Weekend Musings

Hello, Happy Saturday and welcome to my weekend musings. This week has been one of the best, yet most intense weeks of the year. As many of you know Fashion Metric had a major collaboration with GILT which was a lot of fun and we had some fantastic and inspiring meetings. It has been like summer here in LA which has been great for our morning beach walks. The photo below was from our walk yesterday morning, if you notice in the background you’ll see dolphins out by the paddle boarder. An entire school of dolphins was swimming very close to the shore, not something you see every day but pretty spectacular!

Marina del Rey Beach

I really love living so close to the ocean, our morning walks are where we get some of our strategic planning done. Sometimes you have to pull yourself away from the computer, away from the whiteboard, and just let your mind open up to the possibilities. Fashion Metric is not a small business, it’s not a lifestyle business, we are building a multi-billion dollar company. Sounds crazy? Then call me crazy but that’s our goal, and given that the online menswear market is a $49B opportunity with only 10% of sales happening online, it can happen, and yes, I am confident we will be the ones to do it.

I love my domain business, love the domain industry, but honestly I never see my domain business even doing tens of millions of dollars. We will always be able to live comfortably, but I don’t see buying and selling domains as a way to change the world. I love helping startups acquire domains and it’s great to see some of these companies go on to build successful and disruptive companies. However it’s never been my dream to provide people a domain to go off and change the world, I’ve always wanted to change the world myself.

Okay, enough of the mushy stuff. This morning we are having breakfast with our law firm, yes, as a startup you’ll spend a lot of time with your lawyers so you better pick people that you like. Then we’ll probably go for a walk on the beach, grab some lunch and possibly take a nap. We’ve been working late and getting up early so any little dashes of sleep I can get here and there really do go a long way.

Breaking Bad

We started watching Breaking Bad a few weeks ago and I have to say it is fucking awesome (can I swear on my blog?). We tried starting it a few times over the last couple of years but could never get past the first episode, it seemed so dark and depressing and I really wasn’t sure why anyone would want to watch a show about a guy who makes meth. Watch the first four episodes and then try stopping, it’s honestly one of the best-written, best-acted shows I’ve ever seen which is why it’s won so many awards.

This morning I got a notification from my hosting provider that Kayaking.org is exceeding it’s bandwidth limit. I went to take a look and the site is getting 36,000 unique visitors a month. If you visit the site you’ll scratch your head like I am right now. This is a project that has been abandoned, at a time it was making good money but like most things in life, it takes focus, a focus that I haven’t given it since it’s not a priority. Honestly it has a classified ads theme up with about five ads, nothing added in months, and a bunch of old blog posts…I’m thinking this is probably just some strange spam traffic but I’ll be investigating more today.

kayaking-org

It’s also the reason why I say you really can’t build-out too many of your domains because it does take a lot of time and energy for each one. Right now 99.9% of my time goes-into Fashion Metric so outside of this blog and keeping the team at Linton Investments inspired and rocking I don’t have time for anything else.

I used to be a guy who would do all of these “projects” – I would hop from one idea to the next and announce on my blog, “now I’m doing this!” and “now I’m doing that!” You haven’t seen that for a long time since my focus is now very singular – Fashion Metric, Fashion Metric, and Fashion Metric. On that note, it’s time to go meet our lawyers to talk more about Fashion Metric 🙂

I hope you are all having a great weekend and if you haven’t watched Breaking Bad, give it a shot, I think you might just find that you like it…once you get past the first few episodes.

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton