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September 29, 2008

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February 27, 2008

“Relative to GDP, government taxation is 18.5% and spending is 20%, so we borrow the balance. The national debt should not be a scary topic and the fact that it’s gone up is fine as long as it’s proportional to GDP. Where do we get that 18.5%? There’s 2.7 trillion in government revenues. 2.2 trillion comes from individuals, and less than 1% of that comes from the estate tax. 1.1 trillion comes from income taxes, with payroll taxes consisting of 900 billion, but it’s capped at the first $100,000 of salary. We want a tax system that encourages greater prosperity, but it needs to take care of the family.

“We did an informal office survey by looking at the total tax footprint versus the total income. I earned 46 million and paid a tax rate of 17.5%. My rate was the lowest, the average was 33%, and my cleaning lady paid 40%. The system is tilted towards the rich. The Forbes 400 total net worth has gone from 220 billion to 1.54 trillion, an increase of 7-to-1. You see in legislature that there is lobbying carried on by the powerful over issues such as the estate tax and carried interest for private equity investments. We need to flatten income and payroll taxes, and those making under $30,000 shouldn’t be bothered.

“… the best way to stimulate the economy is to give money to the poor. They will spend it.”

Read the full interview.

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Quotes, del.icio.us, Blogs, Twitter

Subscribe to my FriendFeed

February 26, 2008

This blog isn’t going away but, these days, I’m doing most of my publishing on these sites:

You can subscribe to all of these feeds at once by subscribing to my FriendFeed.

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Venture Capital, Venture Hacks

The Latest from Venture Hacks

December 25, 2007

Naval Ravikant and I write a blog called Venture Hacks: an entrepreneur’s guide to hacking venture capital. Here are some excerpts from our latest articles:

Should I pay my investor’s legal fees?:

“C’mon—you have $500M and I am raising $1.5M and you want me to take the first $25K to pay your legal expenses for doing the deal? That’s like your dad giving you your allowance and then asking you to buy him a hot dog. When we were raising money for Flixster I thought that must be a trick—like if I agreed to that term they would pull the term sheet at the last second and say I failed the secret fiscal responsibility test.”

— Joe Greenstein, Founder of Flixster

Should I shop around?:

A deal is only as good as its best alternative. Keep improving your alternatives until you have a signed term sheet. And keep developing your current offers or they will die. Finally, don’t say “shopping around”, it puts investors off their stroke.

What’s dumb money?:

Smart money is money plus the promise of help that’s worth paying for, dumb money is money plus hidden harm, and mostly money is mostly money. Weed out the dumb money with diligence. Evaluate supposedly smart money with the smart money test. Finally, assume your investors are mostly money: unbundle money and value-add to get money on the best terms possible and value-add on the best terms possible.

Read more on Venture Hacks.

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Business, Quotes, Books, Twitter

You can’t be normal

December 22, 2007

From Jeffrey Pfeffer’s book, The Human Equation:

“You can’t be normal and expect abnormal returns.”

You can find more amazing aphorisms on my Twitter profile.

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RSS, Web 2.0

All Your Things in One Place

November 23, 2007

I’ve been using FriendFeed to pull together everything I contribute to the Web via Venture Hacks, del.icio.us, Twitter, YouTube, digg, last.fm, LinkedIn, Yelp, et cetera!

FriendFeed doesn’t have a compelling value proposition for me (yet). But it’s fun to visit it at the end of the day and see all the stuff that I’ve added to the read/write Web.

I can’t imagine anyone other than me would want to see that information presented in that way. But I like seeing it.

Maybe they’re planning to put a “Facebook skin” on the data and build a “distributed Facebook”. Whatever that is.

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Media, Songbird

Songbird 0.3 Has Landed

October 30, 2007

Songbird 0.3 is here.

Songbird is the Firefox of media players. And Mosaic. And Netscape. And a bag of potato chips.

Imagine iTunes with the Web inside. Imagine iTunes sync’ing to every device in the musiverse. Imagine all the people.

iTunes is great but, to quote Trent Reznor,

“iTunes kind of feels like Sam Goody to me. I don’t feel cool when I go there. I’m tired of seeing John Mayer’s face pop up. I feel like I’m being hustled when I visit there, and I don’t think their product is that great. DRM, low bit rate, etc. Amazon has potential, but none of them get around the issue of pre-release leaks.”

