We just talk to each other

Bret Taylor on his present at Friendfeed and his past at Google :

I had a number of accomplishments that I’m really proud of at Google. But I think for me I really wanted to sort of, you kow, forge my own path, if we can do it on our own. When we make decisions, I get to just look up from my computer and say, “Hey, you think we should do this?” And then people say, yes, we should do it. I haven’t made a single PowerPoint presentation. We don’t even use Microsoft Word documents; we just talk to each other.

It’s a really, really interesting dynamic environment. I think no matter how innovative a culture is at a large company, you can’t really reproduce it. And I think that’s what’s so infectious and wonderful about a startup environment, that I think draws a lot of people to it (…)

With 70 people the odds that two people are working on the same thing are probably pretty low. With 17,000, it’s almost a 100% that two or three people will be working on the same idea, or at least very similar ideas, at different parts of the organization. I think there is a certain amount of cost to just coordinating that activity. I’ve been really impressed with how Google has been able to scale, but inherently it has to change – just because there’s that coordination cost.

I think some bloggers call it “strategy tax.” You know, when you grow, your strategy becomes more and more important, and it taxes sort of everything you do a little bit… because everything you do, it strays from that strategy. You know, there’s a huge cost to that. Whereas I think for smaller companies, the strategy is less well-defined, or certainly the impact of straying from it is much lower.

Blogged with Flock

Email Scrolling

Something on standardized emails/newsletters over at 37 signals – People don’t scroll…emails.

Entrepreneurs and Ego

Researcher Brian Wu, author of the paper “Entrepreneurial Risk and Market Entry”, in BusinessWeek:

Entrepreneurs, like everybody else, hate uncontrollable risks, but on the other hand, they’re overconfident in their own abilities — they think they can control their abilities in a random drawing of people. It’s like the Lake Wobegon effect in assessing their position among peers. They think they’re above the average.

This statement is just too over-simplistic to be of any worth.

The Top Ten Lies of Engineers by Guy Kawasaki

This another top ten list -‘The Top Ten Lies of Engineers‘ by Guy made me smile and realize that it’s funny because it’s so true.

“This time we got it right.”

That Wooing Business

Guy-speak on Demo–

“It’s a great event, especially if you understand the dance that’s going on: entrepreneurs acting like they don’t need capital, and venture capitalists acting like they don’t need entrepreneurs,”

(via Paul Kedrosky)

Edge Content

There has been plenty of talk about the Rise of Edge Content lately. Edge Content – the content provided by the long tail of [web] community. Blogs are the perfect example of edge content. While I agree with the idea of eventual prominence of edge content over a centralized system, I’ve certain issues with the general understanding of edge content.

Everyone (I’ve read so far), who talks about ‘the edge’, has a basic assumption that the content has to be created on the Web to be available to everyone, and then there would be various services to aggregate and serve that distributed content. Blogging is super-fine as a casual/amateur content creation tool. But then we need to look for more serious aspects of it. The anonymity of web is a huge road block in the availability of more meaningful content. And also, why limit ourselves to the web, what about the huge content available on desktops.

Content creators need to get their due not only in terms of credit, recognition and feedback, but also monetarily. Why take away that choice from the content creator. The proposed/existing aggregator model may do fine on the recognition aspect, but pretty much dilutes the monetary part. Also, we need a way to measure the access and profile of content consumers. Otherwise the whole edge content thing is a setup to lose.

I need to expand a bit more here, which I’ll do in due course of time.

Why smart people defend bad ideas

This was an interesting essay written by Scott Berkun. Well…he had plenty to write, few obvious things and many insightful comments.

The obvious – “The problem with smart people is that they like to be right and sometimes will defend ideas to the death rather than admit they’re wrong.”

The insightful – “The primary point is that no amount of intelligence can help an individual who is diligently working at the wrong level of the problem. Someone with wisdom has to tap them on the shoulder and say, “Um, hey. The hole you’re digging is very nice, and it is the right size. But you’re in the wrong yard.�?”

Overkill of an analogy, but still-
“I was never very good at pool, but this one guy there was, and whenever we’d play, he’d watch me miss easy shots because I tried to force them in with authority. I chose speed and power over control, and I usually lost. So like pool, when it comes to defusing smart people who are defending bad ideas, you have to find ways to slow things down.”

