off like gunfire across the room. There was no mistaking what that
sound meant. There was no mistaking what he had to do. We figured that he
would have to get up, put on the clasps again, pick up the crutches and
limp his way off stage - to either find another violin or else find another
string for this one. But he didn't. Instead, he waited a moment, closed his
eyes and then signaled the conductor to begin again.
The orchestra began, and he played from where he had left off. And
he played with such passion and such power and such purity as they had
never heard before.
Of course, anyone knows that it is impossible to play a symphonic
work with just three strings. I know that, and you know that, but that
night Itzhak Perlman refused to know that.
You could see him modulating, changing, re-composing the piece in
his head. At one point, it sounded like he was de-tuning the strings to get
new sounds from them that they had never made before. When he finished,
there was an awesome silence in the room. And then people rose and cheered.
There was an extraordinary outburst of applause from every corner of the
auditorium. We were all on our feet, screaming and cheering, doing
everything we could to show how much we appreciated what he had done.
He smiled, wiped the sweat from this brow, raised his bow to quiet
us, and then he said - not boastfully, but in a quiet, pensive, reverent
tone - "You know, sometimes it is the artist's task to find out how much
music you can still make with what you have left."
What a powerful line that is. It has stayed in my mind ever since
I heard it. And who knows? Perhaps that is the definition of life - not
just for artists but for all of us. Here is a man who has prepared all his
life to make music on a violin of four strings, who, all of a sudden, in
the middle of a concert, finds himself with only three strings; so he makes
music with three strings, and the music he made that night with just three
strings was more beautiful, more sacred, more memorable, than any that he
had ever made before, when he had four strings.
So, perhaps our task in this shaky, fast-changing, bewildering
world in which we live is to make music, at first with all that we have,
and then, when that is no longer possible, to make music with what we have
left.
Sunday, June 17, 2007
Getting funding for your startup, and alternatives
Summary:
First-timers in starting up worry about things like (1) competitive products, (2) competition stealing their ideas and (3) VCs divulging their precious secrets, (4) how much of the company they can retain, etc..
Those experienced at starting up focus on (1) how to deliver ever-increasing value to customers and (2) internal execution to achieve that while staying liquid.
A second point:
When it comes to a bacon-and-egg breakfast, the chicken is involved but the pig is committed. With VC investments, the VC investor is involved but you, the entrepreneur, are committed. This means the typical VC investor has a portfolio of maybe 10, 20 or 30 companies. You have, most likely, only one. If it fails, it takes your single five to ten year investment in time and effort down the drain with it. You lose your whole portfolio.
The Details:
I'm well into my third real startup. I started a software company in 1994 which ran for three years, and another software company in 1999 which is still in good business, and in 2005 I started a hardware product company.
The first company, I started with two partners, the second with one partner and the third one I started alone.
We never managed to get financing for the first company, mostly because we didn't have a clue how to go about it.
I was the product guy and one of my partners was a well-rounded business development and marketing guy. Happily, he is a close friend of mine to this day.
The third partner fell apart early on in the startup, so we were quickly down to two.
With two versions of two software products, we secured some several hundred customers over the 3-year life of the company. We didn't make a lot of money out of it, but got some badly needed startup experience.
It is no surprise to me that the vast majority of new companies fail pretty quickly.
After Startup #1 eventually sputtered to a halt, I went back to the workforce with a little hard-earned but valuable humility regarding making a business successful.
Within 18 months, I was smitten with the possibility of starting another software company. That eighteen months gave me the time and space to think hard about the lessons I learned and I religiously applied my newly learned principles to Startup #2.
For almost two years, my co-founder and I buried ourselves in his basement, cutting as much code as we could before cash or motivation ran out. We were fortunate to stumble upon a very sharp fund-raiser to whom we offered the position of CEO and significant partner. Over the course of 4 or 5 years, our new CEO deftly secured three rounds of financing at a good price every time.
I learned a few things during those 4 or 5 years.
I'll talk about startup #3 a bit later.
What are the ramifications of getting funding for your startup? Getting funding for your startup has a number of implications that founders typically don't understand.
#1: Liquidation Preference
In addition to how much stock you retain in your own startup, Liquidation Preference affects how cash is divvied up in the event of your startup being acquired.
Typically, the people who put cash into your startup have a "2x Liquidation Preference". This means that they are entitled to get twice their investment back before you get paid anything, in the event of an acquisition. That's just the theory, of course, and a lot of it is still open for negotiation, depending on how the company is doing, and other factors.
