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Thanks to Pat Lockley from who I learned the phrase Gotchya Day, this week I knew to mark April 6 as the day in 2016 that I adopted Felix from the Payson, Arizona Humane Society.
@felixadog celebrates our 2 year “gotchya” day with a visit and donation to Human Society of Central AZ. They all remember “Fix It Felix” nods to @patlockley pic.twitter.com/s1BL9XWLOH
— Alan Levine (@cogdog) April 12, 2018
I had the original photo taken for me by a staff member as I left the facility my “new” dog. I also happen to have the same t-shirt I wore that day (from a trip to Tasmania in 2011). Cori helped with an attempt to redo the photo in 2023.
Until April 2016 as much as I wanted to have a dog, the extensive travel I was doing for work then (a lot of variable length freelance stuff) made it not feasible. Everything changed when I signed on to an 18 month project with Creative Commons (helping craft the design of what has become the Creative Commons Certification).Having solid work mostly from home for that length of time opened the doggy door, as one might say.
Here’s the thing about memory. My internal story was that the week I signed my contract I went down to the Human Society to look for a dog, but since I have contract files (and more reliable, a blog post), I actually started Creative Commons work March 16, 2016. My flickr photos I went to North Carolina 2 days later for an Indie Ed-Tech meetup at Davidson College.
So maybe I pondered the dog idea for a month. I started looking at the Payson Humane Society web page, taking note of what kinds of dogs were available.
I did make my visit to the Humane Society on April 4, 2016. I had met another dog first, some kind of Australian Shepard, named maybe? Jasper. I almost went with him, but thought it wise to just take another for a test drive.
Felix was one in a cage in the front corner, so newly arrived he was not on the site. He was making quite a noisy excited fuss which almost made my ask about the black labs further down, but I asked to see Felix out of the cage.
They let you set outside in a medium sized enclosure to wait to meet a dog. I was sitting on a low curb when they brought Felix out. He sat right next to me and leaned in to my side. That was it, I was chosen.
First pic:
I put down a deposit, as I knew I wanted him, but they encouraged new adopters to go home, check out their home, and come back to claim a dog.
I was back on April 6, no hesitation. After signing and paying the $75 fee, they brought him out to me. Here he came with now what I know as his typical excitement:
And then they offered to take the photo of us together used above.
I remember walking out to the truck and the thought came flying in my head- I have no idea if he;s going to want to jump in a strange vehicle. What do I do if he recoils in fear?
It was no issue. I opened the door, he jumped in faithfully (like he has done 4000 times since), and we drove home. He loves rides. Still.
The next day, April 7, was our first one together. He stuck his head out the rails of the front porch and gave me the iconic look that I have even out to use as my social media icon.
It’s been lots of adventures since, tracked in his own photos (2146 of them!) and tweets. And here we are together 7 years later, living on a rural acreage in Saskatchewan with a Cori in his life plus 2 cats and a world of snow to roll in and rabbits to chase.
April 6, happy Gotchya Day, Felix.
Featured Image: Composite of my own photo from April 6, 2016– Dog Smiles flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license and a redo photo today taken by Cori Saas to be posted later to flickr under a CC0 license.
Effy is at a crossroads. The energy renovation company based in France is doing well, but it is addressing a market that is much bigger than anticipated. That’s why it is making a bet. The company just closed a €20 million funding round (roughly $22 million at today’s exchange rate) from Felix Capital. This is the first external funding round for the company.
“Our story starts 15 years ago,” founder and CEO Frédéric Utzmann told me. “We tackled this market very early on because we really believed in it.”
At first, Effy wasn’t a tech-enabled startup. The company worked on energy renovation for public buildings, residential buildings and industrial facilities. “We started with heavy energy consuming projects with a business that was very much ‘brick and mortar,’ old school. But this allowed us to develop the company in a self-financed and profitable way,” Utzmann said.
Quickly after that, the company started acquiring websites and services that were useful for energy renovation projects. In 2011, the company acquired Calculeo, a tool that helps you calculate how much you can get in public subsidies for energy renovation work. In 2015, Effy acquired Quelle énergie, a VC-backed startup that could calculate how much money you would save by insulating your roof, changing your windows and more.
At the same time, Effy’s traffic started growing rapidly. Search engine optimizations led to more organic traffic. Effy started building a significant network of contractors and redirecting home owners to these partners.
In 2019, Effy chose to focus exclusively on small residential projects. Engie acquired its B2B activities for an undisclosed amount. Effy chose to reinvest everything in product development and growth. In addition to organic traffic, the company spent some money on brand awareness ads (like TV spots), as well as Google and social media ads.
