hitting .406

Product Gravity

2020-07-26T00:00:00+00:00

Quick challenge: Can you name all of the apps on your smartphone’s home screen without looking?

Now consider your living room - can you name most of the physical products?

If you’re like most of us, you probably have a television, a gaming console like a PS5, maybe an AppleTV or Roku, and if you’re into home fitness, a Peloton or Mirror. They sit on your media console. Next to your television. In the corner looking out the window. Waiting silently. Beckoning you to engage.

The typical silicon valley mantra over the past decade has been that hardware is hard and the margins are unforgiving. An industry best to be avoided. And by and large this belief was correct, until recently.

With the advent of internet connected devices and subscription business models, hardware is experiencing a renaissance through cloud connectivity.

Companies like Peloton, Mirror, as well as your AppleTV and your gaming console have all figured out ways to provide enhanced internet-enabled content & community experiences using physical hardware as a trojan horse to infiltrate your living room.

When you consider the consistent presence of a beautifully designed physical product in a home - you almost can’t put a price tag on its marketing power. I’ve known people who purchase iMacs just because of the way they make a room feel - even though the computer is rarely used. You can’t tell me the Apple brand isn’t silently permeating that household.

Now that connected hardware is able to leverage high margin subscription business models, expect to see more innovation in connected, beautifully designed hardware around your home.

Many of the new exercise apps on the iPhone are missing an important opportunity to establish a type of “gravity” in the living room. They’re trying to leverage push notifications and instagram ads to get user attention - but most of us are so inundated with ads and push notifications, we’re never going to notice. They should be building hardware accessories that enhance application experiences and integrate naturally into our physical space.

As we walk around the house, we can’t ignore the beautifully designed stationary bike. Or the well placed mirror on the wall, silently reminding us there are thousands of livestream classes and workout buddies available instantaneously.

Application developers need to be thinking beyond the screen and claiming physical space in our lives. It might cost more money to get into someone’s living room - but it’s also more difficult to get rid of a 60kg carbon steel stationary bike than it is to delete an application from your smartphone.

Buying Options at Seed

2020-05-24T00:00:00+00:00

We’ve done a handful of deals with multi-stage $1B+ venture funds in hyper-competitive seed rounds. As a predominantly pre-seed fund, these investments are not core to our model, but we make the occasional small supporting investment in our network.

The price of these rounds is often astounding. We’ve seen newly formed companies raise $5M+ at $30M+ valuations with nothing more than a slide deck.

When we expressed our amazement at the willingness to pay such prices at such a high-risk stage, one of the investors from the big fund commented:

It's not really about price, it's really about ownership.

My first reaction was that this was a stupid justification. How far could the “ownership” priority be taken? Would you be willing to invest $20M at $100M valuation for a brand new startup just because you got your ownership target?

When you consider the model for a $1B fund however, the model starts to make more sense. Series A rounds (in 2020, this is defined as $10M+ for 15%+ of the company) are often the most competitive because they offer the best risk adjusted returns on capital. Series A deals are about “winning”.

So then a $1B+ multi-stage firm is really just buying an option during the seed round. When their funds were smaller, they accomplished this via scout funds, but I think scout funds have proliferated to the point where there are so many scout investments the signal to noise ratio is low, and many hot deals often have scouts from multiple large funds so information arbitrage is no longer a viable advantage.

“Buying out” a company with notable operators or past successful founders then becomes a viable strategy precisely because you’re positioning the fund to be able to best preempt the Series A. Additionally, the fund then ends up often with more than 30%+ ownership after the 2 rounds, which also can significantly reduce the possible exit scenarios for the company that can return the fund.

Is “buying out” a good strategy for the $1B+ multi-stage firms? I’m not sure. It all depends on the failure rate from seed fundraise to Series A.

Founders Dilemma

I think a lot of founders completely ignore the potential negative scenarios that the large seed can introduce for them down the road as well.

Everyone knows the seed investor overpaid just to have an option for the Series A. If you aren’t able to materialize the type of growth expected for a $15M+ Series A, then you’re going to raise a downround and you’ll end up in a worse scenario than if you had raised a traditional $1-2M seed.

More often than not, as a founder you’ll end up in the “gray area” where you’re not a breakout hit, but you might warrant another round of financing. In this scenario the multi-stage firm that led your seed is probably going to pass, which introduces significant negative signal to the market. If you had raised at a $8M valuation previously, you’ll likely be able to raise another round at $12-15M. But if you raised your seed at $20M+, you’re likely going to have a downround.

I think as a founder you need to ask yourself, “Do I really need the extra money?” It can be exciting to raise $4-5M fresh out of the gate, but realistically you shouldn’t be paying yourself more than you need to live, and hiring too many early employees before you really know where you’re headed is a recipe for disaster.

A lot of founders I talk to proudly say “Well we have 60 months of runway now!” — and they’re right that often times, success can take many years. But the sad reality is that the founding team and investors at the $1B+ firm aren’t going to care about much about the company 4+ years down the road when there hasn’t been any material growth.

Overall, I don’t think the massive seed rounds are positive for the ecosystem - founders and investors alike. But in such a competitive Series A environment, I understand why firms need to get creative about buying their options and it does seem like a viable strategy if you’re good at identifying the massive winners.

COVID-19 Survival Tips for Restaurants

2020-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

It’s no secret that restaurants are not faring well with shelter-in-place orders. Though the more I think about their circumstance, the more I’m convinced that restaurants should not only be able to survive — but perhaps should even thrive in this new environment if they can adapt to the new reality.

The New Reality

It’s important to realize that things will not be returning to normal for restaurants until there is confidence around the effectiveness of a vaccine. This could take 18-24 months, which is a lifetime for most restaurants — most won’t survive 3-6 months without regular patronage.

What we need to realize is that the current pandemic is the psychological equivalent of the 9/11 terrorist attacks - there is severe and permanent fear in society right now around public density - these fears are not going to go away anytime soon and they could persist for generations!

My 4 year old niece is already incredibly diligent about touching anything public, about maintaining 6-feet of social distancing. She will yell at anyone who comes to close or flee the immediate area if anyone sneezes or coughs. We don’t even know the type of lasting psychological effect this could have on an entire generation of children whose developmental psychology around disease is going to be imprinted with a once in a century pandemic.

We’ve all been on airplanes or in restaurants where someone is coughing incessantly. Now imagine that same situation today, everyone is likely to just leave the plane or restaurant, or advocate to staff that the person coughing needs to be removed!

Things will not be returning to “normal”. There is a “new normal” developing around consumer demand and habits that is going to reshape the way we eat, play and live.

So how can restaurants possibly survive this calamity? On the brightside, everybody needs to eat, and a large percentage of the population either prefers or is otherwise unable to cook their own meals. So a considerable part of the population is still likely to demand restaurants, but only if they’re able to adapt.

Current Restaurant Economics

Restaurant margins are razor thin. The average profit margin for a restaurant in the US is only 3-5%.

This pain is only compounded when a restaurant has to rely on 3rd parties to drive demand and fulfill payments and deliveries. Delivery services like Doordash, Grubhub and Uber eats take on average 15-30% of order value, sometimes even higher! In the screenshot above, you’ll see an example of a pizza restaurant in Chicago who did $1042 in order value, but received only $376 after delivery commissions, processing fees and promotions.

In addition to obliterating the restaurant’s bottom line, the pay & benefits for delivery workers at the major services is abysmal.

Assuming this is our new normal, how can we build a better remote workflow for restaurants?

First let’s talk about discovery. How could a restaurant build a cheap web presence as cheaply as possible and reach as large an audience as possible?

The most immediate opportunity would probably be to create an Instagram profile, and take a picture of each item on the menu. Boom, instant web presence and menu. Put the prices and ingredients description in the comments with a menu item ID.

Users can follow their favorite restaurants in their city, and restaurants can post mouth watering stories to drive demand for dishes.

2. Order via DM & Text / Pay via Venmo

Once the menu is up on instagram, let people order via direct message or via a phone number in the photo comment or in your bio. Add instructions to send orders via DM / text message that include the menu item #, delivery address, and venmo, paypal or square cash username. Let them know that the order won’t be prepared until payment is received.

3. Repurpose Waitstaff for Delivery

Since there’s no more waitstaff or bussing needed in the restaurant, this frees up considerable resources to fulfill orders and handle deliveries. Busboys or waitstaff can stage deliveries and help optimize routes and pack orders. There’s still probably going to be some waitstaff who lose their jobs, but many will be able to adapt to take the SMS orders, pack boxes, and transfer to delivery people.

Also - add a delivery fee! Most users are accustom to paying 10%++ in fees to grubhub/uber eats/doordash anyways. If they want delivery, you need to charge more.

4. No More Dine-in: Ditch Your Real Estate

Another benefit that every restaurant will have to consider, is to move facilities to a more favorable location that isn’t prime commercial space in a downtown area. This could save massive costs in rent and utilities.

Additionally, restaurants can save massively on the reduced overall footprint as there is not longer a need for dining areas and customer restrooms.

Restaurants could even leverage the new emergence of cloud kitchens where you can share facilities with other restaurants in a more traditional warehouse area. This provides economies of scale for expensive fixed equipment, fire suppression and HVAC systems that are usually handled individually by the restaurant.

This will likely involve breaking your lease - this is a very unfortunate circumstance, but sadly might be the reality of dine-in patronage is not returning to normal anytime soon.

Tell your landlord you need to break the lease and negotiate a termination fee if your contract doesn’t have one already - otherwise tell them you’re declaring bankruptcy if they don’t accept (which is sadly likely the reality if they don’t allow you to terminate the lease agreement.)

5. Leverage Pre-orders!

We’re already seeing restaurants leverage pre-ordering so they can better optimize the amount of staff & ingredients they need for a given night. Limiting the amount of orders one night might also get some latent demand for future nights, which further builds anticipation and can yield a positive marketing effect.