Songbird 0.3 is mostly for developers but I’m already using it to discover and subscribe to badass new music like Knob Tweakers. It is stable and the inevitable bugs at this stage of development are innocuous.

P.S. Songbird has tabs. Tight:

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Business

Ken Hess’s Checklist for Building a Company

October 25, 2007

There’s a lot of wisdom in Ken Hess’s Remarks to Software Forum Dinner Meeting (from 1997!):

Ken’s Checklist for Building a Company

This checklist is about getting the odds in your favor. Fitting together all these pieces of the puzzle is what separates a good business plan from mere speculation.

1. Are you focused on creating the product?

2. Are you the world expert in your product niche?

…

4. Do you have the force of will to make things happen regardless of the inevitable obstacles?

…

6. Are you spending money wisely?

Then once you’ve shipped, continue to ask:

7. Will today’s task contribute to or diminish the organization’s focus?

8. How can I broaden the market?

9. Is the company’s scale appropriate to the task?

10. Is it time to sell?

Another snippet from the talk:

Spend Money Wisely

Profit. A bootstrap must have a positive cash flow (by definition), even though this is much less important to someone purchasing the company than sales growth.

“Just say NO” to things that aren’t profitable — and be happy

…

Develop products that will be profitable. A give away, market share strategy is inappropriate for a bootstrap.

…

Play on being small, “We don’t have a budget for that…”

…

Many people inside and outside the company want to spend YOUR money because of what it does for THEM. You must ask what spending the money does for YOU.”

Read the rest of Ken’s Remarks to Software Forum Dinner Meeting.

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Business, Humor

Makin’ Moves

October 19, 2007

I laughed, I cried. Watch this video if you don’t see the embed below: Makin’ Moves.

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Technology, Google, News, Science, Humor

Science and Technology Humor

October 16, 2007

Google Launches ‘The Google’ For Older Adults

“All you have to do to turn the website on is put the little blinking line thing in the cyberspace window at the top of the screen, type ‘thegoogle.com,’ and press ‘return’—although it will also recognize http.wwwthegoogle.com, google.aol, and ‘THEGOOGLE’ typed into a Word document.”

Google Announces Plan To Destroy All Information It Can’t Index

“We believe that Google Desktop Search is the best way to unlock the information hidden on your hard drive,” Schmidt said. “If you haven’t given it a try, now’s the time. In one week, the deleting begins.”

Although Google executives are keeping many details about Google Purge under wraps, some analysts speculate that the categories of information Google will eventually index or destroy include handwritten correspondence, buried fossils, and private thoughts and feelings.

Scientists Ask Congress To Fund $50 Billion Science Thing

According to the scientists, the electromagnetic science-maker will make atoms move and spin around very quickly, though spectators at the hearing said afterward they could not account for how one could get some atoms to move around faster than other ones if everything is made of atoms anyway.

The highlight of the scientists’ testimony was a series of several colorful diagrams of how the big machine would work. One consisted of colored dots resembling Skittles banging into one another. Noting the motion lines behind the circle-ball things, committee members surmised that they were slamming together in a “fast, forceful manner.” Yet some expressed doubts as to whether they justified the $50 billion price tag.

“These scientists could trim $10 million if they would just cut out some of the purple and blue spheres,” said Rep. Roscoe Bartlett (R-MD), explaining that he understood the need for an abundance of reds and greens. “With all of those molecules and atoms going in every direction, the whole thing looks a bit unorganized, especially for science.”

Another diagram presented to lawmakers contained several important squiggly lines, numbers, and letters. Despite not being numbers, the letters were reportedly meant to represent mathematics too. The scientists seemed to believe that correct math was what would help make the science thing go.

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Psychology

Ignore your limits?

October 7, 2007

From Aging’s Changing Face in Psychology Today:

Researchers who have found that negative stereotypes about aging can actually shorten your life. A Yale University study last year in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that people who have a positive perception of aging tend to live seven and a half years longer than those who don’t. The difference may be the result of a better response to stress or even just the will to live, according to the study.

