Closer To The Ideal

Fred Wilson hopes more entrepreneurs get funded.

I second Ron Conway’s hope that “any entrepreneur that has “the guts” to start a company gets funded.” That is my kind of thinking. We need more entrepreneurship, not less. So I’m with Ron 100% on this. Of course getting funded does not means 10s of millions of dollars of funding for every entrepreneur. It means enough funding to actually build something and see if the idea and the team has the right stuff to build a company. Then market forces should take over and determine what ideas and teams get more funding and which ones should close the doors and think about what is next for them.

Mike Arrington expressed the contrary opinion, apparently held by many VCs (not me), that this mini explosion in angel investing is creating a bunch of “dipshit companies.” I don’t know what a dipshit company is. I haven’t seen one. If you listen to the chatter on the Techcrunch comment threads, you will see that people think Twitter and Foursquare are dipshit companies. Fine. Many great companies have been built on a wall of derision and I personally think those two are going to join that list of laughed at great companies (and maybe already have). My point is you just don’t know what is a crazy idea and what is a brilliant idea. And you don’t know what is a great team and what is a weak team. Of course, we have our opinions on that. We make those judgment calls every day. But we are often wrong. VCs are wrong more often than they are right. It is good for VCs if 10x or 100x companies get angel funding. That is more opportunity for us.

This is a great article on where A/B testing can wrong. It rings true with me. I’ve recently been A/B testing a lot of the ads we run for Codewi.se, and I admit, in my impatience, I’m often ready to read significance into results before enough data has come in.

Last week I tossed a coin a hundred times. 49 heads. Then I changed into a red t-shirt and tossed the same coin another hundred times. 51 heads. From this, I conclude that wearing a red shirt gives a 4.1% increase in conversion in throwing heads.

A ridiculous experiment (yes, I really did it) with a ridiculous conclusion, yet I sometimes see similarly unreliable analysis in A/B testing.

It’s logical and laudable that designers should seek data in our quest for verifiability and return on investment. But data must be handled with care, and mathematical rigour isn’t a common part of a designer’s repertoire.

This bit sums up how reliance on tests can lead to bad design:

Logical positivism and design don’t mix – not everything we do can be empirically verified – yet some businesses fall back on A/B testing in lieu of genuine design thinking. I call this the “A/B death spiral”, and it plays out something like this:

Designer: Here’s a new design for this screen. You’ll see it has a new navigation style, tweaked colour palette and I’ve moved the main interactions to a tabbed area.

Product owner: Wow, those are pretty big changes for such a high-risk screen. I tell you what: let’s test them individually to see which of these changes works and which doesn’t…

As the proverb suggests, sometimes you can’t jump a twenty foot chasm in two ten foot leaps. Cherry-picking only those design elements that are “proven” by an A/B test can be a route to fragmented, incoherent design. It may earn marginally more money in the short term, but it becomes hard to avoid a descent into poor UX and the long-term harm this causes.

This is a good article with good reminders about how to handle stuff like Functions with Arbitrary Number of Arguments. However, I almost never use any of this stuff. Partly, these seem to go against default assumptions of how people use PHP. If I want more freedom about handing parameters to functions, maybe I should be using a more flexible language, like Ruby or Javascript?

PHP allows anything. It is something of a dump. Any feature of any language is eventually offered in PHP. Nowadays, PHP even has closures and name spaces, badly done and awkwardly implemented. But do we have to use the features, just because they exist? When I really want closures, shouldn’t I use a language that has an elegant, beautiful implementation of closures, like Ruby or Groovy?

And then, there is the argument that PHP sometimes encourages too much flexibility. Consider GLOB:

Using Glob() to Find Files
Many PHP functions have long and descriptive names. However it may be hard to tell what a function named glob() does unless you are already familiar with that term from elsewhere.
Think of it like a more capable version of the scandir() function. It can let you search for files by using patterns.
view plaincopy to clipboardprint?
// get all php files
$files = glob(’*.php’);

print_r($files);
/* output looks like:
Array
(
[0] => phptest.php
[1] => pi.php
[2] => post_output.php
[3] => test.php
)
*/

Most of my work nowadays involves working with frameworks, such as Symfony. Maybe the framework might use glob, but I never will. Too flexible. (Possibly I might use it for a command line script? I use PHP to write most of my command line scripts. But seems like ls piped to grep gives me most of what I need when I’m trying to match files on the command line.)

Memory Usage Information could be really useful, though 99.9% of the time, if I’m using PHP, then I want to be protected from having to know about how my code is interacting with the hardware.

I like this:

Someone interviewed me a few months back for an entrepreneurship project, and he mentioned that in his conversations the thing that stood out most was the willingness of great entrepreneurs to be vulnerable. It’s not the first association you’d make with an entrepreneur. Words like “driven,” “ambitious,” and “persistent” usually come to mind. But the moment he said it I knew he’d hit the nail on the head.

Vulnerability. It is the most poignant quality in every entrepreneur I know.

There’s a misfit in each of us, and it’s the most delicate, precious thing that we have. Sadly, most people make it their life’s mission to hide it, to cover it over in the same clothes, the same work, the same “regurgitations,” as Thomas Merton wrote, as everyone else. This virus of homogenization has infected the landscape. Our backdrop in real life now mimics the scenery repetition you’d see in a Fred Flintstone cartoon as he drove down the street. But now it’s Home Depot-Walmart-McDonalds-Starbucks; Home Depot-Walmart-McDonalds-Starbucks; Home Depot-Walmart-McDonalds-Starbucks.