6. Only Your Best: Limited Menus are Your Friend

What dish do you do best? Keep it simple and focus on just a few of your top selling items. This helps you limit the amount of inventory you need to purchase, eliminates spoilage and significantly reduces preparation complexity.

7. Group Buys: Get Your Biggest Fans to Market For You

The concept of getting a large group of people to commit to purchasing a service in order to make it a reality is super powerful. If you’re having financial difficulty getting back into the game, setup a weekly kickstarter for your most popular dishes and get your following to send word to all their friends that they have to try out your new popup. This method helps ensure you have enough demand to make it work.

Since kickstarter takes 10% - you don’t necessarily need to use kickstarter, but it’s a good way to build latent demand and actually escrow payments until you meet a threshold of orders where it makes sense for you to put in the work. It also solves taking payments from customers.

8. Reward Your Loyal Customers!

This is perhaps the most important time to reward your most loyal customers. Let them purchase packs 10 dinners, and surprise them with personal touches whereever possible. The truly loyal want to make sure you can continue what you do - don’t be ashamed to ask them to get the word out via sharing your instagram posts, or your kickstarters for weekly popups.

9. Communicate Safety Protocols

Your customers want to feel safe. Ensure them you’re taking proper safety precautions - publish an instagram post w/ text describing your safety protocols.

Take delivery & restaurant worker temperatures daily before they clock-in.
Enforce strict protocols around new gloves & wearing masks.
Ensure handwashing at regular intervals.
Full list of FDA recommendations here

Overall

Overall, I think the future of restaurants is still bright — although our perception of a restaurant will have to evolve to re-envision the dining experience. Menus will need to adapt to become more delivery friendly, and restaurant owners will have to innovate to reduce their reliance on 3rd party delivery platforms for demand generation and fulfillment.

But to those restaurants who can successfully make the shift and handle orders and payments in-house, there are significant profits to be made with a considerably more efficient model.

Cars and real estate

2020-01-24T00:00:00+00:00

A look at private transportation, its land use, and effects on urban environment

It’s astounding to consider how much of our urban footprint is dedicated to the automobile. As we inch closer to a post-automobile world, it’s interesting to consider how our local environments will be transformed. This transition will happen in phases: From internal combustion engine to electric vehicles; privately owned vehicles to shared fleets of autonomous vehicles; and eventually to autonomous vertical-takeoff-and-landing (VTOL) aircraft — deprecating trillions of dollars of transportation infrastructure globally.

Gas stations

Gas stations are going to be the first to begin to disappear. As EV adoption accelerates, many traditional downstream oil and gas businesses are going to be forced to consolidate or transition to providing alternative sources of energy. However, since 60% of trips are below 6 miles, the majority of charging will be done via level 1 & 2 charging infrastructure at home.

There will still be a need for the occasional charging outpost, but this demand might be more adequately met by Airbnb-style home charging stations scattered across less populated areas. Community or federal / state charging infrastructure using cheap solar panels might also be available, especially as a way to mitigate surplus energy generated on antiquated grids that are over capacity by incentivizing any nearby vehicles to charge w/ dynamic pricing.

I wonder how we’ll re-envision the many street corners currently occupied by gas stations? Until we have self-driving fleets and car ownership decreases considerably, there will still be a need for parking infrastructure in suburban areas where biking is not feasible. I would hope that the gas stations are replaced with small local businesses, but the high likelihood is that they will simply be replaced with other franchise / chain food and beverage locations.

Startups who are considering how to redefine urban spaces like Remix, Culdesac and Curbflow are all serving important functions to drive more efficient urban land use. Perhaps we’ll see a new Airbnb-style EV charging network alongside the continued proliferation of larger infrastructure providers like Chargepoint.

Autobody shops

With the imminent demise of the internal combustion engine, autobody shops will begin their precipitous decline throughout the decade. While electric vehicles will still require some maintenance, some simple analysis and anecdotes suggest electric vehicles cost significantly less than their internal-combustion engine counterparts. This means there will be significantly reduced demand for auto mechanic services, and that the work will be far less complex.

The total cost of maintenance after 40,000 miles has been $0. Not even new tires yet. I’ve had 3 minor repairs done to my car, all of which were covered for free under the warranty and each time the Tesla Mobile Ranger came to my location and fixed the issue. So far the only recommended maintenance according to the manual is tire rotations every 10,000 miles. But I have a local tire shop in my city that gives free tire rotations to Tesla owners. Some people say ”What about the cost of a new battery?” What if it never needs a new battery? Since I got my Model 3, the estimated range has actually increased by 10 miles. First my estimated range went from 310 to 325 miles as a result of a free software update. My current estimated range is 320 miles so I've only lost about 5 miles of estimated range after driving 40,000 miles. Based on this, at 400,000 miles my Model 3 could still have an estimated range of 275 miles which is more than some EVs right now that cost 3x as much as the Model 3.
Source: Tesla Model 3 review on Youtube

There will probably be some interesting real estate redevelopment opportunities to transform these older autobody and mechanic warehouses into new residential lofts or hip new corporate offices. Automechanics will not go entirely out of business due to the continued maintenance required on tires, batteries, motors, brakes, windshields etc… but the vast majority of complexity will be reduced and I estimate that the autobody industry will be reduced by half by the end of the decade. The remaining mechanics will need to become experts in electric vehicle batteries and motors, as well as the increasingly complex internal processors and computing infrastructure integrated into new vehicles.

Infrastructure-light mechanics like Your Mechanic might be able to make the transition to the post-ICE era. Software specific operations will occur at the operating system level, though there will likely be software specalists licensed by the manufacturer to troubleshoot individual vehicle operating system issues.

Parking lots, garages and roads

We’re probably going to be seeing full absorption of autonomous vehicles on the streets in anywhere from 10 to 30 years, and a lot of the financing for projects is on a 30-year basis. So if you’re a developer looking at building a parking garage and you don’t really know if you’re going to be able to finance or have a consistent revenue stream for a parking garage for the next 30 years, we’re finally at that point where we’re actually having a lot of developer clients who are questioning the financial feasibility of building parking garages.
— Kristen Hall, urban designer at architecture firm Perkins + Will

As we transition into self-driving fleets and VTOL, we are going to have the opportunity to reverse the plight of our natural ecosystems and redefine our urban and suburban spaces. This is an enormous opportunity to redefine daily life to become pedestrian-centric, encourage light exercise, significantly reduce carbon emissions, and develop green areas that return many of our living spaces to their green splendor of the 19th century and prior (but with all of the industrial and technological advances of the 19th and 20th century!).

Multiple land surveys conducted in the US estimate over 60% of urban land is dedicated to the automobile and US federal spending on highway infrastructure regularly exceeds $200 billion dollars.

This represents an enormous opportunity for the US to reallocate resources towards more sustainable pedestrian and biking friendly infrastructure. Let’s hope that the parking lots are redesigned as green spaces and playgrounds, and the roads are bulldozed for wildlife to reclaim the vast suburban and rural stretches scarred by asphalt and pavement.

Request for startups

There’s a powerful opportunity at hand for the United States this decade with the imminent demise of the automobile. I hope that we realize the enormous potential to redefine our urban experience in delightful ways that are safer, healthier, and more environmentally sustainable than perhaps any other time in history.

If you’re working on ways to rethink and recapture urban spaces that are currently dominated by the automobile, I’d love to hear from you.

315.360.000 seconds

2019-12-31T00:00:00+00:00

I don’t usually write annual prediction posts, as I feel it’s too difficult to evaluate real shifts in human behavior over short time periods. A decade however? A decade gives us ample opportunity to distinguish the technological advances that have become prevalent in everyday life.

Every decade is as important as the last. While there are certainly years where turbulent events have indelible impact on society and the way that we think and live, it’s important as ever that we strive to avoid complacency, and that we treat one another with the utmost compassion and respect in our everyday lives. We cannot choose how and where we are brought into this world, but we can choose how we live each day and how we treat one another.

As we inch ever closer into an era of Transhumanism towards the end of this century, I’m hopeful of the future for mankind, and that the world will continue to adopt Humanist values in our never-ending quest for a ‘better life’.

With that, here are a few tech-related predictions for the new decade. There are certainly plenty of trends that are missing from this list, but these are some topics that are top of mind that I’ll be watching closely and actively supporting throughout the decade:

1. Self-sovereign data / identity

SaaS (Software as a Service) subscriptions prevailed as the dominant business model of the 2010s. These cloud services essentially consist of a bunch of proprietary data and interfaces protected by a proprietary “username:password” authentication mechanisms for personalization.

The centralized SaaS model has effectively concentrated power into a few oligopolies who own the vast majority of valuable personal data: Google for general search queries, email, video and mobile operating systems; Facebook for our social graph; Apple with hardware and app store ecosystems; and Amazon for everything e-commerce related.

As more of our lives are spent interacting digitally, exponentially more data is being concentrated into the same cloud servers. The original value of convenience of the centrally managed cloud services becomes its achilles’ heel, as hackers are able to infiltrate systems and breach databases with hundreds of millions of personal records. With all of this power comes great responsibility of cloud security. But even the largest, most sophisticated organizations are susceptible.

The resulting effect is a distrust with the data monopolies and cries from the public for the government to step in and regulate data capture, custody, and portability. Governments across the world are already enforcing strict data privacy laws like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe and the Online Privacy Protection Act (Cal OPPA) in California.

Additional severe data breaches, destroying the integrity of billions of digital identities worldwide, will continue to occur with increasing regularity, and governments will continue to enact stronger laws favoring systems that facilitate more secure data privacy.

I believe these forces are going to drive the adoption of decentralized identity and data management protocols towards the end of this decade. We’re going to see new protocols like Decentralized Identifiers and Verifiable Credentials take hold and proliferate into mainstream applications like managing and verifying personal biographical data, as well as other custom verifications like work and education history, certifications & licenses, etc…

2. Data interoperability

Self-sovereign data through decentralized protocols will require the proliferation of new types of actors. DID Hubs will provide data storage solutions that contain semantic data objects and resolvable locations.

