(Emma is top right, Jackie is bottom right – they’re both Boston Terrier)

The first thought was something along the lines of: “Damn, I wanted to do such and such, and now I’m stuck here. What should I do?”. And then I ALMOST started blaming my wife for locking the second lock.
The easiest way to fix this would have been to call a Lyft (I try to avoid Uber unless it’s absolutely necessary, as I consider them an evil company, and I also question its investors), get a ride to the restaurant where my wife works (a bit more than 2 miles away), get the house keys and the car keys, drive back home, get in, and later today pick her up from work. I could have also told her about her mistake.
That’s when things started to get interesting.

Turning negatives into positives
Call it zen, call it whatever you want, but at that point I simply tried to turn a negative into a positive.
My thoughts went a different way:
“If I walk to the restaurant with the dog, I accomplish a few good things: the dog gets her morning walk; I get to walk, too, and given that I don’t do enough physical exercise, this is good for me and my health; I will also have 70-80 minutes for myself, which I can use to think and wonder with my mind; the city will still be asleep, and therefore it should be a quiet, pleasant walk.”
And then I simply did it, and the walk turned out to be fantastic. I really enjoyed it, and now that I’m back home, I felt a huge desire to share it and so here I am, writing this blog post.

Funny enough, just before arriving at the restaurant, I realized that it wasn’t my wife to lock the second lock of our door; yesterday evening, in fact, our neighbor’s dog, Jackie (isn’t she cute? See her in the picture above), was keeping us company, and after we fell asleep, her owner opened our apartment door to pick her up and he most likely locked the door from the inside. It was him, not my wife!
I almost blamed her for something that she didn’t do, besides the fact that she’s my wife, my companion in life, my partner in life, and I should be nice to her whenever I have a chance.
In fact, when I saw her this morning at the restaurant, she was smiling, pleasantly surprised to see me, and had a good laugh when she discovered that I was locked out of our house. I was nice to her and she responded in kind.
The day turned into a beautiful day so far, and for that I might deserve a small pat on the back because I tried to turn a negative into a positive.
Also, while walking, I thought about a few other things. I want to share them with you.

TalkPay
In the last few days, there has been a lot of buzz about #TalkPay – in essence, people are openly sharing their salaries, online, mostly on Twitter, but also with long posts like this excellent one by Patrick.
I realized that it is somewhat difficult for some people, including me, to disclose that – either current, or past.
I currently work at VMware as a Vice President and Chief Techologist in the vCloud Air group – the “cloud” offering by VMware. In the past years, I worked at Amazon Web Services (AWS) as a Technology Evangelist – first in Europe, then in Asia, and then in San Francisco.
IANAL (I Am Not A Lawyer), but I am sure that disclosing anything related to my past compensation at AWS could lead to nasty legal action from them. Well, at least I am allowed to say that I expect that kind of behavior from Amazon.com. Therefore, I don’t want to do that.
I also don’t want to disclose my current salary, as it would create unnecessary tensions between me and a few other colleagues, and would probably create some internal “HR” issues as well, despite VMware is a very nice company in terms of how I feel treated as an employee (that’s my very personal view and experience, I don’t respond for others).
However, there should be a way for people like me to disclose my salary details, WITHOUT incurring into legal action or tension with colleagues.
Maybe I could disclose these details to a trusted person, and ask him/her to anonymously disclose these details online.
I am wondering what the best way to do it would be. Please comment this post or email me if you have suggestions.
In any case, I still want to operate within the law – I don’t want to break any law, or risk any issue with current or past employees. It would just cost me too much, and I had my fair share of legal battles in my life already.
Well, end of first random thought.

Good Marketing, Bad Marketing
I took those two pictures during my dog walk; take a look. I would call them “the hard way” and “the nice way”.

(The hard way)

(The nice way)

Which one do you like best?
You also need to know that a public space, and therefore a public flowerbed like these two above, is NOT a private property and therefore BOTH these signs ask for something that I am not legally forced to observe.
But take a look, and tell me which one would you like to respect, and which one you wouldn’t have an issue to break. I guess I know your answers.

Pigeons
This guy works at a gas station. It’s probably a tough job. Despite that, he is able to enjoy his day. How? I was driving back home (after having met my wife at the restaurant and got the keys), and I’ve heard him imitate the pigeon’s cooing (the sound they make) in order to attract them, and feed them with some breadcrumbs. How nice. I felt connected with him, and I thought that it’s always good to find simple ways to enjoy life.

Sometimes I conjure master plans to make millions and conquer the world… And then, a simple guy working at a gas station brings me back to reality. Thank you, anonymous man.