…To embrace the misfit in oneself is to be vulnerable. It is to forsake the easy acceptance that comes with fitting in and to instead be fortified by a kind of love, really. A love of life, a love of wonder, and, ultimately, a sustaining love for oneself. Far from egoism, that love for oneself is a measure of one’s love for others, for humanity. And it is only from love that great ideas can be born.

This kind of love cannot be taught in business school. It has to be felt. It has to be given sanctuary away from the noise and relentless assault of information. And then it has to be nurtured. It must be embraced, in the light of day, for all to see, for people to ridicule, to criticize, to laugh at. And the entrepreneur has to be willing to feel the pain of that ridicule and suffer the risk of the dream being stolen, or crushed by the meanness of this world. But the misfit doesn’t worry about that. The misfit has a higher calling: to bring the unmanifest into being, no matter who is saying what.

This part is good:

Turning the other cheek turns out to have selfish advantages. Someone who does you an injury hurts you twice: first by the injury itself, and second by taking up your time afterward thinking about it. If you learn to ignore injuries you can at least avoid the second half. I’ve found I can to some extent avoid thinking about nasty things people have done to me by telling myself: this doesn’t deserve space in my head. I’m always delighted to find I’ve forgotten the details of disputes, because that means I hadn’t been thinking about them. My wife thinks I’m more forgiving than she is, but my motives are purely selfish.

I gather that when Paul Graham needs to think about something, he takes a shower. I, instead, go for a walk, but I suppose everyone has their own favorite way to daydream and muse about an issue:

I suspect a lot of people aren’t sure what’s the top idea in their mind at any given time. I’m often mistaken about it. I tend to think it’s the idea I’d want to be the top one, rather than the one that is. But it’s easy to figure this out: just take a shower. What topic do your thoughts keep returning to? If it’s not what you want to be thinking about, you may want to change something.

I am amazed at how many people, in 2010, pretend that the only model of genetic influence is one of genetic determinism, or who fail to grasp the basics of evolution, or even the simple idea that the people who currently exist are just a small sample of all of the possibilities allowed by our genes. These debates have gone on for decades, but still the common responses are the ones that were common 40 years ago.

I responded more in the comments of that post.

From Arnold Kling:

But part of me worries that the the much-vaunted flexibility of the U.S. labor market is a thing of the past. Robert Fogel tells us that the three long-term superior goods are leisure, health care, and education. Obviously, an increase in leisure does not increase employment, although it certainly creates opportunities in complementary goods and services.

But health care and education in the U.S. are arguably the most cartelized labor markets in the world. How many entrepreneurial ideas in those fields are rendered implausible by credentialing issues? If you want your innovative school to draw customers, you have to get accredited–not to mention dealing with the fact that your competition gets public funds and you do not. Your innovative health care delivery process will run afoul of medical license and practice laws.

We probably could be retraining lots of unemployed workers to serve the education and health care industries in productive ways. But the credentials bottleneck is very restrictive.

Interesting:

Nobody would argue that Torrance’s tasks, which have become the gold standard in creativity assessment, measure creativity perfectly. What’s shocking is how incredibly well Torrance’s creativity index predicted those kids’ creative accomplishments as adults. Those who came up with more good ideas on Torrance’s tasks grew up to be entrepreneurs, inventors, college presidents, authors, doctors, diplomats, and software developers. Jonathan Plucker of Indiana University recently reanalyzed Torrance’s data. The correlation to lifetime creative accomplishment was more than three times stronger for childhood creativity than childhood IQ.

Interesting:

Since then, the cost of genetic sequencing has fallen dramatically in a biotechnology equivalent of Moore’s Law. Mapping the first human genome took years and cost $3 billion. Now it takes only 8 days and $10,000. Industry analysts predict that in three years, it will take only 15 minutes and a mere $1000 — comparable to many routine medical tests.

In theory, every cell in our body is genetically identical, but of course, the current working state of each cell is unique. After all, some cells become kidney cells, and others become bone cells, and others become brain cells. The cells specialize, and in their current working state they hold the information that tells them what their specialty is suppose to be. I suspect the biggest breakthrough in genetics will come when sequencing the genome is cheap enough that we can compare the whole chromosomes of multiple cells in our body, and thus see how the current working state of each is different. Indeed, it is hard to imagine how we will come up with a cure for cancer, till we better understand the forces that normally work to keep the current state consistent.

Interesting bit about Chrometa. Apparently there was no magic bullet for them, just pure persistence.

Our Lessons Learned

Focus on one, and only one, initial market. Otherwise it’s very easy and tempting to spread yourself too thin. If you’re trying to tackle a few initial markets in parallel, you’ll become frustrated if you don’t move the needle in any of them. It’s hard enough to move the needle in one market with a new product.

It’s easy to get discouraged if things don’t ramp as fast as you had hoped. Grit and persistence do pay off. Especially if you are bootstrapping your efforts (as we did). Of course you want to ramp up adoption and sales in the classic hockey stick fashion – but it rarely happens this way in practice. As long as your customers are paying for your product – and they are happy with it after their purchase – you are doing fine. That means the fundamentals of your situation are good. And you just need to go find more customers – and that is very doable (easier said than done, but doable!)