These data objects will be consumable by 3rd party “Agents” that act like our cloud applications do today, but on decentralized data that we own and to which we can delegate specific access for things like executing contracts, verifying information, issuing credentials, purchasing things, etc…

I believe that some open-source ontological system will mature and become mainstream near the end of the decade. Google has already been structuring a large amount of the semantic web via machine learning from the trillions of search queries and unstructured data they’ve indexed over the past 20 years. They have a very large head start in defining and maintaining an accessible web ontology for DID protocols, but I think that they will likely fumble the opportunity to establish themselves as the predominant semantic verification service provider.

For all of this to work, we of course need a new type of economy to provide incentives for secure storage, compute and “agent” like application resources. Ironically, due to natural economies of scale, it’s likely that these capacities will still be serviced primarily by the large cloud providers today, notably Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and Amazon Web Services. However, since this new system is in direct competition with their current business models, it’s likely that one or two of the current leaders will not be able to made the transition — much like Yahoo in the 2010s — and end up losing significant market share and fading into the obscurity of history.

Another notable concept in the decentralized identity conversation are Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAO). I believe we’ll start to see certain consortiums — mostly technical and crypto organizations at first — organize and execute core decisions via smart contracts and blockchains. This will eventually tip over into mainstream consumer once the core digital identity protocols and mainstream decentralized applications “agents” proliferate.

You can expect to use your smart devices to do things like vote in your condo association or school organizations, make payments to distributed service providers, and more. I think we’ll start to see the first major corporations organized and run via DAOs by the end of the decade.

3. New Cities

If you’ve spent any time in San Francisco lately, the disdain for mismanaged municipal resources is palpable. The heart of the problem is misaligned incentives between older generations with retirement savings locked up in real estate. This leads to antiquated and overly restrictive and arbitrary zoning rules that make building real estate impossible and leading to astronomical prices.

As these unsustainable economic dynamics strain cities, and the younger creative classes will seek to build entirely new cities and redefine existing suburban and exurban locations to build new types of cities that better service their needs.

These new cities offer a plethora of interesting opportunities to truly revolutionize the way we eat, sleep, raise younger generations, provide social services, conduct commerce, and interact in general. The concept is large enough that it deserves its own post (I’m actually currently writing 15+ separate posts on New City development!) — though for this prediction post I’ll only say that we’ll likely see many new clusters of cities globally and especially domestically in the US that have the following qualities:

More densely clustered housing;
Less restrictive zoning provisions, allowing for more organic evolution of local goods and services;
Emphasis on pedestrians over automobiles (e.g. ban autos altogether from urban core) and micromobility EVs for local transport;
Community solar and broadband facilities & services;
Sustainable farming services via local vertical farming warehouses;
New types of community education and childcare initiatives;
Local governance, legislation and voting handled via DAOs w/ considerably more transparency and accessibility for the average resident (requires proliferation of decentralized digital identity)

4. Micromobility & Local Transportation

The proliferation of more dense cities in combination with the massive reduction of battery prices will fuel the continued rise of cheap last-mile transport. Cities that prioritize pedestrian and biking infrastructure will attract the best talent, who seek out short, pleasurable and healthy commutes over sitting in traffic for much of their lives.

The electric bicycle form factor will prevail as the primary mode of transport, with cargo-like form factors that enable storage and better tandem transport begin to take shape and gain popularity. “Micro EV” form factors will take shape in municipalities with less pleasant climates.

We’ll see the first consumer VTOL flights near the end of the decade, which will become the mainstream regional transportation option from the mid to late 2030s onward; leapfrogging high speed rail (luckily for the US, who can’t execute on these major infrastructure projects).

5. Sustainable Food

This is a space I don’t spend as much time researching, but I do believe we will start to see a major shift in sustainable food options and consumer demand shifting towards plant based diets.

Estimates put the total % of vegetarians in the United States at about 3.5%.

I suspect new molecular techniques to produce sustainable, and tasty alternatives to meat and other environmentally hazardous food sources will push this to closer to 10% — a notable improvement considering we’ve increased from 1% to 3.5% in the past 50 years.

6. Home Health Diagnostics

We will begin to have affordable in-home devices to significantly enhance our abilities to diagnose major health issues and take preventative measures before they become serious concerns.

As our digital health data begins to proliferate with new sensors available for our heart, blood, and other biomarkers, it is imperative that the privacy of our health-related data be handled securely. The development of self-sovereign decentralized identity protocols to manage our health data will be one of the most critical factors near the end of the decade and into the 2030s. Our federal government must step up its actions to help the appropriate consortiums to create adaptable standards and force adherence.

7. The Next Mass Consumer Device

I’ve written before about the next great consumer device, and predicted that with the advances in machine learning and resulting exponential increases in computer vision applications, we will soon see a mass-market set of smart glasses.

I wrote that post after Google I/O in May 2017, where I predicted Google Glass V2 the following year. I was clearly incorrect with that timing, but I still believe that we’ll hit a mainstream visual device from Google or Apple in the early 2020s, and most certainly before 2025.

I’ve also underestimated the popularity of other devices entering the mainstream in 2015-2020; notably Airpods and the Apple Watch. Airpods are still limited in their applications, but their form factor and user experience is top notch. The Apple Watch will continue to dominate the wearables market for its comprehensive and powerful health applications.

The popularity of Airpods and the Apple watch have tempered my expectations for AR glasses, in that I now believe in a more holistic collection of background devices that feed into an enhanced human experience. By this I mean that I do not think that our smartphones or our workstations (laptop + screen) are going away by 2030, just that we’ll continue to see new types of background and supplemental devices enhance our experiences by interoperating seamlessly. Unfortunately this likely means even deeper ecosystem lock-in.

8. New Sources of Capital & Liquidity

The token economy, DAOs and smart contracts will provide the foundation for innovative and more efficient shareholder agreements. The lack of regulation in the industry will drive the invention more stringent shareholder agreements via smart contracts that programmatically define vesting schedules / token distributions, sales restrictions, etc… The more developed investment infrastructure will open the early-stage venture markets in developing nations and help power their early participation in the digital economy.

But new forms of asset management — the next iteration of hedge fund managers and venture capitalists will begin to establish themselves on these new crypto platforms. Protocols like Melon, Decred and MolochDAO are current thought leaders in this new ecosystem of organizational governance and will likely lead the charge into the next decade.

Stablecoin adoption will continue to proliferate in developing nations, serving as a powerful gateway to the decentralized finance ecosystem. The US will largely miss this revolution due to onerous regulations, but emerging economies in SE Asia, India and Africa will benefit immensely from the new DeFi protocols and decentralized applications.

9. Resurgence of Personal Websites & RSS

This is sort of a continuation of part 1., and admittedly more of a personal hope than prediction (though virtually all of these are naively hopeful on multiple dimensions, though I prefer to think of it as ‘optimism’).

I predict that we’re going to see a shift back towards personal websites that are powered by a new wave of dynamic developer options in the JAMStack ecosystem. Public GraphQL APIs and headless CMS’ will proliferate and integrate seamlessly with static sites.

There will be a resurgence in the popularity of RSS, as independent journalists and larger publishers discover new lightweight and flexible modes of subscription and micropayments that unlock new business models and a more efficient content marketplace.

To revisit in 315.360.000 seconds

That’s all the predictions I have in mind today. There are a number of topics that I didn’t have time to mention, many of which could have a bigger impact on our lives than anything I’ve listed here like geopolitical and trade conflict, cyberwarfare, and of course accelerating climate change.

The value in the predictions isn’t being correct necessarily, but in making an attempt to venture out into the future. The most important thing is that we continue to think critically about the current state of affairs, and that we endeavor as entrepreneurs to exercise our agency as human beings to move things continually forward for all mankind.

New Cities: Community

2019-12-21T00:00:00+00:00

New Cities: Governance

2019-12-20T00:00:00+00:00

New Cities: Public Safety

2019-12-19T00:00:00+00:00

New Cities: Telecommunications

2019-12-18T00:00:00+00:00

New Cities: Healthcare

2019-12-17T00:00:00+00:00

New Cities: Sanitation

2019-12-16T00:00:00+00:00

New Cities: Education

2019-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

New Cities: Economy

2019-12-14T00:00:00+00:00

New Cities: Transportation

2019-12-13T00:00:00+00:00

New Cities: Electricity

2019-12-12T00:00:00+00:00

New Cities: Housing

2019-12-11T00:00:00+00:00

New Cities: Transportation Infrastructure

2019-12-10T00:00:00+00:00

New Cities: Geography

2019-12-09T00:00:00+00:00

This is the first post in a series exploring what it would take to develop new human settlements (a.k.a cities) from scratch.

The first question when considering a new city is obviously where exactly we are going to settle. For the sake of this exercise, we’ll assume we’re going to stay within the continental United States. This section will explore the geographic location of our new city - we’ll discuss urban design: the inner spacial distribution, zoning and patterns of movement, in later sections.

Geographic independence

One of the supreme advantages of the late 21st century in terms of geographic settlements is going to be the availability of inexpensive energy generation & storage. Cheap power means the cost to transport goods and people will fall dramatically, which will expand our ability to establish new, productive & livable cities at frontier locations, far from any existing public infrastructure.

The obvious other considerations with regards to geography are resources, weather and terrain. Though not an absolute requirement, we would benefit from being close to rivers, lakes or the ocean as they would largely negate the need to build significant road infrastructure through town (and provide additional local fresh water and possible clean energy sources, more on these later).

Temperate climates would be net positive from an overall comfort perspective - though we also need to be considerate of any potential common natural disasters. We could consider geography as an aggregate scorecard of the following metrics:

Accessibility

Roads: We’re gonna need some way to approach the outer limits of our new settlement. So it’d be ideal if we can piggyback on some existing roads that pass through an unincorporated area. Railroads might also suffice if the routes permit passenger service trains.

