I’m finally back from Hungary. For those of you who do not know where Hungary is, it’s a landlocked country in Eastern Europe next to Austria and Romania. The capital city is Budapest, which is actually two cities, Buda & Pest (pronounced Pesht). I had no idea that Buda & Pest were separate. The city of Pest is the urban and flat land where Buda is the hilly countryside. The Danube River cuts through them and it’s an unbelievable sight.

I arrived in Budapest later than expected because my flight had to make an emergency landing 40 minutes after take-off back at JFK Airport. Apparently, the air conditioning system for the engines didn’t work correctly and they were afraid to fly the plane over the Atlantic Ocean. I knew there was a serious issue when I was a few thousand feet in the air and saw a helicopter escort bring us into JFK… and fire engines and emergency crews lined the runway. Needless to say, 5 hours later, we were back up in the air and on our way to Budapest.

I was meeting Sherri in Budapest who had already been there for almost a week on business. We stayed at the most beautiful hotel: the Four Seasons Gresham Palace. The staff and attention to detail was magnificent and every little amenity was provided. After arriving late on Friday evening, we decided to walk across the famous bridge (the first bridge you see in the picture) and view the city from afar. It was gorgeous! I decided that we must return to this bridge later on in the evening for something else…. Well, long story short, we did return the to the bridge a few hours later, darkness upon us, right before dinner, and I worked up the courage to propose to Sherri…. right then and there, we got engaged, ring in hand, ready and willing. It was one of the most unbelievable experiences ever and we both shared an amazing moment and proceeded back to the hotel to call our families.

We enjoyed a fantastic dinner at a restaurant called Mocca that evening. Very impressed. The next day (Saturday), I spent the morning with Andras Pfaff from Dream Interactive, one of the top Interactive design shops in Budapest. Andras and I talked about the Interactive community in Budapest compared to New York and found some common bonds (BMW Z4, T-Mobile, Apple, art, etc) and some significant differences. I have to say that I was incredibly impressed with Andras and look to work with him on upcoming projects. Afterwards, Sherri and I took a tour around Budapest with a private guide and saw many destinations including castles, outdoor baths, museums, Parliament, and other nooks and crannies.

We spent the rest of the trip at fantastic restaurants eating more goulash that you can imagine, viewing wondrous castles, the Jewish Synagogue & and delicate architecture, and fending off phone calls from family/friends about our engagement. While I have not downloaded all the pictures from my digital camera yet, I have posted the first 50 or so to my photoalbum on Flickr, so I invite you to check out some of the images. I would certainly go back to Budapest again - but would want to travel around the country or take a side trip to Vienna. It’s a gorgeous city that is in the midst of change and I highly recommend you go and check it out. It’s extremely rich with history (communism, World War I, World War II, 1956 Uprising).

Things I noticed:

• No Starbucks (yet)
• Burger King outnumbers McDonald’s around the city
• There is a TGI Fridays (though different look/feel compared to USA)
• There is a restaurant called Wall Street (go figure)
• The food isn’t as cheap as one would expect, but fairly on par with NYC restaurants (if you’re going to eat at a high caliber)
• A taxi ride anywhere will probably run ~$10 USD (within the city, excluding airports)
• The food is generally excellent. There was only one restaurant I didn’t fancy, but everyone else liked it.
• Most menus are in English & Hungarian
• Tip around 10%
• Fish is an extremely popular menu item
• The weather mirrored London or Seattle (grey skies)

I am a reader of PSFK and recently, Piers wrote a posting asking people to upload photos to Flickr and tag them a certain way about what inspires them. Immediately after I read that PSFK posting, I wrote Piers and we recently sat down in Soho over a great sushi lunch and spoke about a number of things, one of them being inspiration. With that said, this is my take on inspiration and what inspires me as a resident of planet Earth.