Conclusions
I hope that you liked my random thoughts. Have a nice Sunday!

Very frequently I am asked, by different organizations and individuals, what would be the best strategy to reach out to developers, build a community, and create a positive “buzz” related to a specific technology. Or, how to do Evangelism.
I have decided to spend a long and lazy evening to share my thoughts on the subject, and the result is this blog post. I hope that many people will find this helpful, and of course comments and suggestions are more than welcome.
To be clear, this is more about how a Company can do Evangelism, rather than how an individual can be an Evangelist.
Good? Let’s start.

First, let me introduce myself.

[Simone Brunozzi keynoting at VMWorld 2014 in San Francisco]

I have been an “Evangelist” more or less since 2004, when for a few years I voluntarily spent time and effort to drive adoption of Linux Ubuntu, alongside my other jobs (entrepreneur, Professor, CTO). Thank to that experience and a lot of sane stubbornness and hard work, I landed a job as a Technology Evangelist at Amazon Web Services (or AWS) in early 2008, and left Italy to travel the world.
Back then, most people dismissed AWS as Jeff Bezos’ risky bet, and the business was way, way smaller that the current 1.5B$ revenues per QUARTER, as recently reported. When I started, Europe only had Amazon S3, and in the United States there were only two EC2 availability zones. There were no data centers other than those.
My role was to “evangelize” people on AWS’ technology: it meant being a public speaker at 100+ events per year, engaging with the community, dealing with developers and customers on a daily basis, and becoming a “bridge” between product and customers.
I wrote “Letter to a Technology Evangelist” and “Being a Technology Evangelist“, two years apart, where I shared some of my thoughts on how to do my job. (if you are interested in how to be an individual Evangelist, these two posts are a good start).
I was Technology Evangelist for EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) for about 2 years, then for APAC (Asia Pacific), then for Americas.
I used to travel A TON. This map shows you the places I’ve visited during my first 5 years at AWS. It includes exotic places like Australia, New Zealand, Iceland, South Africa, Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Bhutan, Estonia, Israel, and pretty much any other country with some sort of IT industry.

Last year, I left to become Chief Technologist at VMware, still focusing on Cloud technologies.
Part of my activity is still related to Evangelism, although I usually target a much more diverse crowd, which now includes a lot of large enterprise companies.

The rest of the post will focus on Evangelism, and how a company should define it and execute it.

1) What’s your technology? What’s your mission?

A company should start by defining what’s the technology that they want to promote, and what’s the mission. I will use an hypothetical company that doesn’t exist in reality. Let’s call it Simon Cloud – a new startup that provides cloud services, very much like what AWS (at a larger scale) does today.
Let’s assume that Simon Cloud wants to be the next generation Cloud Provider, embracing containerization, microservices, and agile development. It targets developers right now, and in the future will also target larger organizations.
Simon Cloud was created by looking at the pain points of current Cloud Computing offering, and found the following:
a) Cloud Computing is great to start with, but costs get out of control when the usage grows.
b) Need to learn new skills to use Cloud
c) Annoying lock-in after you start using many of the ancillary services
d) Hard to manage existing IT infrastructure together with It that sits in the Cloud.
Simon Cloud is a small startup, and they can’t boil the ocean. They can’t really solve issue D for now, but they think they can defuse the first three issues by offering a very simple solution where you use APIs to buy/sell hardware, and “rent” data center capacity where you can put that hardware you just bought. An additional benefit is that you can bring those machines back into your own data center, if that’s what you want (which reduces issue C, and possibly A). They also offer a very nice, sleak User Interface (UI), and a great UX (User Experience, which is how users interact with the service).
On issue B, they have created some great documentation that explains everything in detail, and they also want to launch a huge education effort to make sure that Computer Science and Engineering students become familiar with their technology and will later adopt it.
The mission, of course, is to become the new, big and bold Cloud Computing provider of choice.
Our goal is to help them “spread the message”. That’s when Technology Evangelism comes into play.
Ok, let’s look inside.

2) Evangelism strategies

There are many ways in which you  can do evangelism.
Let’s cover a strategy that would help Simon Cloud, assuming that the strategy would be executed over the course of 4-5 years, during which Simon Cloud grows from being a small startup to a huge company, ready to IPO (or, in other words, ready to “go public”).

At first, your technology should brilliantly solve a problem, even if that problem is specific to a fraction of your market. That’s how you find your first enthusiasts.
In Simon Cloud’s case, we are solving the problem that many startups have with Cloud providers: they just need “easy” hardware, or easy capacity, and they don’t want to deal with telephone calls or long setup processes, nor they need additional services pre-baked by the Cloud Provider. Existing players, such as AWS, Azure, Google Compute, Digital Ocean, Rackspace, or VMware’s vCloud Air, they all have a relatively simple way to get started, but none of them offers a pure, simple, “co-location” option that is offered on-demand, via a simple web interface or an API.

In this case, the strategy is to find early adopters, meet them and get to know them, and understand why they are adopting Simon Cloud instead of the other incumbents. Then, you capture these stories and use them as material to start “evangelizing” and create your own story. “Find your story” is your first step.
Second, you should “create a movement”, or in other words, find ways to multiply your impact by enabling other people to tell your story, or their story, and thus contributing to the company’s momentum.
Third, when a movement grows, it tends to “split” into sub-movements, because of different ways of thinking or different preferences. To avoid “losing customers” to other technologies or competitors, you should create a connection between the technology that you provide and the customers that use it. It simply means to tell their story to your company, and make sure that the whole group feels ownership for the technology, and feels in control of where the it is going. An example that I really like is Microsoft’s publicly available roadmap.
Find your story, create a movement, connect customers and company.
Fourth point is to “create a legacy”, or to find ways in which your technology will have a lasting impact in the world. How? For example, by finding partners that can build on top or around your technology, and dramatically increase your outreach. This last point cannot be solely done with evangelism, but evangelism is a critical aspect of succeeding at doing this.

Now that we’re done with strategies, let’s see how execution would work.

3) Execution

During my last two years at Amazon Web Services, between 2012 and 2014, I increasingly got involved in creating an identity for the Technology Evangelism group. A culmination of that effort resulted in the TES internal events (Technology Evangelism Summit), where every product team had a chance to discuss the product in front of the entire Evangelism team, making sure they would know how to evangelize it, and where Evangelists themselves had the opportunity to share ideas, discuss, and take action.

The trick about executing an Evangelism strategy is a lot about teamwork, and how this team interacts with the rest of the company.
The following can probably be applied to many other situations as well.

First, the team you build should have a clear vision of where you want to go. They need to know that the current team of, say, 4 people, will grow to be a 30 person team in four years time, and that the tactical execution will evolve based on team size, and maturity of the technology offered by Simon Cloud.
Each individual should know what this means for his/her career, potentially allowing them to carve out a specific role that they love, and that fits in that strategy.
Evangelism is a very tricky career path; it’s kind of an hybrid, between a purely technical role, a semi-technical role like Solutions Architect / Sales Engineer, and a Marketing/Sales/Business Development role.
Some people want to be evangelists for their entire life. Some others like to be evangelists as a way to share with the world their passion with coding and technology. Some others see it as an intermediate step.
You should know these things, and how they will affect your team. Especially at the beginning, spend time with them and make sure they understand all the implications of their career choice, and where they want their career to evolve next.

Second, you should build a process machine, where with little overhead you can track, measure, and correct what each individual does.
I have personally NEVER seen an Evangelism team adopt these tactics, possibly because evangelists are seen as special, weird individuals that travel an insane amount of time and have enough intelligence and smartness to be able to contribute to the success of the company. Well, this is wrong. On one side, you should allow creativity and initiative to flourish, but at the same time you want to map these activities into something meaningful and, where possible, measurable.
Actually, to be more precise, EVERY time I have seen teams adopt some of these tactics, results have been amazing, but so far I have NEVER seem a team programmatically and systematically adopt a process framework for Evangelism.
Let me give you a personal example on how this would work.
Every quarter, or sometimes every two quarters, I would meet with EVERY product manager at AWS, including the ones whose product wasn’t launched yet. I would first try to understand the product, or the new iteration of the product; then understand what problem they were going to solve; and then discuss which strategy would be best in evangelizing that specific product to the masses, including deciding which conferences made sense, which audiences we wanted to attract, etc.
Then I would do tens of events, some of which would give me the opportunity to talk about that particular product. I would create a report on these events, which customers I spoke to, and metrics related to how many people went to my presentation on Slideshare, or how many retweeted my presentation, and where possible how many asked for AWS credits.
Then I would sit down with the same product manager, and try to get metrics on adoption and signups, trying to understand correlation between these and the conferences that I did.
In that way, I had a process to provide Evangelism to a specific product, and somehow measure its effects.
This example shows how an individual (in that case, me), following a process, could provide an output that would fit in a general framework.

