David out of context - David Kuchar

Longevity

2013-01-14T00:00:00+00:00

It’s cliche to say that money doesn’t buy happiness. And while there are elements of truth in that statement, cliches have a knack for painting concepts in black and white. The truth is, having some money does buy happiness, as it reduces the stress of providing basic needs for you and your family.

But, there’s a point whereby acquiring a higher standard of living reaches diminishing returns. At this threshold, wherever it may be for you ($75k USD per year is typical), you would only be marginally more happy with an increase in salary. You don’t need steak every night, and as someone who was fortunate enough to experience this personally, after a few months you probably will get sick of living on a beach.

The other night I watched a couple related documentaries, How To Live Forever and Transcendent Man. Both were fantastic at reviewing man’s recent efforts to attain improved longevity, the second detailing Ray Kurzweil’s quest for immortality.

In the end, these documentaries rekindled in me a thought I got pretty hung up with during my first year of university.

The line drawn between the rich and poor will eventually define the mortal and the immortal.

Longevity is different than long life in that it’s a long life lived happily and with your health. All the metrics on money and happiness rely on life being finite. But eventually, it may be extendible thorough medical treatments.

Even if you want to suggest that these will come down in price, there will invariably be a transition period where a longer, better life would prohibitively expensive for all but the most wealthy of individuals. It’s looking more likely that this could happen within our lifetimes, or at least our children’s.

There’s always been ethical debate on whether or not everlasting life would be a good thing. My guess is most of this is mostly academic - things you might say when something isn’t possible. I’d estimate that when it actually became available, much of the debate would end and people would look to acquire immortality just as they accept more money.

My judgement on wealth has always centered around freedoms: freedom from need, and freedom from want. I don’t need or want much more than I already have, and on my death bed, I wouldn’t regret not ever owning a designer car or living in a mansion. However, I fear that I might regret the fact that I am about to die.

The Antifragile Business

2013-01-11T00:00:00+00:00

I’m a big fan of Nassim Taleb’s work, and his latest, Antifragile, is no exception. As he puts it, he wrote this book to build on the concepts he laid out on his previous volumes, taking ideas for granted that he previously made efforts to rationalize. In a way, I’d compare Antifragile to Dawkins’ The Extended Phenotype. As The Selfish Gene had the burden of proving that the gene was the unit of evolutionary selection, he could write his second volume with the assumption that it’s case has been made.

In Nassim’s foundational work, The Black Swan, he explains how improbable, unforeseen events account for the vast majority of change in the world. Since he’s now shown how important these events are, he can write Antifragile, which is about how different types of objects and organizations fare in the face of a Black Swan.

Antifragile, the concept, isn’t simply robust, which would describe something that is invulnerable to variation. It’s something that is improved by unpredictable variation - think of a bridge that doesn’t collapse from an earthquake but rather gets stronger - that bridge would be antifragile.

Antifragile is not always better. But in business, where the ecosystem is so complex that even the success/failure events that wouldn’t seem to represent black swans may appear like black swans, antifragile is better. Investors, especially seed investors and incubators, take advantage of this by making small bets in a variety of fledgeling businesses, taking small losses on most choices, but participating in the big wins. It stands to reason that if Silicon Valley itself is antifragile, as Taleb suggests, then an “index fund” of it’s best bets would exhibit similar or better properties.

While you could make an argument that Silicon Valley, and it’s investors do benefit from powerful, unpredicted events, early stage, venture funded businesses typically exhibit fragile qualities. Most nowadays are pre-revenue and sometimes never find market fit or the growth in users required to justify follow-on financing.

If the focus of the business isn’t wildly successful quickly, support will dry up, and changing that focus is costly in time and energy. It’s a big, all-in bet, and if the bet is off, the company will likely die. And the odds aren’t generally good - when my fellow founder-friends talk about odds, they usually quote a 1% chance of success.

Now, while the failure of any one business isn’t ideal for investors, their loss is relatively small, and it makes logical sense for them to instead double down on the winners, rather than serve as a tourniquet, since the rewards for doing so are disproportionally large. However, to the business and it’s founders, this failure is catastrophic.

So, if we agree that as is, fledgeling businesses are fragile, what would an antifragile business look like? Again, an antifragile business would not only survive the unexpected, but would stand some chance to greatly benefit from it. So while something like investing in real estate is relatively robust, it lacks explosive upside.

