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Agreed. I think asking questions is more a trait of successful people. Most of the very high IQ people I've worked with have been much more likely to make bad decisions by not asking questions than lower IQ people. When I interview people I don't look for intelligence as much as I look for awareness of the the limits of a person's intelligence. Intelligence will not cure hubris. And from what I've experienced, intelligence and hubris are highly correlated. I'm glad to hear that the author of this article has had a different experience. There is nothing more delightful than working with a person with a high horsepower brain who is good at steering it.

For the last two years I worked on autonomous cars. The one thing everyone in our company agreed on, regardless of political persuasion, was that robo-cars were going to thunder fuck the high speed rail. A 2033 deadline makes this all but certain.

Yeah, I moved to SF from DC about a month after that one. Still here. At a third startup :)

I agree. But the energy was undeniable.

I would. A friend who works at Zynga showed me around a week ago. It looked like Wall St. meets Silicon Valley. Real-time metrics scrolled across flat screens. And huge teams of engineers packed into single rooms plotted different ways to bilk housewives. It was the first software company I'd ever seen where money was the metric. They have a quarterly bonus schedule and everyone was aware of how much money they've made for the company. If it weren't for the giant cardboard cartoons hanging from the ceiling, the dyed hair and the dogs, it would be indistinguishable from my sister's high yield bond desk at Morgan Stanley.

That beast is hungry. I wouldn't bet against it.

Rich people do awesome things all the time. Most investment vehicles are essentially loans to businesses to help them grow. As long as the money is not in the mattress, it's probably doing something awesome for whatever business or person is indirectly borrowing it.

Or you rent your car out to the grid rather than park it. Like air-bnb for cars.

Regulation and fear are to be expected. The question is, what to do about them? I predict the largest PR campaign in the history of technology. Public opinion generally drives regulation. So less public fear will lead to less regulation.

While I have no way to prove it, I'd bet my right hand that Google's PR people made this story happen. I'd bet they also made the first NYT piece blowing up the Chauffeur project happen and they made it look serendipitous for authenticity. I think "The Suit is Back," and I think it's going to come back again and again.

Prediction: Driverless cars will be portrayed in a very positive way in a major motion picture within the next year.

Then the question becomes:

Would the drug problem exist without the CIA?

a) Yes.

b) Yes but slightly less bad.

c) No.

'c' is unreasonable 'a' and 'b' are reasonable answers.

Now:

Would the concentration camps exist with or without the North Korean Government's help?

'c' is the only reasonable answer.

Making a concentration camp is intentional. Allowing a drug war to proliferate is neglect. Intent matters in criminal sentencing and it matters here.

They certainly didn't help you with a picture of the hardware.

[edit] Being serious. They're selling a computer without showing a picture of it. I was surprised.

The factory calibration on the 64 diodes of the velodyne is bad. It needs to be fixed. There is a paper out of Stanford that tells you how to fix it. I can't think of the name off the top of my head but if you email me I can dig it up.

Also the error grows with distance. So if your bot is navigating off of objects 200 meters away, yeah you'll be more off. But you can use points closer to it and you'll get better results. Look around and you'll see that the velodyne has been made to work. Nobody loves it though.

The riegl has very low beam divergence, is beautiful, survey accurate, not waterproof and $300k+.

Don't forget the workhorse SICK scanners. They are cheap and have their pros and cons.

The riegl for sure. Others have made the velodyne work.

There are other ways to get even greater accuracy than an applanix. But they require pre-indexing the surroundings and using a lidar to position yourself within the "virtual" world.

While too advanced for the phone at this stage, there is something called "direct inertial aiding" that solves this problem. Basically it uses the gyro to estimate the position during a gps outage and then it can tell the GPS where to look in the sky for satellites. As it is, the gps has to scan the entire sky and it assumes nothing about its position. Even if you just passed under a bridge and only had a monetary outage. Direct Inertial Aiding makes pick-back-up times very small.

It should be possible to get a best fit curve between all the towers to get a more accurate position.

Was not meant to be at all. Hang around the valley long enough and you'll see this happen a million times. I've been that technical founder and I've worked for the same type of guy. Self realization is difficult as is forced growth. Justin struck me as a real leader and a real example to technical founders. Job well done.