Let's look at a theoretical example.
You have an equal partnership with your co-founder. Investors want to invest $10m into your startup, and for that, you agree to give them 40% of the company. This means the company is "valued at $25m" in terms of what is called "pre-money". (If 40% = $10m, then the company should be worth 40% + 60%, you'd think. "Pre-money" means 'before the investment is made').
So now you and your co-founder have 30% each of a company that is worth $25m (on paper) and has $10m in the bank.
Yippee!
Not quite Yippee.
Your investors have what is called Preferred Stock. You and your co-founder have Common Stock. Preferred Stock has typically a Liquidation Preference associated with it and Common Stock typically does not.
Aside from money speaking louder than words, Liquidation Preference is there for a number of reasons. (1) it discourages founders from forcing a sale at a price at which Investors would lose money (imagine a week after the investment, you got an offer to sell the company for $10m) (2) it forces the Common Stock holders to increase the value of the company to a number where it makes investment sense for the Investors. There are other reasons too, but I'll get back to that.
It's great to get all that cash injected into your startup. Overnight, you go from scrimping and scraping to make ends meet, to getting paid a salary and still being able to pursue your brilliant idea. You are, as my friend Randy put it, betting with house money.
Pigs get Fat; Hogs get Slaughtered
A risk with this model is, with every round of financing, you significantly raise the acquisition price required for the Common Stock holders to make any money. After the first round, you have to sell the company for $50m in order to satisfy the Investors with their 2x Liquidation Preference. Mind you, if you do sell the company for $50m, and you still have 30% of it, you're in good shape.
The problem is, it will take a long time and a lot of effort to double the value of your startup to reach that $50m. And the journey to get there is fraught with danger.
Rule of thumb: a 2x Liquidation Preference = 2x the company price must be.
You'll have to bring out newer, better versions of your product or products, reel in more customers, get process in place and generally prove to the world that your company is growing. A lot of things can go wrong in that time. And when they do, you can't just make a few phone calls and secure another $10m to take another swing at it. Or rather, if you do, you'll have to give away another big piece of the company, perhaps even more than 40% if your company is having troubles. Having company troubles means that you might need a "down round". A down round is where you give stock away at a price that is less that the previous investment price. If you have to give away another 60%, everyone loses 60% of their share of course, investors included, but your Common Stock, now at maybe 10% of the company, needs a significant acquisition purchase price before you make a dime.
The biggest problem with Common Stock is, your share of the company is "diluted" with every round, so you have to continue to be successful every year of the startup. One bad round and you're what they call washed out.
Question: What makes a company work?
Answer: Creating customer value.
In the long run, you must create customer value in order to stay in business. You must deliver something to your customer that they feel good about paying for...something they get a multiple of the value for. Profit will eventually come if you continue to increase customer value, but customer value will not necessarily come as a result of profitability.
#2: A Conflict of Interests - Investors versus Founders:
The typical VC investor invests in many different companies at roughly the same time. They might have investments in twenty different startups chugging along and as long as two or three of them turn out to deliver bumper returns, most of the others may evaporate, yet still the VC is in excellent shape overall.
Not so for the lowly entrepreneur who is strapped to a single company.
The typical entrepreneur has his or her retirement buried in the startup. Or at the very least, has bet a lot on a successful return from the startup. Yes, the VC might have poured $10m into it, but as soon as it looks like it is, as they say in the vernacular, going south, the VC tends to shift focus towards the prosperous companies in his portfolio and away from the troubled one. The mathematics of the VC's investment portfolio makes him or her unmotivated to deal with hard issues in the startup.
This inherent unwillingness to make hard choices, coupled with the fact that their Liquidation Preference protects them from an entrepreneur selling the company at a fire sale price, puts the entrepreneur into a vulnerable position, one that is not obvious before problems arise.
How can an entrepreneur protect himself/herself?
To be fair, when an investor sticks millions of dollars into your idea, he/she is making a huge commitment. You will probably draw a salary and pay into your retirement fund while you work your idea at their expense. That is a significant commitment they are making to your dream.
Still, you should understand the mathematics that make you vulnerable in ways the investor is not vulnerable.
Taking investment into your startup does not decrease risk. It delays risk.
The pros of taking investment:
A lot more companies get sold for $3m than get sold for $10m, or $30m, or more. The higher the number, the fewer companies get sold for that amount, the less likely you can strike a sale, statistically speaking.
