...and another thing:

Nazis nazis nazis Hitler. I win.

Sat, 06 Apr 2013 08:00:27 -0700

From ‘evernotes that never got blogged’ 3/23/12

Godwin’s law, and in particular its use as a rule to shut down debate when invoked, is a uniquely American thing even though netizens everywhere are familiar with it. It is also the case that Europeans - particularly those GenX and up - reference Hitler and the Nazis in a wide range of situations. But there is a reason for this, and one that is too quickly dismissed with the assumption that references to Hitler and the Nazis are just trivial consequences of an inevitable conversational gambit. Hitler and the Nazis were not nice. Europe was devastated by their actions. The legacy of those actions lasted decades. We grew up in cities still scarred by bomb damage (literally - there were spaces between buildings not filled in since the war, lasting right into the 80s that I remember). We had grandparents, and in some cases parents, who fought in, or remembered other aspects of the war. Hitler and the Nazis fucked things up in Europe in particular, without even getting into the greater consequences of their activities.

It’s also pretty hard to dismiss concerns raised, as they usually are in conversations and debates, that certain steps eased the way for Hitler and the Nazis unless one ignores the fact that other than the direct consequences of warfare there was the systematic murder of millions of Europe’s Jewish population. This wasn’t a small thing. There are steps, trends, actions, which in hindsight, were clear steps towards the rise of Hitler, the Nazis, their power and what they did with it. There were many exit points where we could have got off that path, as a world, Germans as a country, Europeans as a whole, had sober heads honestly thought through the consequences of letting things keep going in the directions they were headed. It is often the case in the modern world that we can see these steps in action and indeed leading to severe consequences. Rwanda’s massacres really didn’t come out of the blue. The slaughters at the disintegration of Yugoslavia were preceded by warning signs.

There are social trends which lead to the kind of absolutism coupled with unaccountable power which time and again results in massacres, mass suffering and a loss of everything good a society amassed in prior times. It isn’t a virtue to act like such trends and activities don’t exist. Just because it’s become a trite cliche to say that those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it, doesn’t make the sentiment less valid.

So, yes, it can be annoying if someone trivially brings up Hitler and the Nazis in every argument. It can indeed be used to shut down debate on topics in some circumstances. But yelling Godwin, I win, is also shutting down conversations. Often when people are trying to make the legitimate point - whether right or wrong (that’s the point of debate) - that in their opinion the opposing position is a contributing factor to states of affairs where they recognize a pattern similar to that in societies which have suffered from the same sickness that was Germany under Hitler and the Nazis, Cambodia under Pol Pot, Rwanda as talk radio coupled with extremist politicians whipped up their citizens into such a frenzy they hacked whole families to death with machetes.

Godwin’s law: In any debate of sufficient length, eventually someone will bring up Hitler and the Nazis, to support their position. Sure. But sometimes that’s okay, because sometimes interlocutors are making a sober point and taking seriously the fact that societies sometimes murder millions of their own citizens and become a threat to all around them. Preventing that is more important than protecting the feelings of folks who don’t like their poorly thought out positions characterized as having similarities to the roadmap which takes society down that path.

Intellectual relativism

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 16:00:30 -0700

From ‘evernotes that never got blogged’ 2/4/12:

When you think all opinions are equally valid… when you think you have the right to be taken equally seriously for poorly thought out garbage as for rigorous science… largely because you have never “learned proper”…

Well, then such a situation takes hold it’s increasingly easy for leaders to convince people that those people are already smart and that their prejudices are actually the result of deep intellectual consideration, which is to be respected. It is fare easier to manipulate the followers this way than it is to convince people they need to put in the effort to actually become smart, whereby they might pose a threat to the self-interest of said leaders

Likewise it’s easier to convince people “we’re number one” (woohoo!) than to convince them that they have to put in the hard work necessary to actually BE number one.

(As an aside, of course it may be neither necessary nor even desirable to achieve that goal - for example merely creating a winner/loser situation where someone’s number one at all may be less mutually beneficial than a win-win - game theory comes into play here but I digress.)

People suffering from intellectual relativism often (usually?) have a blind spot when it comes to self awareness - this sometimes manifests itself in an insistence that others follow different rules in qualifying to speak on a topic than they themselves choose to follow.

e.g. this absolutely garbage post which prompted this rambling thought in the first place. Writing at its most mediocre from a publication I otherwise tend to enjoy.

