jaspertheghost

hmm is this effective altruism, seems like they used it to cover massive fraud.

did you use vectorbt or event driven backtesting?

At first glance, it seems very logical. Why do you need a middle man, these companies will all die out. The problem with this argument is that he doesn't realize advertising is 600B globally. Each of the small boxes there is 1b-40b depending the bucket (from tag management to mobile (100b)). When you realize that there's only 15 companies serving a 1 billion dollar market, you realize that it's not that small.

Granted. There will be companies that will die in the ecosystem, but the logic is poor. It's like saying why do you need a CRM system, it's just a tool standing between the sales person and the customer.

Because Rapgenius hasn't profited out of the lyrics yet. DMCA focused on monetization of other people's content as one of the main criterias for violation. It doesn't matter whether it's UGC or not.

Grit & determination are for me defining factors in a person's character IMO. What initially turned me onto this was the Teach for America article on the effectiveness of teachers. One of the most surprising items on the research was the effect of grit on the teacher. More specifically:

"What did predict success, interestingly, was a history of perseverance—not just an attitude, but a track record. In the interview process, Teach for America now asks applicants to talk about overcoming challenges in their lives—and ranks their perseverance based on their answers. Angela Lee Duckworth, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, and her colleagues have actually quantified the value of perseverance. In a study published in TheJournal of Positive Psychology in November 2009, they evaluated 390 Teach for America instructors before and after a year of teaching. Those who initially scored high for “grit”—defined as perseverance and a passion for long-term goals, and measured using a short multiple-choice test—were 31 percent more likely than their less gritty peers to spur academic growth in their students. Gritty people, the theory goes, work harder and stay committed to their goals longer. (Grit also predicts retention of cadets at West Point, Duckworth has found.)"

That started the initial conversation with Adam Smith. This let to a fascinating conversation with respect to startups, teaching, and everything else too.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/01/what-mak...

There are a couple of things:

1. The servers aren't all application servers. There's load balancers, memcache servers, lossy memcache servers, etc.

2. It's the cloud. It includes large instances, HA-Proxies, memcache servers, etc. 3. There's very high write characteristics for social gaming's data store, but the read is similar to normal web application.

4. He took an aggregate server #, and generalized it over a period of 30 weeks. It's directionally accurate, but I wouldn't take it literally.

I disagree with this. You want to go after roads that give you greater option value. Adult industry is not a career killer per se, but provides you less option value in terms of industry experience (for example, Linkedin provided the insight to go into FB for Matt Cohler).

Who you are is a more accurate predictor of entrepreneurship and success. That being said the two schools that have the best track records are Stanford and UIUC. Stanford (Google, Yahoo, Sun Microsystems) and UIUC (Netscape, Paypal, YouTube, Oracle, Yelp, Farmville)

http://www.quora.com/What-startups-have-come-out-of-Stanford... http://www.quora.com/What-startups-have-come-out-of-Universi...

Social network composes of three parts: social graph, reach applications, and games. Slide provides social media applications and the expertise to make them. The part about FB profile data is not true, and based on ToS, they wouldn't be able to use it.

Slide started out as a global recommendation push engine for shopping items. They pivoted to a widget company when it took off.

I believe that tenacity leads to luck, simply through more tries:

Chance II springs from your energetic, generalized motor activities... the freer they are, the better.

[Chance II] involves the kind of luck [Charles] Kettering... had in mind when he said, "Keep on going and chances are you will stumble on something, perhaps when you are least expecting it. I have never heard of anyone stumbling on something sitting down."

http://pmarca-archive.posterous.com/luck-and-the-entrepreneu...

It's about time. Google AppEngine (Map Reduce, GFS, etc) has always lacked behind the Dynamo architecture in terms of winning developer mind share and specing the right features. The inherent problem with Google App Engine is it's not backwards compatible with existing system.

It's hard to tell. For salary info go to: glassdoor.com

I think the core of the question is can you start a technical company if you have a MBA. Yes you can, but you have to have a strong technical founder. Sun Microsystems had Andy Bechtolsheim and Bill Joy. EA had David Maynard. Genetech had Herbert W. Boyer. Macromedia had Marc Canter. Akamai started from technical founders ... etc. etc. Having a MBA doesn't preclude from being a founder (i.e. Intuit), but you better start finding a good technical co-founder.

