So the folks at ad:tech is helping to solve this rather large problem. Innovation Alley is a new section of the ad:tech exhibit floor that is dedicated to interesting new startups in the advertising technology world. There are plenty of conferences that focus exclusively on technology and web startups but they’re attended largely by people within that world. You rarely find customers at these kinds of startup conferences. Industry conferences for different verticals such as advertising, healthcare, transportation, etc., could take ad:tech’s example and devote space to highlight innovative new startups that would normally not have resources to buy exposure to influentials and decision makers from the industries they’re targeting.

The startups I found most compelling at Innovation Alley were ones that addressed the emerging importance of social media in advertising and marketing. I haven’t watched television for a long time. Most of my friends haven’t as well. Not only do we not see mass market television advertising, we don’t trust it anyway. And while we begin many of our purchases online through search engines, we will increasingly get influenced by our social networks of friends, colleagues and relatives to buy things we hadn’t considered before. This is why Google the Goliath is afraid of David Facebook.

Peerset helps advertisers improve their audience targeting. From what I gathered by talking to some of Peerset’s employees, the company combs through social network profiles to construct anonymized data sets of interests and behaviors. The more you reveal about yourself on your profiles and social status updates, the more you will receive relevant advertising. As much as we’d like to believe that we’re individuals with unique tastes and opinions, we’re very much like the rest of our friends. We are more easily put into a group or several groups that share common characteristics than we believe. What I’d like to see is “data profiling” companies like Peerset and probable competitor Rapleaf use their technology to not only help advertisers serve advertising more accurately but to also just produce more interesting content. Sort of advertising by not advertising. Yes, that’s very vague and unhelpful but I think someone will figure out what I mean.

140 Proof delivers advertising exclusively on Twitter. The company helps brands target the right people in the Twitter universe. This is another example of the increasing importance of social networks and the opportunity to customize messages based on personal, yet public, information. 140 Proof claims that great tweets get retweeted. The retweet function, which was invented by users and not Twitter’s management, is one of the most simple, brilliant, and elegant ways to make a message viral. It would be interesting to get real hard data on how often marketing and advertising messages get retweeted versus “regular” tweets.

Brickfish helps brands create campaigns that get consumers to create user-generated content revolving around the brands. Many startups have tried to accomplish this kind of concept. It’s really difficult. As much as we’re becoming more social, we’re also becoming more cynical or skeptical. Consumers are trained to beware of blatant advertising. We might be even more cautious of blatant attempts to get us to help create still more blatant advertising. I’m sure that Brickfish has encountered resistance in some of their campaigns. Perhaps they’ll figure out how to systematically incent customers to sing the praises of brands. If someone can figure this out, I think they have a big hit.

I’m looking forward to the next ad:tech in New York. I hope they will continue to allow startups onto the show floor through the Innovation Alley program. You expect to see the big guns like Microsoft (MSFT) and Google there. There should be room made for pleasant surprises.

The market takes a breather after several weeks of blistering recovery from last winter’s doldrums. Commodities all around saw amazing advances. Crude oil rose 8.3% last week and has more than doubled over the last year. I remember taking my first car, a Honda (HMC) Civic, out for the first time and pumping gas for about $1.18 per gallon. This was also in the notoriously gas-expensive San Francisco Bay Area. Base commodities and gold continue to follow oil’s lead in going the opposite direction of the U.S. dollar. Will the likely Democratic presidency mean a material difference to the nation’s budget policies and thus the value of our currency?

The tech-laden Nasdaq Composite took a 1.3% dive last week. Does this in any way validate my technology industry bifurcation thesis? Absolutely not. Relative to the rest of the equity markets, the Nasdaq Composite performed decently. The S&P 500 stock index saw a 1.8% decline while the Dow Jones Industrial Average (a poorly constructed index) lost 2.4% over the last week. More painfully for investors anticipating a real estate recovery, REIT stocks lost 3.2% collectively. The Nasdaq Composite (actually a very well constructed index) performed better than other equity indexes. In essence, technology stocks as a whole, large blue chips and second tier small caps, did better than the old industrial giants found in the DJIA and the big caps in the S&P 500 by a significant margin.