Third (and this is something that I was unable to fully achieve at AWS, for internal reasons), you should get support from the rest of the company on things you need to operate more effectively and efficiently.
Example? You might need budget, and some headcounts, to create a “champions program”, where you have a selected group of individuals that you treat in a special way, but at the same time you need tools to capture and measure that interaction. As an example, if you give these individuals a certain number of credit coupons, to try out the service, you NEED the tool to investigate which of these coupons have been redeemed, and how these customers are growing in size over time. That details tells you how effective that individual is, and will become your best friend to ask for an increase in budget for the following year. At the end of the day, someone in the company always wants to know that if they put 100,000$ in that bucket, the bucket will return an X amount within a certain period of time.
Another example? You might need tools to monitor social media activity related to your “fleet” of evangelists that are presenting at events all over the world (and perhaps use it also to monitor how your “champions” are performing).
The tricky part here is to understand how to convince the company to give you these resources. You need to know how politics work at your company, and you need to know what you can leverage to move money to your projects.
In Simon Cloud’s hypotetical case, they want to use education as a way to minimize issue B (need to learn new skills to use Cloud), and maybe your team wants to take charge of it. That would partially fit into evangelism, and partially be an initiative that could stand alone.
In that case, it’s up to the individual running Evangelism to decide if he can take responsibility for a separate project, knowing that only part of that project will be strictly related to evangelism.
In any case, I am a firm believer in the importance of education as a way to gain marketshare and become a thought leader, true for any technology company. Evangelism has limitations, and that’s where education comes into play.

4) Conclusions

I told you it was going to be a long post. There would be so much more to discuss, but my time is up for now.
I hope that you found this piece useful, and that your company will benefit from it in their evangelism efforts.
Feel free to comment here, and if you really liked it, please share it online, or discuss it on Hacker News.

Richard Stallman (also known as RMS, from his initials) is considered one of the fathers of the Free Software movement.
I have a deep respect for someone who dedicated most of his life to a noble cause.
His latest article is about “Reasons not to use Facebook“.

(photo courtesy of RMS himself, source here)

The article is smart, factual, and well written.
Unfortunately, there’s a fundamental flaw in it.

Stallman would like to convince MANY people that using Facebook is wrong, and lists the reasons.

The problem with his view is that MOST people would not be able or willing to give up using Facebook for these reasons.
Let’s take a quick look, and imagine the “average Joe” pondering whether a reason is good enough or not.

The need to use a real name
Well, Joe would be ok with it. He wants his friends to know that he is in fact that guy on Facebook.

Censorship
Joe doesn’t care about censorship in Russia or Turkey, because he doesn’t live there and doesn’t really see the harm.

Privacy
Joe doesn’t believe, or doesn’t care, that having his personal data shared with Mastercard will actually lead to him spending more. Why?

Ads
Joe sees ads everywhere. On TV, while driving, when searching the internet. Why Facebook should be different? It’s free at least.

Psychological harm
Joe is not prepared to enter a decade-long argument with his kids on why they shouldn’t use Facebook. All their friends use it, and that’s it.

Taxes
Facebook is a tax dodger. And so are many other companies. And Joe either doesn’t know, or doesn’t care.

Most importantly, Joe viscerally knows that his actions alone won’t change a thing. His peers, his friends, his kids’ friends use Facebook. It’s a necessary evil. Joe has other things to worry about in life, like his job, his mortgage, or how to hide his lover from his wife to avoid an expensive divorce. Whatever it is, Facebook and privacy and freedom are not his primary concerns.

Joe doesn’t want a list of reason why he shouldn’t use Facebook. He wants a valid alternative. The alternative doesn’t exist (Diaspora, really? Good luck with that), and therefore he’ll just keep using it. He follows the herd.

Conclusions
I don’t like how Facebook behaves, and I pretty much agree with many of RMS’ points. However, his way to convince people is utterly wrong and almost useless. I wish he, and his accolites, would realize this, and maybe change tactics. I would be very happy to see them successful in these campaigns, because privacy matters and freedom matters. In this world, money drives many things, and the individual person doesn’t have much choice in most cases.
Using DuckDuckGo instead of Google or Bing might be a good start to improve your privacy, but it’s not for everybody.
Using Bitcoin? Definitively not for everybody.
Tor? Only for a selected few.
The tools are there, but are not good enough for the average person to justify the switch, and the effort.

There should be another way.
I don’t know which one though.

[discuss on Hacker News]

I’m a fan of Techstars, even though nobody’s perfect (no, not even YC).
David Cohen, one of Techstars’ founders, has interacted with hundreds and hunders of startups, and their mentors.
In his latest post, he writes his version of a “Mentor manifesto”, to answer the simple question of:
What does it mean to be a great mentor?

I have a slightly different view, but I think it’s wise to build on top of what David has already written.
Therefore, I will list his points, comment or elaborate on each point, and add my own.

But first, let me tell you why you should even listen to me – and my experience as a mentor.