What's more, many companies get the opportunity to get sold as a technology play early on, before the startup really becomes a company. After that, there can be a long, parched road before another opportunity to get sold appears.
This means, whilst you may have had an opportunity to sell the company for $5 - 10m, you may not get another chance to sell it before it passes well beyond the $100m company value range. There is a big difference between having a product and having a company. There is very little in between that a potential acquirer will be interested in taking on.
If you are a Product Builder, which many entrepreneurs are, and you are not a Company Builder, which many entrepreneurs are not, then you might be successful at building your initial product, at which time your startup will be worth something, and selling it to the first suitor.
After that, during the steep learning curve of you learning how to build a business, you may fritter away lots of the hard-earned company value you accrued early on, and end up diluting your value by effectively investing your hard-earned value (you built a product) into something which is not your specialty (building a company).
Moral #1: Always be selling your stock.
Moral #2: Start a business that does not require significant investment, but does exploit your specific skill set.
For all the assumed goodness that millions of dollars brings to your startup, the fact is, things quickly get more complicated with all that money involved. Suddenly, there is serious time pressure to deliver. Sure, everyone wants to be successful quickly, but now that your company has taken the VC money, your investors are anxious for you to burn the midnight oil and give them a return quickly.
In many cases, another 40 engineer bodies on the problem will only make a marginal improvement to your chances. Often, VC investment in a software company is a exercise in posturing. With software in particular, you might actually be better off limited to the original two or three engineers working the problem. Sometimes just a few hours work every night, while you keep your day job, is enough to keep the startup progressing enough, but takes a lot of other pressures off. For instance: (1) you can keep the price of the software at whatever you think is right, even free, if that gives some advantage (2) you can mull over some decisions for a long time before making them, (3) only perform the key improvements that you know will add value. But most of all, when you get an offer from someone to buy out the technology, a few million will probably be very attractive to you. There are MANY big technology players out there who will fork out a few million just for the chance to try out your fledgling product in terms of an acquisition.
You see, people think, just because they suddenly have this $5 or 10m in the company coffers, their chances of success are suddenly improved.
They're not really.
The risk of failure is simply postponed, or exchanged for a different kind of risk down the road.
So, when you take a big investment from a VC company, understand that it brings with it significant risks that are not obvious when your company deposits that check into its bank account. Think long and hard before you strap yourself to that Big VC Rocket.
Once you do, there is no turning back.
I wish you good luck, no matter what.
Liam
Further Ramblings from Liam can be read here...
First-timers in starting up worry about things like (1) competitive products, (2) competition stealing their ideas and (3) VCs divulging their precious secrets, (4) how much of the company they can retain, etc..
Those experienced at starting up focus on (1) how to deliver ever-increasing value to customers and (2) internal execution to achieve that while staying liquid.
A second point:
When it comes to a bacon-and-egg breakfast, the chicken is involved but the pig is committed. With VC investments, the VC investor is involved but you, the entrepreneur, are committed. This means the typical VC investor has a portfolio of maybe 10, 20 or 30 companies. You have, most likely, only one. If it fails, it takes your single five to ten year investment in time and effort down the drain with it. You lose your whole portfolio.
The Details:
I'm well into my third real startup. I started a software company in 1994 which ran for three years, and another software company in 1999 which is still in good business, and in 2005 I started a hardware product company.
The first company, I started with two partners, the second with one partner and the third one I started alone.
We never managed to get financing for the first company, mostly because we didn't have a clue how to go about it.
I was the product guy and one of my partners was a well-rounded business development and marketing guy. Happily, he is a close friend of mine to this day.
The third partner fell apart early on in the startup, so we were quickly down to two.
With two versions of two software products, we secured some several hundred customers over the 3-year life of the company. We didn't make a lot of money out of it, but got some badly needed startup experience.
It is no surprise to me that the vast majority of new companies fail pretty quickly.
After Startup #1 eventually sputtered to a halt, I went back to the workforce with a little hard-earned but valuable humility regarding making a business successful.
Within 18 months, I was smitten with the possibility of starting another software company. That eighteen months gave me the time and space to think hard about the lessons I learned and I religiously applied my newly learned principles to Startup #2.
For almost two years, my co-founder and I buried ourselves in his basement, cutting as much code as we could before cash or motivation ran out. We were fortunate to stumble upon a very sharp fund-raiser to whom we offered the position of CEO and significant partner. Over the course of 4 or 5 years, our new CEO deftly secured three rounds of financing at a good price every time.