Buzz and coverage won’t necessarily make your business (but bad press could very well break it). We’ve been covered by major mainstream and industry sources – and you’d be surprised what actually has and has not moved the needle for us. One example I always use is our very first piece of media coverage, by none other than Inc Magazine. How cool, right? While it was very cool for us personally, our product wasn’t yet ready for prime time – AND, the coverage wasn’t exactly geared towards a Chrometa prospect (since it was about raising angel funding) – so the overall effect of this particular piece was somewhat smaller than you might expect. Whereas coverage in industry specific publications (such as TechnoLawyer) has really worked great for us. So it’s tough to anticipate the effect a piece of coverage will have on your business – but I’d say the tendency for us optimistic entrepreneurs is to overestimate that effect.

A really interesting look at the “winner takes all” dynamics of being a fashion model:

“I can’t just book any girl I want,” he explained. “After I see all the girls, you know, I call the agents up and I say these are the girls that I would like for this show. And they don’t normally give me girls right away. The first thing they ask you is, “Well who else is in the show?” … They want to know who else you’ve got. So I always have to get that one girl. If I can get, I guess this season was Coco.” At this he rolls his eyes, and continues, “You know as soon as I got Coco in the show, it was like, okay now I’ll book whoever I want.”

Today, this casting director still cannot see what it is about Coco that makes her a winner. “But now,” he explained, “it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what I think now. Like she is, you know, it right now.” As in the fable of “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” even if one does not believe in the legitimacy of a social order, one obeys the conventions of a social order because one believes that other people find it legitimate and will obey, a classic condition of legitimacy noted by Max Weber. Quite possibly, one may not be able grasp why a model stands out as a winner, but the label legitimates itself as other tastemakers imitate their high-status peers.

Imitation, however, is a funny thing. It’s not so simple as mere mimicry of established players, because in fact, established players are just the best imitators. That is, a successful and powerful fashion client like Russell Marsh also has to know what to imitate, and crucially, the right moment. To do this, they need a little help. I found both formal and informal means of sharing information in the fashion market. Informally, producers talk. They hang out throughout the week at lunches, dinners, parties—at one point I studied booking agents in New York who had a regular karaoke party with clients and models. They talk constantly, facebooking, texting, and drinking; they even date each other. They share social and cultural space, and they pick up on the gossip, or “the buzz,” this way. Naturally, social ties are important for producers to figure out what’s fashionable, since there is so much uncertainty and ambiguity in their work. Lots of industries work this way: publishing, film, art, and even, sociologists have found, financial investing.

I especially like the conclusion, that points out how much the public partakes in booms such as the housing boom, and then afterwards the public seeks to put the blame on a few greedy executives, rather than admit their guilt:

But perhaps most worrisome in the fallout of the economic crisis is our ongoing commitment to an ethos of individualism to make sense of it all. We chalk the crash up to a few bad apples and “greedy” executives gone astray—not far off, by the way, from rhetoric in the fashion press celebrating the genius new beauty of Coco. Without a view of the market as a social body—composed of individuals acting in concert with each other, aided by financial models, and bound together by conventions to help them anticipate one another’s actions—we can’t see how participants act together. Yet their collectively attuned steps can inflate or deflate the value of assets, thus building economic values from cultural ones. Don’t take Fashion Week at face value; the catwalk delivers an important sociological lesson for free market enthusiasts.

A great post by Smart As A Bear, about the delusions people suffer regarding the advantages their startups have, or rather, do not have.

This sounds smart, and yet, I can not agree with it:

For the last five years, I’ve been a Japanese salaryman, and have often worked 70 hour weeks out of a sense of social obligation. I understand, very well, the social pressures which could lead someone to write “If your nearest competitor or neighbour works X hours, you must work for X+1 hours.” It is just a terrible strategy. Your competitor can adopt it as easily as you can, and then you’re playing a game of multiplayer endurance chicken against everyone else in your market. You can’t win but you can certainly all lose, by ending up with an entire community where soul-crushing hours are normative. (There are certain tendencies to this among Silicon Valley startups. Take it from a Japanese salaryman, guys: it is a disease so vicious that in addition to hobbling businesses it damages society itself. We’re barely beginning to recover from it decades later.)

Why can’t you win? Well, suppose that longer hours are indeed the key to success and that Paras is willing to work longer hours than 99.9% of the population of India. I don’t know how many hours that is at the 99.9% level, but call it 82 a week. He’ll work 82 hours and then find, oh shoot, over a million people are willing to work more.

Working harder is a particularly bad idea for startups because you are likely competing with people with resources which, relative to yours, are infinite. I compete with several educational publishers who employ tens of thousands. Paras competes with Google. Our competitors have more man-hours in a week than we’ll have in the next decade. Engaging them on those terms is madness.

I agree that I will never have the resources of Google. I can not assign 200 programmers to work on my websites all day. But I draw a different conclusion than the above – the conclusion I draw is that I should not compete with Google. I do not think startups should go after something that is the focus of a giant company. Startups need to get going by focusing on a niche, or focusing on some new possibility that no one has yet focused on. For both the niche and the unique opportunity, there is usually only a small window when you can work without facing a lot of competition. During that small window, I think you do need to work 70 hours a week. You need to get a little bit of a head start, so when the avalanche of competition, including Google, finally decides to compete with you, you already have some momentum, and hopefully some advantages that allow you to stay in the game, even when companies thousands of times bigger than you are coming straight at you.