We have seen very little evidence of second-tier technology companies suffering from the recent slowdown in economic activity. This is particularly interesting because one of the historic catalysts for technology capital investment by enterprises, the Microsoft (MSFT) operating system upgrade cycle, is not a large factor in this market. The Vista operating system has not caught fire like previous Microsoft operating system launches. The Windows XP operating system was a blockbuster and so were earlier versions of Windows. Prior upgrading cycles resulted in renewed investment in computer equipment, computer peripherals, and secondary software products.

Macro

I’ve alluded to my concern about Ben Bernanke’s ability to display great staying power in his effort to jump start the economy by lowering interest rates. With oil and commodity prices barreling higher every week, the specter of inflation looms menacingly and hampers the Federal Reserve’s ability to continue lowering rates. The macro themes of globalization and emerging giants like China and India have been the drivers of skyrocketing prices in oil and food commodities.

However, I see imbalances developing between asset prices and the underlying supply and demand curves. Crude oil’s meteoric rise to record prices never before seen in history is rooted primarily in fundamental, systemic growth in demand. But the recent, almost parabolic rise in oil prices suggests that speculators and trend followers are piling in, hoping for continued profits flowing. Speculators and trend followers, by definition, introduce inefficiencies and imbalances to asset prices. China’s trade surplus is growing at a decelerating pace. Our diminished dollar makes our goods and services much more attractive to foreign consumers. It also makes foreign goods and services much more expensive for Americans to buy. The trade frictions caused by our historically cheap dollar might just slow down emerging markets growth and thus the demand for oil. Oil is the hot investment right now, but it could be flammable for recent riders of the bandwagon. We might be caught in what I call the “Black Bubble.”

Micro

Priceline surges on strong earnings, outlook – Priceline.com (PCLN) hit an eight-year high as both its domestic and international businesses enjoy huge demand. The company’s business model, which allows travelers to name their own prices or bids, has been attracting legions of bargain-hunting travelers. How long will this last? Priceline.com is one of the few companies thriving in the travel industry. The airlines, other online travel retailers or portals, and car rental companies have mostly seen their stocks decline over the last year.

Constant Contact’s first quarter revenue soars – Email marketing is so Web 1.0, isn’t it? Older Internet users still rely heavily on email. Early adopters and younger users of the Internet are less reliant on email. Instead, they gravitate to other services such as instant messaging, text messaging, and social networking. Twitter, is a very interesting next generation platform that further reduces the need for email communication. All these usage patterns do not bode well for Constant Contact (CTCT), a provider of software for email marketing campaigns.

The CAPS Screen: 10 Small Caps on Fire – The Motley Fool includes Interactive Intelligence (ININ) in one of their interesting screening exercises. Interactive Intelligence makes software that manages call center or contact center operations. Screens are a good way to generate investment ideas, but a formulaic investment program based on screened variables does not automatically lead to good investments. Many investors employ screens to find stocks selling cheaply. Sometimes, companies are cheap because they deserve to be cheap as the economic merits of their businesses deteriorate. An investment decision made solely by screening and without knowledge of the competitive standing of the company in question is akin to marrying a girl solely because she comes from a good family. Full Disclosure: I currently have a long or short position in ININ in one or more of my private investment partnerships.

National Oilwell Varco, Inc. Q1 2008 Earnings Call Transcript – I mentioned that oil appears to have become a speculative market surrounded by a thin film of soapy substance. Bubbles don’t fizzle out, they usually burst or pop with ferocious force. National Oilwell Varco (NOV) provides equipment and supplies to the oil and gas industries and has been a big beneficiary of the rising price of crude. The price of oil may continue its amazing ascent or it may flush out the speculative latecomers, but the imperative to keep searching and producing oil will hardly diminish.

James River Coal 1Q loss widens on higher costs, stoppage – Alternatives to oil become more attractive as black gold becomes more expensive. Thus, oil shale, ethanol, coal, solar power, and biofuels become serious considerations. I have been investing with this thesis for over a year. James River Coal (JRCC), one of the worst managed coal companies around, has seen its stock move in lockstep with the rising price of oil. So although it continues to run into management and operating gaffes, the stock market has rewarded it and its highly leveraged balance sheet with new price highs. Full Disclosure: I currently have a long or short position in JRCC in one or more of my private investment partnerships.

