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rolling as straight as possible might bump from side to side, but between the left and right side the wheels will be rotating with as little friction as possible.

deliberately going to one side guarantees that the wheels will never reach max speed.

I'm not saying they are, but if asshole-ness and makes-awesomethings-ness were linked, would it be preferable for him to be "a nice guy" and not "a guy who drove plausible solutions to global online payments, solar power, electric cars, and space travel"?

Or would we rather have another nice guy that didn't do those things?

It's hard to imagine that anyone who continues to work for Elon Musk's companies right now doesn't have alternatives. So they're CHOOSING that, for whatever reason. Maybe they tolerate his behavior to be a part of what he does. But nobody is really trapped there without options.

Maybe (probably) it's possible to be nice and be awesome. But it's not important to me that Elon Musk is nice. If I have to pick between his creation and his compassion, I pick creation.

I'm wondering how this warranted a writeup like this. Someone starts a few ventures, a few people lost some money, its ambiguous as to whether or not there are valid claims to the lost money. Total amount "a few million dollars".

What makes this different?

And the examples given are of ventures that Josh worked for 8+ years in. Hardly the mark of a conman.

Many HN participants have left behind more failed ventures or lost more money than this Josh.

Same vein.

I have no idea what 100 years from now is going to look like, much less 1000 years.

That isn't to say that I am looking for 1 year, in and out, flip acquisition companies but optimizing for the "way way after I'm dead" timeline is equally ludicrous to me.

I care most about whats going to happen in my human lifetime. If I can create something that persists 1000 years, great, but that's not really important to me.

VC's: I don't really see there being an interest in this. What's the viral coefficient?

A whole day?! Driven entrepreneurs like me can finish a can of pringles in 15 minutes.

Gold.

We're all passionate about a lot of things that simply aren't commercially viable.

I sell rental application software for a living. It's necessary, a part of the industry, and not something I'm particularly passionate about in subject matter. I AM passionate about doing the absolute best job by a mile and providing the incontestably, incontrovertibly, unambiguously best option on the market for our customers.

Almost EVERYTHING I do (and the awesome people on my team do) has nothing specifically to do with rental application software. Rental application software is just a widget that we sell that has commercial value and therefore pays the bills.

What we do is: software delivery, customer service, operations, listening to our customers, and a bunch of other stuff that is immediately translatable to <any other widget>. But we do the absolute best in industry at those things.

So I'm not really passionate necessarily about "what I do" in the way people thing (rental application software), but we're really passionate about "what I do" in the way that I think of it (running the best damn business).

Rental application software is just this tiny, tiny, tiny kernel of a thing makes it easy to classify what we do into an industry or subject bucket -- but for what we deliver, what we think about, what we REALLY DO, that tiny kernel occupies less than 5% of our thoughts.

I have on more than one occasion heard founders (maybe in the process of pitching for investment dollars) say things like:

> "This is my life's work. I'm passionate about _____"

Where ________ is something like:

    - accounting software
    - restaurant POS systems
    - online coupons

If they are saying that to convince someone you're all in on it, I get it. I've pitched/sold before. And don't get me wrong, those are important things for someone to do. It's just not really necessary or important to me that those are things that the founder is deeply passionate about.

Yes, I would MUCH rather invest in someone who is truly passionate about that boring thing. But:

1. If it's true, that person is probably awful boring (or alternatively, I have been blessed with really awesome and interesting friends!), and

2. Coupling your financial future to the commercial viability of "what you're passionate about" still strikes me as terrible advice, though admittedly feel-good advice that resonates with a generation of people accustomed to excess disposable income and who consequently have had the ability to pursue passions.

There's a reason why big accomplishments always come with effusive thanks to family and friends. It's not just about giving thanks—it's about publicly apologizing to the people who've sacrificed so much so you can realize a dream.

In one small part, former NSA head says they make almost the same decisions regarding issues of how to defend our nation.

Gen. Alexander: Obviously they come from different parties, they view things differently, but when it comes to the security of the nation and making those decisions about how to protect our nation, what we need to do to defend it, they are, ironically, very close to the same point. You would get almost the same decision from both of them on key questions about how to defend our nation from terrorists and other threats.

Not the same as "Obama makes almost the same decisions as Bush".

And it only takes a few different decisions to be meaningfully different.

it's difficult to describe and people pronounce english words differently so this isn't definitive, but

yao1 is like "yao ming", like if you stub your toe and say "owww!" in pain, or "yowzers!" -- those vowel sounds are all the same for me, so if they are for you too, that's probably the standard sound for "yao" in chinese.

liu4 is much more closed mouth. rather than opening your mouth wide, your mouth will be closed as if you are pronouncing the english name of the letter "e". the vowel sounds are roughly like taking the words "he" and "who", stripping the "h" sounds, and ramming the vowel sounds together. this (for me) sounds similar to the sound a child makes when he/she sees something disgusting and says "Ewwww!" or the english word "few" (the opposite of many). hopefully those 3 also sound the same to you.

yao1 (1) and liu4 (6) should be pretty distinct. but if the way you pronounce them is similar for whatever reason, you can always use yi and chinese listeners won't flinch. in fact, taiwanese americans will be confused by yao, but zero people will be confused by yi so it's arguably better to use that if you don't know the background of your counterparty.