Research has found that memory studies can intimidate elderly subjects into performing poorly. Older subjects score higher on memory tests if they aren’t explicitly told that the study is about memory and aging, according to a study by researchers at North Carolina State University in Raleigh.

We are swayed by our own expectations. The research, reported in the Journal of Gerontology, found that elderly subjects scored 20 to 30 percent worse on memory tests after reading a pessimistic newspaper account about aging and memory than those who read a cheerful article about growing older.

I think I suck, ergo, I suck?

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Business, Quotes, Twitter, Psychology, Recruiting, Competition, Social

Great Quotes from Twitter

August 28, 2007

Here are some of the latest aphorisms I have posted to Twitter:

“When humans are uncertain, we rely on social connections to help us out.” — Joshua Porter

“At any given moment, the majority of resources in a capitalist system are being pushed over a cliff by morons.” — Scott Adams

“I have a life, and it only goes in one direction: forward.” — Don Draper

“Reality, it turns out, usually delivers results somewhat worse than the ‘worst case’.” — Eliezer Yudkowsky

“In a startup, no facts exist inside the building, only opinions.” — Steven Blank

“Competition starts at $100 million.” — Glenn Kelman

“Star performers are never expensive… mediocre performers are unaffordable.” — George Doriot

“[An organization] is much more difficult to copy than strategy.” — Jeffrey Pfeffer

If you want more, subscribe via Twitter or RSS.

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Quotes, Blogs, Community

Edward Tufte on Moderating Forums

August 9, 2007

Edward Tufte on moderating forums:

“Moderating a forum is fairly straightforward: knowing what you want, deleting entire threads that aren’t going anywhere, correcting the spelling of the word “it’s,” fixing URLs, deleting individual contributions that fail to advance the thread. It helps to have experience writing and editing (and reading student papers, refereeing journal articles, reviewing manuscripts and grant proposals).

“As clearly indicated to potential contributors, we do a lot of deleting–only about half of all submitted contributions survive for more than a month. This doubtless hurts a few feelings but substantially raises the quality of the board. Very few published contributions are edited at all, other than silently to correct spelling, update an URL, or to delete a sour note in an otherwise good answer. Our view is that every contribution to Ask E.T. should advance the analytical quality of the thread. We particularly seek to avoid the chronic internet disease of “All Opinions, All the Time.” The idea is to have an interesting and excellent board on analytical design that serves the content and the readers, not a board logging every attempt at publication. We also are ruthless in deleting contributions with incivilities, rants, taunts, and personal commentary on other contributors.”

This applies to blogs too. Read the entire article.

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Psychology

Cognitive Biases Make You Stupid

August 3, 2007

I recently enjoyed Cognitive biases potentially affecting judgment of global risks:

All else being equal, not many people would prefer to destroy the world. Even faceless corporations, meddling governments, reckless scientists, and other agents of doom, require a world in which to achieve their goals of profit, order, tenure, or other villainies. If our extinction proceeds slowly enough to allow a moment of horrified realization, the doers of the deed will likely be quite taken aback on realizing that they have actually destroyed the world. Therefore I suggest that if the Earth is destroyed, it will probably be by mistake.

The systematic experimental study of reproducible errors of human reasoning, and what these errors reveal about underlying mental processes, is known as the heuristics and biases program in cognitive psychology. This program has made discoveries highly relevant to assessors of global catastrophic risks…

Availability

A general principle underlying the heuristics-and-biases program is that human beings use methods of thought - heuristics - which quickly return good approximate answers in many cases; but which also give rise to systematic errors called biases. An example of a heuristic is to judge the frequency or probability of an event by its availability, the ease with which examples of the event come to mind…

People refuse to buy flood insurance even when it is heavily subsidized and priced far below an actuarially fair value. Kunreuther et. al. (1993) suggests underreaction to threats of flooding may arise from “the inability of individuals to conceptualize floods that have never occurred… Men on flood plains appear to be very much prisoners of their experience… Recently experienced floods appear to set an upward bound to the size of loss with which managers believe they ought to be concerned…”