When critical mass is achieved, the eagerly welcomed venture capital that forms to service innovative startups becomes a hot topic of conversation. Networking groups begin to get together to talk about how to raise money from venture capitalists. “Consultants” come out of the woodwork claiming expertise in helping new companies attract venture capital. Venture capitalists are looked upon as “masters of the universe” and treated like rock stars. University business school programs institute curricula aimed at instilling students with an understanding for the process. MBA grads and finance majors from those same university business schools decide they want to become venture capitalists. Local business magazines hyperventilate upon the sexy subject. Entrepreneurs talk in awed tones about their peers who have successfully attracted funding. Angel groups form and hold workshops or seminars about the process of fundraising. Websites with glossaries of mysterious VC lingo spring up out of nowhere.

We have glamorized venture capital beyond reasonableness. We spend an inordinate amount of time, energy, and attention on the subject of venture capital and end up mythologizing it. Because we talk about it so much – in such reverent tones – entrepreneurs unfortunately fixate on it at the expense of other critical components to building great companies. Would-be entrepreneurs start to reason that they must get venture funding in order to “really do something.” It is a convenient excuse to do nothing. Because we talk about venture capital so much, some of us start to see raising capital as the ultimate measure of success. “If I could just raise one million dollars, things would be different.”

Can we talk less about venture capital and more about great ideas and business building? Sure there are some programs that mix in subjects like building a great management team, hiring best practices, networking and relationship building, but venture capital gets the overwhelming majority of attention. What we need more of are entrepreneurs with the ability to figure out if their pet idea is something worth pursuing. At the very least, we need workshops and seminars that help entrepreneurs figure out if their idea, frankly, sucks. We need to talk more about making sure that our ideas are unique and bring some sort of new value to the world. We need to talk about how to execute better than your best competitor. We need entrepreneurs that can focus on the essentials of building great companies.

What entrepreneurs ought to realize is that venture capital follows true innovation and execution. It goes where the action is. It does not precede the action. Entrepreneurs who are willing to put the work in to become savvy about the whole process will come to understand that raising venture capital is relatively easy when compared to out-thinking and outrunning your best competition. It is much easier than keeping customers ecstatic. Raising venture capital is immensely easier than finding and acquiring the scarcest resource of all, great talent. Raising venture capital is not the end game. We need to stop perpetuating the myth.

The technology sector gets a big surprise with Microsoft (MSFT) announcing that it will cease to pursue the acquisition of Yahoo! (YHOO). Most analysts and market pundits expected Jerry Yang & Company would ultimately accept a deal, albeit at a higher price than Microsoft’s initial offer. Expect Yahoo! stock to take a precipitous plunge at the market open and the announcement of class action lawsuits from its larger shareholders. While this saga of two tech giants unwinds, plenty of news in the rest of the tech sector deserves attention.

The Nasdaq Composite continues to roar back from the recent market slide with a strong 2.2% gain last week. This makes my tech market bifurcation thesis look increasingly faulty. The bellwether technology issues have performed well as predicted, but so has the middle tier and even the bottom tier. International growth accounts for much of the resilience and strong performance. Technology companies reporting satisfactory or better results included Affiliated Computer Services (ACS), a business processing outsourcing and information technology services firm, Ansys (ANSS), a provider of engineering simulation software, Expedia (EXPE), the online travel e-commerce company, TeleCommunication Systems (TSYS), a provider of carrier-class wireless technology, Concur Technologies (CNQR), a maker of expense management software, LoopNet (LOOP), a website for commercial real estate listings, and Symantec (SYMC), the security software giant.

What about the rest of the market? Hallelujah! The Oracle of Omaha, Warren Buffett, has openly stated that the worst of the recent credit crisis has passed. Many value lemmings and growth copycats will take this as reason to dive back into the market with enthusiasm. Indeed, we are an eager shareholder society and investing is both pastime and profession. Investing might very well be religion. It is so for the pilgrims that never miss the Berkshire Hathaway (BRK-A) annual pow-wow to join in the proceedings presided over by high priests Buffett and Munger. The event occurred just this past week and, as usual, Buffett warned shareholders of smaller future returns for Berkshire. This warning is coming from the greatest investor alive, the prophet of profit, and the diminishing returns doctrine is probably the one part of the gospel the congregation finds hard to believe. We’ve all grown accustomed to his ability to outperform and deliver us from the evil of poor returns.

