May

28

Memorial Day, 2006

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In light of all the fighting all around the world, and all the young soldiers that gave up their lives for the freedom of others, without the opportunity to reap what they have sowed — this line (excerp from Mark Goulston’s post) says it all:

Wealth is what you take from the world;
Worth is what you give back.

Happy Memorial Day.

(damn, I haven’t done enough to give back)

May

28

Looking out for conflicts of interest

Filed Under passion | Leave a Comment

Here’s an interesting econ book that I haven’t had the chance to read. Interesting enough, or it wouldn’t have made #2 on the New York Times bestseller list.

I read this post by Jim Durbin, in which he quotes this book and asks if your recruiter truly has your best interest at heart (vs. an ulterior motive).

An example using real-estate agents:

The book is really about dispelling myths by explaining how incentives drive us to act. One of the examples is real estate agents. Using some basic numbers, the book explains that a $300,000 house that sells yields a $4500 average commission for a real estate agent. A $310,000 yields an average $4650 commission. Thus the effort to hold out for the best price yields very little for the agent, but $10,000 for the seller.

Tracking the agents who sell their own homes, the book finds that the agents hold out for $10,000 more when it’s their own home, but not so much when it’s someone else’s. It’s an example of simple math. Effort matched to reward.

Now that’s a job you do for the money! Does anyone know a real estate agent that is actually passionate about the job? Someone that literally loves driving clients around showing them properties for sale, someone looking out for the client’s long term “big picture” financial health? Everybody’s other cousin and little brother is a licensed real estate agent in California.

That sounds like a job I guess I’m just not cut-out for. I can’t imagine myself convincing a middle-class couple to flip a property fast just so that I can get it over with, knowing that they could be making tens of thousands more if I weren’t so worried about losing a few hundred in commision.

I’ll sell, but not like that. Nothing against real estate agents, just an example as a reminder that it’s always useful to question the motive of others. I’m pointing out the obvious.

Other professions that could be put to question: Does your doctor get a commision by prescribing you a certain brand drug? Does your mechanic install a certain part because of a higher profit margin on that part?

May

20

Entrepreneurs keep moving ahead

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Here’s an interesting quote from John Nesheim in his post about unshakable startup founders:

Steel is made stronger and stronger as it goes into and out of red hot and icy cold, time after time after time. So it is with great entrepreneurs.

John writes about a CEO that got burned by a reporter.

When a reporter from a big name media company wishes to interview you, they usually already have a set angle in mind, whether positive or negative; Therefore they go into selective listening mode and hear only what they want to, in order to beef up their story. They do what they do, to sell the story.

I realized that I’m being a little biased against reporters here, but the point here is that it is generally not easy to switch someone’s perception about something overnight. Better find out what they think about you in the first place and with strategy, plan a transition from perception A to perception B.

Anyway, the story and lesson to be learned here is that good entrepreneurs keep chugging along, learn from their lessons, and are not discouraged by depression from such a devastating blow.

Life’s a journey, not a destination :)

Hats off to that unnamed CEO in John’s post.

May

16

Get a job for the right reason

Filed Under business, career, google, self improvement | Leave a Comment

There’s an awesome blog post here on Business Pundit by rob. It touches many important points about work and life (and business). The line between work life and personal life is a rather blurry one and I seriously doubt you can entirely separate both. You will probably spend most of your hours awake, working anyway. So rather than lie about it, just be honest and admit that ( work = life ) and ( life = work ).

Work sucks. It sucks because at its core it has become impure. Business used to be about providing value to the customer. Entrepreneurs captured a portion of that value creation as profit. The more value they created, the more profit they could make. But then along came Wall Street. Obsessed with quarterly profit increases and seeing them as disconnected from value creation, Wall Street encouraged businesses to think short-term. The things that led to value creation - things like innovation, continued learning, employee development, long-term focus - were replaced by pump-and-dump management styles. What can we do to hit the target next quarter regardless of the long term consequences? After all, we just want to pump this baby up and sell it off.

Google offers no guidance on its stock for investors. They definitely saw this coming. Some called Google arrogant. I say they’re in it for the long haul.

Once people gave up on the idea of greatness for business, work changed. Now most people are working out of necessity, not desire. Few companies provide good working environments, because employees have come to be viewed as expenses, not assets.

The irony of a job, is that although you get a job because you need money to obtain basic necessities, you should get a job because you absolutely love that job (you’re passionate and genuinely interested with what you do at work), and not because you just need to pay off your car loan, cell phone bills, etc.

A simple test is to ask if you view your job as a burden that you just need to get it over with (because of your bills) or do you look forward to Monday mornings to tackle that next milestone. I strongly believe that if you constantly strive to be better at what you are passionate about, the money will follow. (I know, that sounds similar to Google’s “build it first, figure out how to monetize later”, but I promise I didn’t copy).