Working 70 hours a week is not sustainable over the long term, but we are not talking about the long term. We are talking about the 2 or 3 years of your life that you try to launch a startup. Those 2 or 3 years are going to be a unique era in your life. Like hiking the Appalachian Trail, bicycling from New York to California or fasting for a week, launching a startup entails unique strains, but also opens the door to a unique adventure. You probably didn’t work 70 hours a week when you were 15, nor are you likely to work that much when you are 60, but somewhere in between, you might want to give it a try for a few years.

I used to participate in a lot of discussions in the startup groups on LinkedIn. I would also answer questions in those forums. However, LinkedIn is visually cluttered. Also, they allow mountains of spam to get in. The management of LinkedIn does not seem to care very much about their own website. As a heavy user of LinkedIn, I have to say I am really unimpressed with the direction (or lack of it) they’ve taken over the last 3 years.

Where can I go to find great discussions about startups?

Answers On Startups could be interesting. Clearly, it does not yet have a big audience. I assume, from its look, that it is based on Stack Overflow. I am sorry to say that its interface looks cluttered (I have the same criticism of Stack Overflow).

Founders Space has great people behind it, and great energy, but as yet it lacks a critical mass of discussions.

Hacker News attracts a crowd of programmers who are also interested in startups. However, the focus is on tech, not the messy details of running a business.

Any suggestions on other places? I’m under the impression that there is no perfect place.

I have occasionally cut corners in the programming of my own websites, but I lack the resources that LinkedIn has. I’ve often been annoyed for the bad design and visual clutter of LinkedIn, but lately I’ve been noticing that the programming itself is sloppy. For instance, I just wrote a status update comment that was too long and tried to post it. I was given an error message, which you can see below (see the pink?), but I was not given a chance to edit the comment. Instead, everything I wrote was simply erased.

This is the kind of thing that I would be embarrassed about on my own sites, but on a big site like LinkedIn, it’s really shocking.

I like artists who have range, who go to extremes, and who can do opposite things. All of which is true of Stephin Merritt’s albums Distortion and Realism.

“I thought of the two records as a pair,” Merritt reveals, “and I kind of wanted them to be called True and False. But I couldn’t decide which I wanted to be called True and which I wanted to be called False. They both have to do with the notions of truth and falsehood in recording and music—not particularly with the lyrics but with the production style. Distortion went as far as one could really go in the direction of stylized noise-pop, which is probably the limit of stylization in rock before it turns into some other genre. And Realism is folk, although I couldn’t really bring myself to go all the way with folk. I can’t stand the sound of an acoustic guitar for more than three minutes at a time. So I didn’t go really, really folk, I thought I would go in a ‘variety folk’ format, like a Judy Collins or a Judy Henkse album. Most of my favorite records are variety records. Distortion was one monolithic production idea and Realism is a more kaleidoscopic approach to a genre.”

Merritt was inspired by the orchestrated British folk of the late ’60s / early ’70s, which had evolved beyond the strictures of traditional music following sustained exposure to the psychedelic movement, and by the groundbreaking work of arranger-producer Joshua Rifkin on Collins’ In My Life and Wildflowers. Says Merritt, “It was as if the world were put on one record, where you have absolutely no idea what’s coming next. I like that in radio programming. I like it when I’m deejaying, I like doing it on my own records. With Collins’ records, there are hardly any musicians in common from track to track and each song is written by a different person.” Merritt, of course, writes everything himself. “I just pretend to be a lot of different writers.”

A surprising attack on Rails, from someone who built their whole business around Rails. Also, some surprising praise for the stability of Java and its frameworks.

There’s also a ton of fragmentation. Do you need a queue library? Something for url slugs? There seem to be 10 of everything. And most of them are not maintained. You better hope that the library you choose to build on top of still exists a year from now.

Contrast that with iPhone development: I think I found one bug in the iOS SDK last year, and it was fixed before I could even report it. I’m sure those on the bleeding edge see more issues, but my experience has been perfect.

Similarly, Posterous leverages Java quite a bit for our email processing. And in years of developing our email engine, I haven’t found a single bug in those frameworks. Obviously these Java frameworks are much older and mature.

At the end of the day, building on high quality frameworks that just work lets me focus on my code and my product. I want to build on top of developer tools and libraries, not fight them.

Interesting:

It’s no accident that both modernism and modern fantasy made their entrances at that moment, in that same displaced generation. It’s rarely remarked upon, but just as Virginia Woolf and Joyce and Hemingway were inventing the modernist novel, Hope Mirrlees and Lord Dunsany and Eric Rücker Eddison were writing the first modern fantasy novels, at least in the form most fans are familiar with. This happened for a reason. Modernism and fantasy were two very different responses to the same disaster: the arrival of the modern era and the death of Woolf’s beloved nursery-world. Though like siblings—or roommates—who are mortally embarrassed by each other, they’re not in the habit of acknowledging the connection. Like Woolf and Dutton, modernism and fantasy are each other’s uncanny double.

