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If the RIAA comes calling, you can produce them in the same way as the documents mentioned in the blog post. :)
this made me laugh out loud. I just had to forward your comment to lauren. i've got all of our CDs and even cassettes saved plus other embarrassing geeky stuff (old company tshirts, etc).
joanne wilson
joanne@solomonwilson.com
Not to defend Fred in any way, but just as a little perspective, my grandpa used to keep the cork from every single bottle of wine he's ever drank, driving my grandma completely insane...
I'm bad with document retention and need to also improve my backups. Great to have a reminder on that front.
Cheers.
Personal attacks are generally best ignored, in my opinion
i'm stil laughing at gotham gal's rant. it's good that the whole world gets to her side of the story.
When I sat down with the long-time CEO to work on pricing, he turned to his credenza, pulled out a file, and removed one 8.5x11" sheet of paper. It was the original model for the work we were doing for the customer. In pencil. From 1984!! We then discussed our actual experience compared to the model he'd created, and used that intelligence to craft the new pricing model. Needless to say, it made the exercise much easier than starting it from scratch.
After that time, I tried to keep anything that might be useful. You never know when you might need it.
regards, John
also, if one is a fiduciary, this is clearly your fiduciary duty and responsibility (and good sense anyway)
and fred is soooo right -- anyone who is in business for more than a minute or two experiences that "there are people out there who will try to screw you over and paint you as the bad guy." and if such a situation ever gets tough, you are protected only if you can priduce some kind of documentation or clear evidence of events etc
“Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you” -- Kurt Cobain
If you act ethically and follow the law, those documents only help you. It's the people who try to beat the system that find paperwork to be a liability.
You can tell the ethics of someone by how well they document things. If people insist that everything be done in person and refuse to put anything to paper (or email), be afraid. I personally follow up and confirm things by email from time to time. That way if people go back on their word or change their mind... I have something to back me up.
Thanks for bringing this up. I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks this way. Destroying documentation is just an admission to guilt in my opinion.
But, every couple of months I'll have that experience similar to yours where you have the obscure email or long-forgotten pdf doc right there at your fingertips. Being prepared and knowing that you have the right info at the right time is a huge comfort.
But while in the "space is inexpensive" and "indexing makes things so darn easy" argument another element is forgotten and that is if someone else gets hold of that information. Access to your gmail with 3 years of data? Broken into your home and stolen the hard drive with ten years of scanned images? What of it then? What type of profile can some someone develop from that massive amount of information to do you and your family harm? There is also a danger of overreliance on one service or another - what happens if that service goes away? or it takes weeks for a service provider to restore after a catastrophic error or a criminal erases your data?
Anything I consider important I save a copy to be stored offsite in a safety deposit. As far as I am concerned everything else is expendable and I can survive without it. And I'm sure you can all to.
But I enjoy seeing it through your eyes and it makes me better and smarter
I think the answer is no to my request but I thought I would ask anyways:
Is there any chance that you can post the original Sino investment memo? It will be really instructive to enterpreneurs like me to see how VC's think about investments prior to knowing if it was going to be a success.
I am sure there must be rules of confidentiality that prevent you from doing this but I was thinking that if you can share this with Kellogg, perhaps you could share this with us (esp given how transparent you already are!).
I think the investment memo will perhaps come closest to the Autodesk file (http://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/www/autofile.html) for Sina.
Another random observation- you seem to have done quite a few successful international investments (mercado, sina...) in your earlier avatar. I had always thought you were more US centric and changed only after your recent trips to Europe.
Nik
They had a strong practice in europe and also partnered with episode1 so they really didn't need or want us doing that
They did also have practices in asia and latin America that did want our help with investments in those regions so that's why it went down that way
I learned a lot from those investments and have taken a more cautious approach to investing internationally since
But Patagon, StarMedia (for a while), Mercado Libre, and Sina all did very well for us. And we almost invested in Rediff which I think we should have.
I'll think about posting the investment memo. Not sure what confidentiality obligations we have on that.
vast majority of people behave very badly around money - or when faced with the prospect of coming in to a great deal.
At home - I keep virtually everything. But I am trying to do it virtually as much as possible - scanning and PDF'ing, then shredding. I throw out large, black garbage bags of shredded paper, but still have a problem staying above water. I wish more companies had a better on-line, savable bill form. I download my B of A, Fidelity, Amex, etc statements, and shred the paper.