Business is like a game, and like any other game, I hate to see people cheat. Nothing is more exciting than the ongoing battle for profit between two companies that are waging market wars using real tactics like innovation, productivity increases, better marketing, sounder strategy, solid business models, and flawless execution. It’s much more exciting than watching them win by lobbying the government for protection from competitors or pushing money around financial statements until it looks good.

It’s a shame that most businesses don’t compete the true capitalistic way. Even Google is guilty of that. The law provides too many ways for businesses to *cough* exploit *cough*, just to get ahead.

May

13

Quote — Franklin D. Roosevelt

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I love collecting quotes. Here’s one I found yesterday:

The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today.

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

May

7

Startup School 2006!! w00t!

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This is a wrap-up post of my recollection of Startup School 2006. That weekend out of town was a huge setback on my GTD-weekend-todo-list effort that weekend, so I am just now getting around to write about this, a whole one week later, when everyone else has already forgotten about it. Pardon me please.

My objectives were to meet energetic ambitious geeks, and learn from the veteran tech entrepreneurs.

And that, I did. Here’s what happened:

I attended Startup School 2006 at Stanford, organized by the Y Combinator and I’m sure glad I was there. In fact, it made me regret not being there last year. But now that I know about it, I definitely wouldn’t pass it up next year. I first got to know about this event by following Paul Graham’s essays (which I highly recommend reading). Although I have not completely read all of his essays, the ones that I have read resonated deeply within me. Suddenly, it all clicked, brights lights turned on from nowhere, and I whacked myself in the head and said “hey, that’s me!”

The event for me actually began Friday evening (being from San Diego, I had to travel a bit), with the reception party thrown by the Y Combinator folks. Kudos to them, they definitely weren’t cheap with the food and service. In fact, they were pretty classy - the very well dressed and very polite waiters, the decent selection of quality food; a very very nice treat for poor young starving college kids (yes, I can’t call myself a college kid anymore, but I haven’t outgrown the mentality and I sure am starving). And in many ways, I don’t want to outgrow the starving college kid mentality. It’s because of that kind of mentality that I saved myself from otherwise splurging on numerous unnecessary cool me-too geek toys that would have burned a major hole in my wallet. My favourite starving-college-kid line of all time has to be “I just can’t justify that expenditure”.

Startup School 2006 was definitely very well planned, the reception on Friday (from a functional perspective) was definitely important because it gave people a chance to connect - which the actual Startup School day didn’t because of the nature of scheduled speeches (and the fact that it is rude to chat when everyone is trying to pay attention to the speakers). In the invitation to the reception, there was a mention of huge metal robots (and they weren’t kidding): everyone got to slobber over the hot cool robots from the Anybots lab. I can’t resist the temptation to keep this post short, so I’ll include just 1 picture (from psychofish on Flickr):

A party so cool, I was actually kicked out when they had to close.

There’s no geek party, like a Y Combinator geek party!!

The speakers for the event were (in order of appearance):

  1. Joe Kraus, Co-founder of JotSpot and Co-founder of Excite
  2. Page Mailliard, Partner at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati
  3. Mark Fletcher, Founder of Bloglines and Founder of ONElist
  4. Ann Winblad, Founding Partner of Hummer Winblad
  5. George Willman, Associate at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati
  6. Tim O’Reilly, Founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media
  7. Paul Graham, Partner at Y Combinator and Co-founder of Viaweb
  8. Caterina Fake, Co-founder of Flickr
  9. Om Malik, Senior Writer at Business 2.0
  10. Chris Sacca, Head of Special Initiatives at Google
  11. Joshua Schachter, Founder of del.icio.us

Plenty of other attendees have taken miscellaneous notes, many much better than mine - so instead of sharing the sub-par notes I have, I’ll show you the better quality ones instead:

There were also plenty of pictures, courtesy of these generous photographers:

(I got the links above from the main Startup School site and duplicated them here because the main page will probably remove them when next year comes around)

I did follow up later with Page Mailliard from Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati and Ann Winblad from Hummer Winblad Venture Partners to see if I could have a copy of their presentation slides, which they were happy to provide (Thanks Page, thanks Ann!).

May

6

Why word-of-mouth works in the Attention Economy

Filed Under marketing | 1 Comment

If you think about it, your attention does have a price to it. Not that you can make a decent living just by giving up your attention, but someone out there will pay for your attention. As Michael H. Goldhaber mentions in his article on Wired titled “Attention Shoppers!“:

By definition, economics is the study of how a society uses its scarce resources. And information is not scarce - especially on the Net, where it is not only abundant, but overflowing. We are drowning in information, yet constantly increasing our generation of it.

Because I was out of town last weekend, I’m just now getting around to read all the interesting articles I have bookmarked this weekend (a whole 7 days later). Not to mention, my to-do list also has “Read Monday’s bookmarks” and “Read Friday’s bookmarks” on it. Information overload? I think so.

One of the things I bookmarked last weekend was Ross Mayfield’s blog post titled “Power Law of Participation“. In it he mentions,

We network not only to connect, but leverage the social network as a filter to fend off information overload.