Read this:

http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/10/the-pmarca-gu-1.html

"Once you have picked an industry, get right to the center of it as fast as you possibly can."

"Every job, every role, every company you go to is an opportunity to learn how a business works and how an industry works."

When you're young, you should always trade income risk and get to the center of the action ASAP and decide which "businesses" you want to learn. For example, if you want to start a enterprise software company, you would work at SAP.

This is only for you're very ambitious. If you're not, focus on the compensation, challenging work, environment, etc that everyone talks about. The fact is if you're doing a startup, you learn about the business from being in a company in the space. (SAP spun out of IBM, Salesforce/PeopleSoft/Siebel from Oracle, YouTube/Slide/Geni/Yelp/Linkedin from Paypal (all consumer internet), etc).

My family is in the biotech/pharma side, and I'm on the computer science side, fyi just to add credibility to my argument.

The issue is your field. If you just had a B.S. and you were doing computer science, I'd say go for startups, but the barriers to entry for biotech firms are much higher. Typically they fund professors and Ph.D's and not undergrads.

Innovation and utility is defined by use. If people want to use social networks and not some microformats to enable the semantic web, that's innovation. All this complaining about working on worthwhile products has some truth to it, but look at the utility of lasers. In the end, lasers enabled cd/dvd's for millions of people to watch movies and music, and that's the ultimate utility.

It's true that you need additional skills to grow a successful company, but without the product/technical skills, you can't start recruit or sustain a company. A technical company is primarily a function of its people and its products. As companies mature, more adults that aren't as product focused come in and think it's entirely about brand, marketing, sales, etc. It's true that those things that bring in the money, but once your focus shifts toward those areas, you'll inevitably turn into a EBay, Yahoo, or Apple (pre-Jobs). When Jobs came back, he said the only thing he did was shift the company's focus toward "product" not marketing or sales.

I've had many non-technical friends that have had a "great" idea and wanted to recruit programmers. It's never worked. It's best if you have the skills yourself.

A lot of people were surprised that Amazon not Google dominates cloud computing or that it branched out to the Kindle. Amazon has always had a technical culture focused on great user experiences. It's not a surprise at all when you take a look at it from that standpoint.

It's true that you need additional skills to grow a successful company, but without the product/technical skills, you can't start recruit or sustain a company. A technical company is primarily a function of its people and its products. As companies mature, more adults that aren't as product focused come in and think it's entirely about brand, marketing, sales, etc. It's true that those things that bring in the money, but once your focus shifts toward those areas, you'll inevitably turn into a EBay, Yahoo, or Apple (pre-Jobs). When Jobs came back, he said the only thing he did was shift the company's focus toward "product" not marketing or sales.

I've had many non-technical friends that have had a "great" idea and wanted to recruit programmers. It's never worked. It's best if you have the skills yourself.

A lot of people were surprised that Amazon not Google dominates cloud computing or that it branched out to the Kindle. Amazon has always had a technical culture focused on great user experiences. It's not a surprise at all when you take a look at it from that standpoint.

It's true that you need additional skills to grow a successful company, but without the product/technical skills, you can't start recruit or sustain a company. A technical company is primarily a function of its people and its products. As companies mature, more adults that aren't as product focused come in and think it's entirely about brand, marketing, sales, etc. It's true that those things that bring in the money, but once your focus shifts toward those areas, you'll inevitably turn into a EBay, Yahoo, or Apple (pre-Jobs). When Jobs came back, he said the only thing he did was shift the company's focus toward "product" not marketing or sales.

I've had many non-technical friends that have had a "great" idea and wanted to recruit programmers. It's never worked. It's best if you have the skills yourself.

A lot of people were surprised that Amazon not Google dominates cloud computing or that it branched out to the Kindle. Amazon has always had a technical culture focused on great user experiences. It's not a surprise at all when you take a look at it from that standpoint.

I personally read a lot and I think the electronic medium will add an additional layer of value: annotation, collaboration, access to a large amount of knowledge without having to lug around paper. Print's slowly dying because it's not linked to rest of the content in the world.

I don't think content creators are dead by any means, but I do think there have to be devices and mediums that enable more than the create and publish model.

