Progress

It’s Friday evening of Memorial Day weekend and in my corner of Vermont we are in the middle of a seemingly endless train of rain showers.  I was hoping to get out on the bike tonight but it looks like that is on hold.  I can’t complain however, because I managed to ride on four of the past seven days starting with a terrific ride last Saturday afternoon (see the picture accompanying this post), progressing to a longer ride on Sunday, a commute to and from work on Tuesday and a ride to and from a business lunch meeting on Wednesday.  All told I believe I logged 130 miles or so of riding and most of it was in spectacular spring weather.  Supposedly the weather gets better as the holiday weekend progresses and I imagine I will soon return to riding.

Meanwhile, we have had a good week of progress on Road Pitch.  Several more founding riders have signed up including Alan Newman perhaps Vermont’s most prolific serial entrepreneur, Dave Schmidt one of the few people in Vermont who has been CEO of a venture capital backed company and a terrific photographer to boot, and Andrew Stickney who is Vice President for the Vermont Center for Emerging Technologies.  The new “Hub” a co working space in White River Junction agreed to be a host site for the riders to listen to pitches starting at 3:00 PM on Tuesday August 5th and the Hotel Coolidge agreed to give us a room deal for the same night.  The Stone Grill Pub and Restaurant in Morrisville, Vermont  agreed to host us for lunch on August 7th.  Things are shaping up!

As a novice rider I keep running track of the various mistakes I make while riding.  Most common is forgetting to turn off my turn signal but on Saturday I did something truly ridiculous: I managed to hit the kill switch and turn the bike off while cruising at speed.   I coasted to a stop, got the bike in neutral and figured I must have forgotten to turn the gas line on.  Nope.  I thought perhaps the kickstand was loose or had come down which will shut the bike off if in gear.  Nope.  Then it dawned on me what I had done.  Mistakes are an integral part of learning to ride and mistakes are also the way you learn things when you are an entrepreneur.   The trick in both cases to to fail in ways that don’t cause major damage.

As always if you are interested in riding, or pitching or hosting us please visit the contact us page.