I learned a few things during those 4 or 5 years.
I'll talk about startup #3 a bit later.
What are the ramifications of getting funding for your startup? Getting funding for your startup has a number of implications that founders typically don't understand.
#1: Liquidation Preference
In addition to how much stock you retain in your own startup, Liquidation Preference affects how cash is divvied up in the event of your startup being acquired.
Typically, the people who put cash into your startup have a "2x Liquidation Preference". This means that they are entitled to get twice their investment back before you get paid anything, in the event of an acquisition. That's just the theory, of course, and a lot of it is still open for negotiation, depending on how the company is doing, and other factors.
Let's look at a theoretical example.
You have an equal partnership with your co-founder. Investors want to invest $10m into your startup, and for that, you agree to give them 40% of the company. This means the company is "valued at $25m" in terms of what is called "pre-money". (If 40% = $10m, then the company should be worth 40% + 60%, you'd think. "Pre-money" means 'before the investment is made').
So now you and your co-founder have 30% each of a company that is worth $25m (on paper) and has $10m in the bank.
Yippee!
Not quite Yippee.
Your investors have what is called Preferred Stock. You and your co-founder have Common Stock. Preferred Stock has typically a Liquidation Preference associated with it and Common Stock typically does not.
Aside from money speaking louder than words, Liquidation Preference is there for a number of reasons. (1) it discourages founders from forcing a sale at a price at which Investors would lose money (imagine a week after the investment, you got an offer to sell the company for $10m) (2) it forces the Common Stock holders to increase the value of the company to a number where it makes investment sense for the Investors. There are other reasons too, but I'll get back to that.
It's great to get all that cash injected into your startup. Overnight, you go from scrimping and scraping to make ends meet, to getting paid a salary and still being able to pursue your brilliant idea. You are, as my friend Randy put it, betting with house money.
Pigs get Fat; Hogs get Slaughtered
A risk with this model is, with every round of financing, you significantly raise the acquisition price required for the Common Stock holders to make any money. After the first round, you have to sell the company for $50m in order to satisfy the Investors with their 2x Liquidation Preference. Mind you, if you do sell the company for $50m, and you still have 30% of it, you're in good shape.
The problem is, it will take a long time and a lot of effort to double the value of your startup to reach that $50m. And the journey to get there is fraught with danger.
Rule of thumb: a 2x Liquidation Preference = 2x the company price must be.
You'll have to bring out newer, better versions of your product or products, reel in more customers, get process in place and generally prove to the world that your company is growing. A lot of things can go wrong in that time. And when they do, you can't just make a few phone calls and secure another $10m to take another swing at it. Or rather, if you do, you'll have to give away another big piece of the company, perhaps even more than 40% if your company is having troubles. Having company troubles means that you might need a "down round". A down round is where you give stock away at a price that is less that the previous investment price. If you have to give away another 60%, everyone loses 60% of their share of course, investors included, but your Common Stock, now at maybe 10% of the company, needs a significant acquisition purchase price before you make a dime.
The biggest problem with Common Stock is, your share of the company is "diluted" with every round, so you have to continue to be successful every year of the startup. One bad round and you're what they call washed out.
Question: What makes a company work?
Answer: Creating customer value.
In the long run, you must create customer value in order to stay in business. You must deliver something to your customer that they feel good about paying for...something they get a multiple of the value for. Profit will eventually come if you continue to increase customer value, but customer value will not necessarily come as a result of profitability.
#2: A Conflict of Interests - Investors versus Founders:
The typical VC investor invests in many different companies at roughly the same time. They might have investments in twenty different startups chugging along and as long as two or three of them turn out to deliver bumper returns, most of the others may evaporate, yet still the VC is in excellent shape overall.
Not so for the lowly entrepreneur who is strapped to a single company.
The typical entrepreneur has his or her retirement buried in the startup. Or at the very least, has bet a lot on a successful return from the startup. Yes, the VC might have poured $10m into it, but as soon as it looks like it is, as they say in the vernacular, going south, the VC tends to shift focus towards the prosperous companies in his portfolio and away from the troubled one. The mathematics of the VC's investment portfolio makes him or her unmotivated to deal with hard issues in the startup.
This inherent unwillingness to make hard choices, coupled with the fact that their Liquidation Preference protects them from an entrepreneur selling the company at a fire sale price, puts the entrepreneur into a vulnerable position, one that is not obvious before problems arise.