My badge when I was mentoring at Techstars Cloud in San Antonio, Texas

My experience as a mentor

During the last seven years, I met over one thousand startups, while I was Technology Evangelist at Amazon Web Services and now as a Chief Technologist at VMware. I advised a few hundreds of them.
Of all those, I could claim that I properly “mentored” only a few dozens. Still, it’s a good number.
I mentored through incubators and accelerators (Techstars, Founder Institute, H-Farm, Mind The Bridge, among others), as well as by direct interaction.
Three years ago I also became an angel investor, and started investing in a few companies. Those are, naturally, the ones that I have mentored the most.
Hopefully this is enough experience to have a decent idea of what a mentor should do to help startups succeed – and of course, experience is never enough, so feel free to comment and tell me what I’m doing wrong or where I can improve.

A (hopefully) better version of a mentor manifesto

Here we go.

1) Be socratic (notes by Brad Feld here).
I agree, and by “being socratic” we mean that you (the mentor) should ask the right questions, engage in the right conversation, and get a sense of how you can help the startup that you are mentoring. (I would have used a different term, since the socratic method is much more than that, and it’s not the only way to have that discussion)
2) Expect nothing in return (you’ll be delighted with what you do get back).
I only partially agree. I expect that you show up on time, that you know why I’m there to help you, that you somehow respect the fact that I am dedicating my time to helping you. Other than that, yes, I don’t expect anything else.
3) Be authentic / practice what you preach.
This has nothing to do with mentoring. I think this should apply to everything. Furthermore, if you are not authentic in a normal situation, you will not be authentic when you mentor. I like it, but it’s useless.
4) Be direct. Tell the truth, however hard.
Fully agree. Not much to be added.
5) Listen too.
Well, let’s just use #1 (be socratic). This is redundant.
6) The best mentor relationships eventually become two-way.
Hmm. It’s poorly defined. Say something more specific like “A good mentor-mentee relationship includes the mentor helping the mentee, but also the mentor learn from the relationship.”
7) Be responsive.
Well, agree.
8) Adopt at least one company every single year. Experience counts.
Don’t necessarily agree. If you already have a vast experience, and you will only mentor one startup in your lifetime, you can still be a great mentor. I don’t think this should be in the list.
9) Clearly separate opinion from fact.
Yep.
10) Hold information in confidence.
Agree, and even more: most “young” startups don’t really know what can happen when certain pieces of information are leaked. Not only you have to hold information in confidence – go the extra mile: help them understand the consequences.
11) Clearly commit to mentor or do not. Either is fine.
Ha. This is controversial (but I kind of agree). I expect nothing in return, right? So, let me tell you the story of a Techstars alumni from Boston (I won’t name the company here). I met them twice during the Techstars program, exchanged several emails with them, I was elected their lead mentor by them, I followed them for a few months quite closely, and provided mentoring and advice even after graduation (in specific on how to do technology evangelism). I met one of the founders in Boston months after graduation. I made several introductions. In short, I think I committed a lot of time. I didn’t expect much in return, but I got exactly nothing. They raised a big series A and then a bigger series B, and they simply forgot about me. I feel that this was unfair. I didn’t expect advisory equity or else; but simply, a couple of unexpected “thank you” would have been fantastic. So, dear startup, tell me: do you want me just for this one hour, or do you want me for more? If so, I think we should have a discussion. What do you think?
12) Know what you don’t know. Say I don’t know when you don’t know. “I don’t know” is preferable to bravado.
Yes.
13) Guide, don’t control. Teams must make their own decisions. Guide but never tell them what to do. Understand that it’s their company, not yours.
Yes.
14) Accept and communicate with other mentors that get involved.
How? Techstars didn’t do much to facilitate this. Almost nobody helps you with this. I find it ironic that you see it in the manifesto, but it’s left to the individual mentor to figure out how to do this. I think there should be a better way.
15) Be optimistic.
No. Be realistic.
16) Provide specific actionable advice, don’t be vague.
Yes.
17) Be challenging/robust but never destructive.
This can be incorporated into #15 “Be realistic”.
18) Have empathy. Remember that startups are hard.
Yes.