While at Startup School, Joel Spolsky talked about two ways to go in terms of starting a business: bootstrapping, and venture funding. Since he’s succeeded using both strategies, his perspective is compelling. But is there something in between the two? Can you bootstrap with an eye towards an IPO? Can you balance big bets and keep the lights on even when those bets fail?

Since I started my journey in business, I’ve always thought that the only way to reasonably ensure success as an entrepreneur was to commit to getting as many at bats as possible. And to me, this meant starting a series of businesses, regardless of success. But maybe consistently picking up and starting over is more expensive than simply designing your organization to balance swinging for homeruns with the occasional single.

To me the best example of an organization doing this right is Rovio, who made a number of moderately successful games, that kept themselves in the business of making games, until they stumbled upon Angry Birds.

When you have a wildly successful game on your hands, you raise venture capital and you scale it. But starting out with the idea that the process of getting there is a direct one, seems to me like a fragile idea. Setting out to build Angry Birds on day one, to me sounds silly.

Games like Angry Birds are made by companies, but their runaway success isn’t. It relies on many fortuitous events, most of which lying outside of your control all aligning at the right time, centered around your creation. To be antifragile, a business needs to be in the business of creating chances for itself to win.

Up Periscope

2012-12-19T00:00:00+00:00

In San Francisco, I’m continuously surrounded by people with good follow-through. When the majority of people around you are industrious, it’s infectious. It fosters an environment with a lot of forward momentum.

Follow through is important because people learn most effectively by doing. You can understand something is right conceptually without knowing it in your gut, but guts are what count, and they’re developed as a result of practically applying your knowledge. This is one of the reasons why the Thiel Fellowship makes sense - in the real world “book smarts” don’t beat practical experience.

Productivity is important and it’s tempting for us to equate getting things done with the fecundity of our output. Taking time to think can often feel like we’re just dragging our feet, or lacking focus.

But mental consideration should not be relegated to brainstorming goals and setting them, with the premise being that once those decisions are made, follow-through is all that’s required. Rather, it’s good to stop and reflect on your progress from time to time to make sure that your beginning assumptions haven’t been invalidated and that the tactics you’re using to accomplish your goals are adequate.

This additional step is what I call using your periscope (i.e. look up and see where you’re heading once in awhile) and it can be especially frustrating for those who are impatient to see their vision brought into reality. That is because, in addition to making us feel like we’re slowing down, reflection calls our current progress into question.

You may be forced to ask yourself, “Did I just spend all this time building something useless?”, and you might have. To make matters worse, you may not have learned anything useful from the experience either, but the time to recognize that is now, before more time and resources are wasted.

Everything planned is based on a hypothesis, everything carried out is an experiment. Periodically evaluate your progress in each part of your life, adjust your plans as necessary and don’t be afraid to move on to the next trial when you’ve identified that the current one has run it’s course.

Thanks to Charlotte Aldrich for reviewing this.

Blogging

2012-12-12T00:00:00+00:00

Blogging is telling all those stories you’ve been telling your friends and family. But, in a forum that is public and scalable. Everyone has stories that define them, indeed, storytelling is the most effective mode of communication humans have practiced since pre-history.

The problem is that the most interesting people tend to devalue the stories they have to tell. Their stories are interesting because they seek interest, and don’t find that quality in their accomplishments to date.

That isn’t to say that people should simply value what they’ve done and cease to move forward. Rather, they should practice gratitude, relish in their past success, move forward to new challenges and tell their story for whatever it’s worth.

If Forrest Gump taught us anything, the true worth of a life is in the courage practiced. Courage breeds persistence. Courage welcomes challenge. A persistent focus on a challenge creates solutions and greater challenges. The greatest solution is predicated on the greatest challenge.

If nothing else, I aim to have the courage to tell my story.