How can an entrepreneur protect himself/herself?
To be fair, when an investor sticks millions of dollars into your idea, he/she is making a huge commitment. You will probably draw a salary and pay into your retirement fund while you work your idea at their expense. That is a significant commitment they are making to your dream.
Still, you should understand the mathematics that make you vulnerable in ways the investor is not vulnerable.
Taking investment into your startup does not decrease risk. It delays risk.
The pros of taking investment:
- You get to draw a salary.
- You get to apply extra resources into your startup.
- You need to sell the company for a much higher $ figure for you to make anything.
- You introduce a lot of complexity into your startup.
- You lose significant control over the direction of the company and everything in it.
A lot more companies get sold for $3m than get sold for $10m, or $30m, or more. The higher the number, the fewer companies get sold for that amount, the less likely you can strike a sale, statistically speaking.
What's more, many companies get the opportunity to get sold as a technology play early on, before the startup really becomes a company. After that, there can be a long, parched road before another opportunity to get sold appears.
This means, whilst you may have had an opportunity to sell the company for $5 - 10m, you may not get another chance to sell it before it passes well beyond the $100m company value range. There is a big difference between having a product and having a company. There is very little in between that a potential acquirer will be interested in taking on.
If you are a Product Builder, which many entrepreneurs are, and you are not a Company Builder, which many entrepreneurs are not, then you might be successful at building your initial product, at which time your startup will be worth something, and selling it to the first suitor.
After that, during the steep learning curve of you learning how to build a business, you may fritter away lots of the hard-earned company value you accrued early on, and end up diluting your value by effectively investing your hard-earned value (you built a product) into something which is not your specialty (building a company).
Moral #1: Always be selling your stock.
Moral #2: Start a business that does not require significant investment, but does exploit your specific skill set.
For all the assumed goodness that millions of dollars brings to your startup, the fact is, things quickly get more complicated with all that money involved. Suddenly, there is serious time pressure to deliver. Sure, everyone wants to be successful quickly, but now that your company has taken the VC money, your investors are anxious for you to burn the midnight oil and give them a return quickly.
In many cases, another 40 engineer bodies on the problem will only make a marginal improvement to your chances. Often, VC investment in a software company is a exercise in posturing. With software in particular, you might actually be better off limited to the original two or three engineers working the problem. Sometimes just a few hours work every night, while you keep your day job, is enough to keep the startup progressing enough, but takes a lot of other pressures off. For instance: (1) you can keep the price of the software at whatever you think is right, even free, if that gives some advantage (2) you can mull over some decisions for a long time before making them, (3) only perform the key improvements that you know will add value. But most of all, when you get an offer from someone to buy out the technology, a few million will probably be very attractive to you. There are MANY big technology players out there who will fork out a few million just for the chance to try out your fledgling product in terms of an acquisition.
You see, people think, just because they suddenly have this $5 or 10m in the company coffers, their chances of success are suddenly improved.
They're not really.
The risk of failure is simply postponed, or exchanged for a different kind of risk down the road.
So, when you take a big investment from a VC company, understand that it brings with it significant risks that are not obvious when your company deposits that check into its bank account. Think long and hard before you strap yourself to that Big VC Rocket.
Once you do, there is no turning back.
I wish you good luck, no matter what.
Liam
Further Ramblings from Liam can be read here...
Friday, June 8, 2007
Golf. An endless series of tragedies
Golf can best be defined as an endless
series of tragedies obscured by the
occasional miracle, followed by a good
bottle of Pepsi .
Golf! You hit down to make the ball go up.
You swing left and the ball goes right.
The lowest score wins.
And on top of that, the winner buys.
"Golf is harder than baseball.
In golf, you have to play your foul balls.
If you find you do not mind playing golf
in the rain, the snow, even during a hurricane,
here's a valuable tip: your life is in trouble.
Golfers who try to make everything
perfect before taking the shot
rarely make a perfect shot.
The term "mulligan" is really a
contraction of the phrase "maul it again."
A "gimme" can best be defined as an
agreement between two golfers ...
Neither of whom can putt very well.
An interesting thing about golf is that
no matter how badly you play;
it is always possible to get worse.
Golf's a hard game to figure.
One day you'll go out and slice it and
shank it, hit into all the traps and miss
every green. The next day you go out
and for no reason at all you really stink.
