Archive for the ‘things to ponder about’ Category

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Half-baked Idea Of The Day: TLDR

Saturday, October 9th, 2010

Update 1: Based on initial feedback, I might be conveying this wrong. The proposed idea is not yet another way to find interesting things to read. Example use case: The moment you visit a URL, just as you are about to read it, the browser tells you that “hey, before you read this, this might actually be a waste of your time.”

If you’ve never seen that expression “TLDR” on the web, that’s short for “too long didn’t read”.

I use Instapaper to save things I want to read for later when I have time to read. But just as my pre-Instapaper days, the problem is that my list of things to read grows faster than I actually have time to read and de-queue items from the list. As you’ve heard, “wealth of information creates poverty of attention“. Not a new problem that I’m sure a lot of people suffer from.

We all have our own ways of coping, so I wonder if we could take all the methods (that work) and productize it.

There is an old story about a finance professor and a student who come upon a $100 bill lying on the ground. The student stoops to pick it up. “Don’t bother,” the professor admonishes. “If it were really a $100 bill, it wouldn’t be there.[1]“

The above story captures the essence behind one of my own tactics to cope[2]. (more…)

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Posted in half-baked idea of the day, ideas, problem-opportunity, things to ponder about | 2 Comments »

Half-baked idea of the day: Exchanging contact information [update 2]

Tuesday, October 5th, 2010

Here’s a half-baked idea that I’ve been thinking about today. I’ve recently made some new friends from a dinner party organized by mutual friends (a pretty common thing most people can relate to, I hope) and I was asked for my vCard. That’s rather unusual – first time I’ve been asked for a vCard. Then I started thinking, how have I exchanged information with new people I’ve met? There’s no one clear easy way. Sometimes we exchange Twitter handles, Facebook accounts, email addresses, phone numbers, etc. by means of writing it down on a paper, verbally, exchanging a business card, or literally pulling out the phone in my pocket and immediately firing an email off to the other person so they’d have my email right away (or I email myself their information so that I can tweet at them later, etc.)

No, I don’t use silly phone apps – I know there’s a million of them. Why? While they are cool and feature rich (‘feature rich’ is not a compliment here), usually they require the other person to also have the app. While it’s great for the startup because they think it increases virality and helps with their user acquisition, I’m not going to try to convince someone to install an app the first time I’ve met the person just so we can exchange contact information. No.

But the vCard request digs at something deeper. When I think of someone’s complete and comprehensive contact information, I’m thinking of the person’s email, mobile phone, work phone, home phone, home address, work address, Twitter username, Facebook account, Skype username, LinkedIn, etc.

It’s still fundamentally a pain in the ass to exchange a collection of such information to someone new. Usually we just ask for one piece of information, and we proceed to create a new contact, and then fill in the other fields later, usually manually by hand.

Is there a better solution? Is there an opportunity for a solution?

Update 1: LOL – less than 10 minutes after I post this, someone in my social network tells me he has a startup that’s attacking this problem. I’ll be looking forward to hearing about this solution ;)

Update 2: The day after, I stumble upon this story on WaPo: “Business cards thrive in a digital age“. Perhaps an indication that all electronic solutions to date still don’t have a value proposition that is powerful enough to “punch through” the status quo (to quote Marc Andressen)

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Roll with uncertainty

Saturday, November 14th, 2009

A lot of time we spin our wheels going back and forth when faced with uncertainty in life. I know sometimes I tend to overanalyze and try to risk-assess something to death, and still get no closer to a decision. At the last Y Combinator Startup School in Berkeley, Mark Zuckerberg said (paraphrase),

“In a world where everything around you is constantly changing quickly, the most dangerous thing you can do is to not change”.

And that’s especially true in the technology business. As a technologist, if you don’t learn to love it, you won’t keep up. I’m a big fan of Tina Seelig and her famous talk at Stanford titled “What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20” (I can’t highly recommend it enough, please check it out and you can thank me later). That talk has received so much interest that it’s now a book.

Going back to uncertainty, it just never stops. If everyone had equal visibility and the exact equal amount of information for decision making, then everybody would be able to make the same sound decision. Now making decision, with incomplete information .. that’s how you win; how you get an edge on the competition. Also not easy, but you have to roll with it.

In a recent Q&A with Tina on BNET,

Q: Your latest book is entitled What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20: A Crash Course on Making Your Place in the World. So the inevitable question: if you could go back and give your 20-year-old self just one piece of advice, what would it be?

A: I would tell myself that the uncertainty of life never goes away. There are always choices in front of you, challenges to overcome, and failures from which you need to recover. If you embrace the challenges and view them through the lens of possibilities, then you will not only be happier, but will be much more likely to turn the inevitable obstacles into opportunities. The world is always changing, and it is up to you to be flexible and optimistic. With a positive attitude and creative thinking, most problems can be viewed as opportunities in disguise.

Yours truly is reading this book on my Kindle. I. highly. recommend. it.

What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20: A Crash Course on Making Your Place in the World



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Can we contribute to a conversation without being present?

Sunday, October 11th, 2009

Update 12/16/2009 — My “minimum viable product” (or at least the first very rough iteration of it) is complete. Check it out here http://www.jaysernbot.com. See how my own Twitter account is own its own, chatting up people (screenshot of day 1) I have never discovered before. I would love to hear from you!

I’m a geek and I like to automate stuff, because it’s cool and I am lazy. Not that we aren’t already suffering from chronic email fatigue, but with the advent of social media / Web 2.0 – especially Twitter – the more you try to keep up, the more you actually fall behind.

This sucks.

Case in point: You have to be constantly checking Twitter about what’s someone’s saying about you, or saying to you, or what someone’s saying about something (perhaps a topic of your interest where you have some domain expertise) – if you want to participate in the conversation. If people are tweeting about the ice hockey game right now, and you chime in 3 days later, you’re already out of the conversation. It’s all real-time (or at least “near” real-time) now.

Does anyone else wish that you could participate in a conversation without having to be tethered to your Twitter client 24/7 ?

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Flame out or become a $1Bil business

Saturday, September 19th, 2009

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.

Posted in changing the world, entrepreneurship, passion, quotes, startup, things to ponder about, things to remind myself | No Comments »

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