Macro

American taxpayers should be receiving their economic stimulus checks in the coming weeks. Will this provide the country with a sudden explosion of consumer spending? The bureaucrats in Washington believe that the increased spending will pull us out of the recent economic slump. But what will we probably do with our returned tax dollars? For the legions of homeowners who have seen the value of their most significant asset plummet in price, will they put the check towards a mortgage payment? Robert Shiller, the economist and father of the Standard & Poor’s/Case Shiller housing price index, predicts that housing declines have not come to an end and further declines could exceed the damage suffered during the Great Depression. In that scenario, homeowners on the brink of mortgage default would just walk away and spend their stimulus checks elsewhere instead of holding onto homes with values underwater.

Micro

Interactive Intelligence profit drops, sales rise – Confirmation bias, the cognitive error whereby investors search only for evidence that confirms their beliefs, is a very common mistake. With the second paragraph of this post, I run the risk of committing the more surreal non-confirmation bias, whereby I cite only evidence that refutes my tech market bifurcation thesis. So I best avoid this masochistic foible by pointing to Interactive Intelligence’s (ININ) somewhat disappointing earnings report. The company’s call center management software generated record sales but profits actually declined from the year ago quarter. There has been much debate about where corporations cut back expenditures in recessionary or slowing economic environments. The consensus is that advertising is the first thing cut. I don’t think so; I believe that short-sighted corporations tend to cut customer service functions and budgets. If true, ININ remains in trouble. Full Disclosure: I currently have a long or short position in ININ in one or more of my private investment partnerships.

MicroStrategy 1Q profit declines as operating expenses rise – Here is another case of a technology company that was able to grow sales while seeing profits decline. Are second-tier technology companies losing pricing and negotiation power? Are large corporate customers taking advantage of the slowing economy as an opportunity to demand better terms from technology suppliers? I remember when MicroStrategy (MSTR) generated as much hype as Salesforce.com (CRM); the promise of business intelligence software was as big as sales management software. Michael Saylor’s company took investors on an 18.6% dip last Friday.

Sohu 1Q profit soars with rising brand ad, online game sales – Last week, I profiled Sohu.com (SOHU), a Chinese Internet portal and online gaming company. Since then, the company reported record results and the stock rose an astonishing 25.6% in the space of five trading days. Sohu.com’s TianLong Babu massive multiplayer online game has become a best seller. The long term prospects for this company should be extremely bright and so are the long term prospects for the gaming industry in Asia. However, buyers of the stock now would be paying premium prices.

Perfect World Collaborates with Intel and Haier – Perfect World (PWRD) is another online gaming company based in China. The new alliances with Intel (INTC) and Haier give it some serious marketing muscle to push its massive multiplayer online games (MMOGs). They’re usually called “massively multiplayer online role playing games” (MMORPGs) but I’m going to keep it short and sweet. I’m also going to assume that future large scale games will not all be role playing game formats. Someone is going to produce a smash hit with a massive scale first person shooter like Halo.

Dolby posts higher Q2 profit; raises 2008 view – I used to take the public bus to high school in the ghetto and pass by the red brick building that houses Dolby Laboratories (DLB). San Francisco was an interesting place to grow up. One minute I’m riding the bus through the South of Market neighborhood and checking out the shingles of creative technology companies and the next minute I’m riding through the ghetto looking at beat up cars and pit bulls loosely chained behind chain link fences. Unlike in the digital video space, where scores of competing codecs vie for dominance, the digital audio space is in fact dominated by Dolby technology.

AgFeed Industries Completes Previously Announced Acquisition – China’s economy is bound to slow down just a bit as global macro factors diminish the competitive advantage of its low cost labor force. Nevertheless, population growth is unlikely to slow much and all those billions of hungry mouths to feed bode well for food companies. AgFeed Industries (FEED) produces hog feed and chicken feed. The company is aggressively expanding into hog raising and turning itself into a vertically integrated food producer.

I referenced last week Mark Zandi of Economomy.com (MCO)regarding the increased likelihood of homeowners walking out of their mortgages and homes as the amount they owe becomes greater than the value of their properties. Bloomberg just reported that foreclosures are on the rise as owners “give up” on “underwater” homes.

U.S. mortgage foreclosures rose to an all-time high at the end of 2007 as borrowers with adjustable-rate loans walked away from properties before their payments increased, the Mortgage Bankers Association said today.