Gotta love the title’s demand - only comment if you’re a lawyer. This appears to be missing the subtitle “of course I am not a lawyer myself, yet I will spout pseudo-legalistic nonsense, in an incoherent argument, but your opinions aren’t as valid as mine cos i write for a blog with rock-star writers associated with it”.

Intellectual relativism sucks. When those whose profession is the conduct of public discourse are so heavily mired in it, it doesn’t bode well for the future.

Paying attention

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 08:00:05 -0700

From ‘evernotes that never got blogged’ 11/11/11

[I wish I had taken a note of which obituary in particular made me think to write this note, but then perhaps its point is better made in the not knowing]

I hate it when somebody dies and their obituary makes me regret that I didn’t pay more attention to them during their life. Which makes me think I wish I paid more attention to everybody I interact with in my life.

My reason or excuse might be that I am building a company and changing the world, or I am putting food on the table for my family and a roof over their heads, or I am taking care of two growing children, one of whom has special needs. That all takes so much focus and concentration I find it hard to direct as much of either as I’d like, towards other people. Or so my internal narrative goes.

Not paying attention means that so many people we know or know of really are known to us only as caricatures.

Ideas

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 00:14:30 -0700

From ‘evernotes that never got blogged’ 2/28/10:

Cloud services have made me so much more productive, without me really noticing incremental improvements until I look back and compare. Being a bit ADD, and having an always-on creative mind, they’ve let me harness my creativity yet tame the urges to follow every thought, and instead focus on just one or two, focus on execution.

I have less of an “act now or it’s lost” fear, so I can make better decisions - still quickly but less impulsively. Ideas are never lost. They are always just a few clicks away, to be worked on in spare cycles as the interest catches me.

It’s a good way to hone in on a plan when you’re starting point is a vision and understanding of the broad framework of the future - the underlying currents whose waves break in cycles of creativity and expansion.

It’s a personal portfolio strategy. A portfolio of ideas. Put them into practice when you get the chance. Ideas are freed by writing them down and giving them a chance. Imprisoning an idea in your mind and never putting it into practice is not protecting the idea. Protecting an idea. It’s an odd concept. Ideas don’t need protecting they need exposure. Just as describing patents as protecting ideas is such a misnomer. They merely reward someone who had the right circumstances and appropriate resources to acquire legalized control of implementation of that idea, at the expense of reducing its dissemination. That’s not protecting an idea, it’s clipping it’s wings and denying it it’s desire to fly freely and benefit us all.

If the promise of the cloud is anything it’s that it might allow us to share ideas more structured than just blog posts or media, but really share the underlying concepts, share the implementation.

Facebook Home - a reflection

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 00:01:51 -0700

There’s a sadness permeating our culture today. Facebook, Twitter, the digital social world inserts itself as a salve. But it’s artificial.

As people feel their lives become less meaningful. As they feel less and less control over them. As we all falter in our efforts to change our circumstances - for some to make their financial lot in life better, for others use our electoral processes to instigate the fundamental changes needed in a society we feel has in some ways gone off the rails - we start to feel an existential angst.

We fill that void with status updates - shouting to the world i exist, i matter, there is a thing that it is to be me and this is it. Yet the status has overtaken the being - the declaration of being has superseded the being of being.

“Here I am” is not a statement of fact benefiting anyone who reads it, it’s a question in search of validation. ”Here I am?”.

If we don’t document we were here perhaps we weren’t. In a world where reality and its simulacrum overlap so fully, we cannot be confident that a memory held by our future self can be relied upon without a digital note for future reference, as though this most mutable of media is somehow more reliable than our flesh brain.

It is self fulfilling. Note to self. I was here. I don’t have a memory of it as my being here was filled with documenting being here rather than experiencing being here. I stopped to take a picture of the roses, though I’m sure they would have smelled delightful, had I had a spare moment to indulge that sense.

Facebook Home could crush app developers

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 23:42:45 -0700

I was reading this Om Malik post and the accompanying Hacker News thread, when this point jumped out at me:

It wants to be the start button for apps that are on your Android device, which in turn will give Facebook a deep insight on what is popular. And of course, it can build an app that mimics the functionality of that popular, fast-growing mobile app. I have seen it done before, both on other platforms and on Facebook.