Hindsight bias

Hindsight bias is when subjects, after learning the eventual outcome, give a much higher estimate for the predictability of that outcome than subjects who predict the outcome without advance knowledge. Hindsight bias is sometimes called the I-knew-it-all-along effect…

Viewing history through the lens of hindsight, we vastly underestimate the cost of preventing catastrophe. In 1986, the space shuttle Challenger exploded for reasons eventually traced to an O-ring losing flexibility at low temperature. (Rogers et. al. 1986.) There were warning signs of a problem with the O-rings. But preventing the Challenger disaster would have required, not attending to the problem with the O-rings, but attending to every warning sign which seemed as severe as the O-ring problem, without benefit of hindsight…

Black Swans

Black Swans are an especially difficult version of the problem of the fat tails: sometimes most of the variance in a process comes from exceptionally rare, exceptionally huge events. Consider a financial instrument that earns $10 with 98% probability, but loses $1000 with 2% probability; it’s a poor net risk, but it looks like a steady winner. Taleb (2001) gives the example of a trader whose strategy worked for six years without a single bad quarter, yielding close to $80 million - then lost $300 million in a single catastrophe…

Another example is that of Long-Term Capital Management, a hedge fund whose founders included two winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics. During the Asian currency crisis and Russian bond default of 1998, the markets behaved in a literally unprecedented fashion, assigned a negligible probability by LTCM’s historical model. As a result, LTCM began to lose $100 million per day, day after day. On a single day in 1998, LTCM lost more than $500 million. (Taleb 2005.)

But wait, there’s more! This article covers seven more biases! For free! (Opportunity costs not included.)

Read it.

(All hail Jey Kottalam for the link!)

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Venture Capital, Community, Recruiting

Poll: Would you join a startup that recruits developers from Craigslist?

July 13, 2007

Would you invest in an early stage startup that recruits developers from Craigslist?

Would you join one?

Do good developers look for jobs on Craigslist?

Do good startups need to use Craigslist to find talent?

If we assume the talent on Craigslist is so-so, does that mean that software startups that recruit from Craigslist are so-so?

What do you think?

(Apologies in advance to all great people who find jobs from Craigslist. And great companies who find people on Craigslist.)

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Business, Quotes, Books, Interviews, Learning

Pithy Business Observations from Jeffrey Pfeffer

July 13, 2007

From Guy Kawasaki’s interview of Stanford professor Jeffrey Pfeffer:

“Learning requires, first, a tolerance for failure, since by definition, learning means doing things you aren’t very good at.”

“A lie takes two people: the person who tells the lie and the individual who signals that s/he wants to hear it.”

“The most important three feet of real estate in retail—or in many industries—is the distance between the customer and the sales associate or individual who is serving that customer.”

“Companies choose to locate their R & D facilities on the basis of the availability of talent. This is more important than tax abatements and certainly much more important than rates of pay. If location was determined by cost, Silicon Valley would be empty.”

“Incentives should be large enough to provide an occasion for celebrating success but not so large as to distort behavior.”

“Every CEO was CEO for the first time.”

Read the rest of the interview

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Business

Ignore the competition

July 12, 2007

“Even in the fact of massive competition, don’t think about the competition. Literally don’t think about them. Every time you’re in a meeting and you’re tempted to talk about a competitor, replace that thought with one about user feedback or surveys. Just think about the customer.”

– Mike McCue, CEO Tellme Networks, Former VP of Technology Netscape

“Competition starts at $100 million.”

– Glenn Kelman, CEO Redfin

If you don’t understand the customer better than the competition, quit.

If you can’t recruit a team that can serve your customers better than the competition, quit.

If you don’t think the market is big enough for competitors, quit.

Assume you have 30 competitors. Assume half of them have more money than you. Assume they’re ahead of you. Don’t worry when they launch before you do. Every overnight success story is the result of years of sustained, focused execution.

If you want to be #1, ignore the competition.

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Communication, Blogs, Community, Learning, Writing

Quick: Vertical Blogging

July 11, 2007

Start a blog devoted to your expertise.