The resemblance isn’t immediately obvious. The modernists were interested in confronting reality directly, and meticulously documenting their experiences of it—like Woolf, they had no patience for those who dallied with fays. The modernists are the cool ones: modernism is the twentieth century’s most canonized, most critically decorated literary movement, while fantasy remains one of the least assimilated and least critically understood genres. Over the years the academics who tend the canon have extended rope ladders down to some of the “lower” forms: science fiction, detective fiction, comic books. But never fantasy. High-status literary novelists love to dabble in genre writing—David Foster Wallace, Margaret Atwood, Doris Lessing, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Cormac McCarthy have all written science-fiction novels, for example. But by and large fantasy remains proudly, stubbornly culturally radioactive. The fantasist is not a pukka Sahib.

But fantasy and modernism aren’t just opposites, they’re mirror images of each other. When the social, cultural, and technological catastrophe that inaugurated the twentieth century took place, leaving the neat, coherent Victorian universe a desecrated ruin, all that was left for writers to do was to sift disconsolately through the rubble and dream of the organic, vital world that had once been. Modernism was pieced together out of the jagged shards of that shattered world—it’s a literature made of fragments, the better to resemble the carnage it represented. Whereas fantasy was a vision of that lost, longed-for world itself, a dream of a medieval England that never was: green, whole, prelapsarian, magical.

Here and there you can spot their shared heritage, the places where modernism and fantasy touch. Modernists and fantasists both rework myths and legends: you can watch King Arthur and his knights trot, obscured but still visible, through Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (in the person of the knightly Percival), and Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (“Arser of the Rum Tipple”) to emerge into the sunlit meadows of T. H. White’s The Once and Future King. Modernism and fantasy are set against the same landscapes: verdant preindustrial hills and dark, broken ruins. La tour abolie of “The Waste Land” is the architectural double of Orthanc, the tower of Saruman the White in The Lord of the Rings. The green fields of Narnia abut the “fresh green breast of the new world” that Fitzgerald invokes at the end of The Great Gatsby.

Articles like this are worrisome to me. TypePad is losing out to Tublr.

Typepad’s waning popularity could have more to do with economics than features, as Tumblr’s freemium model is probably much more appealing to users than Typepad’s premium service (especially when one considers the recession the world is in).

Regardless of which number you use, Typepad’s fall from grace (at Tumblr’s expense nonetheless) will probably motivate other blog platforms to follow WordPress’s lead and mimic the micro blogging site.

Although it still isn’t too late for Six Apart to revamp Typepad and reclaim the bronze (as currently WordPress and Blogger hold the silver and gold, respectively), the company may want to redouble their efforts on making Typepad more appealing (perhaps by dropping the price?), as falling into irrelevancy could ultimately hurt their bottom line.

I have a few questions in my head:

Does Tumblr make any money? TypePad charges so its revenue is more solid up front.

37 Signals is doing well, so I think it is a little too easy to suggest that a freemium model always beats a paid model. However, as the folks at 37 Signals like to point out, it is much easier to sell to businesses than to consumers. Consumers on the web expect things to be free. Businesses, other the hand, are used to paying for things.

Obviously, I think about my site Codewi.se when I write these words. I assume we get most of our money from businesses. I take some relief in that thought. (Not that it has been easy to sell our services. It has been very difficult and slow, and the amount of money involved is still trivial.)

I suspect that paid and freemium models can both be made to work. TypePad has failed to do anything interesting in many, many years. Their great breakthrough was MoveableType, which was released in 2001. What new, interesting thing has it done then? It did introduce Trackback, which was a badly designed idea that invited spam (read this hilarious satire).

I wonder what it is like to work at a company run by a husband and wife team? I assume one can not confide in one about the other. One can not go to Ben and say:

“Mena flaked out in public and subjected people in the audience to a hypocritical attack.”

One can only say:

“Mena was so right about the need for accountability.”

I would think only one side of the issue can really be expressed? In meetings, you are not just facing off against 1 executive who has done badly, you are also facing off against their spouse. Surely this must stifle some of the honesty that one needs to have a board meeting?

The USA has been in slow, relative economic decline for several decades now, and severely so in recent years. The next big economic boom will probably come from the gathering revolution in our understanding of biology, in general, and genetics in particular. Sad to say, the USA might miss this next boom, due to an unwillingness to teach it in schools. If the USA does well during the boom in genetics, it will be a remarkable demonstration of how much a well educated elite can achieve in defiance of the ignorance of the masses.

A great rebuke to those who would suggest that software will always run faster if it is written in C. A good reminder that there are many things that influence the speed of software, and efficient use of CPU cycles is only one.

I was recently drawn into another discussion about a claim that project Foo was faster than project Bar because Foo is written in C (or maybe C++) and Bar is written in Java. In my experience, as a long-time kernel programmer and as someone who often codes in C even when there are almost certainly better choices, such claims are practically always false. The speed at which a particular piece of code executes only has a significant effect if your program can find something else to do after that piece is done – in other words, if your program is CPU-bound and/or well parallelized. Most programs are neither. The great majority of programs fit into one or more of the following categories.

I/O-bound. Completing a unit of work earlier just means waiting longer for the next block/message.

Memory-bound. Completing a unit of work earlier just means more time spent thrashing the virtual-memory system.

Synchronization-bound (i.e. non-parallel). Completing a unit of work earlier just means waiting longer for another thread to release a lock or signal an event – and for the subsequent context switch.

Algorithm-bound. There’s plenty of other work to do, and the program can get to it immediately, but it’s wasted work because a better algorithm would have avoided it altogether. We did all learn in school why better algorithms matter more than micro-optimization, didn’t we?