And now let me add a few more from my own opinion:

19) Explain why you want to mentor them, and what’s your approach.
Sometimes there are these “mentor days” where each startup meets 4-5 different mentors. They usually don’t know who they are in details (in the sense that they only know the name, the current occupation, some background, and not much else), and besides the big, famous exceptions, most of these mentors look the same on paper.
So, when you meet a new startup, briefly tell them why you are there to mentor them, how you intend mentoring, etc. Possibly, even tell them what’s your goal. Examples? Looking for new opportunities; looking for good investments for my fund; looking for talent that I can lure into my other company (well, a few people do that, even if it’s not nice); looking for companies to acquire before they get too expensive; or simply to get experience in mentoring other people.
20) If you want to become a long-term mentor of the company, explain what you expect from them (equity? cash? attention? nothing?). Just make it clear.
21) Take notes, and follow up. You become a more effective mentor if you take notes on each company you meet, and then follow up on these notes. It’s actually good to write down your after thoughts, and share these with them. I rarely did it when I started, but then I discovered how useful it is. I also don’t do it with everybody, because I prefer to focus on the few selected ones that I like to mentor.
Also, taking notes is useful if you want to mentor them on a specific aspect for the long term. Example: if I want to help a company do technology evangelism right, our first meeting might not go well because maybe they have a different view. I take notes, and after a month or two I check in and see how it went. If I was right, I should be able to point the mistake and help them steer the ship in the right direction.
22) Ask them to explain how they feel about your mentoring. Do mentor ever do this? Rarely! And yet, it’s also a very important way to understand if you have been of help AT ALL, and perhaps in which areas you should improve.
23) Prepare in advance. At your first meeting this is especially important. Make sure that you know enough about the company, and possibly that you have already reached out to them, telling them who you are, what you do, and your areas of expertise. I am not very good at doing this, but I am improving.
It’s also good, prior to any meeting, to set an agenda and decide what you want to discuss. Most of the time, the first meeting is to get to know each other and see if some “magic” happens, but why not use it to try to discuss and solve a specific problem that the startup is going through now?
24) Provide feedback to the incubator/accelerator (if applicable). Yes. A good mentor not only is a good mentor for the individual startup, but he/she also provides specific feedback to Techstars, or any other incubator/accelerator. His interaction with the startups might have been better. The notes on them might have been more detailed. Or, the presentation decks should all be available as a single zip file. Etc.

That’s it for now. What do you think?

[discuss on Hacker News]

He recently wrote that, in his view, Apple will buy Tesla for $75B in 18 months.
I 100% disagree.
Let me explain.
(disclaimer: I own no AAPL or TSLA stocks, I don’t own a Tesla car, and I own two Macbooks).

What’s the current status?
Some facts, so that we are all aligned.
Apple is worth more than $740 Billion. It sold about 170 million iPhones in 2014, among other things.

Tesla is worth $25 Billion. It sold about 33,000 cars in 2014. No, that’s not a typo. It’s only 33,000.

What about Tesla?
1) Tesla’s Elon Musk is great at generating free PR for his company (besides being a really smart guy). Everybody knows about Tesla cars, despite there are so few on the streets, mostly in California (and everybody here thinks there’s Teslas everywhere. Like the “Starbucks” bias that every Newyorker has). This helps him hire and retain great talent and make them work really really hard, and it helps with the stock price, although you might want to remember that stock prices are mostly driven by decisions taken by “big whales”, not by small fishes like us.

2) Many other companies are pursuing the dream of electric cars, not just Tesla. Tesla will not be alone in this race.

3) Electric cars are very simple. No gears.  No gas. No oil for the engine (but you still need lubrication for other parts). Easy.

4) The hard part is batteries. They are heavy, they take time to recharge, and most of all, they’re expensive.

5) There’s also no charging network (the equivalent of gas stations), and no one has solved this yet. Shai Agassi tried to solve this with Better Place, and he failed miserably. No one has figured out how to power millions of electric cars. It’s a huge problem.

6) Tesla’s plan to solve the battery problem is to build the Gigafactory, to supply high quality, low cost batteries to its Tesla cars, and possibly to sell it to other car manufacturers. If you think this is a novel idea, you’re wrong. Praise Elon’s great PR strategy, but there are already Petafactories (orders of magnitude greater than Elon’s Gigafactory, in terms of output) in Japan, China and Korea to produce batteries. They’re old style, of course, and I bet that you can improve many things.
Look at this graph. Three BILLION cells produced per year.

7) Tesla makes some money by selling electric car certificates in California. In short, just in California, car manufacturers have to sell a small percentage of electric cars in order to sell the other cars. Most of them don’t sell electric cars, but they can buy “certificates” from Tesla. This will not last forever. As an example, Fiat Chrysler Auto (FCA) equipped a Fiat 500 with batteries and an electric motor, and sells it to offset the sales of the gasoline-powered Fiat 500… And for each one it sells, it loses about 5,000$.