Start a vertical blog.

A vertical blog is for your readers. Personal blogs are great, but they’re focused on you and what you find interesting. They’re not focused on your readers.

A vertical blog is focused. Focus is a competitive advantage. It will be a better blog.

A vertical blog is branded. Its focus re-inforces its branding. People remember and spread brands.

A vertical blog attracts a specific audience. Readers come to a vertical blog because they know it has what they want. And they know you’re the world’s expert on the topic. What is the audience for your personal blog?

Example: mikearrington.com vs. techcrunch.com.

And every once in a while, summarize your vertical blog posts on your personal blog.

Personal blogs are dead, long live vertical blogs.

That’s why I started Venture Hacks.

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Psychology, Design, Life

Quick: Complaining is silly. Either act or forget.

July 11, 2007

You have probably seen this list from Stefan Sagmeister’s diary, but it bears repeating regularly:

Complaining is silly. Either act or forget. Thinking life will be better in the future is stupid. I have to live now. Being not truthful works against me. Helping other people helps me. Organizing a charity group is surprisingly easy. Everything I do always comes back to me. Drugs feel great in the beginning and become a drag later on. Over time I get used to everything and start taking it for granted. Money does not make me happy. Traveling alone is helpful for a new perspective on life. Assuming is stifling. Keeping a diary supports my personal development. Trying to look good limits my life. Worrying solves nothing. Material luxuries are best enjoyed in small doses. Having guts always works out for me.

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Psychology

Quick: Never be disappointed

July 9, 2007

When you get rejected, don’t say that you’re ‘disappointed’.

If you’re an investor and an entrepreneur decides to take money elsewhere, you say:

“Congratulations! Awesome! Wicked! Is there any room left for us to participate!?”

If you’re trying to get a job and the company decides to hire someone else, you say:

“Congratulations! Awesome! Wicked!!! Please keep me in mind for the next opportunity… is there anything I can do to improve my chances next time?”

If you’re trying to recruit someone and they take a job elsewhere, you say:

“Fucking AWESOME! I wish you the best of luck on your new gig… give me a shout when you’re ready to move on.”

Saying ‘I’m disappointed’ makes you sound like a tool.

And here’s some good advice on rejection from Psychology Today.

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Arts, Communication, Design

Quick: Hierarchy of Designers

June 28, 2007

Here is my understanding of the different types of designers:

Artist: How do I make a farting bird?
Graphic Designer: How do we make this icon or logo or font communicate?
Information Designer: How do we lay out this static page so it communicates?
Interaction Designer: What happens when a user clicks this? What is the user experience when s/he is physically interacting with the page?
Information Architect: How should I architect this software so the designers can do their thing?

It’s a hierarchy that goes from being an artist to being a software developer (not that software developers aren’t artists). The boundaries between stages are obviously blurry.

Corrections are welcome. By now it should be obvious that I don’t know shit.

P.S. I hate the word ‘designer’. Designers should be called “the people who make the part that the user actually uses and communicates all the magic inside.”

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Books, Learning, Psychology

Quick: Psychology Today

June 27, 2007

My favorite new “undiscovered” blog:

Psychology Today (RSS)

The best article so far is Trashing Teens which argues that teen-hood is an unnecessary part of life that teenagers should be able to skip through tests akin to a driver’s exam:

Why do you believe that adolescence is an artificial extension of childhood?

In every mammalian species, immediately upon reaching puberty, animals function as adults, often having offspring. We call our offspring “children” well past puberty. The trend started a hundred years ago and now extends childhood well into the 20s. The age at which Americans reach adulthood is increasing—30 is the new 20—and most Americans now believe a person isn’t an adult until age 26.

The whole culture collaborates in artificially extending childhood, primarily through the school system and restrictions on labor. The two systems evolved together in the late 19th-century; the advocates of compulsory-education laws also pushed for child-labor laws, restricting the ways young people could work, in part to protect them from the abuses of the new factories. The juvenile justice system came into being at the same time. All of these systems isolate teens from adults, often in problematic ways.

