Why Startups Condense in America May 2006 (This essay is derived from a keynote at Xtech.) Startups happen in clusters. There are a lot of them in Silicon Valley and Boston, and few in Chicago or Miami. A country that wants startups will probably also have to reproduce whatever makes these clusters form. I've claimed that the recipe is a great university near a town smart people like. It is by no means a lost cause to try to create a silicon valley in another country. 1. For example, I doubt it would be possible to reproduce Silicon Valley in Japan, because one of Silicon Valley's most distinctive features is immigration. A silicon valley has to be a mecca for the smart and the ambitious, and you can't have a mecca if you don't let people into it. Of course, it's not saying much that America is more open to immigration than Japan. 2. I could see India one day producing a rival to Silicon Valley. In poor countries, things we take for granted are missing. The US has never been so poor as some countries are now. 3. 4. 5. 6.
Quantum Bayesian Networks TechCrunch The Venture Capital Aptitude Test (VCAT If you want additional proof that we’re in a bubble, here it is: young people are trying to get into the venture capital business again. I get several emails a week along these lines: I’m about to graduate from college where I majored in economics. I’ve always been interested [what does “always” mean for a twenty-something year old, but I digress…] in business and entrepreneurship and ran my school’s entrepreneurship club. They see a wonderful job: going to cocktail parties and networking events, flying in private jets, and getting sucked up to by entrepreneurs while pulling down a base salary of $500,000/year plus a piece of the upside of selling a YouTube for $1.6 billion. First, a rare moment of Guy-Kawasaki humility: I am by no means “proven” as a venture capitalist. Regardless, here’s my advice to all the Biffs, Sebastians, Brooks, and Tiffanys who want to be kingmakers: Venture capital is something to do at the end of your career, not the beginning. Part I: Work Background Results
Good and Bad Procrastination December 2005 The most impressive people I know are all terrible procrastinators. So could it be that procrastination isn't always bad? Most people who write about procrastination write about how to cure it. But this is, strictly speaking, impossible. There are an infinite number of things you could be doing. There are three variants of procrastination, depending on what you do instead of working on something: you could work on (a) nothing, (b) something less important, or (c) something more important. That's the "absent-minded professor," who forgets to shave, or eat, or even perhaps look where he's going while he's thinking about some interesting question. That's the sense in which the most impressive people I know are all procrastinators. What's "small stuff?" Good procrastination is avoiding errands to do real work. Good in a sense, at least. Some errands, like replying to letters, go away if you ignore them (perhaps taking friends with them).
Slashdot (15) What Business Can Learn from Open Source August 2005 (This essay is derived from a talk at Oscon 2005.) Lately companies have been paying more attention to open source. More significant, I think, is which 52% they are. But the biggest thing business has to learn from open source is not about Linux or Firefox, but about the forces that produced them. We may be able to get a fix on these underlying forces by triangulating from open source and blogging. Like open source, blogging is something people do themselves, for free, because they enjoy it. Another thing blogging and open source have in common is the Web. Amateurs I think the most important of the new principles business has to learn is that people work a lot harder on stuff they like. Business still reflects an older model, exemplified by the French word for working: travailler. This turns out not to be the last word on work, however. There's a name for people who work for the love of it: amateurs. It's not that Microsoft isn't trying. Workplaces Bottom-Up Startups Notes
Pick One: Sick Kids or Look Poor Katja is on a roll: SODIS is a cheap method of disinfecting water by putting it in the sun. Like many things, it works better in physics than society, where its effects were not significant, according to a study in PLoS medicine recently…. Fascinating as signaling explanations are, this seems incredible. … Perhaps adults are skeptical about effectiveness? The study said: We powered the study to detect a 33% reduction in diarrhoea incidence after reviewing the evidence base for point-of-use water treatment. So the results are (barely) consistent with the bottles working for everyone who used them, which should reduce kids’s death rate by 1.5%. ShareThis Tagged as: Medicine, Status Trackback URL:
Techmeme Raw Thought: Aaron Swartz's weblog What Happens in The Dark Knight Spoilers, obviously. As we’ve discussed, in Batman Begins 1960s-style full employment and antipoverty programs lead to skyrocketing crime while in The Dark Knight Rises 1980s-style tough-on-crime policies and neoliberal economics lead to a revolt of the economic underclass. The films are mirror images, one about the failure of liberal policies; the other about the failure of conservative policies. In this sense, The Dark Knight is truly the final film in this nihilistic trilogy, documenting the hopelessness of anything outside that usual left-right struggle. From the start, the city is torn about how to handle the Batman, who has inspired a wave of second-rate imitators. Dent is doing his own part to lock up the criminals, working inside the system. Dent decides the only way to win is to go big — really big. Just as Dent is frustrated with the justice system, the Joker is frustrated with the criminals. I was in Burma. Note the parallels. November 1, 2012
Crazy Cones On a long drive across the country this summer I noticed something odd about construction areas. They put out cones to block off an area for construction many hours before the construction actually starts, and take them away many hours after the construction ends. Most of the time you drive by a blocked-off area, there is no construction actually happening there, though there are a lot of travelers delayed by these cones. Now I’m sure they save some time by being able to put out and pick up the cones on some schedule and plan convenient to them, and it would cost more to put out and pick up the cones just before and after the construction. I don’t expect full efficiency from governments, far from it, but I do expect them to try to appear somewhat efficient to voters, and I expect them to try especially hard on the most visible choices they make. Why are governments be so very visibly inefficient, and why don’t voters punish them more for it? ShareThis Tagged as: Politics Trackback URL:
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