At work, I understand your point about a clear conscience being its own reward. But I am a former sell-side analyst, and I've heard too many horror stories of plaintiff's lawyers trying to take things out of context. I keep very shorthand notes - scrawls. And the last thing I want to do is leave that open to misinterpretation from someone who is paid (very well) to misinterpret. So while I keep almost everything, I am much more careful about notes. I either clean them - spend the time to turn them into complete thoughts, less prone to misrepresentation - or delete them (when they are no longer useful).
The thing that drives me nuts are the number of people I've worked with who put the most ridiculous things in e-mail. Maybe they don't have bad intent, but any outsider would have a field day with discovery. I have always assumed that an e-mail could appear on the front page of the WSJ. That's why I was never cited in the Spitzer investigation of Street research. But I still remember seeing a friend's e-mail on 60 Minutes. The number of CxO's I worked with who fail to understand the ramifications of their e-mails is staggering.
I am much the same way, but only with electronic documents. I scan everything and file it away on my hard drive (with multiple backups), but I hate clutter and get rid of all the physical stuff.
Paper is the worst- it requires super-compulsiveness to keep organized and mostly just ends up as what the fire marshalls call "excess fuel load". Thank god for cheap scanners.
I seldom have to retrieve paper documents, even ones I want to keep permanently. The least burdensome approach seems to be to toss everything I want to keep permanently (other than tax documents) into an expandable folder labeled "Diary 2009." For significant transactions, I try to put a note in my Outlook calendar, to help me narrow down the search if I ever need to do one. That seems to be less hassle than scanning things. (Tax documents go into their own annual folders.)
BTW, I'm also a lawyer -- formerly a public-company GC, and before that a technology litigator.
Three cheers for the document retentive souls!
Hopefully, you don't get sued. But if you do, it pays to keep everything.
I have also been deposed and was grateful that I could look back on emails and notes to refresh my recollection of an event, and in particular, to respond to a question that attempted to take a quote out of context. At the same time, a friend of mine in a business dispute was certain that he had an email trail that would prove his side of the story, only to find that the commercial email provider he used automatically deleted emails every 90 days, which would mean he would have to rely on a discovery procedure to prevail.
The document retention policies to which you're objecting are more applicable in my view for large businesses where every additional page of information that comes under a legal hold order as part of a lawsuit represents time a lawyer will spend reviewing that document. More documents for review means more money to the lawyers.
When you're facing a new lawsuit every day (as very large enterprises do), the cost savings to document retention policies becomes very real. More generally, without a centralized archival policy, an IT group is left running around checking a million different places for content applicable to a lawsuit. Sure, its not a big deal for Fred because the places are limited and few and the lawsuits occasional, but it becomes a much harder problem at scale.
And yes, disk is cheap and getting cheaper, but if you're running IT for a F500 company, its still expensive to keep every email for every employee. 25 emails per employee per day . . . 100 KB per email . . . it adds up quick.
Of course, I keep all my emails on a local archive for personal productivity. And I log all my instant message conversations. And I keep versions upon versions of my documents. Which is a probably a statement on the value I place on personal productivity (the benefit I see from saving so much) vs. the potential risk to my employer.
Sure, in theory a large company might save some lawyer time by having an aggressive policy for disposing of old documents. (BTW, electronic-discovery firms have developed increasingly-sophisticated keyword searching software for doing preliminary document screening, which can save significant amounts of lawyer review time.)
The problem is that in many companies, document-disposition policies are aggressive in name only. People have other things to do; they don't get around to reviewing and disposing of old documents as regularly as they're supposed to. And management often monitors compliance with such policies on a sporadic basis at best.
What often happens is belated, "catch-up" document disposition. But that's likely to be portrayed as spoliation of evidence and/or obstruction of justice -- the other side will argue that the company knew or should have known that the belatedly-destroyed documents should have been preserved. That's exactly what torpedoed Arthur Andersen.
So my sense is that in many circumstances, even for large companies, the theoretical cost savings of an aggressive document-disposition policy will be more than offset by the potential downside of sporadic enforcement.
That doesn't mean document retention policies aren't a good idea. You merely need to execute them in a more consistent, automated manner because the interest of the overall organization merits it.
But the lines can blur, right?
the professional records managers will say that only something like 10 - 15% of email are 'business records'. That 10-15% is probably very far away from where the blur point is.
Our platform offers the capability to access your email archive to find important emails, documents and conversations. www.mxsense.com
Great discussion and excellent posts
I have been burned plenty of times with what was an innocent conversation and then abused by an adversary.