If your best shots are the practice swing
and the "gimme putt", you might wish
to reconsider this game.
Golf is the only sport where the
most feared opponent is you.
Golf is like marriage:
If you take yourself too seriously it
won't work , and both are expensive.
series of tragedies obscured by the
occasional miracle, followed by a good
bottle of Pepsi .
Golf! You hit down to make the ball go up.
You swing left and the ball goes right.
The lowest score wins.
And on top of that, the winner buys.
"Golf is harder than baseball.
In golf, you have to play your foul balls.
If you find you do not mind playing golf
in the rain, the snow, even during a hurricane,
here's a valuable tip: your life is in trouble.
Golfers who try to make everything
perfect before taking the shot
rarely make a perfect shot.
The term "mulligan" is really a
contraction of the phrase "maul it again."
A "gimme" can best be defined as an
agreement between two golfers ...
Neither of whom can putt very well.
An interesting thing about golf is that
no matter how badly you play;
it is always possible to get worse.
Golf's a hard game to figure.
One day you'll go out and slice it and
shank it, hit into all the traps and miss
every green. The next day you go out
and for no reason at all you really stink.
If your best shots are the practice swing
and the "gimme putt", you might wish
to reconsider this game.
Golf is the only sport where the
most feared opponent is you.
Golf is like marriage:
If you take yourself too seriously it
won't work , and both are expensive.
Thursday, June 7, 2007
More cute things school children say
Q: Name the four seasons.
A: Salt, pepper, mustard and vinegar.
Q: Explain one of the processes by which water can be made safe to drink.
A: Flirtation makes water safe to drink because it removes large pollutants like grit, sand, dead sheep and canoeists.
Q: How is dew formed?
A: The sun shines down on the leaves and makes them perspire.
Q: How can you delay milk turning sour?
A: Keep it in the cow.
Q: What causes the tides in the oceans?
A: The tides are a fight between the Earth and
the Moon. All water tends to flow towards the moon, because there is no water on the moon, and nature hates a vacuum. I forget where the sun joins in this fight.
Q: What are steroids?
A: Things for keeping carpets still on the stairs.
Q: What happens to your body as you age?
A: When you get old, so do your bowels and you get intercontinental.
Q: What happens to a boy when he reaches puberty?
A: He says good-bye to his boyhood and looks forward to his adultery.
Q: Name a major disease associated with cigarettes
A: Premature death.
Q: How are the main parts of the body categorized? (e.g., abdomen.)
A: The body is consisted into three parts - the brainium, the borax and the abdominal cavity. The brainium contains the brain; the borax contains the heart and lungs, and the abdominal cavity contains the five bowels, A, E, I, O, and U.
Q: What is the fibula?
A: A small lie.
Q: What does "varicose" mean?
A: Nearby.
Q: Give the meaning of the term "Cesarean Section"
A: The Cesarean Section is a district in Rome.
Q: What does the word "benign" mean?'
A: Benign is what you will be after you be eight.
A: Salt, pepper, mustard and vinegar.
Q: Explain one of the processes by which water can be made safe to drink.
A: Flirtation makes water safe to drink because it removes large pollutants like grit, sand, dead sheep and canoeists.
Q: How is dew formed?
A: The sun shines down on the leaves and makes them perspire.
Q: How can you delay milk turning sour?
A: Keep it in the cow.
Q: What causes the tides in the oceans?
A: The tides are a fight between the Earth and
the Moon. All water tends to flow towards the moon, because there is no water on the moon, and nature hates a vacuum. I forget where the sun joins in this fight.
Q: What are steroids?
A: Things for keeping carpets still on the stairs.
Q: What happens to your body as you age?
A: When you get old, so do your bowels and you get intercontinental.
Q: What happens to a boy when he reaches puberty?
A: He says good-bye to his boyhood and looks forward to his adultery.
Q: Name a major disease associated with cigarettes
A: Premature death.
Q: How are the main parts of the body categorized? (e.g., abdomen.)
A: The body is consisted into three parts - the brainium, the borax and the abdominal cavity. The brainium contains the brain; the borax contains the heart and lungs, and the abdominal cavity contains the five bowels, A, E, I, O, and U.
Q: What is the fibula?
A: A small lie.
Q: What does "varicose" mean?
A: Nearby.
Q: Give the meaning of the term "Cesarean Section"
A: The Cesarean Section is a district in Rome.
Q: What does the word "benign" mean?'
A: Benign is what you will be after you be eight.
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