Continue reading Avoiding operating at capacity.
Recently in Thoughts Category
About six months ago I started holding office hours instead of meeting for coffee. Since then Ohours says I've hosted 59 sessions, and I've met a lot people I wouldn't have met via coffee or otherwise.
I am going to keep doing them, but have evolved my original approach slightly. For those that are interested in doing something similar, here's what I learned.
I am going to keep doing them, but have evolved my original approach slightly. For those that are interested in doing something similar, here's what I learned.
Continue reading Office hours revisited.
Photo credit: IT IN place, specifically Glitchportriat.
There have been a number of instances where I've found myself repeating the same directions to a lot of different people, which means I can compare how different people follow them. A current example is the application process for Open Angel Forum Philly.
Continue reading On following directions.
I've been thinking again about the software eating the world thesis. Recently, I came across two related things.
First, this Fresh Air interview with Steve Coll on his new book about Exxon Mobil. He commented along the line that in 1955 Exxon was #2 on the Fortune 500 list. In 2012 they are #1. In another 50 years, would you expect Apple or Exxon to still be near the top of the list?
Second, Mary Meeker's slides from the All Things D conference on the state of the Web. Slides 32-84 show examples of the re-imagination of X industry/product, which is the most visual manifestation of the thesis I've seen to date.
First, this Fresh Air interview with Steve Coll on his new book about Exxon Mobil. He commented along the line that in 1955 Exxon was #2 on the Fortune 500 list. In 2012 they are #1. In another 50 years, would you expect Apple or Exxon to still be near the top of the list?
Second, Mary Meeker's slides from the All Things D conference on the state of the Web. Slides 32-84 show examples of the re-imagination of X industry/product, which is the most visual manifestation of the thesis I've seen to date.
Continue reading Software eating the Fortune 500.
- Going to MIT - applied early, got in, and didn't apply anywhere else. In retrospect I had confused it with Cal-tech after seeing Real Genius as a small kid and not seeing it again until college. I did visit MIT as a junior and really liked it at the time, but I really didn't give other schools much of a chance.
- Meeting my wife - she looked super intriguing to me in our freshman picture book and so I decided to just reach out one day. Fate? Easily my best decision ever.
- Getting married - planned a bit of a proposal but just seemed like the right time (few years out of undergrad).
- Starting NamesDatabase - did a random one day side project and then many months later that side project turned into that company.
- Starting DuckDuckGo - similarly, side projects merging into something that seemed tangible. One day just decided it's fun so why not work towards a launch of something.
Continue reading Fluid decisions.
Continue reading The evolution of my perception of money.
Between two kids under three and running DuckDuckGo I have a very tight schedule. I try really hard to maximize my productivity through a variety of efforts like online services (just added RescueTime to the mix) and attempting to maintain a makers schedule.
The problem is requests to meet for coffee, usually by local entrepreneurs. It's a problem because I do generally want to meet with these people, but I just can't make it work logistically. Going somewhere to meet for coffee usually literally takes about three-five times as much time as the actual "content time" of the meeting itself. It's highly inefficient.
Continue reading Office hours instead of coffee.
I'm a pretty calm person. I hardly ever raise my voice. I also don't usually get extremely excited about stuff.
That's not to say I don't think things are cool. On the contrary, I see cool stuff all the time and tell people about it constantly.
It's more that it is not in my personality to be as likely to be emotionally taken with stuff as much as others seem to be. For example, I know a lot of people who get extremely impressed with other people's accomplishments when they meet or read about them. It manifests itself in statements like "X is amazing at Y. He/she revolutionized/invented Z."
Don't get me wrong -- I generally find these people interesting, as I find most people interesting and love to hear their stories. But I rarely put them on a pedestal in the same manner, and I know some people find it off-putting.
It works the other way around though too. I find it a bit off-putting when other people get extremely excited about seemingly run-of-the mill stuff. I guess it feels a little boy who cried wolf.
I suppose my threshold is just a lot higher. I'm more excited about two or three standard deviations when other people seem to get enthralled by one.
I don't get offended and riled up on the negative side as much either, politics or otherwise. This personality trait has definitely increased with age. As a teenager I definitely got more exited about stuff in both directions.
Not that I can control it, but aside from being off-putting to some people, I think it has helped me manage the startup career path. I have up and down moments like everyone else, but they don't seem to hit me as hard. I generally don't get taken with fads or "celebrity" endorsements/advice. It helps me stay on critical path and work toward a long-term vision.
