d4nt

Was this awful incident a one off or is attacking female speakers at tech conferences a thing? I've not noticed it until now. I don't get it, why would you? To what end?

In the current system, generators and consumers (domestic supplier companies are "consumers") trade freely with each other but have to submit notifications to the system operator of the trades that they have done. You trade electricity in half-hours but 1 hour before each half-hour in question you must submit your final notification of your traded position. This profile is what the operator expects you to product/consume over that half hour.

You may also participate in the balancing mechanism[1]. This is where you also submit bids/offers to produce/consume more/less during that half hour. The National Grid will accept bids/offers in order to balance what it sees at the difference between your traded position and forecast demand. If you get your traded position wrong, the grid will have to balance things up by accepting bids/offers and the cost of doing so will fall to you (plus a bit more to teach you a lesson).

The Balancing Mechanism works on a minute to minute type level, to handle second by second fluctuations there is also a service known as Frequency Response which the more flexible generators may provide to the grid. This is a mostly automated system in which their generation equipment continually adjusts to compensate for the changes in frequency.

In the film we saw, at least one Hyro plant was ready to come on. We're not told whether it had sold its power on the open market or had had a bid accepted on the Balancing Mechanism. However, when the French inter-connector trips the Grid brought on another hydro plant. This would probably have been via the Balancing Mechanism. The operators of the inter-connector would have had to pay for failing to meet their traded position.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Electricity_Trading_Arrange... [1] http://www.bmreports.com/bwx_reporting.htm

If you have to be a techie to get value from this data then there must be a market for easier to use data analysis tools for non-technical people, which I'm sure the market will fill. (Checkout my profile page, I'm building one right now).

Style guides are ok though, so long as they're short and not enforced too bluntly.

1. Seed capital seems largely useless, my lifestyle is very modest but the realities of childcare and mortgage mean my living expenses are higher than for your typical 20-something. The sums of money available at an early stage wouldn't last long enough to build an MVP, demonstrate traction, then find an angel. I'd have to go back to freelancing, only then I'd have an investor on my back. Bootstrapping seems like the only real option.

2. Having worked for 14 years as a developer then manager, I have a pretty good professional network. I've been pleasantly surprised by how easy its been to get work that fits round my startup work. I'm booked till Apr 2013 and turning gigs down at the moment.

3. Having kids is a huge time commitment. I simply cannot work at the office for 80 hours or more like some startup people do. However, I share an incubator space with some people like that and without wanting to sound in any way arrogant, I've realised that (a) my time constraints force me to focus really hard, I put in 50 really focused hours a week whereas they sometimes kick back and chat for a while because their energy is low, and (b) I have a lot more experience than them so I'm able to move faster than them on things like how to prep for a meeting with a potential partner or how to architect a system for the future. I think of it like this: if I can't leverage my ten years extra experience on these people to match their output in less time, then I deserve to go bust.

3. Energy: I'm doing what I love, I have all the energy I need.

Basically, you have to be a different kind of entrepreneur, some wouldn't call my product a "startup" because it isn't (yet) a shoot for the moon type venture, but I'm still 'starting something up' and it's still an exciting challenge :)

With Python, in the past things were a little trickier with easy install, but these days the library's web page would probably have told me to type:

    pip install third_party_library

I lost hours trying to set up Maven to download one library and build my project. All the documentation pages seemed to point to other documentation pages. I ended up trying to download about 30 jars manually, but the versions seemed to clash. I am convinced that the best thing a programming language can to do improve adoption is not to create a JVM version, but to create a package management system like pip/npm/NuGet.

But pg's point was specifically about how the Euro top ten was dominated by old companies and boring business models. My point is that aside from google, amazon and Facebook, the US top ten is not all that hip and fresh either.

Work out how many people you need signed up in order to live off the income, after a few weeks of marketing extrapolate out how many weeks it'll take to get enough people signed up to live off this business. Consider whether it's worth continuing or re-evaluate at that point.

Santander bought A&L a few years ago when they got into trouble during the credit crunch. Before then, Santander was not trading in the UK.

This, for me, is the weak point in an otherwise excellent article. A lot of investments, valuations and jobs rest on this assumption. Facebook's PE ratio is currently 127, this assumption is the reason that it isn't around the same level as other entertainment companies like, say, Disney (17) or News Corp (56). And when Facebook's valuation rises like that and people invest at that level then there's a whole lot of money for paying engineers >$100k salaries and buying up pre-revenue businesses like Instagram. So, even if you're Google and you're bringing in real money, the application of this assumption to a few big cases permeates through the whole system and means that you too have to pay engineers >$100k and you too have to pay more to get hold of someone like Nik (makers of Snapseed).

PG logic appears flawless, but as a seed fund manager in the middle of this ecosystem, he's working several layers of abstraction up from some big applications of this assumption. So much so that it probably doesn't feel like an assumption to him. After all, he didn't value Facebook[1] at that level.

I genuinely hope this assumption is correct, because a lot of people and livelihoods are depending on it.

[1] I'm using Facebook here as an exemplar, I'm sure there are lots of other companies out there with valuations that are due in part to the assumption that users = revenue. My argument is that when someone sets a valuation based on this assumption it has a knock on effect to the whole ecosystem.

If you're going to go after a very varied audience you should probably think carefully about whether you need to have lots of sub brands (e.g. Proctor & Gamble) so that your customers simply google for the sub brand, or whether you actually can attach some core values onto the parent brand that will be meaningful in all these different markets (e.g. Virgin or Disney). It's no good having a scatter gun product strategy then neglecting your branding and online presence because you sell to everyone everywhere.

[1] Things like major sporting events, Saturday night talent show finals, large scale news events e.g. 9/11, Christmas specials and key episodes of certain soap operas.

This strikes me as the saddest part of this article, but also a bit of a failure on the part of the author. Part of being a founder is surely inspiring others to believe that you're on to something; that you’re adding value and ultimately making the world better. If you believe in something, strongly enough to make you sleep in a truck, but can't communicate that to the people closest to you (who should be predisposed to listening to your point of view) then surely there's a problem.

When I say 'communicate' I don't even mean getting them to sign up to your service, I just mean making it clear to them why you are sleeping in a truck and why that's a rational behaviour from your point of view.

If, for example, you were sleeping in your truck to raise awareness of homelessness or as some kind of performance art; your friends and family might not agree that that was the best way forward, but they'd probably still be bringing you hot food at night. Why is your proposition so hard to explain that you're lying about where you sleep? Is it actually quite a shallow mission (e.g. I just want to make lots of money and haven't really got a vision of how to make the world better) or is it that you're not able to communicate your vision well, even to those close to you? Either way, alarm bells are ringing in my head.