Airports: Until our city gets big enough to warrant our own international airport, or until we see mass scale vertical-takeoff-and-landing aerial vehicles, we probably should attempt to stay within a few hundred kilometers of an airport.

Geological risks

We should consider any possible geological risk factors as we select our geography. Luckily, there’s a wealth of data to consider with the US Geological Survey. The natural hazards we’ll need to consider for the continental United States include: earthquakes, flooding & erosion, droughts, fires, hurricanes and volcanoes.

Defense considerations

If we’re assuming we’re incorporating within the boundaries of the continental US, then we’re protected domestically with our national defense and likely don’t have much additional need for defense from non-residents. I’m assuming we’ll want to keep the borders of our city open to all visitors, but this is a point for later discussion.

If we wanted to future-proof our city to ensure we could make it more defensible in the future, we might consider settling near the top of a hill. This would allow for fortification to inhibit invasion by permitting enhanced line-of-sight and ringed walls surrounding our city. This type of design emulates many early settlements throughout civilization, especially the medieval settlements throughout europe, which are quite striking.

Of course, building walls hasn’t generally the best way to ensure a harmonious society. Perhaps we should play the optimist when considering the geographic design of our new city and hope that we will not be invaded - though history might prove this assumption is foolish. Additionally, if we assume the cost of operating aerial vehicles will be decreasing rapidy in the coming decades, walls might not have considerable effect in the near future on any attacks.

Geographic considerations for defense aside, we should certainly have our own police force to ensure public safety, and will be discussing this in depth in a later section.

Proximity to resources

Energy considerations

Solar output
Wind, hydro electric, tidal, nuclear

Climate

Vegetation / Arable land

Soil quality

Minerals

Time zone

proximity to major economies

Environmental impact

New Cities

2019-12-08T00:00:00+00:00

San Francisco is burning. Our streets are littered with trash and human waste from the thousands of individuals without access to affordable housing, mental health or rehabilitation facilities. Crime is rampant and goes largely unpunished. Public transportation is chronically disabled, late, or unsafe. Public school lotteries are logistical nightmares.

Frustrated residents are understandably irate with the local government and its inability to make any measurable forward progress with their $12B budget - a figure larger than the budget of many US states and even some European countries.

If we assume that many cities suffer from the same fate — mainly, antiquated infrastructure and lackluster city services, funded by overreaching and dated tax policies and overrun by nepotism and patronage systems — wouldn’t we be better off starting from scratch?

What if we wanted to build new cities designed for the 21st century? How much investment would it require to bootstrap a new city from scratch and what would we want it to look like to flourish in the 21st century?

The thought of new city development — of starting with an entirely blank slate — is as exciting as it is daunting. Who finances the necessary infrastructure? What will the local government look like and who will make policy decisions? Where will I get my groceries, drycleaning, my haircut? And what about local culture? What are the important considerations and frameworks we should be establishing around socioeconomic, religious, and cultural diversity…if any at all?

Nota bene: The recommendations in this series of posts skew heavily towards privatization to avoid taxation. This is mostly a function of wanting to keep the problem space as tractable as possible, as I believe tax systems generally increase complexity and would slow down any potential development. That said, being active in political discourse, on both the local and national level is still very important in our democratic society.

One of the penalties of refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.

— Plato

Guiding Principle

I’ll attempt to minimize the financial resources required to meet the threshold of vital resources & services that are historically provided via municipalities and public utilities (e.g. water, sanitation & waste management, electricity, education, transportation infrastructure, public health, etc…). This is to ensure we can create a MVS - a “Minimum Viable Settlement” that has all the ingredients that our new city requires with the minimum amount of capital outlay by initial settlers. The goal is to build a community that is more adaptable to change, both in terms of infrastructure improvements and local policies, than the current systems that exist today.

Can You Create a City?

Totally. Every US state actually has their own municipal incorporation procedure. California is actually one of the most straightforward:

An incorporation committee defines and articulates incorporation goals, raises funds, collects signatures, assembles application materials, works with LAFCO staff and consultants, testifies at hearings and negotiates changes in the proposal.

LAFCO = Local Agency Formation Commissions

May require at least a year of formal review. The purpose of such a process is to ensure that any proposed incorporation is economically feasible, in the best interests of the community and environmentally and logically sound. The procedures for incorporation should be followed carefully to avoid delays and to reduce the risk of potential litigation.

Incorporation Stages:

Initiating the incorporation process

Application to LAFCO

LAFCO staff review

LAFCO Commission hearing

Election and the first year

Incorporation can be initiated in one of three ways--by resolution of a public agency, by petition of registered voters or by petition of landowners

Why now?

On the technological side, we have a plethora of options to make off-the-grid communities as affordable and efficient as their counterparts who rely on public utilities. Advances in solar power & home battery technology, water reclamation and filtration systems, prefabricated housing and advanced materials, remote work / education platforms, autonomous and electrified transportation systems, and decentralized digital governance capabilities all are possible and in some cases more affordable and performant.

On the policy side, many current municipalities are victims of historical baggage that incentivizes long-time residents to enact policies that harm new entrants. In my experience this is mostly a zoning problem and a function of residential property being viewed as an investment, which causes significant negative externalities to non owners and exacerbates inequality.

As I intend to revisit and further develop many of the important ingredients of great communities, I’m going to break out each topic into its own post to explore further independently. Here’s the general framework we’ll explore over the series of posts:

Geography

Transportation Infrastructure

Sanitation & Public Health

Healthcare

Telecommunications

Public Safety

Governance & Policy Development

Community, Culture & Political Theory

There’s certainly a lot to explore as we’re reshaping the way we eat, sleep, work, move, educate, provide care, and generally interact within our communities. Starting anew is a powerful opportunity to assess the current state of our local communities and how we might leverage new technologies and information to improve livelihood for everyone.

I’m sure there’s a class of people who think this entire exercise is naive - that developing cities is far too complex and that it’s foolish to expect we can attain the amount of coordination necessary to create a world class city from scratch. To those arguments, I would say that every city on earth started as just a simple plot of land with a common motivation to build something better. Our new cities are no different.

We can’t expect to solve difficult problems without imagination, courage & conviction. Perhaps a certain amount of delusion is the necessary ingredient to break the status quo and create some new — and hopefully better — reality.

On to the first topic. Be sure to add your email below if you’re interested in reading my updates as I explore what it takes to develop new cities.

Part 1: Geography »

Death by a thousand cuts

2019-08-28T00:00:00+00:00

A fairly common phenonemon in seed investing is when an investor doesn’t commit to invest within the first few hours of meeting it’s very likely they’re going to pass.

If they’re on the fence after meeting, one of the first things an investor will do after an intro call or meeting will be to “dig in” to the market, available data, product, cap table, etc… (if any of these exist) by sending a detailed, often thoughtful list of questions.

The detailed list of questions is usually an exciting email to receive for founders. “Oh! Look at this long list of questions! They’re totally interested!”

The somewhat confounding effect of providing this information however, is that most times, the information only serves as confirmation bias to the investor that their initial hunch was correct and that they should in fact, pass on investing.

When flooded with information, it’s easy to see something you don’t like about the opportunity that you think is going to torpedo the company’s chances of being a big success.

I think the best founders are able to control the aperture of the conversation to maintain focus on the biggest opportunities and how you intend to exploit some market anomoly or unique insight to your advantage.

This is the asymmetric information that investors are looking for. What secret do you know about the world that nobody else knows and how are you going to make it reality?

Crypto's Gateway Drug

2018-12-17T00:00:00+00:00

Stablecoins are cryptocurrencies designed to minimize the effects of price volatility, thus they seek to function as a store of value and a unit of account. To minimize volatility the value of a stablecoin can be pegged to a currency, or to exchange traded commodities.

2018 was the year of the stablecoin.

Increased volatility led to demand for store of value that remained within the crypto ecosystem. This led to more robust and diverse solutions built by talented teams backed by substantial venture capital including DAI/MakerDAO, Trust/TrueUSD, etc… The further maturation of stablecoin solutions increased confidence in the stability of the pegs, driving further adoption.

Critics of cryptocurrencies argue that a core use case still hasn’t emerged and that interest/usage of cryptocurrencies is still concentrated mostly in early adopters.

Stablecoins however represent a powerful gateway to the broader decentralized ecosystem. They are the gateway drug into the broader ecosystem of decentralized applications and distributed data. The maturation of stablecoin solutions is integral to the further adoption of decentralized applications and development of programmable money via smart contracts.

Digital Wallets Adoption in Emerging Markets

Digital money is here to stay. Digital wallets have proliferated over the past few years in emerging markets, boosted primarily due to the adoption and daily engagement of rideshare and messaging platforms like Grab & GoJek in SE Asia, WeChat in China, PayTM in India and MPesa in Africa.

As a large % of the population in Africa, China, India and SE Asia still remain unbanked or nominally banked, these digital wallets represent an immense opportunity to provide essential banking services (microloans, insurance, etc…) to further enhance economic growth and wellbeing for billions of people globally.

Despite impressive digital wallet penetration rates in these emerging economies, saving and transacting in local currencies can be unpredictable and subject to arbitrary regulations.

Stablecoins have the opportunity to represent a ubiquitous global currency, where digital wallet providers and buyers, sellers, and investors can interact using a global digital currency.

Emerging market instability and unpredictability in monetary policy & governance makes these markets the most likely to adopt new digital wallets that integrate mature stablecoin solutions.

The UX layer for crypto is already happening right under our noses. By providing a familiar and predictable medium of exchange, stablecoins are poised to accelerate mass market cryptocurrency adoption and be one of the first foundational UX components of the decentralized web, serving as a powerful gateway to onboard billions of new crypto users worldwide.

