I traveled to San Francisco today for a few meetings. Primarily I was going to visit Larry Augustin. Larry is a professional adviser and is someone I have the highest respect for in business and technology. He’s also just a wonderful down to earth guy who is very generous with his time. I have not written about Larry previously, but he has had a significant impact on the success of my business. I could go on and on about how great Larry is, but I’ll save that for another post on another day. Anyway, Larry had to back out of our meeting last minute due to some pressing business of his own. This meant my day was far less productive than I desired, but I did have a valuable meeting with a gentleman named Lars. Lars is a seasoned open source VP of Sales that recently left a prominent open source CRM vendor for an open source BI software company. In this meeting I benefited from having our new MT VP of Sales, Mark, pick Lars’ brain. Mark and me left with some valuable insights and I was gladdened to have made the acquaintance of such an accomplished and intelligent person. Thanks Lars, you single-handedly made the trip worthwhile. 
On the flight home to San Diego the Captain roused me from my power nap with an announcement over the loud speaker about the Santa Barbara fires. I snapped a couple photos:
In the event the photos don’t convey it, the fires looked really bad. The smoke plume traveled out to sea and seemed to go on forever over the Pacific. The smoke was visible for the remainder of the flight to San Diego.
