links for 2010-10-04

  • And it’s not as if the stories we hear about entrepreneurs are biased in a random way. Paul [Graham] quotes one of his founders like this: “That's the actual beauty in the off-the-record-ness: you hear just how screwed up most of these successful startups were on the way up.” In my experience, the official stories are always more linear, make the founders and investors look smarter, and dramatically overstate the level of certainty everyone had at every stage of the process. Failures, pivots, and crappy minimum viable products are generally elided. And the kinds of failures that do get airtime are usually failures to adequately plan, anticipate, or design in advance. So, naturally, the kinds of inferences we make from these stories are: we need heroic entrepreneurs, with absolute certainty in a brilliant idea, and we need to plan and execute well.
  • (tags: startup pr)
  • Yes, it can, especially in bad weather. I'm going to start turning off my electronics, I thought it was a myth
  • Choose your tests well, they'll help you get the right algorithm for the problem
  • "Two, get a coach. Because people aren't going to tell the boss what you need to know about yourself. Bad news never travels all the way up. So get a coach who helps you, and criticizes, and makes demands, and holds you accountable. Don't you think there's a reason that even superhuman athletes, the best in the world, always have coaches? Yet how many CEOs do? I occasionally had a coach [Peter Wendell, head of Sierra Ventures] and made some of my best decisions when using him.
  • wow. what really impresses me is mint isn't an engineering company - they're a marketing company that put some ajax on top of yodlee. yodlee's been around for over 10 years and they never built a brand or a community like mint. mint is now #1 on my 'notes to self' when i get so focused on engineering my way to a solution i forget sometimes its' better to partner with a competitor and move on.
  • tracks website hits, site traffic, you can compare sites
  • We are a society that basically eats, sleeps, works and then veges out. Not surprising, I guess, given that the tip of the spear of the economy are those same kids who a decade or two earlier were living at home with their parents after college, after graduate school – well, some still are. That plus a car, food, our two-hundred dollar experience machine games, and we are happy as a clam. I don’t know exactly how this economy works, but I can tell you that it is not working well. What are all of Reich’s workers doing for jobs now? Where is the money coming from for even this minimally consumptive society? What levers can we pull to get ourselves out of this stagnant economy, to reduce unemployment? We are approaching our second lost decade, and nothing seems to work. Not that most people care.
  • author recommends TimeSvr - $69/month, unlimited tasks, sounds pretty reasonable
  • But graduating students will be equipped to do far more than work at Big Blue, says Stanley Litow, IBM's Vice President of Corporate Citizenship & Corporate Affairs. "The idea is to create a new [educational] model for science, technology, engineering, and math--areas where companies are aggressively hiring. If you look at hiring requirements, you won't see a huge amount of difference in a lot of entry-level IT jobs." So students will, theoretically, have the skills to work any entry-level IT position.

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