gems from Paul Graham

three excellent passages from Paul Graham's September 2012 post, Startup=Growth (emphasis is mine): 

on commitment: 

"Startup" is a pole, not a threshold. Starting one is at first no more than a declaration of one's ambitions. You're committing not just to starting a company, but to starting a fast growing one, and you're thus committing to search for one of the rare ideas of that type. But at first you have no more than commitment. Starting a startup is like being an actor in that respect. "Actor" too is a pole rather than a threshold.  At the beginning of his career, an actor is a waiter who goes to auditions. Getting work makes him a successful actor, but he doesn't only become an actor when he's successful.

on startups' tendency to working in technology:

Growth is why startups usually work on technology—because ideas for fast growing companies are so rare that the best way to find new ones is to discover those recently made viable by change, and technology is the best source of rapid change.

on mode of business vs. core industry:

Starting a startup is thus very much like deciding to be a research scientist: you're not committing to solve any specific problem; you don't know for sure which problems are soluble; but you're committing to try to discover something no one knew before. A startup founder is in effect an economic research scientist. Most don't discover anything that remarkable, but some discover relativity.

coaching/specs

Laszlo Bock on hiring

you've got to be *real* busy to justify not having read this week's nytimes interview with Google SVP Laszlo Bock - it's excellent.  my favorite passage: 

One of my own frustrations when I was in college and grad school is that you knew the professor was looking for a specific answer. You could figure that out, but it’s much more interesting to solve problems where there isn’t an obvious answer. You want people who like figuring out stuff where there is no obvious answer.

i managed to structure my college career in a way that avoided the issue Bock addresses (the Linguistics department at UC Santa Cruz was excellent), but i've encountered it many times since - in extracirricular education, job interviews, and just in *life.*  

my feeling: if i'm working with you, the facts you know are useless as the business landscape we're working in - the game we're playing, really - changes.  i want your intelligence, not your knowledge.

currently listening to

this ScHoolboy Q track: 

ScHoolboy Q feat. Kendrick Lamar - Collard Greens Produced by THC / Co- Produced by Gwen Bunn Mixed By Ali #OXYMORON Coming Soon

what it was like/the pace of modern life

as a rule, i *really* try to not talk about sweeping changes in the human experience, as it were.   in-demand job skills change; modes of interaction change; cultural values, modes & availability of transportation, style - these things all change.  but what it's like to be alive depends on the individual, not the time.  one's ability to engage with his peers remains inextricably tied to his willingness and desire to do so - not to the technology that enables interaction.

also, xkcd is just... well, if you have to ask, there's no use. 

user story: the Public Radio

as a guy, i want a simple on/off function, so that i can turn my radio on easily when i'm shaving and have shit on my hands.

acceptance test: there's only one knob on the radio, and when i turn it clockwise, there's a tactile "click" and then the radio comes on to whatever station i have it preset at.

photo

from National Geographic Found. 

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Fishermen load their catch of sardines into crates on the Adriatic Sea, May 1970.

PHOTOGRAPH BY JAMES P. BLAIR, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC

Ballmer on meetings and powerpoint

from a 2009 interview in the nytimes; found on Edward Tufte's excellent blog. 

Q. What’s it like to be in a meeting run by Steve Ballmer?

A. I’ve changed that, really in the last couple years. The mode of Microsoft meetings used to be: You come with something we haven’t seen in a slide deck or presentation. You deliver the presentation. You probably take what I will call “the long and winding road.” You take the listener through your path of discovery and exploration, and you arrive at a conclusion.

That’s kind of the way I used to like to do it, and the way Bill [Gates] used to kind of like to do it. And it seemed like the best way to do it, because if you went to the conclusion first, you’d get: “What about this? Have you thought about this?” So people naturally tried to tell you all the things that supported the decision, and then tell you the decision.