8) Tesla is a solid company, but nothing says that in the future they will be alone in this market. Actually, whenever battery technology will be mature enough, every car manufacturer will want to switch to electric-powered cars, because margins can be higher for them. Why should Apple buy Tesla, then? Jason made some interesting points, while some others are less compelling.
Take this one, for example: “Tesla is going to take the 5-inch thick battery from the Model S and plant it on people’s garage walls, according to reports, so that they have enough battery power to last a week. ”

Well, that battery might cost more than the entire house (because you would need several of Tesla model S’s batteries to run a house for a week). And for what purpose? So I can disconnect from the electric grid for a week, and then reconnect again when the battery has run out? Or to power it with expensive solar panels? I don’t think so.

He also makes several points related to how Apple can then push its apps into the car, and let people use these apps while a driverless Tesla drives them around. Why can’t Apple do this without buying Tesla? It would be a smart partnership, and it’s not unlikely to happen in my view. I think that living in Silicon Valley (like I do, by the way) might obfuscate your view of how other companies in other parts of the world operate or think.
I am not an expert in car manufacturers, but I certainly know the sophistication reached by R&D centers of big brands like Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Audi, many Japanese ones, or even Ferrari (in its own way). I had some opportunities to get in touch with these realities with my current and previous jobs. Enough to know that Tesla should not underestimate what other companies can do.

This is probably the only very solid point made by Jason: “Apple would need at least seven years to get a car on the road: three or four years to design it, followed by three to five years of building factories capable of any sort of modest capacity.” If Apple really wants to go after the car market, and speed up things, then I agree that acquiring Tesla might be the only viable option.

Will it happen?
I don’t know.
Jason’s hypothesis might be legit, but I don’t see any compelling reason for this to happen.
I don’t predict the future, therefore we’ll just need to wait and see.

By the way, I’m up for a bet with Jason, if he wants to make it. Add 18 months to Feb 14th, 2015, let’s say August 14th, 2016. If, by that date, Apple didn’t buy Tesla, I win. Otherwise, he wins. Jason, what do you say?

You can discuss this on Hacker News.

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I am reading a book on presentations, “Resonate”, by Nancy Duarte of Duarte Design, one of the largest design firms in the world.
Below there’s an excerpt from page 12.

People are interesting
“A great way to stand out is to be real.
Presentations tend to be stripped of all humanness – despite the fact that humans make up the entire audience!
Many corporations condition employees to put meaningless words together, projects them on a slide, and talk about them like an automaton.
The cultural norm is for presenters to hide behind slides as though that’s a form of skilled communication. Look at the slides to the right. These are real statements taken from real presentations. They’re meaningless. Yet these statements were written to attract and lure customers to products or services. It’s the wrong bait.
Presenters think they can hide behind a wall of jargon, but what people are really looking for at a presentation is some kind of human connection.
…
Forming connections is an art, and when it’s practiced well, the results can be astounding.”

What do you think about it?

The recent discussion around “Accents” is very dear to me. Let me tell you something. Read on.

1) Accents
Paul Graham recently wrote about accents. Simply put: if you have a strong accent (e.g. your English is not that great), you are more likely perform poorly as the CEO of a startup.
It is rather obvious, but important to know.
One more point that Paul raises is that when communication is important (when you are the CEO of a Startup, and not just any employee), there are situations where communication degradation is particularly bad for you. When on the phone, for example, your understanding of English and your ability to be understood degrade a lot.
The Mean Opinion Score shows that on the phone it’s at least 20-25% more difficult to understand what people are saying, and it doesn’t take into account that you can’t watch body language. When on a videocall, body language is still used far less than in real life.
It also doesn’t help that the language spoken is English, that is, containing English phonetics, as some of the sounds are particularly hard to understand when communication is degraded. Which leads us to the next point.

2) English
Latin and Greek were the “Lingua Franca” of the Roman empire. The Mediterranean Lingua Franca (80% of Italian, and a bunch of other languages) became the main medium of communication in the Middle Age and Renaissance, and remained common until the 19th century.
None of these languages (Latin, Greek or MLF) were easy to master and the latest modern example of global Lingua Franca, English, is no exception.
There is an important difference, though.
Mediterranean Lingua Franca was a pidgin: “a simplified language that develops as a means of communication between two or more groups that do not have a language in common”.
English, instead, is a full-blown language. It means that:
2.1) There are native English speakers who master it.
2.2) It’s more difficult to learn compared to other Lingua Franca languages.

3) Arrogance
Sometimes it’s arrogance and sometimes it’s just ignorance, but when native English speakers are in conversation with non native English speakers, they often don’t grasp how difficult it is for the latter to follow the conversation, and the non native speakers often perceive the other as either arrogant or ignorant.
I am NOT saying that they are necessarily arrogant or ignorant, but that is what is perceived.