How true is that to you? I never really thought of it as an information “filter” before, but in essence it is. I lament to my buddy how I can’t think of a decent restaurant for a blind date. He then tells me his wonderful experience at this one restaurant downtown San Diego. Since I believe him (he is my buddy), I end up going to that restaurant downtown San Diego.

What I have just done here is completely ignore all the restaurant ads I have seen on TV, newspaper, billboards, and the radio. Too many ads, all claiming to be the best, who am I to believe? Word-of-mouth trumps them all.

I read a post by Kathy Sierra, liked the picture below so much I printed it and stuck it on my whiteboard at work:

http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2006/04/the_myth_of_kee.html

.. and now, back to my reading.

May

6

Proof methods

Filed Under geeky, humor | Leave a Comment

Proof techniques #2: Proof by Oddity.

SAMPLE: To prove that horses have an infinite number of legs.
1. Horses have an even number of legs.
2. They have two legs in back and fore legs in front.
3. This makes a total of six legs, which certainly is an odd
number of legs for a horse.
4. But the only number that is both odd and even is infinity.
5. Therefore, horses must have an infinite number of legs.

Topics to be covered in future issues include proof by:
1. Intimidation
2. Gesticulation (handwaving)
3. "Try it; it works"
4. Constipation (I was just sitting there and ...)
5. Blatant assertion
6. Changing all the 2's to n's
7. Mutual consent
8. Lack of a counterexample, and
9. "It stands to reason"

May

5

The value of Pi

Filed Under geeky, humor | Leave a Comment

The primary purpose of the DATA statement is to give names to
constants; instead of referring to pi as 3.141592653589793 at every
appearance, the variable PI can be given that value with a DATA
statement and used instead of the longer form of the constant.  This
also simplifies modifying the program, should the value of pi change.

-- FORTRAN manual for Xerox Computers

May

4

New PDP-11 instruction set

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Proposed Additions to the PDP-11 Instruction Set:

BBW     Branch Both Ways
BEW     Branch Either Way
BBBF    Branch on Bit Bucket Full
BH      Branch and Hang
BMR     Branch Multiple Registers
BOB     Branch On Bug
BPO     Branch on Power Off
BST     Backspace and Stretch Tape
CDS     Condense and Destroy System
CLBR    Clobber Register
CLBRI   Clobber Register Immediately
CM      Circulate Memory
CMFRM   Come From -- essential for truly structured programming
CPPR    Crumple Printer Paper and Rip
CRN     Convert to Roman Numerals

May

3

Architecture of brands - Introduction

Filed Under marketing, product management | Leave a Comment

Did you know that the same company that makes Clorox (the bleach) also makes Hidden Valley Ranch (yes, the salad dressing)? Boy what a marketing nightmare that would be more people knew that. Bleach flavored salad dressing? Yummy!

I’m learning more about branding every day. At the moment, I’m studying a paper written by David A. Aaker and Erich Joachimsthaler titled “The Brand Relationship Spectrum: The Key To The Brand Architecture Challenge“, California Management Review Vol 42, No. 4 Summer 2000. Awesome paper, definitely a recommended read.

What can I say, the only architecture I am familliar with is software architecture. The other architecture that I have heard of, is the kind of architecture where you need an architect to design your house, figure out the dimensions, where to place the doors, windows, etc. But brand architecture? There’s a first time for everything.

Essentially, you have to figure out how brands interact with each other. Among other neat stuff, one brand can break, make, cannibalize, or have no effect on another brand. According to the Aacker and Joachimsthaler, the Brand Relationship Spectrum consists of 4 basic strategies which in turn branches into 9 substrategies.

Strategy #1: House of Brands

  1. Not Connected - RCA (GE), Saturn (GM)
  2. Shadow Endorser - Tide (Procter & Gamble), Lexus (Toyota)

Strategy #2: Endorsed Brands

  1. Token Endorsement - Universal Pictures, a Sony Company
  2. Linked Name - McMuffin (implies it is a McDonald’s product), Nestea (implies its a Nestle product)
  3. Strong Endorsement - Courtyard by Marriott (Courtyard’s value proposition is credible)

Strategy #3: Subbrands

  1. Co-Drivers - Gillette Mach 3 (Both Gillette and Mach 3 are strong brands in their own respect)
  2. Master Brand as Driver - Dell Dimension (Dell is the brand, not Dimension)

Strategy #4: Branded House

  1. Different Identity - GE Capital, GE Appliance (same brand, different context)
  2. Same Identity - Virgin (umbrella corporation with many products)

These is only a high level overview, too much to summarize in one post so I’ll break this up into a few posts (also partly because I don’t have the time to write everything up front now). Stay tuned!

May

1

Gmail

Filed Under google, photos | 1 Comment

If you use Gmail, then you should probably meet Paul Buchheit, the person behind Gmail and Google employee #23.

I ran into Paul, while wandering the halls of Stanford.

Paul Buchheit

(I’m the one with the dorky name sticker on my coat and a laptop sling on my shoulder, incase you haven’t figured out)