And it has paid off, as Effy attracted 18 million visitors to its websites in 2022. Some people just want to use Effy’s tools to see how much money they could save with energy renovation projects. Others go one step further and submit a request for some construction work.
Effy then contacts those potential customers to understand their needs. To give you a sense of Effy’s scale, last year, the company ended up contacting 500,000 individuals and completing 100,000 energy renovation projects. Effy handled €800 million in transactions on its platform.
Effy can still improve its service in several ways. In particular, its marketplace is still mostly a lead generation product for energy renovation contractors. When potential clients want to move forward with their home projects, they are connected with independent contractors.
These contractors supply quotes, which means that it creates some friction for the end customer. They have to compare quotes between multiple contractors and pick one.
Of course, Effy spends a lot of time curating its marketplace. There are currently 3,800 contractors working with Effy. The company gathered 16,000 reviews and the average rating is 4.8 stars.
Similarly, Effy can handle the paperwork to obtain subsidies for energy renovation work. The company takes a cut on this administrative process and charges contractors a small nominal fee for new potential clients.
Effy now wants to switch to a first-party marketplace model. Clients interact directly with Effy and negotiate the quote with Effy. “Historically, we had an almost 100% third-party business — it represents 90% of our business today,” Utzmann said.
It opens up some new possibilities on the product front. First, there are a lot of optimization possibilities when it comes to creating a quote, sourcing materials and everything that isn’t the construction work itself. This way, contractors can accept more jobs as Effy handles the rest.
Second, Effy could start offering some financing options with partners. For small amounts, Effy can use “buy now, pay later” products. For bigger sums, Effy has an internal team that can negotiate credit lines with Sofinco and Cetelem.
Sure, energy renovation projects can be expensive. But customers often end up paying smaller bills once these projects are done. Effy could even look at the impact on your bills thanks to smart meters.
“Let’s say you pay €2,000 per year and you will pay €1,000 per year starting tomorrow. You could set aside €800 to pay back your investments. You end up saving less because you have to pay something back, but your house is also worth more money,” Utzmann said.
In addition to this product roadmap, Effy’s business could end up growing rapidly thanks to favorable market conditions. The war in Ukraine has had a significant impact on energy bills.
At the same time, the European Union wants to finance projects that have a positive impact on climate change. Residential buildings indirectly generate a ton of carbon emissions as it requires a lot of energy to heat and cool them. Many EU countries are rolling out generous subsidies to foster energy renovation projects.
Finally, Effy is only available in France for now. The company could expand to other European countries in the future, starting with Germany and Spain.
After bootstrapping for 15 years, energy renovation company Effy raises $22 million by Romain Dillet originally published on TechCrunch
Over the last month I have made some progress on a few different aspects of this project.
The main task in Paris was continuing working through the boxes of Georges Dumézil’s courses, held at the Collège de France archives. I’ve now done a quick first pass through all the courses he delivered there, and then went back to the less complete materials for his courses at the École pratique des hautes études (EPHE). I’d already looked at some of those before, when editing Mitra-Varuna, as that book was first delivered as a course. His handwriting remains exceptionally difficult to read, and his course materials are very messy, with lots of crossing out and marginal additions – including some on scraps of paper pasted onto the main sheets. It would be difficult, I think, to work out the order he presented things in the class. It seems to me there are good reasons, beyond his smaller audience, why these have not been edited for publication. But there are some benefits to his way of working. For one, unlike Foucault, he dates things quite precisely, and makes notes of when material has been removed to be used elsewhere. When sent letters he often adds the date he received them, and/or completes incomplete dating by the writers. In his books he often gives quite precise indications of when he first delivered material, and it does seem much, possibly most, of what he published developed from teaching. There are also a lot of additional materials in the teaching boxes – offprints, some correspondence, reading notes, etc. Some of these are interesting and make some connections I hadn’t thought about before.
I also worked through most of the first of two boxes of material relating to the administration of his courses, this one relating to the EPHE. These are something of a treasure trove of small details, with an ability to track who attended classes, and various bits of correspondence with those students. He also often indicates who attended lectures as notes on his course manuscripts. After previously reading reports of the large audiences for Foucault and Barthes, these numbers are often very small indeed. But there are some interesting names.
Various things, along with the strikes on 19th January, when the archive was closed, meant that I didn’t get to work through the second of these two boxes, relating to the Collège de France teaching, in any detail. That will be the first thing on my list when I am next back in Paris. There are also some boxes relating to Dumézil’s teaching outside of France, which I also plan to work through on a later visit.