I decided that’s not what I want to do anymore. I don’t think it’s productive. I don’t think it’s efficient. I get impatient. So most meetings nowadays, you send me the materials and I read them in advance. And I can come in and say: “I’ve got the following four questions. Please don’t present the deck.” That lets us go, whether they’ve organized it that way or not, to the recommendation. And if I have questions about the long and winding road and the data and the supporting evidence, I can ask them. But it gives us greater focus.

i am not enthusiastic about powerpoint, though my reasons are an admittedly weak combination of stubbornness and blind adherence to Tufte's critiques, which i've found very compelling.

pivoting

summer approaches, and the current phase of my life has begun to take some shape. my life, and direction, is largely in flux, a fact which i have respect for - and some uneasiness about.

i've been going on my share of job interviews lately. i've also been dating, and talking a lot - to friends, acquaintances, and anyone who will listen - about the recent disruptions in my life, and the tack that i have taken as a result. i talk a lot about startups and new technologies, and inevitably i'm asked (often with a touch of skepticism), "so, why do you want to work in tech?"

in february, i quit my job on short notice and packed up my life to move to new york. my immediate goal was to explore areas of the world that have, for the past five years, been largely missing from my day-to-day life. i was primed for a pivot, and put much of my energy into discovering what was out there. since i graduated from college, i have worked primarily in construction, design and manufacturing, and these areas have been highly rewarding to me. i have had the opportunity to see significant projects to completion, an experience which has enriched my sense of accomplishment, strength and self worth. i have transformed physical space. my efforts - my sweat; my mental, emotional and corporal commitment - have enabled real people to engage in real interactions. my ideas - things i dreamed up - have been transformed into objects that my contemporaries use in their daily lives.

but i have also, to some extent, sat by as my generation has explored a collective interest in new modes of experience and interaction. every time someone would remark at how cool my bicycle framebuilding business was, i couldn't help but feel that their romantic appreciation of my craft carried with it a degree of unintended condescension. my thing, as it were, was cute. regardless of the personal satisfaction i gleamed from the work i did, my craft was mostly just a mimicry of a process that has been largely unchanged for a century. put more directly, nothing i was doing was changing the world.

another of my frustrations came from the risk inherent in a career in design. early on, i realized that the bicycles i built were only marginally better than their commoditized equivalents. sure, i had an aesthetic perspective, and there certainly are framebuilders who have built successful careers by differentiating their product in interesting ways. but income distribution in design professions tends to be long-tail; one needs to be very good - or at least very lucky - to be successful. in the bicycle industry, my career prospects were generally poor. whatever direction urban transportation is heading in, custom bicycle frames will forever be a niche product, and my impression remains that the industry is just about as flooded as the market for microbrewed beer.

so, GTTFP already: i want a pivot.

i have spent a while recently thinking about what, exactly, i have liked about my career. a few points:

1. i like being appreciated.
2. i like being compensated.
3. i like being a little over my head. i prefer to stay right on the edge between the things i know i don't know and the things i don't know that i don't know.
4. i like collaborating with people who are better at what they do than i am.
5. i like having an understanding of long-term objectives, and i like being a significant factor in the achievement of those objectives.
6. i like working with people like myself.
7. i like being fully responsible for the execution of a project, however large or small.
8. i like working on a new thing that will change some part of the world.
9. i like working in emerging markets.
10. i like working on things that people like me want, and want to interact with intimately.
11. i like for the product values and interests that i have to overlap significantly with those of my collaborators and our product's users.
12. i like being rewarded for my ability to identify, assess, analyze and solve problems, and i like it when those problems require me to learn about a new area of the world.
13. i like clear objectives - and clear metrics by which they can be judged - over aesthetic, or "gut" feelings.
14. i like working on general purpose technologies.
15. i like working on cross-functional teams, and having responsibilities in many categories of business

some of these items depend largely on my position in an organization and the state of the project. some are temporal and are will change as industries shift. some are my own temporary baggage and will, given enough time, become less important.

but overall, the list reflects ideas that have been simmering in my mind for a long time. and they're things i feel strongly about. and looking back on my short career, i know that i have missed a few of them completely.

my career in construction, manufacturing and design has offered me appreciation, compensation, and challenge. it has offered me opportunities to work with bright, intelligent people on projects that i could conceive of both in close and far perspective. i have been rewarded for my analysis and problem solving abilities. i have been able to exercise a broad array of skills on a day to day basis.

but i have not, for the most part, worked with my contemporaries; nor have i worked for them. i have not changed the world, or been able to implement - and live by - the kinds of quantitative metrics that i would prefer be the measure of my project's success. in critical ways, my career has split me from my generation and the activities it values. and despite the fact that my career has offered me many opportunities to work with intelligent, interested people, it has more often put me in a place where the mere mention of wikipedia draws silence.

