Spencer Fry

Life has just been great the past month. I can’t really put my finger on a single reason for why, but I think much of it has been in a change of attitude. I’ve always been a very positive person on the inside, but it was only recently that I realized how great my life is. I think I was a little jealous of my investment banking friends and their fat paychecks and sometimes second-guessed my entrepreneurial pursuits, but then realized that it’s actually me who has the more exciting life (no offense!). This realization that everything is going in the right direction for me has made me the happiest I’ve ever been in my life. Sorry to be corny, but I thought I’d share my happiness with the few readers of this blog and I wish you all the best too. Follow your heart and follow your dreams. Gary Vaynerchuk has and what an inspiration he is!

I was at the NY Tech Meetup on Tuesday — watching the presentations of Summize, Wirewize, ZocDoc, and others — seated next to a nice gentleman who I started up a conversation with. He’s an inspiring entrepreneur who was in hotel management for 10(?) years, got sick of it, and wants to try his hand at this game. He actually already received funding in January for his idea and is looking to launch in August. He wasn’t specific about what he was doing, but it had to do with video.

As we got to talking, he asked me if I had ever worked a 9 to 5. “No, I guess not,” was my response. And it got me to thinking. I’m very proud of the fact that I’ve never had to work a 9 to 5 job in my life and I hope I never have to — I prefer the 24 hours, 7 days a week, 365 days a year job. I did work a few summer jobs when I was younger (three times at a bicycle shop and two as a teaching assistant for a Yale Summer Programs class), but nothing too serious. On the one hand, I would like to know how it feels to not have any work past 5:01 PM, but on the other hand, I prefer to be able to work when inspiration hits me. Long live entrepreneurship!

I just finished up an intense accounting and financial markets one-week class offered by NYU. (And before I go any further: getting up at 7:00 AM is the worst.) The reason I enrolled in this class was to become better familiarized with accounting and financial statement analysis. I don’t have time to dedicate the normal semester of learning to it, but everyone can take a week to better themselves in their field. So that’s what I did.

Overall, I’m really happy with the class offered by instructor John F. Mahoney, CPA. He’s a great, energetic middle-aged guy who is very passionate about accounting practices. He really knows his stuff and that shines through in his teaching method, which includes a lot of his real life experience.

On to the class. We began the class by going through companies’ annual reports, analyzing business transactions (balance sheet and income statement), utilizing T accounts, trial balance, general ledger, and so forth. We continued down the path of complex accounting such as ratio analysis and ended the class with profitability, investors’ ratios, and in-depth cash flow analysis. There was a lot in-between, which I won’t mention here, but you get the general gist. My brain already feels like it’s going to explode with how much we covered.

Sometimes stretching yourself too thinly on a wide range of topics is a bad thing, but in this case I think it was good. We covered 10 chapters of our accounting book (“Financial Reporting and Analysis” by Charles H. Gibson) as well as many handouts and other things. Why I’m happy we skipped around is because I got a taste of a lot of things and I can go back and further my understanding of what’s most important to me on my own. I now know of most of what’s involved, so I can pick and choose. For example, even though we covered preferred and commons stock, that doesn’t really apply to me at this time. Hopefully, it will one day.

The bottom line (see what I did there?) is that it was really nice being able to take this class to increase my knowledge of accounting and financial statement analysis. It’s not often that at my age (24) you’re still given the opportunity to be able to go back and learn something through a teaching program while still working – unless, of course, you’re going to grad or business school. I want to thank Jason and Dave for picking up the slack while I had my head in numbers all week. They’re the best people I’ve ever worked with and you will be in awe with what we’re coming out with soon. More on that later!

Funny how right before last week I blogged about getting back into a regular, healthy schedule and immediately following that I come down with a bad cold. Terrible timing. Last Tuesday, I woke up with a sore throat, which grew into flu like symptoms (a fever, aches, chills, etc.) on Wednesday and didn’t really improve until Sunday. I’m now almost fully recovered, but I still have a runny nose and a small cough. What a pain in the ass getting a cold is. It really sets you back in your work and your life. I’m hoping it’s the last of the year for me. Now all I have are allergies to deal with…

So I’m feeling a bit sick today. I woke up with a sore throat and a bit if a headache. However, I’m trying my best to not let it get to me. I’ve got a lot of stuff to do today and three networking events to attend over the next three days (including the MindPetals event later tonight). I think I’m going to be able to shake this thing, but it hasn’t really gotten much better so far during the day. How do you guys work through the period you’re not feeling well? Do you just take time off/rest, and hope it passes or do you work through it?

I don’t know about you all, but I need my rest and I haven’t been getting any lately. I think since early last week, I haven’t slept more than 5 hours a night and some nights I haven’t even gotten 5 hours. I’ve had insomniac issues since college, but this past week has been really bad — sometimes not falling asleep until 4 AM. Taking my queue from Fred Wilson who felt similar this past week, I’m hitting the reset button on Monday and going to get back to a normal schedule. Wish me luck.

My parents live in Connecticut, which is about two hours from me in New York City. I see them about every three weeks for a night or two. I don’t have a car, so I take the train. I found that I somehow do some of my best work on this train ride. The train is fairly comfortable, but nothing special. Just your standard train. It’s typically packed, so there are tons of people around me and I usually get squeezed in. But with my laptop on my knees and my iPhone’s earbuds in my ears, I type away as ideas flow into my brain like nowhere else I’ve worked.

I really don’t know what it is about this damn train ride, which I loathe, because it’s “boring,” but maybe it’s being surrounded by working people? Maybe it’s the noise? I have no idea, but the train is a godsend to my work and I wish I could replicate the experience elsewhere. Yesterday I pumped out four pages full of concrete, usable ideas in the two hour train ride for something nterface is working on. Choo choo!

I finally folded and joined LinkedIn. I just had enough inquiries by people if I had a LinkedIn account that I just gave in and signed up today. I’m not really sure what I’m going to use it for — or if I’ll use it at all — but now I can at least answer “yes” when people ask me. I also heard that it had a nice, clean UI and so I wanted to check that out too. So far, I’m impressed.

I’m feeling a bit constrained with the blog posts I’ve been making. I’m going to switch it up a bit and just post with my gut. I want to use this blog as a stress reliever, so I don’t want to feel compelled to have to write on interesting entrepreneurial topics all the time. That being said, I’m going to take a much more casual approach to things overall, but still try to mix in serious topics every now and again. Off to meet up with some friends for a late dinner and some drinking afterward. Enjoy your evening!

I filed an extension yesterday to give me extra time to wrap up a few things. I’m coming off a year where I sold my last company in early 2007, so it’s a bit more complicated than normal years. I’ve learned a few things in the process of gathering my taxes for this year that I should have known before. The first thing is to stay organized throughout the year. I made a mistake of not staying on top of things and it’s made the last few weeks a lot more hectic than they should have been. Second thing is to contact your accountant well in advance of April 15th. I dropped the ball here as well and waited until about one month ago when almost everything was booked up. So for this next year, I’m staying a lot more on top of things by generating monthly reports and keeping my accountant in the loop with quarterly updates. By keeping better organized, you won’t see me having to file an extension for 2008 and I’ll probably spend 1/10th the amount of time trying to locate things as I did this year.