I'm not saying this way is better. Being personality driven, there doesn't seem to be much choice in the matter anyway.
Along time ago I thought it might be apathy, but I was wrong about that. I'm not apathetic. In fact, far from it. Now I'm just more secure about who I am and understand it's just part of my personality.
It's not an easy decision, and one that is constantly in your face, simply because blogging takes a lot of time. A good post may take 3-5 hours when all is said and done. That time (for me) is often directly taken away from other professional activity, so the opportunity cost is quite high. In other words, I must have a good reason for doing so or else I really shouldn't be doing it.
Writing leads to understanding
Blogging forces you to write down your arguments and assumptions. This is the single biggest reason to do it, and I think it alone makes it worth it.
You have a lot of opinions. I'm sure some of them you hold strongly. Pick one and write it up in a post -- I'm sure your opinion will change somewhat, or at least become more nuanced.
When you move from your head to "paper," a lot of the hand-waveyness goes away and you are left to really defend your position to yourself.
Getting over your fears
Blogging is a bit like public speaking, and people are scared of it for good reason. You are really putting yourself out there.
If you do it right, you will stay stupid things every now and then. You will piss people off. It's scary at first to hit Publish and push your ideas into the public sphere.
In the process though you will learn how to live with a thick skin and how to confidently state your opinion. You will also come to be more zen about putting yourself out there in general. In my opinion, these skills are essential for good entrepreneurs and hard to learn elsewhere.
You can reach the right people
When I committed to this blog I had zero following, on Twitter or otherwise. When you have a following, blogging makes a bit more sense since your posts have a built-in audience and are often automatically amplified to some degree, e.g. submitted to social news sites, retweeted, etc.
Yet even without that built-in audience, you can reach the right people. You can still submit your posts to social news sites yourself. People will still find you via search engines. You can @reply the right people on Twitter.
Fundamentally, people like reading blog posts, and you can use that fact to your advantage.
You can stand out
I love under-utilized resources, e.g. Twitter for PR and newsletters for M&A. Blogging is one of these under-utilized resources.
Because it does take a lot of effort, most people won't touch it. But that means if you do, you are all the more visible.
Why are Chris Dixon, Mark Suster and Fred Wilson some of the most well-known VCs? I know they are smart, high-quality investors, but if you look in the VC world there are actually a lot of those types. You know them more because they stand out as a result of their blogs and all the other stuff that flows from them.
**
Maybe I've convinced you to commit to a blog, but probably not :). In any case, if you do decide to do it, please take this additional advice with regards to your blog:
- Don't be bland. Bland blogs don't get you any of the above benefits. You won't stand out or reach the right people because your posts are bland. You won't get over any fears or understand anything better because you didn't really say anything. I know it's hard, but really state an opinion. Really put yourself out there or the whole thing isn't worth it.
- Don't hold back. There are so many startups, and yet there is seemingly so few startup blogs that tell real stories with real numbers. If you accomplish something, in the blog post you write about it, why don't you tell us exactly what you did? Not only will it make clear to yourself what contributed to the accomplishment, but it will help others as well (and therefore attract them to your post). Give us the real numbers!
- Let people know. If you do take the time to write "real" posts, please take the additional time to let people know about them. Yes, it can feel weird submitting your own post to HN, but if you know what you wrote is solid and useful, people will want to read it. Let the right people know on Twitter. You're doing yourself and others a disservice if you don't market your good work.
- Engage. No one likes trolls, but that isn't a good enough reason not to engage with people about your ideas. Engaging amplifies all the benefits stated above. The first decision here involves turning on comments and watching for comments on other sites. I would then try to respond to any comment that warrants it as quickly as possible.
Here are a couple posts that come to mind that really do the above (not by me):
- Misadventures in VC Funding: The $24 Million Moz Almost Raised (just saw this on HN)
- Bootstrapping Stormpulse (this one always sticks in my head)
Comscore and Hitwise are two primary providers of search engine market share numbers. Their two latest reports peg Google's share at around 65% in the US, and that's generally what the press reports.
That seems high indeed, but everyone I talk to "in the wild" who runs high traffic sites actually sees a much higher percentage of their search engine traffic coming from Google, usually from 80-90%. There is some similar data on Quora and HN for reference. If you check those out, you'll see some people (including myself) have seen some sites with less Google % and higher Bing or Yahoo, but these seem isolated cases on particular verticals (and overall smaller traffic sites).
