I was chatting with Adam Schokora from our Shanghai office over dinner last night. Seems we’re both Dead heads – folks a generation apart in age, yet we share a love for the Grateful Dead.

We pretty much agreed that most of the Dead’s studio work was uninspired; they came alive when they were on stage playing for their faithful. I probably saw somewhere between 50 – 75 shows. My first was in February 1974 at Winterland in San Francisco. My last in Hamilton, Ontario in March 1990. The Dead never played the same song the same way, and they never played the same set twice. The simply played whatever they felt like playing in the moment.

In the end, some shows were absolutely amazing. I particularly liked their 1976 New Year’s Eve show at the Cow Palace and the SYF shows at Winterland (both in San Francisco, where I went to high school); the infamous bootleg from their 1977 show at Cornell University has the best Deal I’ve ever heard.

But for every brilliant show, there were a handful that were just as bad – forgotten words, missed cues, flared tempers and so on. None of that really mattered to the audience. We were just happy to be there. No, the Dead played (and lived) without a net... flaunting their imperfections every step of the way. And we ate it up.

Fast forward to today. Funnily enough, I see a lot of parallels between my pony-tailed, tie-dye days and our current communications landscape. Before you laugh too hard, think about it: Every person and every conversation is different. We're all free spirits who want it "live," not pre-scripted, overly edited and force-fed. We all want to hang out with people like us -- wherever and whenever we feel like it. And open-ness and mutual respect are the order of the day.

To think, Mom never thought those nights at Winterland would pay off.