Most of the comments are about the privacy concerns, or the Facebook good/Facebook bad back-and-forth. But what surprised me was that this point didn’t get more play.

As a developer this should be of great concern. I expect to see far more of the conversations which have been alleged in the past which go along the lines “hey, we like your company, let us buy you for [lowball figure] or we’ll crush you by building out the technology ourselves, after all we already have all the data”.

I should blog more

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 23:38:00 -0700

I hear a lot of people say words to the effect “I should blog more”. I tend to nod along, agreeing with the sentiment.

It’s not that I don’t have ideas I want to share. I do.

It’s not that I don’t take the time to write them down. I do. My evernote is full of thoughts which would have been shared, but for the idea I should wait until I get back to blogging then write it up properly.

I was thinking of this recently when, on filling in an application form for something I was asked for my url. I realized I always used to give my tumblr, but I haven’t posted in so long that it’s ridiculous to share. So, rather than just filling evernote I should start writing on here again, and perhaps go back in and pull out those notes over time and catch up a bit.

Here goes…

…oh and in the mean time here are some old posts worth reading:

Photo

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 17:34:41 -0700

WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE INANIMATE OBJECT?

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 16:11:00 -0700

My Dualit Toaster:

Great stuff jmak: Thanks, Steve. Posting designs like this one...

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 21:38:20 -0700

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...

Wed, 21 Sep 2011 00:24:36 -0700

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...

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 23:35:00 -0700

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

Thu, 25 Aug 2011 14:01:44 -0700

Wow

fred-wilson: takin VC money nice work smixx

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 14:23:52 -0700

fred-wilson:

takin VC money

nice work smixx

"I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time—when the United States is..."

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 11:41:30 -0700

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time—when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.”

- Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (1995) page 25 (via spytap)

Poor ad copy

Tue, 22 Feb 2011 20:24:07 -0800

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.

Life after changing the world

Mon, 08 Nov 2010 11:45:00 -0800

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.

Rooftop Cinema: Big Trouble In Little China

Sat, 06 Nov 2010 22:57:00 -0700

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

"Love’s pleasure last but a moment; love’s sorrow last all through life."

Sat, 06 Nov 2010 20:45:46 -0700

“Love’s pleasure last but a moment; love’s sorrow last all through life.”

- (via srellabr)

Never interfere in a boy and girl fight

Wed, 03 Nov 2010 13:20:00 -0700

“People often ask me if I have any words of advice for young people. Well, here are a few simple admonitions for young and old: Never interfere in a boy and girl fight….”

— Words of advice for young people, William S. Burroughs

I tend not to give advice nowadays. I listen. I will express an opinion sometimes (okay, often). But I won’t tell you what to do. The reasons are simple. People will do what they will do. They will have a complex set of reasons and stimulae behind their actions, and some degree of agency in them (just how much is in interesting topic for debate in another forum). However if they act in alignment with my suggested course of action and they arrive at a position they’re unhappy with, they will always blame me for telling them what to do. If things work out hunky-dory they will celebrate their decisive genius.

William S. Burroughs knows no such restraint and in his wonderful little riff “words of advice for young people” that I have an on old CD somewhere he leads off with the great advice I can buy into: “Never interfere in a boy and girl fight”

It amazes me how people in Silicon Valley have so much difficulty following this. If you’re an entrepreneur focus on building a great company and changing the world. Whether Arrington or Calacanis is right really isn’t of concern to you and you can never know. Whether Conway or McClure is right is irrelevant to you if you don’t build anything that either of them is interested in hearing your pitch on.

The truth is you can never know the detailed interplay which goes into any relationship between two third-parties. You can know how they’ve dealt with you and what you’ve observed and that is it.

Arrington produces a great product (TechCrunch) that has been a huge help to me and other startups. We owe him and his team a great debt of thanks for that. Further I’ve enjoyed wonderful parties, movie premieres and an awesome 24 hour coding Hackathon, all courtesy of Arrington’s decision to give back to the community (yes, I know, all part of building the brand). The closest I have come to meeting him in person was sitting right in front of him at the Star Trek premiere when he seemed like an engaging and fun guy. He is honestly passionate about startups and entrepreneurs. He’s on our side. He’s one of us.