Before we go into my actual inspiration, we need to define it. I’ve been known to make up words (people who play Scrabble with me hate it!) but for a common ground, lets use Dictionary.com’s definition: a divine influence directly and immediately exerted upon the mind or soul. As an entrepreneur, I have to constantly come up with new and solid ideas. The ideas may be about a new business, partnership, website copy, investor pitch, fundraising strategy, or even blog posting (amongst many other things). When I’m charged with coming up with an idea and I’m in the office, I’m usually marginally successful. My best thinking comes from being outside the office - in the gym, on a nature walk, at a concert, in an art gallery, and other places. Why? Because I’m not focused on the end goal of the task; I’m doing something else and my mind is fresh and open.

There are certain images and places in this world that make me extremely happy and I look to them for inspiration. I’ve chosen a bunch of pictures and created a slideshow from them. These are a schmear of what I view as my inspiration… though there are many other things as well. Click the picture below to see the slideshow… (a new window may open depending on your browser).

Do you believe that Venture Capital is the holy grail of entrepreneurship? If you do, you may be an entrepreneur for all the wrong reasons. Venture Capital is an enabler for different aspects to a business such as growth but at the end of the day, your product or service should be more important than landing venture capital.

The reason why I’m writing this post is that I meet with many entrepreneurs who are under the spell that raising venture capital automatically validates your business and almost guarantees that you will succeed. If you raise $10M in venture capital, it gives $10M reasons why you will not succeed; the odds are against you. The stakes are higher, every decision becomes riskier. You have $10M to spend and we all know how easy it is to spend money.

Venture capital is sexy. It’s like being able to drive a Ferrari. Being a member of FerrariChat.com, and actively involved in exotic car events around Westchester County, I can tell you that there are many owners of these cars who have no business driving them. It takes a certain type of person to be able to control these exotic vehicles, just look at all the Ferrari Enzo crashes. People who have $1M to spend on these gorgeous cars get behind the wheel, have no business driving them, and crash them within 36 hours of owning them. However, it is sexy to drive these cars…

Venture capital is much the same. Your goal as an entrepreneur is not to raise venture capital, but to build a sustainable business around a product and/or service. If you can do that without raising venture capital, all the power to you. Why give up equity when you do not have to? I’ve personally been on both sides of the fence and have had positive and negative experiences. It takes a gifted leader to balance a board of venture capitalists and ultimately, generating enough of a business to substantiate venture investment.

To all the burgeoning entrepreneurs out there, don’t think that raising capital is the end-all and be-all. If you can do it yourself, go right ahead. If you need to raise capital, be cautious and make sure you’re ready. Build traction and focus. Raising capital gives you minor validation to your business (someone believes in you to invest) but doesn’t guarantee success and should not be the holy grail of entrepreneurship.

What would happen today if there was a significant increase in upstream bandwidth and uploading content (consumer generated, etc) was efficient? Will YouTube (and such sites) need to add a plethora of servers to host the influx of videos?

I had an intriguing conversation with Ken Rossi this past weekend over coffee at my local hot spot and we briefly touched upon this subject but I think it should receive more attention. If it really is simple and quick to upload your content, would more people do so? Would the quantity of content uploaded to servers increase? My thoughts are: yes.

Andrew Parker, a friend of mine and colleague over at Union Square Ventures has a nice tangential posting about Approaching the Limit of Zero (bandwidth/storage costs). Certainly a good read.

Storage space will need to increase but so will databases and search software functionality. Does Amazon realize this with their storage cloud, S3? Do they have a glimpse of the future and striving to become an early leader? Thoughts?

I’m extremely intrigued by isometric pixel art such as represented by sites like eboy, CityPixel, and PixelDam. For those not familiar with pixel art, you can read about it on Wikipedia. In short, Pixel art is a form of digital art, created through the use of raster graphics software, where images are edited on the pixel level. I’m a huge fan of some of the architectural pixel based websites. I find them extremely fascinating. There has been an awesome poster created by eboy about Web 2.0 and some of the companies who have emerged… I’ve ordered it and will frame it - and then hang it up in my new home office. The poster is located here.

I am looking for anyone who is well versed in pixel art who can recommend some other sites to check out. Anyone know of any? Also, looking for fantastic pixel art designers/developers.