Justin, what a great story about self-realization and growth. This is a very common problem among young, successful, technical entrepreneurs. But it seldom turns out as well as it did with you. Good luck and Godspeed.

Bureaucrats and politicians who make ad-hoc decisions like this do a lot of indirect damage to companies. What they have effectively done is raised uncertainty for businesses in SF. Will we get a break? Will our competition? Etc, etc. Uncertainty adds to risk and risk adds to costs.

Languages are tools. Da Vinci with a mop and a bucket of mud would be a better painter than me. In fact I recently saw a video where Kelly Slater surfed a door and a coffee table as impressively as most weekend warriors surf on $700 custom shaped boards.

Focus on your skill not the tools. Surfing is more about timing, fitness and knowledge of waves than it is about the board. Likewise coding is more about RAM, CPUs, HDs, GPUs, busses, networks and ultimately users than it is about what tools you use to manipulate them.

Lawyers make more money because teachers are willing to work for less than lawyers.

That's exactly what I was trying to say. It's true, some people come out of the womb requiring very little discipline. My sister, for example, would yell from her car seat, "Quiz me!" And we had her doing multiplication tables before she could read. She was her HS valedictorian, went to Harvard, played two varsity sports and is a VP at a major Investment bank and she's still in her 20's. She never needed any discipline and probably could have been given her own apartment at age 13.

I on the other hand, was a dreamer who seldom knew which day it was and frequently left for school 30 minutes late with only one shoe on. I hesitate to think where I'd be without my parent's prodding.

If the kid doesn't need prodding, then life just got easier for you. But to allow a kid to rot in the hope that one day he'll sprout wings is bad parenting. From my experience, kids who require no prodding are outliers.

The most depressing people I know were the results of either laissez fair parenting or overbearing parenting. If you let a kid do what he wants, he'll eat coco-puffs, watch TV and eventually turn to drugs and booze. If you're constantly on top of him, and if he doesn't burn out, he'll work incredibly hard for a goal that means nothing to him.

I know 30 year olds who can't put a month of work together. I also know 30 year olds who have no idea why they became bankers and they ask their mom permission to switch jobs. Each one is depressing and there is a balance.

I don't think founders should concern themselves with fixing the inequities of the world. And I think it's in society's interest to place as little burden as possible on people who make goods or provide services that improve productivity.

I also don't think that you should presume to know anything about what my future tune may be.

I can't imagine that many ramen profitable founders would prioritize the finances of pregnant women over the finances of their company.

So you're comfortable pushing those costs onto healthy young men?

I paid $60 a month for catastrophic healthcare from State Farm when I ran a ramen profitable startup. My deductible was $1500. When I nearly cut my toe off walking on a beach, I had surgery, $1000 worth of antibiotics and two follow up visits. I paid a grand total of $1500 for everything. I know I'm a healthy young man, but that seemed like a pretty fair deal to me.

Amazingly this plan will soon become illegal for being too minimalist under the new healthcare laws. I get that there are real problems with healthcare in the US. But entrepreneurs are mostly healthy young men, and it doesn't cost much to insure healthy young men.

It's a perfect name b/c I don't need this tool now, but I probably will later. And I will never, EVER forget the name. Kudos.

It is, but it's less likely. I should have phrased that better. What I meant by out "of the garage" was the end of the really dynamic period of the company. You can be physically out of the garage with an angel investment but still be constantly changing your mind on macro decisions. By the time you're at a series A, you're generally more certain of your direction.

From what I've seen, the person who is good at the really dynamic thinking part is not necessarily good at the focus and execute part and vice versa. Being a CEO of a larger company can actually be really boring for a dynamic, hyper-inventive type. I used to fancy myself as a technical CEO until I got a better understanding of the role. A great CEO is priceless and a great inventor is priceless. If it's the same person, then great. But there is no need to force it if it's not.

On the flip side, I've seen founders cling too tightly to control. Sometimes the guy that is really good at getting a version 1 out of the garage is not the same guy that is good at calling the shots once it's a 60 person company. Taking the stance that "I want to retain control," is obstinate and egotistical. The proper stance is, "I want to retain control until someone better comes along." That may be never. But it's the right attitude to have. In the end, it's not about who controls what, it's about who's more likely to make all the time and money that's gone into the company worth more.