Paul Haahr’s Blog

In theory, at least, I like to blog. I’ve tried to do it for at least five years. And I’ve never averaged more than one post per month.

I’ve come to realize that there are two things which I consider important in my life: my family and my job. (This should be an obvious fact about a married professional with two children, but I’ve rarely stated it that way for myself.) Most of my time is spent on one or the other. Add in the things I can’t seem to avoid, such as commuting or home renovations, and I’m left with almost nothing. I’ve lost touch with lots of friends. I rarely end up replying to personal email. My job is my only hobby. I do the other things I want to do — work out, cook, read books, see friends — much less than I’d like to.

This applies in the internet space, too. I don’t blog often. I haven’t written any open source code in years. I use Wikipedia but I don’t contribute back very often. I don’t post photos publicly.

It’s also why I haven’t tried out social networks. It seems that I have a hard enough time keeping up with my existing friends using traditional means that adding new techniques wouldn’t help — it would just create more obligations for me — though I’m beginning to rethink that.

So, maybe, when I ask myself why I’m not blogging, I need to remind myself that, in fact, I’ve made it less important than the few things I do actually find important. And I admire the people who blog well quite a lot, especially if it’s not their full-time career.

We watched Who is Cletis Tout? tonight. We’d held off on watching it, even though we’d had the disc at home for a while, because, given the title, we just weren’t looking forward to it. But it turns out to be a really fun caper movie. A little contrived and with holes in the plot, but I enjoyed it a lot more than I had expected to.

Kudos to Netflix for their recommendation system, which picked this as one we’d really enjoy.

First of all, congrats over to the team at Mint.com for going live and winning the Techcrunch40 prize. As a die hard Quicken user, I think it’s great that companies are pushing in this space. I can’t say I save money or time by using Quicken, but it lets me feel in control. (And I could always tell when I wasn’t feeling in control of my finances, because I would avoid Quicken.) I wish Mint much luck.

But I’m also left with a slightly nostalgic feeling — and even a bit of jealousy — because I tried to create a similar venture back in late 1999. I was coming off of another startup (which I got wistful for when I first heard about Entise Systems and Azul Systems), all my friends were starting web companies, and I thought that what the world needed was a web-version of Quicken. At the time, everyone I talked to thought it was a crazy idea. People wouldn’t trust some web company with access to all their accounts. I was too late and the market was going to be owned by Yodlee or MyCFO. Only obsessives used Quicken and they were already satisfied.

I built a small prototype that could import my Quicken data. And I managed to disable my Bank of America and American Express accounts a few times while building screen scrapers for them. More importantly, though, I learned a few lessons about startups (don’t try to do it as one person — you need moral support and someone to bounce ideas off of) and about myself (I’m good at technology but not at sales). And, after working on it for a few months, I realized I wasn’t actually interested in building and selling the product, only in using it. So, I closed it down and took a job at a startup some friends had founded, which then disappeared with most of the rest of Web 1.0.

I wonder if it’s still a crazy idea. I hope not. Mint, with their scraping and auto-categorization, seems to have done a nice job. I suspect I’m going to hold off on using Mint.com, because this is one kind of data I actually like to have sitting on my hard drive and not out in the cloud. At least for now.