While in the archive I try to resist following interesting lines of inquiry that the materials suggest, or even locating texts they mention, but just take down details on what is there. I make lots of notes to follow up on some things, and return to these periodically. Some lead down some long paths that would have taken up far too much time in the archive, but are interesting to explore when the archive is closed. For example, a letter to Dumézil from the Bollingen foundation, leading to a bursary for Mircea Eliade, led me to look into the funding, which came from the fortunes of Paul Mellon. The foundation was initially set up to support Carl Jung’s English translations, which opened up the question of the links between Eliade and Jung and the Eranos circle, the connection to an early French Heidegger translator, Dumézil’s trip to Peru, and the link, obliquely, to Henri Lefebvre’s friend Norbert Guterman. A rabbit hole that became a warren. Lots of paths to follow here.
I also spent a lot of time at the Bibliothèque nationale, but this time exclusively at the modern Mitterand site. There I filled in some gaps in my record of Émile Benveniste’s early teaching. The records for the EPHE are easy to access on Gallica, but the Annuaire du Collège de France only has limited coverage there, and the British Library copies don’t go back before the war. At the BnF, the 1930s and 1940s issues I wanted to look at are only on microfilm, which is a pain – unlike the British Library, the machines are not linked to computers, so it’s not possible to export images. But the records are worth digging through. As I knew from Foucault’s courses, and the work I’d done on Dumézil, the titles of courses are preannounced, and then there are, usually, reports on their content at the end of the academic year. Benveniste was elected to a chair in 1937, but only taught for two years before the war, and then not again until 1944-45 after the Liberation. As he was Jewish, he left France before the German invasion. I already had seen the records for the post-war period, where he taught until his stroke in 1969. Material from his final courses has been published as Last Lectures. Going through the old issues of the Annuaire was worthwhile, not just for the first two years he taught after his election, but also some other teaching he did there, and for some other information I found. All this will be really useful as I work in more detail on his publications, and I hope at some point with his archive.
I also did some more work on Barthes’s lecture courses, and his occasional use of Benveniste there and in his published writings. I think my notes on this are now a comprehensive survey, though I’m not sure it adds up to more than that. I also spent some time working through Lacan’s limited references to Benveniste. For knowing where to look, I am grateful to Dany Nobus, who particularly alerted me to the useful Index des noms propres et titres d’ouvrages dans l’ensemble des séminaires de Jacques Lacan, by Guy Le Gaufey and others. A couple of the references to Benveniste are in as-yet unpublished seminars, for which there are various unauthorised transcripts online, so it’s good news that the legal problems have been addressed, and the slow publication of the remaining seminars is starting up again. As I’ve previously mentioned, Seminar XIV, La Logique du fantasme was published recently.
I’ve also worked through Deleuze and Guattari’s use of Dumézil in A Thousand Plateaus, which is interesting though brief, though a bit misleading in its stark oppositions. More useful for its critical approach is Derrida’s engagement with Benveniste, especially in the hospitality and death penalty lectures, and on the question of testimony. Only parts of the testimony material are published so far, so this might be something to revisit when those lectures are published, as I imagine they are the next in the series – or perhaps to consult the manuscripts at IMEC or Irvine.
While in Paris I did some other stuff at the Mitterand site, following up on several references to things which are not easy to find in the UK. Some of these concerned some of the more obscure sources for the story of Paul Pelliot, the publications of Robert Gauthiot and related studies to the early writings of Benveniste. While I’m not sure how much I will do with the discussions of Barthes, Lacan and Derrida’s use on Benveniste, I do think there will be something on the Pelliot, Gauthiot, Meillet and Benveniste connections. I also went back to the Musée Guimet when in Paris, now with a better idea of what I was looking at. Only a little of the material Pelliot brought back is on display, but it was interesting to see at least some of his haul.
Shortly after I got home, I had the good news of the acceptance of a piece I wrote over the summer on “Foucault and Dumézil on Antiquity”. The minor revisions are now done, and the piece is in production with Journal of the History of Ideas. Since initially finishing that piece in September, along with a couple of other pieces still out to review, it’s been good to take a bit of distance from Foucault, after his work being the focus of my research for most of the last decade. But before Christmas I did write a review of Elisabetta Basso’s excellent Young Foucault: The Lille manuscripts on psychopathology, phenomenology, and anthropology, 1952–1955, translated by Marie Satya McDonough (Columbia University Press, 2022) in The Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences. The review is unfortunately behind a paywall, so I posted some key excerpts on this blog, and I’m happy to share the full review if you email me. I have agreed to write a chapter on “Foucault and structuralism” for a major collection, but that’s not due for eighteen months so I have plenty of time to think about that. I think these are likely to be the last pieces on Foucault for a while.
Previous updates on this project can be found here, along with links to some research resources and forthcoming publications, including the reedition of Dumézil’s Mitra-Varuna. There is a lot more about the Foucault work here. The final volume, The Archaeology of Foucault, is now out in the UK, with the rest of the world to follow shortly.
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