Eric T. Hennenhoefer: 2005 Letter and Pictures

2005 Letter and Pictures

(scroll down for pictures)

Friends and Business Associates,

Happy New Year and welcome to 2006!

This morning, enjoying my first cup of coffee for the day, I pondered over what the best phrase would be to describe 2005. Then it hit me. The Year of Starbucks.

I think there’s more to this trend than my infant, work, and travel-induced caffeine addiction. I noticed something strange was happening when people started holding office hours at Starbucks. Suddenly it was commonplace for people to say, “Drop by and see me next week. I’ll be at Starbucks Westlake on Tuesday morning and Friday afternoon,” or “Starbucks Arbor on Monday and Wednesday morning,” or some variation thereof. It really sank in when one of my engineer friends just stopped going to the office. He doesn’t actually work with anyone in Austin. As a member of a cross-functional global task force there’s no real need for him to bother with driving in and sitting in a cube. All he needs is WiFi and coffee to keep him going between conference calls every eight hours. So he goes to Starbucks instead of work. It doesn’t sound too bad. With my closest Starbucks only .2 miles away by car (in America we always drive), it is the closest source of caffeine other than the bottle of Excedrin on my desk.

Aside from the coffee, 2005 was a success in terms of meeting people. Since starting Obsidian several years ago I’ve been so preoccupied with running the company that I haven’t been able to get out much. This year I made a point of getting more involved in business groups and I’m really glad I did. It’s amazing how many interesting people I’ve met with just a little extra effort. To all of my new friends from EO, AeA, Austin Technology Council, Texchange, Austin Wireless, Microprocessor Forum, and DAC: It’s been a blast.

The other fun project I’ve been working on is starting quarterly lunch groups for people in the verification community (http://www.dvclub.org/). Over 250 people attended events in Austin, Dallas, and Silicon Valley in November. Thank you to all the speakers and everyone who came. It’s been long overdue for this community to meet regularly. Planning for Q1 events is underway; anyone want to be a speaker?

Everything is progressing well at Obsidian. Nine years into it I guess the word ‘startup’ no longer applies. The microprocessor business has seen an up-tick in the second half of 2005. Everyone is hiring again and projects are starting right and left. Obsidian launched a major new product aimed at less complex processors and we spun off our service group into a staffing company (Veriseo). Hopefully this will allow me to focus on the processor side of the world while our Ops guy, Hoss, works on expanding Veriseo. Launching a new company is fun, but it’s nice not to have to do it from scratch this time.

My partners, Rob and Becky, are well. Rob and his wife, Sara, will also have their second child early next year. I’m hoping he’ll be a real handful so someone else’s kid will be the bad one at playgroup for a change. Becky is still singing with her band, working obsessively, and doing crazy things like playing golf with her husband, Randy.

This year I continued to travel a fair amount for work. Japan was perhaps the most memorable trip of 2005. International travel is sort of like a dream where things never quite fit together. A typical day doing sales calls in Japan involves walking ten miles, having a stranger tell you he likes your shoes and asking what size they are (maybe practicing English?), and walking into a Starbucks in January where Christmas songs are playing and no one has heard of decaf. I think I’d like to head to Asia sometime in the next few years. Plastic food no longer seems so strange.

Luckily, my personal life is somewhat undercontrol. Baby Ethan is 22 months now and in a couple weeks will be joined by a baby brother. Raising kids seems to be a series of challenges, constantly fixing one problem only to find another. 2005 saw a great improvement in Ethan’s sleep habits, but we also entered into mobility and the world of “No.” Needless to say, we’re not out of the woods yet. The thought of raising two boys seems completely overwhelming to us. We asked around and have managed to find several other couples that actually survived two small boys, but it doesn’t sound easy. If you don’t hear from us next year, you’ll know what happened.

Alisa continues on the bumpy road of stay-at-home mom. It’s a job of great highs and lows. Most of the time she’s very happy with the experience, but sometimes she wishes she was back at Dell, arguing with adults. Alisa even ran her first marathon last spring. Wow.

I hope everyone had a great 2005 and I look forward to seeing you all in the new year. We should grab coffee.

Eric

[Note: On Dec 19th, 2006 my headache doctor banned me from all caffeine, thus ending the Year of Starbucks]

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