I think this is false. Japanese is quite rich for this. It's not worth debating whether Chinese lends itself more to this than Japanese, but as a Chinese speaker (cantonese and mandarin) who speaks Japanese, I find that Japanese is more versatile than Chinese.

Here's why:

1. all the digits have multiple pronunciations.

2. despite your point that many japanese words are monosyllabic, japanese are notorious for shortening their words and maintaining the meaning and also there are the chinese pronunciations ("on reading" vs "kun reading") so there are often monosyllabic ways to pronounce it.

3. additionally, for a given word, there are often tons of different (seemingly sensible) ways to pronounce it. This is confusing to everyone, including japanese nationals. they basically are just really good at figuring out meanings. I often have no idea what the correct pronunciation of written text is, but I know exactly what it means. This is true for japanese nationals as well. here's a great video of a game where japanese people try to guess how to pronounce kanji: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sY63F5wIPzc

Ultimately, the language's ability to be able to be used in the described way depends on the ability to map the pronunciations of digits to other meaningful words. Having a smaller set of sounds leads to more overlap.

Japanese and Chinese both have the property of having single syllable digit names tons of single syllable words in the language to map to. (even though arguably in Japanese "ichi" [1] or "nana" [7] are 2 syllables, "i"" or "na" would be acceptable -- also, in Japanese "shi" and "yon" are both acceptable single syllable ways to say the number 4)

Basically either is ripe for double entendre (not sexual, though possibly that too... for example, in cantonese, you can pretty much say any number to mean penis, though usually with the wrong tone)

(edit: I just wrote a longer detailed explanation of this with examples of neumonics for square roots one comment level above this.)

In school in japan, kids often learn tricks for memorizing multiplication tables and square roots this way, similar to how US high school students have a song for the roots of a quadratic (-b /- root(b^2-4ac... to the tune of Pop Goes The Weasel).

For example:

sqrt 2 = 1.41421356 (night after night, I watch/take care of someone)

sqrt 5 == 2.236069 (a parrot sings at Mount Fuji)

sqrt 6 == 2.44949 (cook the meat well)

sqrt 7 == 2.64575 (there are no bugs in the cabbage)

sqrt 8 == 2.828 (smile)

Breaking down the first one as an example, sqrt(2) : 一夜一夜に人見頃 (hitoyohitoyonihitomigoro)

hito (一) = 1, hitotsu -- the counter term for nights, like "yi ge" in chinese

yo (夜) = 4, this is the chinese reading of "night/evening". this character is pronounced "ye`" in mandarin. in japanese, in common speech you would say "yoru" for night.

[then repeat 一夜 -- actually sounds poetic and makes it mean "nightly" or "every night"]

ni (に) = 2, the same sound also is a particle indicating place or time

hito (人) = 1, pronounced the same as 1, but the character 人 is a homophone for person. person could also be pronounce jin (chinese reading, close to "ren" in mandarin) which is how it would be pronounced if combined with other chinese characters, like "nihonjin".

mi (見) = 3, in japanese, if you recite the numbers from 1 to 10 you would say "san" for 3, but to count items, you would say "mittsu". for example, the company "mitsubishi" has the number 3 (三) as the first character of it's name and it is pronounced "mi" like in this context. mi could mean a ton of other things too, like "ear" (耳) or "body" or "flesh" (身). This digit has a lot of flexibility.

goro (頃) = 56, 5==go, 6==roku. goro is unambiguously understood to be 56. and "koro" or "goro" describes the duration during which something is occuring -- basically "time".

To me this is very similar to the neumonic that US elementary school kids use to learn the planets: "My very educated mother just served us nine pies".

And just like you can use an alternate sentence like "My Very Energetic Mother Jumps Skateboards Under Nana's Patio", Japanese syllables are rich enough that you could construct totally different phrases to walk through those digits.

Japanese is arguably richer than Chinese for this because there are multiple pronunciations for each digit. 2 can be "fu" (like in Fuji above) or "ni" (a preposition like "in" in root 7).

http://m.chiebukuro.yahoo.co.jp/detail/q1223089527

http://www.sf.airnet.ne.jp/ts/japanese/message/jpnDQs4uCYwDQ...

Pretty uncommon among southern Chinese people and Taiwanese (many American mandarin speakers are of Taiwanese descent).

My fitness pal is great, but it too long for me to use, I suck at looking up or even knowing exactly what I ate is.