Our current education system was created in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and was modeled after the new factories of the industrial revolution. Public schools, set up to supply the factories with a skilled labor force, crammed education into a relatively small number of years. We have tried to pack more and more in while extending schooling up to age 24 or 25, for some segments of the population. In general, such an approach still reflects factory thinking—get your education now and get it efficiently, in classrooms in lockstep fashion. Unfortunately, most people learn in those classrooms to hate education for the rest of their lives.

The factory system doesn’t work in the modern world, because two years after graduation, whatever you learned is out of date. We need education spread over a lifetime, not jammed into the early years—except for such basics as reading, writing, and perhaps citizenship. Past puberty, education needs to be combined in interesting and creative ways with work. The factory school system no longer makes sense.

What are some likely consequences of extending one’s childhood?

Imagine what it would feel like—or think back to what it felt like—when your body and mind are telling you you’re an adult while the adults around you keep insisting you’re a child. This infantilization makes many young people angry or depressed, with their distress carrying over into their families and contributing to our high divorce rate. It’s hard to keep a marriage together when there is constant conflict with teens.

We have completely isolated young people from adults and created a peer culture. We stick them in school and keep them from working in any meaningful way, and if they do something wrong we put them in a pen with other “children.” In most nonindustrialized societies, young people are integrated into adult society as soon as they are capable, and there is no sign of teen turmoil. Many cultures do not even have a term for adolescence. But we not only created this stage of life: We declared it inevitable. In 1904, American psychologist G. Stanley Hall said it was programmed by evolution. He was wrong.

How is adolescent behavior shaped by societal strictures?

One effect is the creation of a new segment of society just waiting to consume, especially if given money to spend. There are now massive industries—music, clothing, makeup—that revolve around this artificial segment of society and keep it going, with teens spending upward of $200 billion a year almost entirely on trivia.

Read the rest of Trashing Teens.

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Sundry, Communication

Quick: Bad Words

June 27, 2007

Words I hate:

space: “the advertising space”

play: “this is an VoIP play”

at the end of the day: I am told that this is used so often at Microsoft that they have an abbreviation for it.

deal: “i want to get into this deal”

synergy

no-brainer

I stole the last two from Mike Moritz.

Words I love:

customers

market

users

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Apple, Business, Software, Hardware, Mobile

Quick: iPhone Pet Peeves

June 26, 2007

I’m looking forward to the iPhone.

It’s from the future.

Like something in Minority Report or Blade Runner.

Too bad other companies lack the imagination to come up with something like this.

I hate it when people say things like, “But you can’t edit Excel documents on it!”

That said, here are some prospective weird pet peeves based on the reviews I have read:

There is no way to cut, copy, or paste text.
You have to switch to a different keyboard view to insert a period or comma.
You cannot just start typing a name to call someone in your address book.
You can’t use your songs as ringtones.
Some normal headphones won’t fit into headphone jack.

By the way, I have been using the Blackberry Pearl on Cingular EDGE in San Francisco for six months and the EDGE speeds are fine for Google Maps, Google Mail, and Web browsing.

Steve Jobs always says that Apple is a “software company”. That never made sense to me—Apple obviously makes great hardware too. Then I realized what he means: “We know how to make software. Nobody else does. That’s our competitive advantage. People use software, not hardware.”

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Math, Community, VMO

Quick: It probably isn’t exponential growth

June 26, 2007

Just because you’re growing faster than a straight line doesn’t mean you’re growing exponentially.

Exponential growth means that you are growing at a rate of c^x, where c is a constant greater than 1 and x is a period of time. If c = 2 and x = 1 month, then you are doubling every month. If c = 2 and x = 1 billion years, then you are still growing exponentially but you are doubling every 1 billion years! Or if c = 1.00000000000001 and x = 1 day you are still growing exponentially but you are doubling every 1 trillion years!

I’m no expert on Viral Marketing Optimization (VMO), but the experts who tune their systems achieve exponential growth when c > 1 (with a reasonable x I assume).

Note: Thanks to Paul Bucheit for creating quick blogging.

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About Me

I am currently a Founder of Venture Hacks and an Advisor to Songbird, Grockit, and others. I live in San Francisco. More →

Contact:
nivi at alum.mit.edu

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