5,083 karma · joined February 27, 2007
http://www.bootstrappersbreakfast.com/ You buy your own breakfast and take part in a serious conversation with other bootstrapping entrepreneurs.
http://www.skmurphy.com/blog/
http://www.linkedin.com/in/skmurphy
2. Many problems require situational knowledge to create and maintain complex infrastructure.
3. Moving molecules around
4. Feedback loops
5. Chaos and complexity make many phenomena hard to simulate.
There are also in-person Bootstrapper Breakfast meetings in Las Vegas, San Francisco, and Silicon Valley.
These events are for “entrepreneurs who eat problems for breakfast.”®
Abstract: ‘Forensic metascience’ involves using digital tools, statistical observations or human faculties to assess the consistency of empirical features within scientific statements. Usually, those statements are contained within formal scientific papers.
A forensic metascientific analysis of a paper is the presentation of one or more observations made about features within that paper. These can be numerical, visual, or textual / semantic features.
Forensic metascientific analysis is designed to modify trust by evaluating research consistency. It is not designed to ‘find fraud’. While this may happen, it is not the sole focus of forensic metascience as a research area and practice, it is simply the loudest consequence.
Intelligence Amplification/Augmentation not Artificial Intelligence (IA not AI)
Human Touch at Scale: Enable Customer Intimacy not an Instrumentality
Tap Expertise Like Electricity: Rely on Recon Pull Over Centralized Command
Focus on Learning and Teaching: View Customer Requests as Opportunities Not Costs
Play a Long Game: Focus on Longer Term Possibilities Over Short Term Gains
Play a Fast Game: Act on Good Enough Now Don’t Wait for Perfection or Certainty
Embrace the Possibility of Failure to Prevent it, the Reality of Failure to Learn from It
Act Entrepreneurially and Foster Ecosystems to Create More Value Than You CaptureI was surprised to see that Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz, who has historically shied away from openly criticizing the company that made him a billionaire, endorses the book. Brooke Oberwetter, a former Facebook policy manager whose time at the company overlapped with the period Wynn-Williams writes about, also recommends it.
“I can’t fact check the whole book (and neither can anyone else), but I can say that the meetings and events I was a part of that are recounted in the book (and things that were relayed to me by others contemporaneously) are accurately represented,” she writes on LinkedIn. “Maybe more importantly, the vibe she captured is spot on. It was just all so juvenile.”
The jump to director is by no means driven just by experience or tenure and may require skills or expertise you have not demonstrated. It may be time to have a career conversation with your VP.
I understand you are focused freemium as a goto market strategy with no dedicated sales or marketing team members.
What tools are you displacing (e.g. Excel)?
There are also in-person Bootstrapper Breakfast meetings in Las Vegas, San Francisco, and Silicon Valley.
These events are for “entrepreneurs who eat problems for breakfast.”®
"There has been an increasing amount of fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) regarding AI Scaling laws. A cavalcade of part-time AI industry prognosticators have latched on to any bearish narrative they can find, declaring the end of scaling laws that have driven the rapid improvement in Large Language Model (LLM) capabilities in the last few years."
"The reality is that there are more dimensions for scaling beyond simply focusing on pre-training, which has been the sole focus of most of the part-time prognosticators. OpenAI’s o1 release has proved the utility and potential of reasoning models, opening a new unexplored dimension for scaling. This is not the only technique, however, that delivers meaningful improvements in model performance as compute is scaled up. Other areas that deliver model improvements with more compute include Synthetic Data Generation, Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), Functional Verifiers, and other training infrastructure for reasoning. The sands of scaling are still shifting and evolving, and, with it, the entire AI development process has continued to accelerate. "
Review at https://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P6083.html
Related explorations:
David Gelernter's "Mirror Worlds" (1993) https://www.amazon.com/Mirror-Worlds-Software-Universe-Shoeb...
Guidelines for policy modellers – 30 years on: New tricks or old dogs? (1971) https://mssanz.org.au/modsim2011/G6/syme.pdf
Group model building: problem structuring, policy simulation and decision support https://repository.ubn.ru.nl/bitstream/handle/2066/46184/461...
+ Domain / industry expertise is a key differentiator.
+ Solve a single known problem when launching: be 10X better than current alternatives.
+ Stay focused: continue to ask, "is the task I am working on essential?"
There are also in-person Bootstrapper Breakfast meetings in Las Vegas, San Francisco, and Silicon Valley.
These events are for “entrepreneurs who eat problems for breakfast.”®
There are also in-person Bootstrapper Breakfast meetings in Las Vegas, San Francisco, and Silicon Valley.
These events are for “entrepreneurs who eat problems for breakfast.”®
"We’re all mostly just regular people interacting with other regular people, trying to go about our business and get through our days. Nobody’s asking us to index and catalog entire libraries of information. Nobody really cares if we reuse a stock photo that somebody else might have used somewhere else at some point. We’re not so busy that we need everything predigested before it’s presented to us. We’re still clever enough to work our way through unfamiliar problems. Some of us, I would have to think, still possess the ability and the desire to produce some sort of output in our chosen medium without relinquishing creative control to AI."