New foreclosures jumped to 0.83 percent of all home loans in the fourth quarter from 0.54 percent a year earlier. Late payments rose to a 23-year high, the organization said in a report today.

“We’re seeing people give up even before they get to the reset because they couldn’t afford the home in the first place,” said Jay Brinkmann, vice president of research and economics for the Washington-based trade group.

A couple days ago, Ben Bernanke essentially said that banks should “take the hit” and help distressed borrowers by writing down principle. Two days later, the Federal Reserve just released the Balance Sheet of Households report showing that homeowners’ equity as a percentage of household real estate has shrunk to a record low. As the panic grows, housing prices will continue to plunge and we will see more owners with negative equity situations.

We likely have not seen the end of the bad news. It will be interesting to see what creative methods borrowers will employ to escape their financial predicaments. What kind of shenanigans will we see?

Macro

• More pain in the housing market anticipated as some homeowners find themselves “underwater” or owing more on their homes than what their homes are worth on the market. According to Mark Zandi at Economy.com (MCO), 10% of all homeowners currently face this negative equity situation. Zandi also sees home prices falling 20% as the economy worsens into a recession. Zandi could be underestimating the damage; homeowners abandon their homes and mortgages at a high rate when they enter negative territory on their equity. Foreclosures and abandoned mortgages exacerbate the problem by increasing unsold inventory and unwanted supply.

• More goodies from Economy.com – their data shows that core capital goods orders have been steadily declining since early 2007. One of the few bright spots in economy has been the computer servers market dominated by the big manufacturers such as Dell (DELL), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), and IBM (IBM). In our increasingly virtual/digital economy, computer servers are as tangible a core capital good as we’re going to find. Server sales increased 3.8% from 2006 to 2007 according to Gartner, a market research firm. This data confirms what I’ve been noticing in my industry. All my peers in Internet or web technology startups are increasing their investments in technology infrastructure and talent. If there is a recession afoot, it has not reached the Web 2.0 space. We’ll see how long this lasts; venture capital, the lifeblood of many of these startups, ebbs and flows to the rhythm of the public markets and their reception to IPOs. If Facebook can pull off an IPO, which it will most likely have to do because there are few companies with the firepower to acquire it at current valuations, then the party might still continue.

• Economic Karma – It All Balances Out Eventually: India’s growth as a center of information technology accelerated as the forces of globalization caused U.S. and European companies to outsource much of their technology needs to the land of spices where the labor was relatively inexpensive and talent was comparatively competent. Now there are rumblings that India is beginning to lose some of that competitive advantage as labor costs rise and the best talent has already been snapped up with very little real scientific expertise left to bid for. I suspect that much of the offshoring budgets of the Fortune 2000 will now start allocating resources to other parts of Asia and Eastern Europe. My company, SocialOptimize is outsourcing some of our mundane coding tasks to Guatemala and the Philippines. Also, the dollar’s continued weakening might make most overseas outsourcing alternatives less attractive when compared to domestic software engineers.

Micro

• In times of recession, when unemployment is high, the unemployed go back to school to add marketable skills and increase future earnings power. The leading companies in for-profit education include Strayer Education (STRA), DeVry (DV), ITT Educational Services (ESI), Career Education Corporation (CECO), Capella Education (CPLA), Corinthian Colleges (COCO), and industry giant Apollo Group (APOL). Apollo operates the ubiquitous University of Phoenix campuses. This investment thesis has worked in past recessionary times, but the unique risk this time around is the possibility that the credit crisis will hamper students’ ability to repay or obtain school loans.

• Continuing with what may appear to be a Chicken Little theme of extreme pessimism, consumers tend to put off the purchase of brand name luxury apparel in favor of generic brands and off-quality goods sold in discount retailers such as TJX Companies (TJX) and Ross Stores (ROST). Collective Brands (PSS), the owner of generic shoes retailer Payless ShoeSource should hold up pretty well as more consumers look for alternatives to Nike (NKE). This isn’t Chicken Little, this is survival of the fittest portfolio.

• Obscure Small Company: Water is the next oil. Watts Water Technologies (WTS) makes industrial products that address the water safety, quality, flow control, and conservation needs of the market. It sells product in North America, Europe, and China. Many so-called experts have predicted that food prices will rise because of the increasing demand for nutrition from a growing world population. Few have pointed out that a lack of clean water will make food prices skyrocket even more by rendering agriculture less effective, resulting in a shrinking supply of crops.