Antirez (the creator of Redis) writes about all this: English has been my pain for 15 years.
He is a technical person, and has had trouble explaining things in English.
He has communicated in English with other non native speakers (Europeans), and has realized that English is a bit broken. It is a tough language to learn and speak.
In his view, learning how English sounds is really the key.
If you don’t master it you become an introvert.
Anyway, it’s too late to find another (easier) Lingua Franca, and therefore he suggests to just study English.

Let me explain why I think I believe there is a combination of perceived arrogance and ignorance.
The first time that someone tells you: “I didn’t understand. Please say it again.”, as a native speaker you will often ignore the fact that a non-native can have trouble understanding/processing/hearing you.
However, if you simply repeat it with the same voice and speed, you don’t show particular respect for that person in their perception.
If later in the conversation you keep speaking too fast or not loud enough, you keep showing a perceived lack of respect, or perceived arrogance.

You might say: “If you don’t understand English, it’s your f**king problem, not mine.”.
Well, I disagree, because if your intent is to communicate and you realize that the other person doesn’t understand everything correctly, then you are supposed to do your best to be understood. At least, when the conversation is between equals this should be the case. There are other situations where it is, indeed, your f**king problem.
Let me give you an example I know very well.

I work for a big US company. Long time ago, when I started, my English was already quite good, but not as good as now (still far from perfect, but good enough indeed). I was mostly interacting with Americans and MOST of them would put NO effort in trying to make me understand, not even when I would tell them on the phone: “I’m sorry, I’m not able to understand what you’re saying. Can you space it a bit?”. My feeling was that if this company has hired me knowing that I am not a native English speaker, and if we’re here mainly to communicate with each other, I expect you to try to help me a bit. ESPECIALLY when your effort is minimal (just slowing down a bit would suffice), compared to the HUGE effort I have to put to try to understand every word.
If you perceive that this is a problem, then someone made the wrong hiring decision. But again, since I’m hired and nobody questioned this when I was hired, and we work for the same company, well, I want you to help me a bit.

4) Success
On my end I did all I could to learn and improve my English. I have to thank two people in particular: Martin Buhr (back then, my boss when I was based in Europe), and Shane Owenby (my boss when I was in Singapore). I simply told them: “Every time I make a mistake, correct me. Don’t overdo it, but please keep doing it”. They both did it. I am so grateful to them that they did.
Every time they would correct me, I would take a mental note and once the meeting or the call was finished, I would write things down, or research why that was considered a mistake. I kept reading books in English, watching movies in English, and now I can safely say that my English is good enough. You can still hear that I have an accent, but it’s not as bad as it could be. In fact, I’m a public speaker for a technology company, and if they let me do it, it means that I don’t have too many issues.
As Antirez wrote, there is no other practical solution other than work hard to improve your English.

A few pieces of advice:
1) To be understood better, try to capture the tone (music) of the language you speak. English speakers have a specific intonation when they converse, and if you put accents in weird places, they will have a hard time understanding you. Some people disagreethough, and I am not an expert.
Also, try to use pauses between sentences, and use this time to check if the other person is properly following you. You can restate something, to make sure that you’ve made yourself clear. A very simple example (imagine a bad accent): “In Italy we have a lot of developers with good skills that can do a lot of programming for us in the future, so we want to hire them fast. In other words: we have developers (pause) they are smart (pause) I want to hire them (pause).”.
2) Dare to ask someone to correct you. With a very little effort, you can correct your WORST mistakes, and improve considerably.
3) The way to improve your understanding is to train your ears. If you think there is a shortcut to this you’re probably wrong. If a shortcut exists, it would have made for a super successful startup. Unfortunately, I believe there’s no easy way.
4) I’m a hacker, and there is a way to hack the “conversation” system: try to avoid situations where the “noise” is too high (e.g. phone conversations, or chatting with a friend in a crowded, noisy bar). Another trick is to slow your pace. When the interlocutor hears you speaking very slow, he slows down automatically. Avoid situations where the other person is in a rush, as it would prevent her from slowing the pace. When you hear something and you’re not sure what it means, repeat for confirmation, and mask it as a desire to summarize: “So, what you are saying is that, in essence, we should find 2-3 more people for that geography, and let them cover the community of developer? Did I understand correctly?”.
5) Don’t feel dumb just because you don’t understand too well, but also, don’t feel smart because “these Americans only speak one language, I speak three, they’re dumb and they don’t even know they are”. They’re not more dumb or more smart, they’re just people like you, and they have the advantage that they have practiced the language more.

If you’re not a native English speaker, good luck with your learning.
If you ARE a native English speaker, the next time you are in conversation with an Italian, or a Bulgarian, or a Korean: think about this.

Discuss on Hacker News.