Hi, I’m David G. Cohen.

Today, I created a new page called “My Top Posts” on my personal site with a listing of some of the more popular blog posts I’ve written. I hope it’s useful.

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I don’t want anyone to worry about me when they read this post, so I want to start out by saying everything is 100% fine, and this is not a post about any health issue of any kind. That said…

About a month ago, I got some really bad personal news. It was bad enough that I had to leave work and just go home and be sad. I told my wife about it and after a few hours of being sad together, she started asking me exactly what this new future would be like and exactly how it would affect our lives.

My reaction, as it is so often to potentially bad news was “not just yet.” I told her that I hadn’t given up and I had not accepted in my mind that this bad news was actually happening yet, even though we had just been told that it most certainly was. Even though the bad news had been presented to us as an absolute certainty, I told her that before I started planning for this new future, I wanted to do everything in my power to cause it not to happen.

Very much to my surprise, last night I was told that the bad news is no longer reality! Minds had been changed, and the course of future had been altered. Today, I woke up extremely happy and excited.

Positive thinking and envisioning the world that I wanted to create had won again.

I am a very lucky person. I’m married to the coolest girl I’ve ever met, and I have three fantastic kids. I live in a town I love, and I have friends that I truly admire and respect. Running TechStars makes me very happy, because I get to help so many entrepreneurs every day. I have consistently been lucky in life. Not always, but usually.

And all of this was created by me, first in my mind, and second in reality.

Whenever I feel a cold coming on, I tell myself that I will not get sick. I tell myself “Self, you are not getting sick.” 8 out of 10 times, I can fight that cold off immediately. It’s not the medicine, it’s the belief that matters.

Of course, you can’t change everything in the world just by visualizing the outcome you want. But (and this is the important part) I am a firm believer that visualizing the future that you want has a profound impact on the odds of that future actually happening. It focuses your mind and brings positive energy to the situation.

I am pretty sure that this has something to do with quantum mechanics, but I’m not smart enough to know exactly why.

People say that you make your own luck. More and more I believe that this is true. I think that said a better way, in many cases you can make what you believe.

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TechStars Demo Day for our first NYC class is on April 14. If you’re an accredited investor or venture capitalist, and you’d like to attend, please contact me for an invitation. These are very fun events and currently over 300 investors are registered, so it’s also a great networking opportunity.

Speaking of opportunities, TechStars is accepting applications for our Seattle and NYC programs currently. Boulder applications recently closed, and it looks like another great set of companies will be invited. The Boston program is in progress now.

Watch the @TechStars twitter stream for real time news about TechStars, or subscribe the TechStars blog.

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As you might imagine, I get many random inbound emails. Last I checked, I was getting about 500 emails a day, and about 50 of them a day are from people I don’t know. They often ask for advice, or just want me to look at their startup for investment. This is fine, I try to answer all of them. But I got one today that stood out. It didn’t feel “cold”, it felt well-researched and highly-relevant. Here’s what it said (put here with permission from the author):

Hi David,

I’ve got a startup related question for you that I think might be right up your alley.

We’re starting CriticalArc and we’re focussed on providing solutions to problems that depend on streaming status and location in real time. Things like duress and critical incident response. We’re building a very robust back end to support these mission-critical applications. We’ve got a preliminary landing page up here: www.criticalarc.com and we’re planning to demo our first system at a startup event here in Sydney on 31st March….we’re currently engaging customers and coding like hell.

I know that you have a background in dispatch systems with Pinpoint and I was wondering if you had an opinion here: As a startup seeking investment and a scalable business, do you think we should be focusing on an infrastructure or solution play? Or could we do both to start with and decide to focus on either a general web infrastructure business or a dedicated solution business some time down the track?

Basically, out of the box, should we be SimpleGeo for realtime, or should we provide a solution like what you did with RightCAD at Pinpoint?

I’d love to know your thoughts.

As a separate bonus question, I was also wondering if you’re seeing much activity in this area at the moment? Is real time location hot like the groupon-clone thing that you’re probably being pitched every other day? Or do you think there is some space here? It’s a bit hard to judge from Australia presently.

Hey, thanks for reading this….you’re probably up to your eyeballs with Techstars applications at the moment. Good luck with the summer program.

Best Regards

–
Glenn Farrant
CEO
CriticalArc

Here’s what I love about this email.

1 – He knows my background, and frames the question that he has with that relevant context.
2 – He understands who I am (references to TechStars).
3 – He gets that I’m seeing a million groupon clones and makes me chuckle a little.
4 – He’s clearly generally intelligent/articulate. His writing has an easy style.
5 – He speaks my language. He references “Pinpoint” (the previous company name, before it was bought by ZOLL and started being called that). He mentions “summer program” even though he’s in Australia where this will actually be winter time. He references SimpleGeo, another of my investments. He’s making the question easy for me to answer.

Of course, I try to answer every email I get, especially if it’s from an entrepreneur. But this one really stuck out and made me want to help. So I thought I’d share why that was.

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