Technology

• Adobe’s (ADBE) Flex 3.0 and AIR to launch today at Engage 2008. Adobe’s suite of software has become increasingly important for web developers. Much of my previous startup’s strategy included using Flex intelligently. My current business, which is more consulting and agency-based continues to rely on Adobe software. Simeon Simeonov, a VC at Polaris Ventures, has a very good post about how AIR can be a game-changer as a live bridge between the Web and users’ desktops. It’ll be interesting to see how creative some developers can get leveraging AIR with their social networking web apps

• The success of Guitar Hero by Activision (ATVI) and Dance Dance Revolution by Konami (KNM) validates new video game interaction models based not on hand-held controllers but on input models based on other parts of players’ bodies. Now San Francisco-based Emotiv Systems has announced the launch of a new device that detects electric signals from the users’ brains and interprets those signals to control in-game action. This new interaction model should be very interesting in virtual world environments like Second Life. Of course, the early adopter of this technology could very well be the porn industry; it is usually one of the first movers in experimenting with new technology to distribute content and products.

• LinkedIn, the social network for professionals, launched a mobile version of its website. At its current state, it is “underwhelming” but the company ought to be able to figure out new user interaction models for encouraging connections. Technically, there won’t be a dichotomy between online and offline since mobile means we can be persistently online. On the “regular” version of the website, it has always been just slightly annoying to receive requests to connect from total strangers who share no relevant interests and whose only desire is to expand their “networks.” That behavior is a slightly more grown up version of Myspace (NWS-A) users’ notorious friend collecting. The firm should ensure strong filters to prevent this annoyance on the mobile platform – mobile spam is far more intolerable than desktop email spam.

“What would you do if you only had a few months left to live?”
My good friend SA, the structural engineer, shrugs and says, “I don’t know, but I don’t like some of the messages in the movie.”
“I loved the movie! It was poignant and thought-provoking,” counters TJ, the beautiful Googler we’re trying to set up with SA.
I’m clinging to a thin strand of hope that opposites indeed attract, but it’s not looking good for my already dismal matchmaking record.

We are coming out of a last minute Sundance Film Festival screening of The Guitar, a beautifully produced film by Amy Redford. The movie wrestles with the question – What would you change about your life if you faced imminent death? With stunningly intimate imagery and a moving soundtrack, the story follows a blue collar New Yorker named Mel, played by Saffron Burrows, as she learns of her terminal cancer and her subsequent efforts to cope. Her journey is a meandering mélange of moments of great sorrow, joy, loneliness, defiance, euphoria, and freedom.

“What didn’t you like about the movie?” TJ asks incredulously.
“Something wasn’t right. Plus I could’ve sworn those were San Francisco streets we saw in the movie,” replies SA.
“Big cities are all the same in a visceral sort of way,” I remark.

The problem is Mel’s answer to the central question of the movie. She changes her entire life by moving out of her old, dingy apartment and into a spacious and unaffordable loft. She abandons her senses and inhibitions (oftentimes a good thing) and discovers the joys of over-the-limit credit card shopping. She orders a luxurious bed, designer sofas and lamps, gourmet food for delivery, and most importantly, a magnificent Fender guitar. Mel eventually maxes out her credit limit on a dozen cards with no intentions of ever paying back her responsibility as she nears her impending death.

“That scene in her loft when she’s alone and playing her guitar in front of those gigantic concert speakers and crying…that was powerful. There is nothing quite like the sound of a great electric guitar. The total release of all her emotions…wow,” I exclaim.
“Yeah, that was an amazing scene,” says TJ.
“Yeah, I thought that was pretty good,” says SA.
There you go buddy, agreeing with her every once in a while wouldn’t hurt your case. Maybe this weekend might end on a high note after all with my two friends getting together.

Mel finds great happiness in finally surrounding herself with objects of her desire. The guitar, especially, leads her to a trembling catharsis. But is that the best way to go out? Isn’t what she does a little, if not a lot, selfish? Is the best way to exit the stage by taking as much as one can? What happened to giving all of one’s self as the candle burns out? The most heroic stories I know involve brave souls facing certain death with newfound generosity, giving of all their time and money to making other people happy.

“What would you do Allan?” ask TJ and SA as we walk toward the parking lot.
“I’d charge a Ferrari and drive forever.”