Crypto Canon

2018-11-08T00:00:00+00:00

Money

Assets

Foundations

Bitcoin Whitepaper

Jan 2008

The one that started it all. Sets the foundation for blockchains, proof of work, cryptoeconomic incentives and more.

Ethereum Whitepaper

Jan 2014

Expands upon the original foundation of Bitcoin with the introduction of Smart Contracts and Decentralized Applications.

Fat Protocols

Aug 2016

An analysis of value capture in the current ecosystem of the internet and how value capture might shift to the protocol layer with token economics and cryptonetworks.

Money, blockchains and social scalability

Feb 2017

Socioeconomic analysis of contemporary market dynamics and introduction of cryptography and axiomatic principles within distributed & trustless cryptonetworks.

WTF is The Blockchain?

Jun 2017

An approachable overview of blockchain concepts including hash functions and public and private key cryptography.

Beyond the Bitcoin Bubble

Jan 2018

A contemporary and comprehensive overview on a number of crypto concepts framed against their potential implications on the world's population and the fabric of everyday life.

Infrastructure

A Proof of Stake Design Philosophy

Dec 2016

Original introduction to proof of stake and some of the main concepts.

Enter the Merkle Forest

Feb 2017

Juan Benet, founder of IPFS describes IPLD and the 'Merkle Forest' as well as the component layers that comprise IPFS stack including IPNS, IPLD, multiformats and more.

Blockchain-Anchored Identity – A Gateway to Decentralized Apps and Services

May 2017

Daniel Buchner (head of Microsoft's Identity Division) discusses how decentralized identity has the potential to vastly improve the way we interact with many services today.

Blockchains don't scale today. But there's hope.

Aug 2017

Comprehensive overview of current distributed systems architecture and performance characteristics and proposed improvements.

Explain Delegated Proof of Stake Like I’m 5

Sep 2017

High-level overview of the history behind delegated proof-of-stake consensus algorithm as well as references to follow-up materials.

A Universal Resolver for self-sovereign identifiers

Nov 2017

An introduction to the Decentralized Identity Foundation's Universal Resolver.

Making Sense of Ethereum’s Layer 2 Scaling Solutions: State Channels, Plasma, and Truebit

Feb 2018

Overview of limitations of blockchains, introduction to State Channels, Plasma & Truebit.

A Beginner’s Guide to IPFS

Mar 2018

A general overview of the infrastructure behind the Interplanetary File System (IPFS), distributed hash tables and Merkle DAGs.

Blockchain Mining 2.0

Aug 2018

Notation capital's overview on proof of stake mining, merkle mining, validation mining, the relevant stakeholders, and the value of investors participating as a service provider in new cryptonetworks.

W3C Decentralized Identifier (DIDs) Spec

Oct 2018

The W3C draft spec for verifiable, self-sovereign digital identities. Introduces DID documents, frgments, methods, schemes with references to JSON Linked Data components.

Money

Stablecoins: A Holy Grail in Digital Currency

Apr 2017

General overview of benefits of a stablecoin and introduction to Maker project and its algorithmic stablecoin, the Dai.

Maker for Dummies: A Plain English Explanation of the Dai Stablecoin

Nov 2017

Overview of the Maker ecosystem and its core concepts, including the Dai, CDPs, and MKR token.

Organizations

The Slow Death of the Firm

Oct 2017

A thought piece on how cryptonetworks might cause a shift in the way traditional corporate organizations function through new models of coordination, incentives and value distribution.

Blockchain Governance: Programming our Future

Nov 2017

What types of governance systems will emerge as effective solutions for cryptonetworks? What concepts can we apply from traditional governance today and what new concepts are necessary?

Crypto Commons

Jun 2018

Historical overview of the contemporary corporation and the potential of cryptonetworks to create new types of coordination mechanisms that are a sort of more efficent (and potentially egalitarian) corporate organization.

Economics

Cryptoasset Valuations

Sep 2017

An economic valuation framework as it applies to cryptonetworks. Analysis of concepts such as velocity of asset exchange within a network, monetary supply, pricing and quantity of token resource.

Fat protocols are not an investment thesis

Oct 2017

Critique of fat protocols thesis as an oversimplification of actual value accrual dynamics. Exploration of rather variable dynamics of the current protocol ecosystem.

Making Sense of “Cryptoeconomics”

Nov 2017

An overview of game theoretic concepts, incentives and coordination within distributed systems with cryptographically verified consensus algorithms.

On Value, Velocity and Monetary Theory

Jan 2018

Review of current cryptoasset valuation frameworks and further exploration of velocity and GDP as proxies for overall network value.

Assets

Traditional Asset Tokenization

Aug 2017

How does the token economy improve upon the current state of the marketplace? What types of assets are amenable to being tokenized?

The Security Token Thesis

May 2018

An overview of the benefits of tokenization of traditional assets as security tokens. Review of benefits such as 24/7 markets, fractional ownership, cost reduction, market depth, automated compliance and asset interoperability.

Things to Add

More mining posts
More proof of stake, merkle mining, validation mining
Other emerging consensus algorithms like proof of spacetime
DAOs and end of the corporation
Privacy coins
Oracles
Prediction markets
Crypto custody for all types of stakeholders
Crypto and UX
Mobile wallets and web3 browsing
Dapp ecosystem and where we go from here
Want to add something else? Make a pull request.

The Liquidity Dilemma

2018-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

I hear a lot of new crypto fund managers promote their investment strategy by saying they “act like a venture capital fund but with hedge fund liquidity”.

These managers claim they intend to make token and equity investments (that convert to tokens), selectively capitalizing on short-term gains while staying committed to other projects.

While this approach sounds good in theory, I think the discipline and skills required to be a hedge fund manager are inconsistent with those required to be a long-term venture capital investor and vice versa; hedge fund positions are counted in days, weeks, months or single years and venture capital is a 5-20 year completely illiquid horizon.

I also think this hybrid mindset introduces a tenuous relationship between the people providing early operating capital and projects that have long term ambitions.

When you’re disrupting massive industries with heavily entrenched incumbents — endeavors that often take 5-20 yrs — real-time visibility into your share price is a big distraction. You don’t want investors selling their shares at the first hint of an unexpected obstacle, just as you certainly don’t want founders or employees doing the same.

To me, venture capital is about commitment. Massive disruption takes time and commitment from all stakeholders, not just founders. This is why founders and employees traditionally have a 4-year vesting period with a 1-year cliff on stock grants.

This is why I think the “act like a venture capital fund with hedge fund liquidity” mindset will be caustic to most early projects with big ambitions. Early operating capital needs to expect things will take years to see real progress. Most new protocols aren’t a “build a web app in a weekend” type of thing. We are re-writing entire foundational elements of the internet from the ground up and these things take time.

If you’re a founder or investor and the first thing you do in the morning is open up coinmarketcap.com, you’re in for a bumpy ride.

Open Source Database Schemas

2018-08-12T00:00:00+00:00

While the foundational protocols for the internet like TCP/IP and UDP were developed in the mid to late 1970s, it wasn’t until the early 1990s when HTTP and the modern web browser took shape that the technologies began to coaelsce into something the world was able to adopt en masse.

The “world wide web” offered an easy and inexpensive way to distribute and access information at levels that were never before possible. Fundamentally, the system is made up of “Servers” that make information and applications available for “Clients” to consume and interact.

But while traditional protocols like HTTP have offered access for everyone in the world to find information and interact with applications, ownership of the data is still heavily centralized with a limited number of organizations, as network effects and economies of scale encourage power law distributions where a select few massive winners comprise most of the market. This is demonstrated in Google’s ability to serve as the world’s best demand fulfillment engine, Amazon’s ability to sell you anything, and Facebook’s ability to connect anyone. As they extend their lead in servicing your demands, they attract more users and information and are able to continuously reduce their unit costs.

Because we expect any organization to act in its own self interest, we would thus expect that this massive centralization of data will lead Facebook, Apple, Amazon, etc… to create moats to ensure they remain the sole provider of this data, which only serves to reinforce their dominance. We’ve already seen this play out, as virtually all of the largest companies in the world are now software companies (this trend will continue):

Largest US Companies by Market Cap (2018)

Rank	First Quarter	Second Quarter
1	Apple $851M	Apple $909M
2	Alphabet 717M	Amazon 824M
3	Microsoft 702M	Alphabet 774M
4	Amazon 700M	Microsoft 757M

The Reality of Centralized Data

As Peter Thiel likes to say, competition is for losers. While this is certainly true from the lens of the monopolist, how does this perspective affect the rest of us?

Unsurprisingly, it doesn’t work out very well for us. One recent example demonstrating the possible negative externalities of centrally controlled data is the 87 million Facebook users who unwittingly provided personal information that was allegedly used to gerrymander the most recent presidential election.

Another glaring example is the recent interaction between Epic EHR (and billionaire) CEO Judy Faulkner and former Vice President Joe Biden discussing Biden’s Cancer Moonshot initiative. When Biden asked how he might export his full medical record from a platform like Epic, Faulker responded:

Why would you want your medical records? They’re a thousand pages, of which you'd understand 10...

To which Biden responded:

None of your business! And if I need to, I’ll find someone to explain them to me and, by the way, I will understand a lot more than you think I do.

These aren’t the only issues surrounding the centralized data structures of the internet as it exists today. The network layer of the internet is also centralized, which means governments or other bad actors can intervene and disable internet access for entire nations by severing one or a select few network hubs. This played out during the Arab Spring where governments censored free speech and suppressed anti-incumbency by disabling access to a number of social media applications like Twitter & Facebook.

These examples are representative of the hazards related to monopolies and centralized data, power, and control. How can we be sure that government agencies, corporate CEOs and board members have our best interests in mind when it comes to our personal data and access to digital services?

Crypto & Data Sovereignty

New cryptographic protocols and their corresponding token economies have the potential to provide the necessary framework and incentive structures for individuals to take control over their data.