When Amazon designed Kindle, they tried to make sure the user experience was as close to a book as possible. When I go on a plane, I would prefer not lugging around 4 books in my suitcase vs just using a Kindle. There is something about the print medium that's very pleasing, but I think e-ink and e-books will co-exist like theater and t.v. Although many can say that the T.V. will cannabilze all theater going activity, there is something unique about the experience that the solo activity cannot capture.

Most people these days are lamenting about the death of innovation in the valley. It reminds me of when Arthur Rock said that innovation was dead right before the internet started taking off.

"He predicts few dramatic technological breakthroughs in the next several years, but expects that recent inventions will enable dozens of companies to push electronics into every aspect of life."

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,949965-1,00...

Many people copy success so tons of "me-too" companies get started, but technology just like all industries are dominated by black swans.

Old guard always wants to protect a dying business because the people in charge have to wipe out their existing knowledge and experience of their business to go into a new business. When he/she goes into the new business, he/she would have no advantages vs a competitor that already exists in the field (i.e. a print executive going into tech). Most companies (due to the promotion structure) cannot make this jump some can (Intel).

I think e-books give the best chance for print to survive as a medium (in e-ink form, not in paper form). But as always, the captain of the ship fades away, not unlike a frog being slowly boiled to death because the temperature is slowly increasing.

Advertising comes from T.V. and print, where there's inherent scarcity. Advertising on social media needs to adapt to that and try to understand the keys to unlocking engagement with brands.

I don't the decision should be evaluated just as a yes or no decision. There was a piece of research that looked at applicants to Ivy Leagues and applicants to magnet schools. For applicants of High School Magnet schools, the leading indicator was not whether they got in, but rather if they applied. For people who got into Ivy Leagues, the leading indicator was if they "chose" to go somewhere else and get an education there instead.

There's an inmeasuable quality of ambition that cannot be quantified on paper. I personally know many of my friends who have gotten into "prestigious" Universities who are not doing as well as some of my other friends.

It's the same reason why Nobel Laureates come from various universities. If the measuring tool to get into Ivy Leagues were a perfect indicator, these professors would be considered a fluke.

I've come to realize more and more that tests are inherently flawed.

Sure, but he was always an inveterate tinkerer. Much like the passage described below:

http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/b/bennis-genius.html

Many of the people in our Great Groups are tinkerers--the kind of people who, as children, took the family television apart and tried to put it together again. They are people willing to spend thousands of hours finding out how things work, including things that don't yet exist. There's a joke about engineers that captures the spirit of many participants in creative collaborations. An engineer meets a frog who offers the engineer anything he wants if he will kiss the frog. "No," says the engineer. "Come on," says the frog. "Kiss me, and I'll turn into a beautiful woman." "Nah," says the engineer. "I don't have time for a girlfriend ...but a talking frog, that's really neat. " Members of Great Groups don't fear technology, they embrace it. And they all think that creating the future is really neat.

I really like functional languages while others hate it, but I don't think functional languages will take off by itself. The reason why functional languages don't work is that they're they wrong metaphor. Object oriented programming works because it fits the user model of how to describe actions and the world.

Features of functional languages will influence PL (Ruby, EMCA script, Python), server paradigms (map reduce), but I don't think it'll ever go mainstream by itself.

While long term optimism is a force multiplier, short term pessimism is the key to success. This is the exact reason why you see people at "successful" startups/companies jump to very early startups (pre-product/market fit) and completely flounder. The stage between pre-product/market fit and product/market fit is completely different. The usual thing that happens is that these "successful" people have survivor bias and end up wrecking the company they jump to.

Asking whether you'll jump or not, is always the wrong question. If you're asking yourself that question, you're probably not an entrepreneur. Most entrepreneurs that are successful have multiple previous startups and have always made the jump early and frequently (Jobs and Wozniak with their illegal long distance calling hack, Zuckerberg with a collaborative fitering music sharing app in high school, Aaron (Mint.com) with his multiple startups back in college, etc). Doing every progressive experience gets you used to doing another startup and making you comfortable for the jump. Doing a startup isn't like rolling the dice and seeing if you can win the lottery, it's more of a compulsion.

There was a blog entry :

http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2008/04/ten-questions-a.html "Is there an ideal age for an entrepreneur? No, although most start at a young age since they don't belong in big companies. But once an entrepreneur always an entrepreneur. We've got one entrepreneur in our portfolio who is approaching 60 and working on his fourth company."