And he says-“If you want your smart people to be as smart as possible, seek a diversity of ideas. Find people with different experiences, opinions, backgrounds, weights, heights, races, facial hair styles, colors, past-times, favorite items of clothing, philosophies, and beliefs. Unify them around the results you want, not the means or approaches they are expected to use.”

Something about Scott- “He left his comfortable industry job to go after a life goal: filling the bookshelf near his desk with books he’s written“. I’m impressed.

Cool Hand Luke

Paul Graham is one essayist I respect, not only because he says the things I’m most likely to agree to, but also because he says them with lot of conviction. Hell, I want to be able to write like him.
That apart, his latest essay is about hiring being obsolete. The Point being, “The three big powers on the Internet now are Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft. Average age of their founders: 24. So it is pretty well established now that grad students can start successful companies. And if grad students can do it, why not undergrads?”, even though he accepts that “The 1/10 success rate for startups is a bit of an urban legend. It’s suspiciously neat. My guess is the odds are slightly worse.”

Well, someone(anonymity intentional) wrote me this-

“So, I hear you’re starting your own business?

Welcome, welcome.

Welcome to 16 hour days, and your employees earning more than you. Welcome to heartache and racking your brains for something to give you an edge, calling on experience you don’t have yet. Welcome to doing boring and tedious tasks that if you fail, can land you in prison, like accounting and keeping receipts. Welcome to trying to protect your ideas from much larger and more powerful companies who will take and exploit them in a heartbeat.

Welcome to getting your first solicitor. Welcome to earning far less than minimum wage for months on end, and lets not forget that you may never get anything back. Welcome to friends and family slowly becoming more distant as you have no time to devote to them, welcome to becoming a fanatical zealot, welcome, oh yes, welcome to compromising most of your ideals just to stay afloat.

Welcome to management – you’re the boss now! Welcome to having to see both sides of the story, welcome to slow or non paying customers, welcome to learning how to manipulate your fellow man to achieve your ends, welcome to grey hair and addiction to mild stimulants.

Welcome, welcome, one and all. Do stay a while.

And that light at the end of the tunnel you are striving for?Well I’m not sure what it is, exactly, are you?”

well, every word above said is true, 100% of it, but remember the goal is to kick ass. Yes, indeed.

Disclosing New Worlds

Came across this piece while browsing about Ludicorp , the makers of Flickr, which has just recently been acquired by Yahoo!, perhaps to keep up with Google‘s Picasa. And I really loved it.

“Disclosing New Worlds: Entrepreneurship, Democratic Action and the Cultivation of Solidarity” by Charles Spinosa, Fernando Flores & Hubert Dreyfus (MIT Press 1997):

“Business owners do not normally work for money either. They work for the enjoyment of their competitive skill, in the context of a life where competing skillfully makes sense. The money they earn supports this way of life. The same is true of their businesses. One might think that they view their businesses as nothing more than machines to produce profits, since they do closely monitor their accounts to keep tabs on those profits.

But this way of thinking replaces the point of the machine’s activity with a diagnostic test of how well it is performing. Normally, one senses whether one is performing skillfully. A basketball player does not need to count baskets to know whether the team as a whole is in flow. Saying that the point of business is to produce profit is like saying that the whole point of playing basketball is to make as many baskets as possible. One could make many more baskets by having no opponent.

The game and styles of playing the game are what matter because they produce identities people care about. Likewise, a business develops an identity by providing a product or a service to people. To do that it needs capital, and it needs to make a profit, but no more than it needs to have competent employees or customers or any other thing that enables production to take place. None of this is the goal of the activity.”

The goal is to kick ass. Yes indeed!

In the beginning there was nothing….

….God said, ‘Let there be light!’ And there was light. There was still nothing, but you could see it a whole lot better.
Just read the essay by Pual Graham “How to Start a Startup”. Inspiring and informative piece, full of profound advices.
Carving out theories behind success and failure of businesses, and to make out predictive pattern out of those, is indeed favourite pastime for some,and for some it is even their livelihood, yet the list of various B-School case studies and theories is never ending. Every now and then, people came up with some new explanations.
3 years back, I had written one of my course TermPaper on the Analogies between biological and business systems. And while doing that, I’d come with the notion that just as the “mutation” in the evolutionary biology cannot be predicted, can only be accounted for, business systems follow the same logic(or non-logic) of evolution.
Now coming back to the essay, it had some solid points, advices, humors and rumors..”Does your product use XML?”…its a good read anyday.