One of Jack Dorsey’s key points, paraphrased:
Draw out your ideas, share it immediately, and get instant feedback on what works and what don’t. If it’s not working, then shelve it. Some elements of it might pop up later. How do you quickly move from idea –> drawing –> prototype –> to a position where you can say, “this is what I want to spend my life doing”. Or “something I want to put away for now so that I can draw out the next idea.”
Just 16 mins!
A special plug for my mentor, Rachel – a genuinely awesome person!
If you are in San Diego and know of any children with special needs (or their caregivers), please do let them know of this excellent resource: Cecily’s Closet (www.cecilyscloset.org)
Everything from “guerilla” tips and tricks on how to navigate the “landscape” as a caregiver, to winning a free room makeover for your special needs child .. you’ll guaranteed to find something of use to you.
Wow. First, computers were these gigantic machines that took up all the space in a single room (or more!), made for the government and big corporations. Then prices dropped, technology improved (Moore’s law), and the computer was personalized, and today everybody practically carries one in their pocket.
When I had to first decide what to major in when in college, I did want to major in something to do with robotics. Robotics however, wasn’t exactly a popular or major discipline that was easily available anywhere. Fast forward to today .. we have personalized robots.
Enter the world of Arduino.
Here’s a very basic robot that exhibits basic facial expression, speaks from text, complete with LEDs. This is hilarious. And SOOOOO COOL.
Read more about the Ganzbot here.
Next, we have Arduway, a Segway-like self-balancing robot. It’s like creating a fragile and little life-form from your bare hands.
Read more about the Arduway here.
And alright .. enough of toys. How about a real world application? Here’s a robot that uses GPS and other sensors to steer a 30,000 lbs beast of a machine for a farmer – to harvest soybeans!
Can’t wait for the robotic revolution!
If you are interested in getting started with learning Arduino, here’s a quick link to the books recommended by the official Arduino site.
Getting Started with Arduino (Make: Projects)
Making Things Talk: Practical Methods for Connecting Physical Objects
Earlier this year I made a list of some of the top world problems. So it just seems appropriate that I should also help push this. There’s 5 more days to vote on Google’s Project 10^100. Here are the 16 “buckets” you can pick from so far.
* Drive innovation in public transport
* Make educational content available online for free
* Build real-time, user-reported news service
* Create genocide monitoring and alert system
* Enhance science and engineering education
* Create real-world issue reporting system
* Promote health monitoring and data analysis
* Work toward socially conscious tax policies
* Encourage positive media depictions of engineers and scientists
* Make government more transparent
* Provide quality education to African students
* Help social entrepreneurs drive change
* Create real-time natural crisis tracking system
* Create more efficient landmine removal programs
* Build better banking tools for everyone
* Collect and organize the world’s urban data
VCs take a porfolio approach to managing risk; individual company is largely irrelevant because of diversification effects. In fact, one of my portfolio companies was once rejected by Sequoia because, “You’ll almost certainly build a nice $100 million business. But we’d rather have a riskier investment that either flames out or becomes a $1 billion business.” Thus the key metric is expected value.
Quotable quotes, from 21 Million Reasons For Mint To Sell via CloudAve.
I’ve blogged before about Vinod Khola’s video here (iinnovate’s interview), where in it he says one of the problems he notices in entrepreneurs is that they don’t dream big enough. Just recently Sarah Lacy wrote that the consensus of the recent TC50 panel is that nobody was “swinging for the fences“, everyone just playing it safe–basically dreaming small.
Sarah writes:
Here’s why this matters: Start-ups by definition don’t have the experience, market position, funding or resources to tackle obvious market opportunities. If what they’re trying to do makes clear business sense, a bigger, better-positioned company would do it. A start-up’s only edge is that it’s not built into legacy businesses and preconceived notions and can do something, well, crazy.
There are entrepreneurs somewhere building the next big companies. But it’s probably just a wonky side-project that no one—not even the entrepreneur himself—realizes is the next big thing. That’s who we need to drag on stage next year.
I agree, if it’s an obvious opportunity, someone’s already on it. We need more crazy people working on crazy ideas.
Vinod Khosla on problem solving: You don’t solve all problems before you jump into a new situation. You just believe in yourself, and say, “I’ll figure it out, one way or another”. Vinod had no idea how he was going to pay for fees and rent when he got accepted to the Stanford GSB. To me, this is the “leap of faith” advice entrepreneurs talk about. You just got to jump.
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