There are protocols under development today like Protocol Labs’ Interplanetary File System (IPFS) and InterPlanetary Linked Data (IPLD) that will enable the transition from a centralized web to a distributed network of information and services – where data exists independently of centrally controlled web servers and is not accessed through one single address but through a distributed network of nodes that store and serve information.

What’s more, we can easily encrypt and authenticate data by signing it using digital signatures. This method is superior to the security model of the web where technologies like TLS only encrypt the connection between peers, but do not encrypt or authenticate the data itself.

IPFS & IPLD also allow us to store and access information on the distributed web via massive directed object graphs using merkle links. This gives us similar functionality to foreign keys within relational database systems and model associations in ORMs like Ruby on Rails, where we can retrieve entire graphs of object dependencies.

Shared Database vs. Shared Database Schema

A database is where we store and access organized digital information.

A database schema details the types of data that can exist within a database and how this data is related. In relational database systems, data is typically organized into “tables” comprised of columns and rows. Generally, a table represents a distinct resource, like a new user or a product, where the rows within the table represent instances of that resource, e.g. my twitter account has a row in Twitter’s “User” table and has additional information in columns such as my twitter handle, my full name, email address, bio, etc…

As I delve deeper into the concepts behind the distributed web and distributed databases, where I get stuck is how decentralized applications will read and write information to this distributed database that is portable to any decentralized application. What use is having all this available data if there isn’t a consistent API or shared properties and datatypes for common resources? I’m not sure exactly what to call this, but it’s effectively an open source, shared database schema.

While IPLD does offer some insights into data formatting and establishes conventions by requiring other serialization formats to easily transcode into JSON, the question remains as to how we will define commonly used resources and their properties (like users.name, products.price, locations.country, etc…).

Since JSON seems like the most appropriate option for data storage and exchange given its popularity, flexibility and simplicity, it would therefore follow that we could embed some type of ontological resource validatation within JSON objects to declare to which standard resources want to comply.

The W3C, a longtime advocate of the semantic web, recently developed the JSON Linked Data (JSON-LD) spec, which aims to accomplish the following:

Linked Data [LINKED-DATA] is a way to create a network of standards-based machine interpretable data across different documents and Web sites. It allows an application to start at one piece of Linked Data, and follow embedded links to other pieces of Linked Data that are hosted on different sites across the Web

In addition to all the features JSON provides, JSON-LD introduces:

a universal identifier mechanism for JSON objects via the use of [IRIs](https://www.w3.org/TR/rdf11-concepts/#dfn-iri)

a way to disambiguate keys shared among different JSON documents by mapping them to IRIs via a context

a mechanism in which a value in a JSON object may refer to a JSON object on a different site on the Web

a way to associate datatypes with values such as dates and times

The item that catches my eye is the “@context” property, which essentially maps terms (any non reserved JSON-LD keyword) to IRI’s (Internationalized Resource Identifiers).

Take this example, where this JSON-LD document contains properties consistent with a person, which you can then validate against the Schema.org vocabulary:

{
    "@context": "https://json-ld.org/contexts/person.jsonld",
    "name": "AJ Solimine",
    "homepage": "https://hitting406.com/",
    "image": "https://hitting406.com/images/ajsolimine-canonical.jpg"
}

The use of contexts to establish a standard data schema & vocabulary is compelling. If we apply this concept to the distributed web, this would allow us to create a new object on our shared distributed database, and attach a reference property to validate my object against a shared schema (when writing to the db) or to transcode it to a spec that I’m expecting as an application developer if I’m querying objects I didn’t create.

While the JSON-LD implementation is a step forward towards interoperability and the concept of having an authoratative schema is directionally correct, there are 2 issues why I don’t think it has gained significant adoption like a similar concept would in a distributed web:

The lack of a built-in authentication model thus discouraging adoption around sensitive information (relies on APIs for authentication)
The use of a centralized schema definition

While the first issue around a flawed security model is substantial, I think the larger issue is that JSON-LD uses Schema.org to validate resources, and that Schema.org, while collaborative, is a consortium of mostly for-profit companies that clearly have their own incentives that aren’t necessarily aligned with public good.

An better alternative might be to store the schema on the distributed web itself, and to allow multiple schemas to compete with one another (where objects can just refer to a canonical schema address). While we unfortunately still likely would rely on a few authors & maintainers of this schema (again requiring some form of centralized power since schemas would be ubiquitous), allowing developers to select their schema might help mitigate this effect.

Dapp-centric JSON Schema Validation

Another interesting possibility is the use of the recently proposed IETF JSON Schema Standard to describe and validate common JSON metadata. An example Schema is comprised of a few properties:

$schema states that this schema is written according to the a specific draft of the standard and used for a variety of reasons, primarily version control.
$id defines a URI for the schema, and the base URI that other URI references within the schema are resolved against.
title and description are annotation keywords and are descriptive only. They do not add constraints to the data being validated. The intent of the schema is stated with these two keywords.
type is a validation keyword defines the first constraint on our JSON data and in this case it has to be a JSON Object.

Here’s a reasonably complex example of the JSON Schema standard in action. You’ll see that we can do things like embed other objects with their own schema validation references using the $ref attribute.

{
  "$schema": "http://json-schema.org/draft-07/schema#",
  "$id": "http://example.com/product.schema.json",
  "title": "Product",
  "description": "A product from Acme's catalog",
  "type": "object",
  "properties": {
    "productId": {
      "description": "The unique identifier for a product",
      "type": "integer"
    },
    "productName": {
      "description": "Name of the product",
      "type": "string"
    },
    "price": {
      "description": "The price of the product",
      "type": "number",
      "exclusiveMinimum": 0
    },
    "tags": {
      "description": "Tags for the product",
      "type": "array",
      "items": {
        "type": "string"
      },
      "minItems": 1,
      "uniqueItems": true
    },
    "dimensions": {
      "type": "object",
      "properties": {
        "length": {
          "type": "number"
        },
        "width": {
          "type": "number"
        },
        "height": {
          "type": "number"
        }
      },
      "required": [ "length", "width", "height" ]
    },
    "warehouseLocation": {
      "description": "Coordinates of the warehouse where the product is located.",
      "$ref": "https://example.com/geographical-location.schema.json"
    }
  },
  "required": [ "productId", "productName", "price" ]
}

We can also do things like validate the data type using $type, check that a property is required, and perform more specific validations on numbers.

This is interesting, as a decentralized application could use JSON schemas hosted in IPFS to ensure that any new JSON object conforms to all validation rules of the applicable JSON schema. In this scenario, the dapp developers would most likely be the ones creating the schemas, so the authoritative schema design for a particular object would most likely be dictated by the more popular dapp developers. I’m not sure I’m totally in love with that, but it’s probably the most likely case as every individual dapp developer has an incentive to describe objects that are the most relevant to their dapp. This is similar, but perhaps much more agile than the development of microformat standards.

Machine Learning & AI

While writing all of this has been a useful thought exercise, I can’t help but hear the echoes of all of the critics of the semantic web, arguing that it’s a hopeless exercise to assume some collaborative human effort could define something so complex, and that attempting to manually construct and maintain the semantic web is a foolish endeavor.

Google has almost single-handedly proven that probabilistic modeling is more effective than manual models when it comes to mapping disparate resources. Human coordination is too time consuming and costly, so machines are much better suited to make inferences on data associations on our behalf.

So maybe computers should write and publish the schema we should use via probabalistic modeling by analyzing what everyone is publishing as IPFS documents, in essence creating and maintaining an evolving dictionary that both humans and application developers can understand.

Call it – an observational schema – one that is continuously updated as the overall system adapts to use. If a specific object type begins to contain an additional property with accelerating consistency, then the schema can adapt further.

Whatever solution emerges, I do believe the distributed web will need some sort of shared database schema. In practice, I think it will be some combination of machine learning and individually mantiained JSON Schemas hosted as their own JSON documents on IPFS that succeed.

In any case, I’m excited to revisit this post in 5-10 years to see how things unfold!

The Urban Mobility Landscape

2018-06-25T00:00:00+00:00

This is the first of a series of prediction posts where I attempt to predict what a specific space will look like in 5-10 years.

My primary motivation in doing this is to to formulate my thoughts about markets and consumer behavior to better inform my decision making as a venture investor. The other, more fun motivation is just that the internet is a great place to make declarations and revisit many years later to marvel at in self-congratulatory praise or — perhaps more likely — to laugh at.

In this post, I attempt to predict what urban mobility habits will look like over a 10 year timeframe. I’ll take the approach of walking through each mode of mobility and then estimate a picture of the overall urban mobility market.

MicroMobility Mania

According to the Federal Highway Administration’s National Household Travel Survey, nearly half of all vehicle miles travelled by car last year were below 3 miles.

It’s no surprise therefore that US venture capital firms are now in full obsession-mode with Micromobility providers. Bird, a dockless scooter startup has already raised 250M+ in funding, while Lime has raised…well, I’m not sure but they’ve raised a lot.

And Uber & Lyft, the largest rideshare players aren’t sitting idle as the mobility market spreads itself to last-mile solutions. Last month, Uber purchased JUMP bikes last month for $100M and has suggested they will be continuing to invest in alternative mobility solutions. Lyft is also reportedly working on building their own fleet of eScooters and recently applied for a license with the San Francisco transit board.

It’s clear that we’re just getting started with the urban mobility movement, and that cities in the United States have perhaps the most social good to gain from these innovations given our painfully inadequate transit infrastructure.

Bikeshare (1990s-current)

Bikeshare made sense as the initial model because bikes were the first solution that appeared to be economically viable given the cost of production of a bike in China. The initial financial projections and adoption of the bikeshare model were enough to convince venture capitalists to subsidize millions of dockless bikes in hundreds of cities globally.

While both docked and dockless bikeshare has been around for decades (google bikes?) - it really was the Chinese market that pioneered utilizing QR codes and rudimentary tire locking systems to allow anyone to reserve and unlock a bike using a mobile phone.