Pasta for Forty: The Recipe

2012-12-10T00:00:00+00:00

Ingredients

Basic Pasta Sauce

Linguini, 4 lbs
Olive oil
Butter, 1 stick
Red table wine (cheap), 1 bottle

Spices

Sea salt
Thyme
Bay Leaves
Oregano
Crushed red chili pepper

Fresh Vegetables

Celery, 1 head
Yellow Onion, 2 large
Carrots, 8 large
Garlic, 8 cloves
Italian Parsley
Fresh Basil

Canned Vegetables

Tomato Paste, 18 oz
Whole Peeled Roma Tomatoes (preferably DOP), 4 28 oz cans

Vodka Sauce

Penne, 4 lbs
Vodka, 2 cups
Heavy Cream, 1 pint
Parmesan Cheese, 2 cups

Directions

Basic Pasta Sauce

Prep garlic, carrots, celery, onions. Garlic should be crushed and diced. Peel and dice onions. Peel and dice carrots. Clean and dice celery. Onion/Carrots/Celery should all be in the same quantity, and they make up the The Mirepoix.
In a pan that’s big enough to fit everything prepared thus far, heat olive oil, garlic, chili pepper flakes. Heat a few minutes, adjust heat and stir to make sure nothing burns.
Add onion, coat with sea salt. Cook until translucent, 5 mins or so.
Add carrots and celery, coat with sea salt. Cook until translucent, maybe 10 or so minutes. Keep stirring!
Add tomato paste and add some water as necessary to keep the mixture from drying out and burning. Let tomato paste caramelize.
Move entire mixture to a large pot.
Add entire bottle of wine and stir. I usually just use $2 cab, but Italian varietals are preferable. You’ll want to cook the wine down until the steam stops reeking of alcohol. I’ve found that if you don’t cook off enough of the alcohol, people get acid reflux. Keep stirring, at this point only add water if things start to dry out too much.
Prep your tomatoes. Add all of them to a large separate bowl, and crush the whole tomatoes with your (clean) hands. If the tomatoes are hard to crush by hand, buy better tomatoes next time!
Add tomato mixture to the pot, stir them in, and reduce heat.
Add a stick of butter.
Dice basil and parsley. I like a handful of each when diced.
Add more salt, oregano, and thyme to taste. Add bay leaves.
Cover the pot, stir, add water as necessary, but most importantly give it time - hours at this stage if you can, as it just gets better with heat and time.
15-30 minutes before you’re ready to serve, boil water for the pasta. Add a heaping handful of salt to each pot - this is your opportunity to season the pasta as it cooks.
Once boiled, cook the pasta until almost al dente. Then, drain the water and finish cooking the pasta IN the sauce. It will absorb the sauce into the noodles, binding them better with the sauce and adding more flavor to the noodles.

Vodka Sauce

The vodka sauce starts with the basic sauce. The following is how I turn roughly half of the basic sauce results above into a vodka sauce.

Choose a pot with as much surface area as possible. Add vodka to sauce (stir it in). Cook off the alcohol - it may take up to 30 minutes. If you smell alcohol in the steam, keep cooking it. If you don’t cook off all the vodka it will taste sour - more cooking time solves this problem.
Add the heavy cream, let it heat through (3-5 mins).
Add parmesan cheese - I like to put in about 2 cups of it. Let it all melt into the sauce.
Cook penne as you did the linguini, adding it to the vodka sauce at the end and serving it from the pot.

Pasta for Forty

2012-11-18T00:00:00+00:00

About four years ago my friend Tom served me his bolgonese at a dinner party, and I’d never tasted something so good. Since he’s a Manhattanite, and I live on the other side of the country in San Francisco, I set out to learn to make it myself, starting with roughly his original recipe.

My first few tries were okay. Good enough to the point where I thought I could test it on my friends and they’d be happy with it. Nothing unites people quite like food and drink, especially when it’s all free, and soon I found myself running out of food, as my weekly “Pasta Night” expanded from my roommates to a good slice of everyone I knew in the city.

Being forced to scale the recipe, crowd-sourcing reviews and advice, and iteration wrought a positive evolution of the results. I have vegetarian friends, so eventually my bolognese became a tomato sauce, then I added optional meatballs, and then finally the choice of spaghetti and meatballs for the omnivores and penne with vodka sauce for everyone.

It takes time to make a good sauce. Members of my international warehouse told me their Italian grandmothers start on their sauce at 5am stewing their sauce with a whole pork shoulder, bone and all. Cooking is chemistry, and the longer you cook a sauce the better it is. But my work is demanding, so I’ve never spent more than 5 hours total prep time.

Next, I’ll post my much requested recipe.