What makes this even weirder is Hitwise also recently came out with a report saying Bing/Yahoo users click on more links than Google users, so you'd expect the Google % everyone sees to be slightly lower than their real market share. But it's the opposite.
Bottom line is something doesn't add up here, and I'm not sure what is going on exactly. Rand Fishkin (CEO, SEOMoz) suggested that it has to do with counting internal links on Microsoft/Yahoo sites:
It's hard to believe this would account for the entire difference, but maybe so. It would be great to see #s calculated off of clicks to external sites. That wouldn't be perfect either and would still overstate Bing/Yahoo as noted above (though that could be controlled for). Hitwise seems to already have that data, so putting out a report like that should be relatively straightforward.
The closest thing I've found to that data is from Statcounter. They report Google's US market share at a much higher 80%, which they glean from their analytic (click) traffic. Their browser share #s don't seem way off, so one might imagine that their search engine #s would be equally representative.
Another possibility is Bing and Yahoo are sending a TON of traffic to a small number of sites. We already know that Bing users use IE way more than Google users, which could indicate that they would be a very different group of people cilcking on different sites.
However, that again seems unlikely to account for all of the difference. You would then expect to see more comments on those Quora and HN threads where people associated with some of those sites would step up and report such.
It's not that Hitwise/Comscore/et al. can't report higher #s. For example, they report 90%+ Google market share in other countries. Just not the US.
So what is it? 65% or 80%? That's a huge difference (~25% in relative terms).
Update: good comments on HN.
A lot has changed in the world since 1981, when I was two. Now thirty years later my son is two and I'm trying to speculate which differences will really impact how he (and by extension his generation) approaches the world.
My guess so far as to what will have the the biggest impact is that they will grow up expecting everything should be on-demand. People have usually framed that concept in a critical manner, but I think it is a bit more subtle and could turn out very positive.
Yes, kids want things on-demand and it can be annoying, e.g. that particular episode or song wherever they happen to be in the world at that moment. Yet kids have always wanted things on-demand.
I'm sure I wanted things on-demand when I was two as well. But I usually couldn't get it. We had to wait until the song came on the radio, look in an encyclopedia, etc.
Now my son can often actually get it, and the question is more whether we should give it to him or not. And he knows it. So his default state switches to the expectation that things should be on-demand. It's like his default expectation that everything is a touch screen, which is amusing, but ultimately I doubt it will have much effect on his frame of reference.
Expecting things on-demand though I think has more far-reaching consequences. I'm just not sure exactly what they are.
You could argue that when you grow up thinking like that, slow processes may come to really bother you. Why can't we do that now? Perhaps that will be good for the world long-term as his generation starts to break down processes and make them faster. Or not...
I just received another angry accusatory email that unfortunately I can do nothing about because it was anonymous. I'd love to get to the bottom of the accusation and correct any bugs if they exist, but I can't because there was not enough information provided to do so.
I get a few of these a week, and a lot more (non-angry not-accusatory) anonymous feedback via the DuckDuckGo feedback page and on the DuckDuckGo forum. We accept anonymous feedback both to maximize the amount of feedback we're receiving and also because it is in the spirit of our privacy policy.
For general suggestions and minor bugs, e.g. spelling corrections, anonymous feedback is fine. The problem is that for anything complex we generally need to correspond with the poster to figure out what is happening.
Many bugs involve the specifics of your browser, such as what extensions you have installed, what DuckDuckGo settings you have turned on/off and in many cases what query you performed. I've lost count at how many anonymous emails I've received where I don't have enough information to do anything worthwhile in response.
I understand the need to vent and that you may not want to associate your identity with your tone, or otherwise reveal your identity at all. However, if you're taking the time to write up this problem presumably you want it resolved (maybe not). Well, if you do, I need a way to contact you, which could be a throw-away email account.
I would suggest to provide as much specificity as possible in the original message, but there always seems to be something missing. And I usually really would like to reply in any case, if only to let you know when it is fixed or provide you with an extended explanation.
Just because something is plausible, doesn't make it true.
- News. X happened and reporting says it happened because of Y & Z with seemingly no data to back it up.
- Finance. Some market does X because of some other event Y, or not.
- Science. Study shows X but headline and reporting around it extrapolate to Y & Z.