While the verdict is still out on the economic viability of the dockless bikeshare model, the impressive uptake of venture bikeshare services was a powerful conduit to get people excited about micromobility and alternatives to the automobile, especially with last-mile transport.

eScooters (2016-current)

eScooters were the next natural iteration in urban mobility after bikeshare. This makes sense because:

Given the choice between electric and manual, people will chose electric.
eBikes are heavier and therefore more expensive than eScooters given the same power requirements.
Since eScooters are cheaper to manufacture for similar power output, they came to market first.
Since eScooters are cheaper, rideshare companies can also deploy more of them, which makes them more convenient since you don’t need to walk far to find one.

eScooters were really responsible for starting the super micromobility craze. There was bikeshare before, but it was really the scooters that helped people realize just how much time we spend making 0-3 mile trips everyday. Electric scooters are in many ways the “apple” solution for last-mile transport – They strip everything else besides 2 wheels and a battery out of the way.

Until of course people are finished riding them, at which point they get in the way of everybody and everything. The very explosive growth of scooters is the very thing that’s causing a public uproar and city transit authorities to shut them down.

So how does the eScooter situation play out?

Look, I don’t think eScooters are going anywhere. They’re cheap, they’re lightweight, and they’re a lot of fun. But I don’t think we’re quite going to see the type of retention people are expecting for the reasons that I detail below about some of the alternative modes of transportation coming online, notably: they’re not quite as safe, aren’t as suited for biking infrastructure as bikes are, and aren’t weatherproof.

However, besides installing some basic docking infrastructure, I think the short-term solution that will help eScooters get back on the street is some type of basic cord locking mechanism that you need to connect to a legal bike rack to end your trip. No more leaving in the sidewalk, no more leaving in the bushes, just park the thing like a responsible human and make sure that we all can have nice things.

eBikes (2017-current)

I believe that eBikes will prevail as the most popular mode of transport in many major cities on a miles ridden basis (in spring, summer & fall). I think that eBikes have more potential than eScooters for a few reasons:

Although still severely lacking in most cities, we already have bike infrastructure including dedicated bike lanes and bike traffic signals.
Bikes are generally better equipped for riding on rough pavement due to wider tires and wheel size.
Parking is currently the biggest obstacle facing dockless urban mobility solutions. Bike parking already exists en-masse in most cities. Anyone in SF can request a new bike parking rack using a simple form.
Riding a scooter just makes you look more dorky.

Mini EVs (2019)

Of course, bikes don’t work as well when you wear a suit, dress or skirt to work or you can’t shower upon arrival. They aren’t good options when it’s raining and you’d have to be downright insane to take a bike or scooter to work in the winter in most cities on the eastern seaboard or in Canada. If your commute is longer than 5-10 miles, you might also just not want to be physically exhausted upon arriving to the office.

In these situations, typically your best bet is going to be a rideshare option like Uber and Lyft. Unfortunately, for a 5-10 mile ride in rush hour, this could end up costing you $20-40 each way! Luckily, Mini EVs like the Renault Twizy are on the horizon.

Leaked pitch documents from Lime’s recent $250M round suggest that they will be investing up to $50M towards “ultracompact electric cars”. Axios further details pricing and economics behind the yet-to-be launched Mini EV fleet:

Based on Daimler's Car2Go car rental service, Lime estimates it will charge $1 to start, plus 40 cents per minute. With an average trip length of 20 minutes (or 3.8 miles), and six trips per car, per day, it expects $54 in revenue and $37 in gross margin after costs.

This suggests a 20 minute commute could cost just $9 vs. upwards of $20-30 using a traditional rideshare service (although you’ll be driving). However, given the healthy margins I would expect other entrants to drive the price even lower and it’s possible we’ll see prices in the $0.25 per mile. Recapping why “ultracompact” EVs are so amazing:

You can drive them in vehicle lanes.
They are only a single passenger wide and narrow enough to fit 2 per lane.
They have considerably better lights than a bicycle.
You can fit 2 people seated vertically.
You can drive them in bad weather.

What about parking?

One obvious issue with ultracompact EVs is the the question of parking. One reasonable solution is to dedicate one public parking spot in each block for ultracompact EVs. The average parking spot in San Francisco for parallel parking spaces is 20’0”. With the Twizy’s width registering at a sliver under 4’; this means we could easily fit 3 Twizy’s with approximately 17” of space on each side for the passenger to alight from the vehicle. (Remember that the doors open vertically so we require far less room, like that of the Tesla Model X.)

Given that there are over 275,000 parking spaces in SF proper, with even 1% of our public parking spots dedicated to these ultracompact vehicles, we could house almost 10,000 ultracompact vehicles in San Francisco alone. This would likely be more than sufficient to significantly reduce traffic congestion and car ownership for city residents looking for more affordable and nimble urban transportation. This represents a $130M market within the San Francisco city borders alone.

What about charging?

Currently, eScooters are the optimal solution when considering charging. This is because the scooters are small and lightweight enough for freelance “chargers” to collect a bunch of spent scooters load them into the back of a pickup truck and charge them at home (I’m assuming they have some large charging bank in their garage). There are a lot of interesting market dynamics that go into this marketplace of chargers that is actually really interesting but I won’t dive in further here.

The deciding factor on charging infrastructure is really a regulatory one.

Large cities have come down hard with regulation on dockless scooter share companies since most users park carelessly/irresponsibly in the right-of-way. Ultimately, I see short term and long term solutions emerging for rideshare companies:

Temporary, privately leased charging infrastructure

At first, I think we’ll see a model emerge similar to that used by Zipcar, who leases mostly private parking spaces from garages and parking lots scattered around the city. This is the fastest way to market, but still leaves the question of how these vehicles will be charged.

One option is to install lightweight solar powered charging infrastructure. Orderly Singapore has provided licenses to some rideshare companies to install lightweight infrastructure that is secured via heavy foundation weights instead of being bolted directly into the ground. This makes the chargers very difficult to steal while making installation quick, relatively cheap and non-invasive to surrounding infrastructure.

The other option, and one that’s been dreamed about for awhile but never realized in the electric car market, is that of battery swapping. The predominant problems with battery swapping is that batteries are extremely heavy (even in the Renault Twizy they are about 220lbs), and often the design of the car prevents anyone from being able to easily swap out the battery without damaging components or causing themselves serious injury. Better Place was a well-funded Israeli startup that aimed to provide a solution using robotic swap stations, but ultimately weren’t able to acheive their end goal.

However, I think with recent efficiency gains in batteries reducing sizes and weights considerably, we are getting closer to being able to swap out batteries. There are still issues to figure out but some companies are starting to invest in the swappable model again. Notably, Scoot (shared electric mopeds) recently partnered with Chinese automotive startup CHJ to bring “Small EVs” with swappable batteries to San Francisco. Of course, like anything else that might be good for the city, their plans are currently stalled due to regulatory hearings with the San Francisco County Transit Authority.

Autonomous Carshare (2025)

As excited as I am about ultracompact vehicles coming to our cities, I do recognize they are a stopgap opportunity that will all but disappear completely once autonomous carshare services hit the market in force. However, I think that regulatory issues and disasterous PR with any traffic accidents will generally slow the deployment of fully autonomous networks.

ARK research estimates that only 8% of total miles driven in the US will be autonomous by 2025. Given that I expect to see ultracompact vehicles hit the market en masse in 2019 and 2020, this gives the ultracompact EV a solid 5-10 years of potential mass market utilization before autonomy begins to erode marketshare.

Why is autonomy better? The benefits have been raved about for the better part of the past 5 years:

Increased safety (no more drunk drivers, distracted drivers, human error)
No more stress of driving
More affordable than traditional careshare with human drivers

We all know that autonomy is coming, it’s just nobody really knows when governments and the voting population become accepting that 1,000 deaths a year caused by automomous vehicles is better than 50,000 caused by other humans making mistakes and poor decisions at the wheel. Elon Musk is well-known to be the most outspoken of the utilitarian benefit of autonomous driving.

It’s super messed up that a Tesla crash resulting in a broken ankle is front page news and the ~40,000 people who died in US auto accidents alone in past year get almost no coverage https://t.co/6gD8MzD6VU
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 14, 2018

Ultimately, it’s going to be a rocky transition period before we get to full autonomy that will likely take decades to play out in its entirety. I expect full autonomy to happen much faster in foreign countries with more efficient legislative processes (e.g. Singapore, Scandinavia, Korea, Japan, Taiwan). This actually might take so long to play out, that the overall effect (at least for light cargo / human transport) is dampened since we might get to aerial regional transport much faster than we get to Level 5 autonomy on our current roads and highways.

VTOL Aerial Vehicles (2030)

Aerial personal transport has long been touted as a panacea for all of our transportation needs. But the lack of efficient energy options and aerospace designs has kept the industry within the boundaries of the current model of larger aircraft and long expensive runways and airport infrastructure.

However, given recent battery energy density projections, I think we’re on the cusp of a revolution in regional and metropolitan transportation in the form of Vertical Takeoff and Landing (VTOL) regional transport vehicles. Uber is starting to invest heavily in its own VTOL prototypes with the goal of conducting demo flights by 2020.

Uber’s concept and plans were partially inspired by Nasa’s “Greased Lightning” VTOL prototypes that utilize up to 10 separate battery powered rotors to lift an aircraft vertically, then rotate or activate a forward propulsion system to utilize a fixed-wing to provide lift and provide energy efficiency closer to traditional airplanes.

However, like autonomous driving tests that are being conducted at slower speeds, VTOL tests need to crawl before they can run. If that’s the case, perhaps aerial cargo delivery is a reasonable place to get started. Companies like Elroy Air are building aerial cargo transport vehicles that are capable of carrying payloads of 100+kg with a range of approximately 500 kilometers. These transport vehicles are perfect for making vital military and medical deliveries across complex remote terrain.