If you look at this excellent list of performance problems based on real-world observation, you’ll see that most of the problems mentioned (except #5) fit this characterization and wouldn’t be solved by using a different language. It’s possible to run many synchronization-bound programs on one piece of hardware, with or without virtualization, but the fewer resources these programs share the more likely it becomes that you’ll just become memory-bound instead. On the flip side, if a program is purely disk-bound or memory-bound then you can obtain more of those resources by distributing work across many machines, but if you don’t know how to implement distributed systems well you’ll probably just become network-bound or synchronization-bound. In fact, the class of programs that exhibit high sensitivity to network latency – a combination of I/O-boundedness and synchronization-boundedness – is large and growing.

As a matter of personality, I tend to think about disruptive changes more than I think about incremental change. I have a great respect for Shigeo Shingo, W. Edwards Deming, kanban, Toyota and TQM, but I am not personally inspired to pursue those kinds of innovations. What I dream about is disruptive change. So it is interesting for me to read an essay that is highly critical of pursuing disruptive change:

There’s nothing wrong with incremental improvement. What’s wrong with doing something interesting, useful, new, but not transcendental? What’s wrong with taking a known problem with a known market and just doing it better or with a fresh perspective or with a modern approach? Do you have you create a new market and turn everyone’s assumptions upside down to be successful? Should you?

I’m not so sure. Here’s my argument:

1. It’s hard to explain the benefits of disruption.

Have you tried to explain Twitter someone? Not the “140 characters” part — the part about why it’s a fundamental shift in how you meet and interact with people?

Hasn’t the listener always responded by saying, “I don’t need to know what everyone had for lunch. Who cares? What’s next, ‘I’m taking a dump?’” They don’t get it, right? But it’s hard to explain.

There are ways to elucidate the utility of Twitter, but even the good ones are lengthy and require listeners with patience and open minds — two attributes in short supply.

“It’s hard to explain” should not be a standard part of your sales pitch. “You just need to try it” and “trust me” don’t cut it. That may be OK for Twitter — today — but what about the 100 other social-networking-slash-link-sharing networks that didn’t survive? Ask them about selling intangible benefits.

2. It’s hard to sell disruption, because people don’t want to be disrupted.

If you’re reading this you’re probably more open to new ideas and new products than most, because you’re inventing a new product, starting a company, or you’re just ruffled because I’m pissing on “disruptive” and you’re looking for nit-picky things to argue with me about.

But most people are creatures of habit. They don’t want their lives turned upside down. They launch into a tirade of obscenities if you just rearrange their toolbar. When they hear about a new social media craze they cringe in agony, desperately hoping it’s a passing fad and not another new goddamn thing they’ll be aimlessly paddling around in for the next decade.

Change is hard, so a person has to be experiencing real pain to want change. Selling a point-solution for a point-problem is easier than getting people to change how they live their lives. Identifying specific pain points and explaining how your software addresses those is easier than trying to tap into a general malaise and promising a better world.

I like this post about leadership:

Proof of leadership is found in followers. If other people follow your foray to the unknown, then you are a leader.

I’ll reiterate: proof of leadership is found in followers.

Several factors come into play when people emerge as leaders: their character (who they are), their relationships (who they know), their knowledge (what they know), their intuition (what they feel), their experience (where they’ve been), their past success (what they’ve done), and their ability (what they can do).

There is a difference between leadership with leverage, where someone follows you because you have control over their salary, academic history, or can hold some other gun to their head, and pure leadership, which stems from influence.

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Also, it is incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to fake skill. Studies have demonstrated that experts remember more details from conversations in subjects of their expertise, spot more nuanced features when glancing at a subject-relevant object, and can have quicker response times to questions. When you are talking with someone, through your response time and other subtle cues, they can get an intuitive read of your preparedness or expertise.

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Maxwell says we add value when we value others, when we make ourselves more valuable to others, and when we know and relate to what others value. This last one is huge, both in personal life and in business. On a business’s website, we should tailor our messaging to what the customer actually cares about instead of bragging about our own success. In writing this blog, I am going to try to be aware that examples I provide from my personal life actually help drive points home and are not simply self-serving egocentricity (I have already done some vicious editing).

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7. Law of respect – people naturally follow leaders stronger than themselves

This one is huge. Having an understanding of this is very important to understanding human nature. People will only follow leaders stronger than themselves and very rarely follow leaders weaker than themselves. People may follow someone weaker if it’s in the context of the workplace, or if they absolutely need to in order to achieve some personal end. However, people will rarely comply with people weaker than them and they will resent having to follow someone weaker than them. (It could be fun to do an analysis of leadership in the context of the TV show The Office, wherein frustration results from having a non-leader, Michael Scott, with a leadership title. Incidentally, I am planning another post about The Office, tentatively titled “Information Theory and Comedy”).

This last bit, about The Office, reminds me of Keith Johnstone’s theory that most humor involves some kind of inversion of social status.

12. Law of empowerment – only secure people give power to others

If you’re feeling insecure about this, Maxwell claims the paradoxical “making yourself dispensable, you actually make yourself indispensable”. Unfortunately, he does not justify it from a logical perspective, but it seems intuitively right and I’m ready to believe him based on his extensive leadership experience. Maybe the paradox is true because having the ability to empower people is a leadership trait, and strong leaders are always desirable.