However, the scanner is quiet enough that you can use it while you're on conference calls. :-)
mean that it will be gone
In any case, I now keep everything as imagine the power 15 or 20 years from now where you can query your life at precise moments that has long been forgotten.
I'm with Fred. Archive everything; with full-text search, you don't even have to organize it. If you're worried about your messages being taken out of context, what better solution than producing the context?
Ok, you can do this in the privacy of your own office, but you really shouldn't say so publically.
I share the same genetic predisposition (compulsion?). But I learned in my first company to keep it a secret.
Otherwise, everyone else abandons their (pitiful) attempts at document storage and starts to rely on the knowledge that they can always ask me to retrieve the file.
Can you retract this post before it's too late?
Fred, your word documents are light-weight. Cheap to save and retrieve. What won't be light-weight in the coming years will be all the high resolution photos you'll increasingly start taking, the home movies, the huge .ppt attachments. In the coming decades, our data capture capabilities will exponentially multiply, because data about the world is infinite in nature. So "save it all" must be a losing battle in the end.
The key is algorithmic retention, and optimizing that algorithm.
I take it as an example of how a VC looks at a problem and converts that into an oppurtunity/something-else.
So you had your year-on-year cleaning at home....and you are wise enough to change that to a blog material
for lawyers and digital users....rather than spending your time with your wife and giving her reasons and
convincing her for not throwing those garbages out!!
cheers.
Kasi
We had a case in our office in which our client got a multimillion dollar settlement from a fortune 100 company in part because our client kept everything electronic and the defendant had a “retention” policy that, in those days, caused them to delete old email. The defendant made assertions in various legal filings based on the statements of their employees, which turned out to be completely false when the old emails were produced (by my client). Defendant’s credibility was, of course, completely undermined.
See also my posting Email is Forever for a similar story about instant messaging.
Having said that, not everything is electronic. Careful attorneys often purge their paper files after a transaction for a variety of reasons. One reason is that saving all those forests of paper is expensive (Iron Mountain loves it, of course). Another reason is the one that several comments pointed to: in a litigation, some very bright graduate of some elite law school will doubtless be looking for the worst possible interpretation of everything.
A story that I heard some time ago involves Larry Sonsini, one of the name partners in the venerable Silicon Valley law firm of Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich & Rosati. As the story went, he was being deposed in connection with a securities fraud case. Plaintiff’s counsel pointed to a draft document that had the letters “BS” written in Mr. Sonsini’s handwriting in the margin and asked pointedly what that could possibly have meant. Sonsini, is said to have paused, looked at the document, and responded, “Bob Short to review.”
Having said all this, I keep everything, including my handwritten notes. For better or worse, I need these things (including my notes) to remember accurately decisions, analysis and facts. Like Fred Wilson, I have been deposed, been a witness and had to produce documents (including my handwritten notes). I have never regretted it, and in two cases, my handwritten notes (made contemporaneously with events then long gone) proved critical to my client’s case.
Back to email for a moment, they seem to be a place where people will write all sorts of things that they would never say or write in a more formal letter. Be careful what you write and to whom you send it. Also be aware that whatever you send can be forwarded with ease (or with negligence). Finally, be aware of blind copies. You do not know who is getting the same email you just received.
Man buys used iPod, gets 60 pages of sensitive military data
http://bit.ly/oXFQO
I guess the lesson is that without a plan of some kind it can be easy to forget where your old data may be hiding.
Great point!!
In my opinion, you are better off spending the time to draft emails and other documents carefully so they can't be misconstrued, rather than depending on a deletion policy to wipe it away.
http://www.autonomy.com/content/Functionality/i...
From the Autonomy website:
A critical leap forward came with the ability to actually "understand" the idea behind a given phrase, and retrieve information which is conceptually related, even when a particular keyword is not used. In the above example, if the user types in the letters "D-O-G", a conceptual search engine will retrieve all the information conceptually related to but not confined to the word "D-O-G", perhaps information about a "hound" as well as "walks" and different breeds of dog, because it understands the idea represented by the word. This is incredibly powerful because critical information is often missed because users do not always use the same search terms.
This relates to my thoughts on the scalability of a service like Delicious. If I tag a bookmark with "NYC", someone else tags theirs with "Big Apple" and someone else tags theirs with "Manhattan" - there is no relevant way to link this data.....but that's a different discussion for a different thread.
r.