What I'd like is an app that lets me just take a picture of my meal, then add any comments that might be helpful "ham sandwich" or "poached salmon, about the size of my palm" -- then it magically figures out what I ate and the nutrition contents (within a day is fine)

I've seen this attempted before, but nobody still seems to be in business. I suspect this has to happen with a human powered "pictures+comments to nutrition data" engine.

I'd be willing to pay $30/mo (too low? $50?) for this and commit to paying for 4 months. If 99 other people (or 59) people committed as well, that'd be $3000/mo revenue for the day this thing launches.

1. Would anyone else back that as a pre-signed up user? 2. Is anyone willing to do it for us?

As someone trying to learn to play guitar, being able to loop and 4 measures at a time to play along with is incredibly useful.

The meetup group: http://www.meetup.com/hnchicago/

Ms Tech, which supports women learning, teaching and sharing technology business experiences: http://ms-tech.co/

All the "growth hacking" talk out there makes you want to search for the "one secret trick" or the better placed share button, but for Rocket Lease I did/am doing just tons of unscalable, schleppy, inelegant stuff.

I personally have made thousands of cold calls, found property management companies with errors on their websites and offered to fix them for free to get a conversation started, tried tons of online ad channels (Adwords converts for me now, but I can't buy that many clicks profitably and the viable keyword space is smaller than expected). Flyers, postcards, calling brokers and taking them out to lunch....

Basically all the elegant automated stuff I wanted to happen didn't.

Dogged persistence has been the biggest winner to date. It's gotten easier and with domain age and more back links I'm starting to do better in organic search but it's still not that much (~70 hits a day). With more customers now I have some social proof and I'm starting to get more recommendations in but I think the tipping point for when that becomes a meaningful growth driver is still a ways away.

Oh, and customer service. Unreasonably good customer service. Not because I have to but because I obsess about my business, I personally get to support tickets really fast, try to personally connect with the customer and understand their needs and figure out how to help them.

If I think rocket lease isn't the best fit for their needs, I'll tell them and recommend them to a better suited competitor (this happens if, for example, the landlord wants online rent payments built in to the same system).

Landlords really appreciate the quality service and personal attention. This is typically only necessary early on, and after the customer has used it a few times, it's pretty much auto pilot and they're a customer for life because of the great on boarding experience.

There's a company on the other side of the pond that seems to be making waves -- check out rentify.com.

I've never used them myself but their growth stats seem promising and they are vc backed. The founder, George S, is nice and we have spoken several times.

That is probably not very good since IE usage is disproportionately high among my customer base (side note, I'm going to check my conversion stats by browser now...)

It's profitable but my total investment still probably hasn't been recovered. I'm probably just over ramen profitable at this point.

It's been about 2 years since I started focusing seriously on it around jan 2012), it got to around cash flow breakeven in q3 2013. I haven't received any outside investment.

I write quite publicly about it and am happy to answer questions for anyone curious.

http://blog.ezliu.com/rocket-lease-update-sep-2013/

i've worked with agencies big and small, and above a certain size threshold they'll typically have some sort of in house IT staff. These tend to be generalists and don't "do software" the way "we" (hn, silicon valley, anyone who knows what techcrunch is, who has heard of fog creek) do.

they often hack together brittle solutions, do a lot of herky jerky deployment efforts that never make it to the finish line, allocate 25k to a local development shop and end up unhappy with the deliverable, etc.

Software is hard. it is fraught with challenges. but many businesses, real estate included, assume that it can be done well with a minimal spec and non-expert developers ("hot shot CS graduate with a 3.8+ GPA" is NOT a sufficient condition for assessing excellence and ability to ship code).

So they fail.

And they often then claim that tech is the problem and that developers are incompetent. It's a very long uphill battle to explain how you can deliver better, faster, at a fraction of the cost.

But we can.

1. Slightly linkbaity title (sorry @phil) -- Obviously real estate brokerages "survive" in some form. Great software streamlines. Most of the software out there is just a pain in the ass. But no software will REPLACE brokerage, in the same way that ATMs haven't replaced banks and point of sale systems haven't replaced checkout clerks (entirely).

2. What it will mean though, is that the best brokerages will be very tech enabled and be able to operate at much higher leverage w.r.t. human capital than ever before (once the tools are in place). "Real Estate Brokerage" as a profession is a collection of related tasks -- some which can be automated, some which can't. Reliably removing the rote, repeatable components will let really good brokers/brokerages focus on the hard to automate, human elements and do their jobs better and bigger than they do now.

One consequence of this is that the richest brokers and brokerages will get richer and the poor ones will go out of business. There will be less options in the marketplace. This is bad.

Right now, the spread between a top rental agent and an "average" rental agent is the difference between 500k/year and probably 20k-30/year. In sales, the divide is even bigger because the transaction cuts are bigger.

That divide will get bigger as tech adoption becomes the norm.