in short: i don't want to be the guy who knows how to attach a picture to your email.

i would prefer to be the guy who emails you to ask why the jQuery code he borrowed shows popups with 90% opacity in one context and 100% in others - and then figures it out on his own :). i want to be the guy who struggles to restore the firmware on his inherited XBee. i want to be the guy who doesn't really understand why you like Vesper so much. i want to be the guy who quizzes you about whether you would ever accept SLA parts as everyday objects.

it'll likely be a little while before the shape of my pivot's arc becomes defined. the list above represents what i know i don't know, and i'm still working out the boundary of that region and optimizing where i want to be in it. but i'm working on it.

---

1. i prefer Paul Graham's excellent definition:

   A startup is a company designed to grow fast...For a company to grow really big, it must (a) make something lots of people want, and (b) reach and serve all those people." ↩

2. some months prior i had indicated my intention to move on, and i had been in communication with my boss regarding a six-month transition schedule. but as these things go, our interests were not aligned. my departure was a surprise to some, but not to my immediate counterparts or anyone in upper management. nevertheless, this specific aspect of the arc i now find myself following is one which continues to impose itself in my mental and emotional space. ↩

3. i did not consider myself to be a physical person until well into high school, when i began working - during spring and summer breaks - as a laborer for my father's construction company. the act of busting one's ass for eight or ten hours was powerful, and transformed the way i thought about my body and my level of toughness. ↩

4. even after i became fairly proficient, and even if i kept my living expenses low, it was essentially impossible for me to sell a bicycle for less than $2k. at that price, even my closest friends couldn't justify buying from me, and i took to admitting that most taiwanese made bikes were, really, just fine. ↩

5. cf. my recent post about Adam Davidson's fantastic nytimes piece. ↩

6. according to the Brewer's Association, the number of US breweries has gone from just 89 in 1980 to over 2400 in 2012. cf. also this beautiful graphic (taken from the same Brewer's Association data) from the New Yorker showing brewing industry change in 2012 by state. ↩

7. "Get to the fucking point." see Brad Feld on the subject. ↩

8. cf. the following excerpt from MGI's report on Disruptive Technologies:

   General-purpose technologies also tend to shift value to consumers, at least in the long run. This is because new technologies eventually give all players an opportunity to raise productivity, driving increased competition that leads to lower prices. General-purpose technologies can also enable — or spawn — more technologies. For example, steam power enabled the locomotive and railroads, and the printing press accelerated learning and scientific discovery. General-purpose technologies can take many forms — including materials, media, and new sources of energy — but they all share the ability to bring about transformative change. ↩

9. i reject the argument that the hobbies popularized by greater hipsterdom, e.g. beermaking, are genuinely valued; ultimately, society just isn't willing to pay a brewer the same salary that they'll pay a software developer. ↩

10. i have, after all, fixed my footnote opacity problem; i've got a plan for how to troubleshoot my XBees; i've got (and have mostly determined not to use) Vesper; and i'll go ahead and assert that most people don't want SLA parts on their desk, and won't change their minds about that anytime soon. ↩

commonplacing

i had no knowledge of this term until reading it today in Stephen Johnson's Where Good Ideas Come From.   I like it; it certainly sounds less quaint than blogging.  (note: emphasis below is mine.)

Darwin’s notebooks lie at the tail end of a long and fruitful tradition that peaked in Enlightenment-era Europe, particularly in England: the practice of maintaining a “commonplace” book. Scholars, amateur scientists, aspiring men of letters—just about anyone with intellectual ambition in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was likely to keep a commonplace book. The great minds of the period—Milton, Bacon, Locke—were zealous believers in the memory-enhancing powers of the commonplace book. In its most customary form, “commonplacing,” as it was called, involved transcribing interesting or inspirational passages from one’s reading, assembling a personalized encyclopedia of quotations. There is a distinct self-help quality to the early descriptions of commonplacing’s virtues: maintaining the books enabled one to “lay up a fund of knowledge, from which we may at all times select what is useful in the several pursuits of life.”