As to Jack Stack's book, I think the genius of his approach is communicating simple decision rules to the folks on the front line instead of trying to establish a complex model at the executive level that can become more removed from day-to-day realities. In my experience, which involves working in a variety of roles in startups and multi-billion dollar businesses over the better part of five decades, simple rules updated based on your best judgment risk "extinction by instinct" but outperform the "analysis paralysis" that comes from trying to develop overly complex models.
Reasonable men may differ.
One good book on the positive impact of a metric that everyone on a team or organization understands is "The Great Game of Business" by Jack Stack https://www.amazon.com/Great-Game-Business-Expanded-Updated-... I reviewed it at https://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2010/03/19/the-business-is-eve...
Here is a quote to give you a flavor of his philosophy:
"A business should be run like an aquarium, where everybody can see what's going on--what's going in, what's moving around, what's coming out. That's the only way to make sure people understand what you're doing, and why, and have some input into deciding where you are going. Then, when the unexpected happens, they know how to react and react quickly. "
Jack Stack in "Great Game of Business."
There are also in-person Bootstrapper Breakfast meetings in Las Vegas, San Francisco, and Silicon Valley.
These events are for “entrepreneurs who eat problems for breakfast.”®
"I really appreciated this piece, as designing good metrics is a problem I think about in my day job a lot. My approach to thinking about this is similar in a lot of ways, but my thought process for getting there is different enough that I wanted to throw it out there as food for thought.
One school of thought 9https://www.simplilearn.com/tutorials/itil-tutorial/measurem...) I have trained in is that metrics are useful to people in 4 ways:
1. Direct activities to achieve goals
2. Intervene in trends that are having negative impacts
3. Justify that a particular course of action is warranted
4. Validate that a decision that was made was warranted
The implication is that the goal is not to find the “right” metrics, but to instead find the most useful metrics to support the decisions that are most critical at the moment. After all, once you pick a metric, 1 of 3 things will happen:
1. The metric will improve until it reaches a point where you are not improving it anymore, at which point it provides no more new information.
2. The metric doesn’t improve at all, which means you’ve picked something you aren’t capable of influencing and is therefore useless.
3. The metric gets worse, which means there is feedback that swamps whatever you are doing to improve it.
One other important point to make is that for many people, the purpose of metrics is not to make things better. It is instead to show that they are doing a good job and that to persuade others to do what they want. Metrics that show this are useful, and those that don’t are not. In this case, of course, a metric may indeed be useful “forever” if it serves these ends. The implication is that some level of psychological safety is needed for metric use to be more aligned with supporting the mission and less aligned with making people look good."
This is certainly one of their goals, if only to prevent or reduce churn.
But WP Engine is now owned by Silver Lake, a private equity firm, they no doubt have aggressive growth and profitability targets. Anything that injects confusion into their branding or increases costs is counter to their goals
The real question is the 8% "contribution" that WP is asking for cheaper than other alternatives. The lawsuits are cheaper if they win, but a dead loss if they don't.
As to 30% being "fair" it's a fee structure that is known in advance, you can plan accordingly. I try to deal with the world as it is, not how I would like it to be.
Firms that dominate markets enjoy tremendous inertia in customer choice and can take a long time to die--if, in fact, WordPress is dying. The longer-term perspective on what Silver Lake has been doing to profit from open source efforts by Word Press may reach a very different conclusion about Matt's actions than your assessment.
Matt may need to step down if your assessment is correct but that's distinct from what happens to Word Press as a platform.
My sense is that the Word Press negotiating position is stronger and WP Engine will either have to fork or make a much larger contribution. But I may be wrong. If that does not happen then I believe that the private equity players will do a lot more damage to open source communities because a "harvesting paradigm" will continue.
"In an email, Bruce Perens, one of the founders of the open source movement who drafted the original Open Source Definition, told The Register, "Let's be clear about WP Engine: It's built on WordPress. There would be no business without WordPress. And it's a large business with big revenue, operated as if it's funded by private equity."
"Private equity always demands big returns, regardless of the harm they do to the business. One of my customers has been completely destroyed by them – they are still operating but on such thin resources that they can't dedicate the time of one engineer to work with me on an open source compliance review, even if I do it for free.
"So, WP Engine is in that situation, and has to increase returns to the investors. What do they do? Cut any voluntary expense, which includes returning any value to the creators of WordPress. I'm told that WordPress asked for eight percent of revenue, which sounds fair to me considering that it's the basis of WP Engine's business.
"But because it's an open source project, WordPress can ask but can't demand that money, so they have to turn to hostile enforcement of their trademark and denying access to their updates."