The espresso machine manufacturer La Marzocco recently opened a café near my apartment in Seattle. They formed two partnerships two make it happen: one permanent and another dynamic (I’ll explain in a minute). It’s been a great example of how businesses can flourish when they come together and play to each other’s strengths.

The first partnership was made with a local radio station, KEXP. KEXP recently acquired a beautiful, cavernous space right on the western edge of Seattle Center, with more than enough space for a café. La Marzocco stepped up to make that happen.

But given that La Marzocco itself does not roast coffee, they still needed a roaster partner. And that’s where things get really fun. Every month, La Marzocco invites a new roaster to take up residency and serve its coffee. The inaugural roaster was Stumptown, and so far we’ve had G&B, Buna, and now Campos come as...

Just finished Molly Knight Raskin’s incredible biography of Danny Levin. Levin was one of the founders of Akamai, which could justly be called the first real CDN provider, responsible for enhancing the reliability and responsiveness of properties such as CNN.com and Ticketmaster.com. Prior to Akamai, he served in the Israeli special forces, attended MIT as a graduate student, and worked at Bell Labs (specifically on consistent hashing, something Akamai later utilized heavily).

Levin was also a passenger aboard American Airlines Flight 11, which departed at 8:00 AM from Boston on September 11th, 2001 and was the first airliner hijacked during the 9/11 attacks. He was 31.

Akamai continues today, having survived the triple-pronged devastation of the dot-com bust, the 9/11 attacks, and the loss of their principle founder. An incredible story that I am so fortunate to have picked up on a...

I found this touching remembrance of Jon Postel buried in the IETF archives. It was written by Vint Cerf, a close colleague of Postel’s and the co-inventor of TCP/IP. My favorite excerpt, a summary of Postel’s quiet contribution to a fledgling internet:

Out of the chaos of new ideas for communication, the experiments, the tentative designs, and crucible of testing, there emerged a cornucopia of networks. Beginning with the ARPANET, an endless stream of networks evolved, and ultimately were interlinked to become the Internet. Someone had to keep track of all the protocols, the identifiers, networks and addresses and ultimately the names of all the things in the networked universe. And someone had to keep track of all the information that erupted with volcanic force from the intensity of the debates and discussions and endless invention that has continued unabated for 30 years. That...