- Conspiracies. No example needed :)
- Startups. Perhaps most close to home...awesome product idea X is going to make a killing in niche Y because of Z, but no one has talked to any customers yet.
etc. etc.
tl;dr comments really bother me when they don't have a useful summary attached to them. I don't think I'd have a problem seeing p!=t comments, however.
Long articles are, well, long. But p!=t articles are dangerous, and even if they have kernels of truth in them, I think they do more harm than good.
I have nothing particularly against probabilistic decision trees and scenario planning, but it should be highlighted where you go from fact to speculation, and to what degree that speculation is probable or not.
</rant>
Recently there was some interesting discussion on Hacker News (here and here) regarding whether or not you can retire at 30 with a $1-5million (after selling your company).
That question aside, one major input is inflation, and all these models make the assumption that it is the same for everyone. Depending on your personal circumstances, I think your personal inflation rate could vary highly from the average.
It comes down to that the basket of goods you purchase over the time frame in question may look very different than the CPI (official) basket. Here are some extreme examples to highlight the differences:
- Say you sell your company and buy a house. This expenditure probably dwarfs all your others. If you consider the time period from when you started your company, you might have had a decently negative personal inflation rate due to falling house prices.
- Or say your biggest expenditure is commodity servers, which drop in price rapidly. If your needs are relatively constant, your personal inflation rate could similarly be negative as these assets depreciate fast.
- Taking a longer view, suppose you never have kids (read education expenses), and you buy your house in this economy and live in it indefinitely. Assuming you just buy normal stuff the rest of life (food, etc.) your personal inflation rate should be rather under control. You somewhat cut out a lot of the biggest drivers long term (education, housing) and you gained some negative inflation by buying your biggest expenditure (house) at the right time.
Sometimes I get burnt out. Who doesn't? I'm very sensitive to it though because I know it can be devastating to a startup, especially a single founder startup.
Over the past several years I've learned that a burnout antidote, at least for myself, is rapid prototyping of something brand new. It could be a skunk works project for the startup, but more often than not, it is something just off the wall.
Actually, it doesn't even have to be software related at all. Recently I cleaned out and organized our basement.
I didn't think too much about this process (except for that it works for me) until the other day. Upon reflection, I think why it works is the satisfaction of pushing a minimum viable product out the door.
It's fun and you're left with a great sense of accomplishment. And since it isn't your main thing (startup), you don't feel you have push past that mirage 80% completion and spend the rest of your life on the final 20%.
That's why working on a project related to your startup often doesn't work for this solution. First off, it can't be incremental because then you don't get the satisfaction. But even if it is something brand new, you could feel compelled to keep working on it, especially if it hits users. Now that may not be a bad thing at all; it just may not help with burnout.
The other thing I've learned to stave off burnout as much as possible is to get a lot of user feedback. Ideas and suggestions from real users really motivates me.
Update: also some good comments on HN.
Happy Valentine's day. Here's something I hate: tl;dr comments. tl;dr stands for "too long;didn't read." I've seen these types of comments increasingly on Hacker News lately, the only online forum I routinely visit. Searchyc (a site that searches the forum) confirms the increasing frequency of these comments over the past few months.
People who comment tl;dr are pretty much confirming they didn't read the article they are commenting on, which means the chances of their comment being useful is slim.
The worst is just 'tl;dr' and nothing else, or perhaps even worse, a tl;dr followed by an emoticon. It adds nothing except that the article seemed long in the commenter's opinion. And it's really smug, which annoys me in and of itself.
Slightly longer tl;dr comments try to summarize the article, which can actually be useful. But I'd strongly prefer if they didn't use that abbreviation; just say summary or abstract. Saying 'tl;dr' just brings that smug tone into it.
Finally some people say they serve a purpose to inform writers their posts are too long. I don't buy that, especially on a forum like Hacker News that works on a voting system. Just don't upvote it.
I think pg (the forum creator) agrees, though I sent him an email about it and never got a reply back.
Like a lot of people in the US, seeing Avatar made me think of native American/European history. Yes, there were a lot of wrongs committed. And yes, a lot of it had to do with diseases.
On HN, bokonist started an interesting thread asking whether it would have been better to turn back the clock and not have ever interacted?
I think that is one legitimate, albeit unrealistic, logical conclusion of our modern moralistic sensibilities. hristov makes the point that a peaceful co-existence would have been possible, but in the same breath talks about assimilation.