Each rereading of the commonplace book becomes a new kind of revelation. You see the evolutionary paths of all your past hunches: the ones that turned out to be red herrings; the ones that turned out to be too obvious to write; even the ones that turned into entire books. But each encounter holds the promise that some long-forgotten hunch will connect in a new way with some emerging obsession. The beauty of Locke’s scheme was that it provided just enough order to find snippets when you were looking for them, but at the same time it allowed the main body of the commonplace book to have its own unruly, unplanned meanderings. Imposing too much order runs the risk of orphaning a promising hunch in a larger project that has died, and it makes it difficult for those ideas to mingle and breed when you revisit them. You need a system for capturing hunches, but not necessarily categorizing them, because categories can build barriers between disparate ideas, restrict them to their own conceptual islands. This is one way in which the human history of innovation deviates from the natural history. New ideas do not thrive on archipelagos.

commodities dressed up in premium packaging

Adam Davidson is one of my favorite journalists.  the NPR podcast he co-hosts, Planet Money, is consistently entertaining and insightful, and his nytimes pieces are similarly compelling.  last week, he published a piece on the 2013 Brooklyn Baby Expo, which explored the ways in which consumer products - specifically those geared towards expecting parents - differentiate themselves.  

Nearly every product we buy — from coffee and cereal to hotel rooms and cars — is a commodity dressed up in premium packaging, Oster pointed out. But with baby products, the process is intensified. Kellogg’s, Ford and Starbucks can spend years tempting a consumer, but baby companies have a short window — often just the few weeks before a due date — to capture expecting parents’ attention.

paying attention to the methods by which the products i care most about keep my attention has, for me, been highly rewarding, and has informed my own ideas about the products I have created.  i encourage you, dear reader, to consider the extent to which the products you offer (and we all offer products, in both our personal and professional lives) are differentiated by their content, as opposed to just by their packaging.

meetings/decisions

Most importantly, decisions should never wait for a meeting. If it’s critical that a meeting take place before a decision is made, then that meeting needs to happen right away.

-Kristen Gil, VP of Business Operations, Google, in her insightful thinkpiece on the speed at which startups operate.

spielberg

You shouldn’t dream your film, you should make it! If no one hires you, use the camera on your phone and post everything on YouTube. A young person has more opportunities to direct now than in my day. I’d have liked to begin making movies today.

-Stephen Spielberg

vonnegut on practicing

Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.

-Kurt Vonnegut.  Via A Conversation on Cool. 

days

for a few years i've been keeping daily task lists in Field Notes notebooks.  my style has developed into a form, and this page is kind of exemplary of that form. 

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workflow

it's old, but i love this.   to me it really captures something about how arbitrary design is. because, so what if your workflow is horrifying?  if it works for you, have at it - but don't expect anyone else to build their products around your weirdass ticks.

if you're not listening to

this Sonny and the Sunsets track, you're out of your mind.  this whole album is great. 

edit: the track above crystallizes a lot of things for me.  the one below isn't quite so prescient, but it's weird and honest and really fun all the same. 

ideas in development

i have not figured out how to keep track of ideas that i'm developing.  Evernote is (despite its features) imperfect and expensive.  Vesper doesn't really have that many features.  paper is impermanent and prone to being lost.  Trello is a little overkill, and iOS Notes is as underkill as Vesper without being pretty. 

nevertheless, one needs to save ideas.  so here, in Evernote OSX screenshot format, is a list of ideas i've been developing. 

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a few of them are deeply related and will likely be condensed.  it's also possible that some will be need to be broken down and/or expanded.  some are just tweets, some are soliloquies, some are blog posts, some are just things i mull over or have some indeterminate/passionate feelings about.  with any luck, they'll all be showing up here soon.

galloping gertie

it's an engineering legend, but the fate of the Tacoma Narrows bridge isn't exactly fossilized into American Cultural Heritage. 

you should totally know about it, though, if only because the film of its demise is so visually weird.

of all the gin joints

i was in mixed company a few days ago and was shocked to learn that i was the only one who got (my own) reference to Casablanca.  i try not to be prescriptive about cultural knowledge, but at the same time i greatly enjoy understanding cultural references, and have found that Casablanca is one of the richest source of them.   

you really should see it for yourself, but i'm collecting a few key clips below. 

here's lookin' at you, kid.