Jason Calacanis has never been other than gracious and generous to me. His This Week In Startups podcast is a very good thing for the startup community. Reducing information asymmetry. Listen the whole archive for great insights into startups and the funding process. Sure, he’s a provocateur and you don’t have to agree with him on everything (particularly as he sometimes changes his mind, as people have the right to do). But he doesn’t demand that you agree with him on it all. I joined him for lunch when he tweeted out that he was in Palo Alto and he was wonderful company. He was in town to speak at a Founder Institute event to which I didn’t have a ticket, and with no agenda he arranged my free attendance. His Open Angel Forum is unquestionably a good thing. I attended. He asked questions that were tough and left me pissed off. Pissed off because I should have been better prepared with better answers. If you’re an entrepreneur you have to know, he’s on our side. He’s one of us.

I have merely bumped into Ron Conway at a couple of events, never at times when a pitch would be appropriate. I have no idea why so many entrepreneurs suddenly have an opinion on him that is anything other than positive. I was in a major VC firm last week where he and Maples were the only two angels they had positive things to say about. Everything I have read and heard from people who I respect points to him being a genuine friend to the entrepreneurial community.

I have met Dave McClure a couple of times. As Sacca said in his email about Angelgate, McClure would take a bullet for his startups. The work he’s put into the Lean Startup movement. His blog. His really helpful presentations on startup marketing for pirates are must-reads. He’s a genuine friend to the entrepreneurial community.

The point is you - as a fellow entrepreneur - don’t have to take a side on this stuff, you don’t have to post a comment to suck up to someone who will never see your comment and doesn’t care. These guys will either kiss and make up or they won’t. Either way, hopefully they’ll all keep doing the great things they have all done in recent years to make this the best time in history to be doing a startup.

Let me say that again: All of these people have contributed to making this the BEST TIME EVER TO DO A HIGH-TECH STARTUP!

Everyone likes to have an opinion. Everyone likes to have an opinion on the opinions of others. Everyone seems to have an opinion on what my opinion of the opinions of others should be.

Sure, I have an opinion on Angelgate - my experience at Open Angel Forum is that afterwards the angels there all chatted for a good while after the pitches about how deals could be better structured to lower costs and friction, and make things better for the entrepreneurs. The pitching startups were still in the room at this time. There was no secrecy or nefarious nature to this. ‘Let’s get together and keep talking about this’ seemed to be the net result and that’s probably what the Angelgate dinner was all about.

These guys are on our side as entrepreneurs.

People love conspiracy theories. They’re convinced any time people get together they’re plotting. I went to the Bohemian Grove last year as the guest of a good friend. If you google it you’d think it was some secret society where the rich and powerful plot to rule the world. It’s not. It’s a really nice pleasant place for people to retreat from the world of business and enjoy the arts and a bit of culture in pleasant surroundings among friends. But you’ll never convince the tin-hat brigade of that.

Similarly a journalist will be (rightly) skeptical of prominent people in the industry he covers getting together privately, and there will always be a constituency of embittered entrepreneurs ready to believe investors have it in for them.

In the end though, I don’t have to take a side in these fights. I am too busy. I am grateful to all of these people for making my very-tough job a little bit easier. I don’t agree with all of them on everything:

I think some of the TechCrunch writing has got weaker (while a lot is still top notch we all know that there’s a big range in terms of writing quality). And I think Arrington was wrong on Angelgate.

I think Jason can get too personal and is a bit too aggressive in his anti-Facebook stance (Zuck deserves far more respect than he is often given IMHO, but has made some mis-steps like we all do).

I think Conway is wrong with his statements about when Founders should take liquidity (it’s not the same to say a Founder should get paid off the same time the engineers who came in later and always had a paycheck, and you can get a misalignment between later VCs and Founders if you don’t let them take feed-the-family money off the table).

I love the new angel movement but I think the emphasis on social proof is a mistake and is dangerously leaning towards a cool-kids funnel (which could end up as bad as the post dot.com crash trend of VCs falling back on just funding their MBA buddies which delivered such poor returns).

But those are just my opinions. I wish my industry wasn’t becoming the soap opera it is, but I think it’s a trend that’s not going to reverse any time soon. If you’re serious about building something great and changing the world as an entrepreneur it’s fine to rubberneck at this stuff if you find it entertaining, but, to break my no advice rule, stay out of it. It’s not your business. Stay focused.

“Never interfere in a boy and girl fight”