Avatar sheds light on both possibilities. As a viewer you're almost screaming for the former where us Earthlings would have never set foot on Pandora. Yet both in the movie and in real life I think it just couldn't have happened that way. There are too many independent variables, i.e. people.
We're always going to have explorers, entrepreneurs, and frontiersmen among us. And society isn't going to stop them from interacting with new things. So while idealistic, I think these alternate histories are dream worlds.
Interaction is inevitable. And with interaction, some degree of assimilation is inevitable.
From the Avatar perspective, assimilation seems pernicious, as it would certainly mean the destruction of at least in part the Navi's day to day life, which is painted so majestically in the movie.
Imagine many peaceful human colonies with their modern technology and economy. Some Navi are intrigued and gradually some start to assimilate--have jobs, trade, etc. Is that progress or a destruction of culture?
Avatar paints the Navi as an essentially homogeneous group. And given that they are not human, I'll let it slide. So back to the native Americans.
As like any human population, native Americans have their own explorers, entrepreneurs, and frontiersmen. Some of these people want to assimilate. Some will have gone home at night wishing that they had been born into the European way of life, and visa-versa.
We like to think of these groups as homogeneous, but in reality they are from it.
I recently read The Black Hole War. This quote from pg 418 really got me thinking: "Out of every 10,000,000,000 bits of information in the universe, 9,999,999,999 are associated with the horizons of black holes."
As an apathetic agnostic, I don't think much about how our universe was created. Yet doing so is pretty hard to escape when reading this book.
Suppose the universe was created, but the creators are not omnipotent. For a bad analogy, consider the universe as a large computer program. They designed this system, perhaps one of many, and let it go.
Further assume that though the creators are not omnipotent they may be able to interact with our universe without obeying our laws of physics. That is, they can measure or get views into certain things without effecting anything.
Now if they have active interest in monitoring their creation, what will their stats pages look like?
If indeed pretty much all information is in black holes, would they even know there are bits of information out of black holes? If so, would they further know about life in the universe? And of course, would we (Earth) show up anywhere?
Update: additional comments can be found here (on HN).
Woke up today to see yet another anti-TV post on Hacker News. The comments link to two really funny takes on the issue at Stuff White People Like and The Onion.
Here's what I like to watch on TV:
- Educational
- Charlie Rose
- Q and A
- America and the Courts
- 60 Minutes
- Sunday Morning
- Meet the Press
- The Chris Matthew's Show
- Comedy
- Family Guy
- South Park
- American Dad
- Big Bang Theory
- How I Met Your Mother
- Futurama (re-runs)
- The Colbert Report
- King of Queens (re-runs)
- Seinfeld (re-runs)
- Flight of the Conchords
- Drama
- Sports
- Tour de France
- Tennis
- Soccer
I find it odd to indict an entire communication medium with anything. Of course there is stuff you are not going to like on TV. But by the same token, there is probably stuff you will like too.
Do you want to be good friends with the average person?
I can understand the argument of wanting to reclaim your time. I cut out reading the newspaper in paper-form last year. I used to get the WSJ and the Phoenix delivered. But I didn't cut out the entire news medium. Instead, I just cut down my consumption to what I find most interesting, which I now get through a site I made for that purpose and via RSS feeds.
Similarly, cutting out all TV seems a bit drastic me. Ne qid nimis (nothing in excess). I DVR everything, so I watch it when I want and I get to skip all the commercials.
Anyway, my point here is not really to defend TV. I'm just saying I consider myself a hacker and I, for one, love the above shows.
What do you like to watch?
What does most (>75%) of the population (of your country) do that you do not?
Note that I'm not asking what makes you unique. For example, I'm an INTJ, which is one of those 1% personality types. However, it's not like 99% of people are one personality type and then us INTJs are the other one. There are 16 Myers-Briggs types, so this doesn't count, although it certainly contributes to my uniqueness.
I'm looking for (at least almost) binary things. The first thing I thought of is that don't drink, but it turns out 40% of Americans don't drink. So that doesn't count.
Here's some things that seem to count (with my % estimates):
- I have a graduate degree (10% of US pop>25). (A bachelor's degree doesn't cut it any more as 27% of the US population over 25 has one.)
- I went to a top-10 school (3% of school goers).
- I am a business owner (15% of US pop>25).
- I did not get a job after school. (I started a business instead.) I can't find a stat here, but I'm sure it is very low.
- I'm a stay-at-home Dad (1% of dads).
- I blog (12% of Internet users).