Also, he recommends that you start believing in your people. Dwell on their positive qualities and characteristics; look for their greatest strengths and envision how they could leverage those strengths to achieve significant things. You gain nothing by dwelling on their weaknesses (except, perhaps, when evaluating for termination or reassignment). As Dale Carnegie advises, “Don’t criticize, condemn or complain.”

16. Law of the big mo – momentum is a leader’s best friend

In top-tier organizations, there is a spirit of excellence that produces positive upward momentum.

1. Momentum is the great exaggerator
2. Momentum makes leaders look better than they are
3. Momentum helps followers perform better than they are
4. Momentum is easier to steer than start
5. Momentum is the most powerful change agent
6. Momentum is the leader’s responsibility
7. Momentum begins inside the leader

18. Law of sacrifice – a leader must give up to go up

There is no success without sacrifice. Leaders are often asked to give up more than others. You must keep giving up to stay up; there’s a common fallacy that once you’ve reached the finish line, you can revert to old behaviors. And the higher the level of leadership, the greater the sacrifice.

Make two lists: things you are willing to give up in order to go up, and the things you are not willing to sacrifice to advance. I’ve made some sacrifices already, such as in my diet (avoiding meat, raw and refined sugar, and other indulgences). I’ve stopped smoking weed, and I’m planning on making a post on how to stop smoking, targeted towards people who are thinking about quitting. Also, I’ve really cut down on my alcohol consumption; I rarely drink when I go out. (This doesn’t pose any social problems, since if I want to drink something when I’m out, I order water and tip the bartender, and nobody really cares.) Something I should give up, but haven’t yet, is negative thinking. I am working on it, though. One way I’m tackling it is through journaling gratitude at GratitudeLog.com (I should make this a daily practice).

Maybe Darren Hoyt and I should try this next time they accept applications.

Since I’ve already spent many years around entrepreneurs who were trying to pitch their startup, this list of mistakes is familiar to me. Indeed, the list has similarities to my own list.

You’re probably making a lot of these errors too.

Not that I blame you! After all, these became clear to me only after seeing hundreds of applications; you don’t have the luxury of that perspective.

So for the next few weeks I’m doing a series on these mistakes and what to do about them. This post serves as a hyperlinked table of contents, so either bookmark this page or subscribe by email or RSS to get notified when new articles get posted.

Here’s the list:

Invalid competitive advantages (coming soon…)
“Superior SEO” and “unique features” are not competitive advantages.

Lacking an unfair advantage (coming soon…)
You need one killer advantage that no one on Earth can beat you on. (’Cause you might get beaten on everything else!)

No one said they’d buy it (coming soon…)
You don’t need statistically-significant studies before you begin, but it’s astonishing how many founders blaze ahead before they’ve found even a single person willing to give them money.

Incorrect positioning against competition (coming soon…)
The two faults here are opposites: Believing that uniqueness means competition doesn’t exist, or defining yourself by the competition instead of constructing your own message.

No significant route to customers (coming soon…)
If your marketing strategy is to run A/B tests and build RSS subscribers, you’ve already lost.

I am working on a video game, which I’m trying to build with JavaFX. I’m relatively new to Java and JavaFX. I like this article, for its high level overview of JavaFX development (the article has nothing to do with game development).

I once spent a week in Berlin. I was impressed with the fact that civil rights are taken seriously there. I am from the USA, and I am aware that civil liberties have eroded in recent years. In the USA, of course, there were fears of terrorism that lead to the deterioration of civil rights. In Germany, when I visited various history museums, I was struck by the number of times that fears of terrorism had been invoked to limit civil rights in that country. In the 1800s, the early labor unions had many ugly confrontations with authorities, and the attempts of the workers to seek redress of grievances was often described by the authorities as unlawful attempts to end the social peace. The German government took oppressive measures against the workers, on the grounds that such measures were necessary to maintain order.

Of course, today, labor unions are accepted as a normal part of the life of Germany, their actions are at times very aggressive, and yet civil order continues to prevail in Germany. In fact, Germany has one of the lowest crime rates of the Western democracies. So, what I learned (again) was that the social order can be maintained even when groups are allowed to assemble and take aggressive actions towards the maintenance of their interests. In fact, it seems to me there is some cause and effect there – the societies that show the most concern about civil rights seem to have very low crime rates.

I can not easily say why authoritarian methods backfire, but they seem to do so often. Most Latin American countries have followed authoritarian policies towards their people, and especially against the drug trade, yet those countries remain beset with high levels of crime. I would suspect that authoritarian regimes are vulnerable to high levels of corruption – if it becomes difficult for citizens to criticize the government, then how can police officials be kept honest? If a person who reveals government corruption can be accused of giving aid and information to the terrorists, then how can government corruption be exposed? And if the police can arrest people without cause, then surely they will find it easier and safer to make a living shaking down innocent citizens, rather than going against well-armed drug criminals.

The ability of citizens to push back against unlawful arrest really needs to be the starting point of any system of civil rights. Otherwise, what do civil rights really mean? If you had the assurance of a fair trial, but police were free to arrest you without cause, or with only the slightest pretext of cause, then the police could cause you very serious harassment, though those in authority could defend the legitimacy of their actions by saying, simply, “You are getting a fair trial, so why do you complain about your arrest?” But of course, the arrest itself can be used as a form of harassment, a point that has been obvious to authoritarian regimes everywhere.

