Great stuff

jmak:

Thanks, Steve.

Posting designs like this one makes me paranoid, because I can’t shake the feeling that it’s not original. I enjoyed the process regardless, but please let me know if somebody else beat me to the idea!

Thoughts?

Makes me proud to live on the same planet:

Milky Way above the Himalayas by Anton Jankovoy

Here is my Hackathon pitch. I re-built something I tried to build last year, from scratch by building a social commerce object feed system at the back end and then plugging it together to make an ebay on facebook. It still has the old ugly look of my first effort, but design should be easily solved now it works properly at the back end. 

In fact it’s quite a powerful back end as it can power all kinds of e-commerce and m-commerce. The http://apps.Facebook.com/ForAuction is just a test implementation of the API! Right now it’s just in sign-up-and-express-interest stage and I’ll probably make it fully live later in the week.

Happy. 

Now remember this pitch was after I’d been up coding for 24 hours (on incredibly uncomfortable folding chairs whose ergonomics were such that I have an aching back and bruised ass after sitting on them for about 21 hours!):

ForAuction…

Wow

fred-wilson:

takin VC money

nice work smixx

There’s an ad for pomegranate based shampoo, or some such personal product, and it contains a line like: some scholars say that it was a pomegranate not an apple that Eve gave to Adam.  It’s such a stupid line it just leaps out at me and annoys me every time - and that’s saying something for such a bland ad for an uninteresting product.

What scholars?  Surely either you’re a scientific scholar who doesn’t believe in the Garden of Eden, or you’re a religious subscriber to that bible story, in which case why would you believe that the word of the bible is wrong on that one detail?  I would imagine the set of all scholars who fall into neither of those two camps is vanishingly small.

The biggest problem entrepreneurs have is focus. When you’re an idea factory it’s unsurprising that even when deep into a startup you are passionate about the ideas don’t stop coming. Personally I cope with this by having a notebook and new ideas go into the back of the notebook not to be pursued until the current one has run its course.

So I don’t have any doubt that I will achieve the goal of building something great. Something impactful. But I do like to remind myself what I’d do afterwards - as part of the broader question why.

As an aside I think, the way I feel about it, being an entrepreneur is not something you choose to be or not be as a fully formed adult.  I feel similarly about it as do the folks who like to pose the question “when did you choose to be gay/straight?”.  A question that usually brings a smirk when people think and realize there wasn’t some point of choosing this - there’s merely a trend to be observed among those who they are attracted to.  When I hear people dishing out advice on whether someone should or shouldn’t be an entrepreneur I find it a bit silly.

What do I want to achieve.  What’s my end goal?  Well I suppose the reality is that, as an entrepreneur whatever I set as my goal today, whatever success I have with this company, or the next, it’ll never scratch that itch. There’s a reason you see so many repeat entrepreneurs. It’s a compulsion and it’s hard to stop.

My fantasy though?  Well, of course, I have a son with special needs and several years ago had to face the uncomfortable conversation with the doctor where he told us there’s a 90% chance our son will never be fully autonomous. I have a daughter, in a world that, while it is so much better for women than a century ago, women still aren’t afforded all the opportunity and advantages men have. I have a wife who has had to make do with far less out of life than she might otherwise have had, in order to support my entrepreneurial path. I have two aging parents who have sacrificed so much throughout their life for me. In short it is important to me to take care of those I love. That’s why we all do this on one level, right? Love?

For myself though?  Maybe I’d piss away some money on toys for a while - though I didn’t really do that last time I made some money from a small startup exit, not sure why I’d do it from a larger one.  The obvious materialist impulses seem to have worn off with age. I’d certainly travel. Been traveling all my life. Ideally I’d like the ability to go anywhere any time. But for the times in between, I do long to have a nice house with a large library. I want the freedom of time. I want to be able to sit in my library and read and write about the areas that fascinate me - the intersection of modern physics and philosophy, an itch I’ve been periodically scratching since university. 

First person experience is an exceedingly rare thing in this vast universe. I choose to take advantage of it, but I also think that learning is one of the best things one can choose to do with it. So, once I have finished changing the world, I want to retire to books. Lame really - but not so bad.

Reminding myself of these modest goals - even knowing I’ll probably be unable to quit, probably feel compelled to do another startup, then another - it helps me retain my focus. None of this happens without putting all the wood behind the current arrow.

I made the mistake of selling a company early once before. It was a deeply unsatisfying experience. Seeing your vision die at the hands of others. Explaining to one’s spouse why you’re only actually getting a fraction of what you initially thought, from the sale, because of the subsequent failure of the acquiring company.

Focus on the win. Answer the big questions of life that are unrelated to my startup vision later.

There are many, many cool things about living in the San Francisco Bay Area.  Of course if you are a high-tech entrepreneur and are compelled to do startups for a living, driven by a passion to change the world, there’s nowhere like Silicon Valley (whatever the dreams of so many pretenders around the world).

One of the coolest new things, for me:  A small gathering of movie enthusiasts on a North Beach 5th floor roof, with the panorama of the city spread out in front of us as the backdrop to a projection screen, on which we watch movies once a month.  Kim was invited to the first showing, last month and kindly got me invited too.  That was Blade Runner and I’ll post about it as a follow up to this.

This month was Big Trouble In Little China.  With the aroma of Chinatown restaurants regularly serenading us, we enjoyed a really fun movie on location.  Right above the streets in which it’s set. (A position I’d never have imagined myself being in when this was the Saturday night movie, back in my school days.)

I had forgotten how funny a movie it is.  The writers had fun with it. Some of Jack Burton’s one-liners are brilliantly observed cliches.  A lot of the time this sort of spoof humour falls flat due to it’s heavy handed use of sarcasm & irony, or actors who fail to commit to their roles.  But this is great.  You can see the John Carpenter that influences Quentin Tarantino’s later movies.  Kurt Russell owns his role.

Of course wandering back up Columbus afterwards, past the strippers exiting post-shift and the aimless single guys empty-pocketed to the benefit of same strippers, one does look a little homeless, carrying folding chairs and blankets.  

Still, stop in for a nice slice of Pizza en route back to the car FTW.

“Okay. You people sit tight, hold the fort and keep the home fires burning. And if we’re not back by dawn… call the president.”  

— Jack Burton