putterass. mostly geek stuff.

You learn the most about yourself more than any other vocation as an entrepreneur. You learn what you do when you get punched in the face many many times. You learn what you do when no one is looking and when no one would find out. You learn that you are bad at many things, lucky if you’re good at a handful of things and the only thing you can ever be great at is being yourself which is why you can never compromise it.

Entrepreneurs often fail to realize that when you build something new, no one will care. People won’t use your product, won’t tell people about it, and almost certainly won’t pay for it. (There are exceptions – but these are as rare as winning the lottery). This doesn’t mean you’ll fail. It means you need to be smarter and harder working, and surround yourself with extraordinary people. The default state of the world is to stay the way it is, which means the default state of a startup is failure.

No, the capital returned to a VC fund after an exit is not reinvested. It’s distributed to the LPs. And while yes, strictly speaking, the LPs now have more money to invest than they had before, they are mostly giant endowments, pension funds, and foundations who only have a small fraction of their assets in VC funds, and whose future investment decisions are decided by asset allocation policies and not by recent returns.
The way big exits cause more money to be invested by VCs is not that capital is freed up thereby, but rather that news of them makes more people want to start or invest in VC funds. But that process is much slower.

I don’t think I’ll ever be good at programming. I don’t need to be. But I’ve become pretty good at prototyping. I can read and understand API docs and write a quick Python script to pull in the data I need. I can set up a MySQL database and run simple CRUD queries on the data. I can use Bootstrap to design a simple UI for a quick demo. I think my ability to build a quick and dirty proof of concept helps everything I do as a startup founder.

Lately, though, we’ve been naming more than things. Now we classify ideas and opportunities as well. Getting smart about naming is at the heart of marketing. Calling every single person a ‘customer’, for example, is hardly a nuanced way of engaging with the public. Salespeople are especially nuanced at this, but often make mistakes as well. Car salesman are notorious for misnaming women who walk in (spouse instead of primary decision maker).

Getting it to do stuff (e.g. offering features beyond showing text, pictures & videos) will take a couple months. This is assuming you take on learning as a serious–but part time–endeavour. That might seem like a lot of work. However, it will take far more than a couple month’s worth of time to find a technical cofounder if you don’t already know people. And it will take more than a couple month’s savings to pay someone else to get you through that first bit. If you’re sincere about getting into startups, start learning to code today. It will pay dividends.

So, last week, two Stanford professors made a courageous proposal to ditch lectures in the medical school. “For most of the 20th century, lectures provided an efficient way to transfer knowledge, But in an era with a perfect video-delivery platform — one that serves up billions of YouTube views and millions of TED Talks on such things as technology, entertainment, and design — why would anyone waste precious class time on a lecture?,” write Associate Medical School dean, Charles Prober and business professor, Chip Heath, in The New England Journal of Medicine. Instead, they call for an embrace of the “flipped” classroom, where students review Khan Academy’s YouTube lectures at home and solve problems alongside professors in the classroom. Students seem to love the idea: when Stanford piloted the flipped classroom in a Biochemistry course, attendance ballooned from roughly 30% to 80%.

The way I look at it, ideas are the cheapest commodity on earth. They have no value until they manifest in a product. Until then they are sand, waiting to become a stained glass window.

The group can be put in a circle and items shared amongst the group. No new news there. When I designate who I am sharing the post with, there is a tiny inverted triangle to the right of the space where the names of the circles selected show up. Clicking on it displays an option to “Lock this post.” When I do that, the post and any resulting comments are only visible to the users I share the post with. Here it is circle I selected. Thus I can carry on conversations which are private to this circle. In addition, I can use one or more hash tags on the post. Then I or other group members can search on the hash tags and the tagged posts only appear to the people I shared these posts with.

As you can see, in addition to six and one half, by expressing 13 in different ways and halving it in different ways, one could say one-half of thirteen is 6.5, or 1 and 3, or 4, or 11 and 2, or 8, and so on.)With productive thinking, one generates as many alternative approaches as one can. You consider the least obvious as well as the most likely approaches. It is the willingness to explore all approaches that is important, even after one has found a promising one. Einstein was once asked what the difference was between him and the average person. He said that if you asked the average person to find a needle in the haystack, the person would stop when he or she found a needle. He, on the other hand, would tear through the entire haystack looking for all the possible needles.

Although my list contains about 6 million username/password combos, the list only contains about 1,300,000 unique passwords.
Of those, approximately 300,000 of those passwords are used by more than one person; about 1,000,000 only appear once (and a good portion of those are obviously generated by a computer).
The list of the top 20 passwords rarely changes and 1 out of every 50 people uses one of these passwords.

We’re thinking of running an internet TV show for bloggers. It will be called ‘The Cool Factor’. Bloggers will audition by showing how quickly they can copy, paste and embed the latest buzz track onto their blogs. The fastest ten will then take part in the live shows where they’ll have to demonstrate their ability to check their emails, Soundcloud, You Tube, RSS and twitter feeds in search of the buzz at super-human speed with the audience clicking on little red hearts (that look a lot like Hype Machine love hearts) to vote for their favourite blogger.