While in Berlin I was astonished by the lack of crime. I live in New York City, which has gotten steadily safer since 1993. I have memories of New York City in the 1990s, and so now, in 2010, I am often surprised at how safe New York is. But Berlin is in a whole separate category of safe. I would walk through supposedly bad neighborhoods, alone, at 3 AM and never have the slightest worry. The bad neighborhoods in Berlin are much like the good neighborhoods in New York.

I would encourage my fellow citizens, in the USA, to visit some of those nations with very strong protections of civil rights. I would especially suggest a visit to Berlin, as it is a wonderful city, and something of a revelation in terms of crime.

Though the USA has traditionally called itself “The land of the free” I think a fair and objective comparison of the various Western Democracies, in 2010, does not lead to flattering conclusions about the USA.

Inc magazine has an article by Adam Bluestein and Amy Barrett about immigrant contributions to America:

After months trying to find the best way to connect with U.S. consumers and investors, Mann came across TechStars, a mentoring program in Boulder, Colorado. Mann and Jaroenvanit arrived in Boulder in the summer of 2009 to participate in a three-month program at TechStars. The finale was a presentation to some 150 venture capitalists; Graphic.ly received an enthusiastic reception. But the next day, Mann and Jaroenvanit were on a plane back to the U.K. Why? Their 90-day visas had expired.

Graphic.ly has since raised $1.2 million, nearly all of it from U.S. investors. But the company remains based in the British city of Middlesbrough — where the founders live and work and half of their company’s 20 employees are based (the others are in Boulder). Mann expects hiring will continue to be split between the two locations. “It’s extremely frustrating,” says Mann. If not for the visa issues, he says, “I would have moved to the U.S. and kept the whole business there.”

One of the greatest sources of entrepreneurial successes in the U.S. has been the steady stream of immigrants who come here to find opportunity. Unfortunately, an overly restrictive immigration system fails to reflect that. This has to change.

The solution: a visa program aimed at attracting foreign-born entrepreneurs. According to a 2007 paper by researchers at Duke University and the University of California, Berkeley, there was at least one immigrant founder in 25 percent of all engineering and technology companies formed in the U.S. from 1995 to 2005. And those companies generated an estimated $52 billion in 2005 sales and nearly 450,000 jobs. Allowing more entrepreneurs to come to the U.S. or permitting students to stay here after they have finished their studies at an American university is a logical way to harness that entrepreneurial firepower. “This doesn’t cost us anything,” says Robert Litan, vice president for research and public policy at the Kauffman Foundation.

This idea has one flaw: any government run program aimed to find the good entrepreneurs is bound to make a lot of mistakes. We would have the government literally picking winners and losers (trying to guess who will be successful). There is an easier way forward, and one which ensures that all the good entrepreneurs who want to come here can come here: we can allow unrestricted immigration to the USA. If we allow in everyone, then we are sure to get all the good entrepreneurs who want to come here.

Infant Entrepreneur Mortality:

Most of the entrepreneurs I know fancy themselves to be like Jobs. They think they know—better than their customers—what the customers want, and what they need. Or they believe, as in the movie Field of Dreams, that if you “build it, they will come”. But it just doesn’t work this way in real life. The vast majority of technology startups fail because no one buys or uses their products.

Strategy consultant Sramana Mitra calls this failure “Infant Entrepreneur Mortality”. She says that in the hundreds of companies she has mentored, lack of customer validation is by far the biggest cause of failure. Startup guru Eric Ries says that “validated learning” about customers is even more important than revenue for a nascent startup. Revenue, by itself, doesn’t build traction for a business; it is only when you have products that are tested and proven, that customers are ready to buy, and that you can sell and deliver profitably that you have the right ingredients for a successful business.

How do you determine what customers will buy (or, if you’re building a free web technology, what it is that they will invest the time and effort to use)? Unfortunately, this isn’t a simple matter of asking. Your customers know what their problems are; they know what they like; and they know what they don’t need. They don’t know what you can uniquely develop for them that they will really want. This is what you need to figure out. Start by understanding what the customer’s problems are; use your experience and vision to conceive solutions; share this with potential customers in ways that they can understand; and learn. It is an iterative process.

via Hacker News, I see a link to this post from 1995. Rather funny, in retrospect:

After two decades online, I’m perplexed. It’s not that I haven’t had a gas of a good time on the Internet. I’ve met great people and even caught a hacker or two. But today, I’m uneasy about this most trendy and oversold community. Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.

Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.

Consider today’s online world. The Usenet, a worldwide bulletin board, allows anyone to post messages across the nation. Your word gets out, leapfrogging editors and publishers. Every voice can be heard cheaply and instantly. The result? Every voice is heard. The cacophany more closely resembles citizens band radio, complete with handles, harrasment, and anonymous threats. When most everyone shouts, few listen. How about electronic publishing? Try reading a book on disc. At best, it’s an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can’t tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we’ll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.

What the Internet hucksters won’t tell you is tht the Internet is one big ocean of unedited data, without any pretense of completeness. Lacking editors, reviewers or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data. You don’t know what to ignore and what’s worth reading. Logged onto the World Wide Web, I hunt for the date of the Battle of Trafalgar. Hundreds of files show up, and it takes 15 minutes to unravel them—one’s a biography written by an eighth grader, the second is a computer game that doesn’t work and the third is an image of a London monument. None answers my question, and my search is periodically interrupted by messages like, “Too many connectios, try again later.”