I know, jumping into one of these VTOL vehicles might seem a bit intimidating at first. But if their design is backed by millions of hours of cargo transport with impeccible safety records, you’d probably be more likely to give it a try. And you have to admit, it’s definitely a future worth pursuing:

So how far away are we? Uber claims they’ll be conducting commercial operations by 2023. I personally think that’s a bit optmistic, and expect to see the commercial launch closer to 2030. In any case, we’re certainly closer to this future than you might think.

Developer Segmentation

2017-12-03T00:00:00+00:00

As software continues to eat the world, software creators have increasingly more influence over our daily lives. It follows that the tools these software developers use in their daily work would become increasingly important.

Selling to software developers is notoriously difficult, as the population of developers globally is only ~25 Million and software developers are rather picky with the tools they adopt. The most productive software developers refine their tooling and workflow over decades, and adapt their workflow sparingly.

I recently wrote a blog-post length comment on HackerNews regarding Amazon’s recent acquisition of one of our competitors, Cloud9.

Many “learn-to-code” authors depended on Cloud9 and Nitrous.io’s free offerings as an accessible way for beginners to start writing functioning web applications without needing to install and configure any programming languages or frameworks on their own laptops. One commenter remarked:

I used Cloud9 (pre-Amazon acquisition) for teaching high schoolers the basics of programming. It was super easy to set up and use. It really let me, as the teacher, focus on teaching syntax and principals and less on 'toolchain config', which is helpful for newbies right out of the box. I haven't used this new Amazon Cloud9 offering, but from the initial impression from the blog post, they've traded in the easy of use that Cloud9 once had for a deeper integration into the AWS ecosystem. The screenshots I saw were not something I'd want a greenhorn to have to walkthrough.
TheBrockEllis

My response as to why Amazon decided to abandon servicing “learn-to-code” curriculums turned into a deeper analysis of Cloud development environment & Cloud IDE markets, and perhaps the broader dev tools market itself:

It's not surprising to see the common complaints from learn-to-code authors about disrupting their courseware. We heard this a lot at Nitrous.io and struggled with the importance of the beginner market to our business.

When considering Nitrous as a viable business, I'd talk a lot about the "developer sophistication spectrum" and the challenges of one single product or service attempting to meet the needs of a lot of different types of developers.

On the beginner side of the spectrum, serving the hot "learn to code" market means scaling your potential market size by orders of magnitude. There is some product-market fit here as newbies don't really have substitutes ("what's a development environment?" they'd often remark), but the SaaS economics of selling tooling to beginners was atrocious. Selling to learn-to-code means you're dealing with an incredibly fickle audience where 95% abandon their plans to become a professional programmer within a few months. The other ~5% who become full-time programmers are dedicated enough to their craft to learn about their OS and their options to customize the local development workflow. So they naturally also churn.

(I don't have any knowledge of the market, but I'd imagine courseware providers attempt to charge 100% up-front to account for the extremely high churn. At least, that's how I'd charge.)

So basically all the cloud IDEs are getting hundreds of thousands of signups from a lot of newbies saying "We love [Nitrous, Cloud9, Koding, etc...]!" but not wanting to pay for the infrastructure and churning at unsustainable rates. On the less sophisticated side of the spectrum, I think there is potential for a viable cloud IDE business, but I think it needs to be closely coupled with a content platform like Treehouse, Coursera or CodeAcademy. I haven't looked at any of them recently, but I wouldn't be surprised if they have in-house teams working to improve the editor experience and provide stateful experiences with dedicated cloud compute & storage.

We had a tightly coupled integration with the Flatiron School and it was a pretty solid experience but just wasn't a big enough business for us to scale. So in reality these businesses really just look like a content / courseware business that has a really great cloud development experience. But it's clearly built for people learning to code and they're paying for the courseware, not for the editor.

As you move up the sophistication spectrum, developers begin to experience "cognitive dissonance" when considering how much their time is really worth. That is, when they know how to setup, configure or troubleshoot something themselves, they underestimate the time they spend every month performing those tasks. We spent a ton of time doing deep customer research with excellent engineering teams at Airbnb, LinkedIn, Shopify, etc...

You'd be extremely surprised at just how much time it takes for the average developer at a top-tier engineering org. In some cases, new developers took 3-4 weeks to setup their dev environment. But after setting up a new environment the other dev ops problems start to spider into a web of complex and proprietary issues that are difficult to create compelling marketing / sales presentations. It's like - everyone knows it sucks and it's broken, but nobody quite knows the solution. Which is why a lot of the solutions emerge from open source projects that solve specific issues organically and then expand into powerful platforms that cohesively solve a set of interesting ops problems (e.g. Hashicorp).

This is an oversimplification of the complexities of the developer market - as there is also a spectrum of sophistication within the professional developer market itself. The "intermediate" professional developer tends to be the best market fit right now for cloud development / IDEs, as they often are self-taught and know how to code, but are often not as versed in debugging low-level issues, but usually are more price sensitive to their more sophisticated counterparts (who don't want to use the service in the first place).

In any case, I remember reading a HN comment about the nitrous.io shutdown [1] and feeling bad about not opening up more so I suppose this will provide some color. People loved our service and we honestly loved building it, but the market is incredibly challenging and we weren't able to uncover the right strategic focus. Hopefully Coursera, Treehouse, CodeAcademy, etc... will continue to fill in the gaps for the beginner market - but since those will be tightly coupled with their courseware, it's going to be a difficult spot to be in for the independent educator who is attempting to monetize their own material.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12841858

What's Outside

2017-11-25T00:00:00+00:00

Look outside. What does your block look like right now?

If you’re in the suburbs in the United States, it’s probably a bunch of houses. And a residential street that feeds into larger streets, that feed into even larger highways. Each small subsegment of your city might have a stripmall with a coffee shops, a few restaurants, or a bank, a laundrymat, pharmacy, gas station, etc… the stuff we need everyday. If you’re lucky, they’re only a few minutes down the road.

60 years ago, they would all have been privately owned. Bob’s barbershop. Katz Deli. Joan’s pharmacy. Tim’s gas station. They would have been within walking distance.

But then the automobile stretched things out. Capitalism and Economies of scale led to consolidation. Today it’s not Bob’s barbershop, it’s Supercuts. It’s not Katz Deli, it’s Taco Bell. CVS & Walmart. Chevron. Bank of America. You don’t know the owners – nobody does.

Does anyone actually go to stores for black friday anymore?

Does anyone actually go to stores at all?
— ajhit406 (@ajhit406) November 25, 2017

Luckily, the landscape has been shifting. Amazon has led a fierce charge to revolutionize supply chains and logistics and has delivered a death blow to traditional retail and the way we used to get the things we needed. Because once you go amazon prime, you never go to the store again.

Currently, our demand fulfillment engine is driven largely by delivery people. But soon (I’d say ~2025), many of these delivery people will be replaced by delivery robots.

The death of big box retail has been covered over and over. Good riddance to malls. I know I won’t be shedding any tears.

The neighborhood of the future

What then, when we don’t need to drive to stores anymore? With the advent of electric vehicles, gas stations go away. With autonomous vehicles, car ownership becomes uncommon. Garages, driveways, and roadways need to be redesigned for pedestrian use. What becomes of the highways? The stadium parking lots, the auto mechanic shops? Pay parking meters?

We’re on the cusp of a revolution in urban and suburban design and planning that holds a wealth of potential for sustainability, health and wellness, and just generally nicer communities. This future is within reach and I’m excited to see it develop over the coming decades.

Take a minute to think about your town. Think about all the parking lots. Then think about a world where they didn’t exist. What would you want to take its place?

iPhone: 10 years

2017-10-27T00:00:00+00:00

Every once and awhile, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything.

Steve Jobs Macworld Keynote, January 2007

I remember exactly where I was during the 2007 Macworld keynote when Steve Jobs introduced the original iPhone. Since Jobs' return in the late 90s, the keynotes have become a pilgramage of sorts for me and other Apple enthusiats, many of them programmers. There I was, with my Palm Treo in hand, my mouth slightly agape watching this new device completely leapfrog anything else in the market.

10 years later, Apple has sold over 1.2 Billion iPhones and expects to sell 250 Million more this year. They've done this by introducing a constant stream of new innovation, packing more and more advanced and powerful components into an almost equivalently sized case.

It's easy to forget how far we've come in 10 years of iPhones, so I thought it would be interesting to compare side-by-side the iPhone X to the original iPhone to understand just how much progress Apple has made in a relatively short period of time.

iPhone

iPhone X

3.5"

Touchscreen LCD

5.8"

Super Retina HD OLED Display

Oooh that screen. This is arguably the most important change of the past 9 iterations of the iPhone. The iPhone X isn't much bigger than the standard iPhone 8, but the Super Retina screen feels as large as the iPhone 8 plus. The 2436-by-1125-pixel resolution at 458 ppi with 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio is the brightest and highest resolution screen Apple has ever built.

The biggest problem with the edge-to-edge screen however, is the issue of where to put all those sensors (front camera, proximity sensor, speaker, infrared camera, faceID sensor, etc...)? The Apple design team clearly had to make a sacrifice here and decided to wrap the screen around a visually jarring "notch" that has been the source of a lot of jokes.

128MB

Embedded DRAM

3GB

LPDDR4X RAM

It's always incredible to look back at the progress of the CPU, just to remember how fast exponential growth really takes us in a short period of time. Moore's law predicts that transistor counts will roughly double every two years, which means that the main CPU in the iPhone would double capacity approximately 5 times over the past decade. Moore's law would therefore predict a 4GB processor (128MB * 2^5), which we fell just short of with the iPhone X chip.

Passcode

FaceID

For secure authentication, the TrueDepth front-facing camera on the iPhone X projects and reads over 30,000 infrared dots to form a depth map of the face along with a 2D infrared image. The A11 Bionic chip's neural engine transforms this data into a mathematical representation and compares it with the enrolled facial data. The original iPhone has a 4-8 digit passcode.

Delicate

Splash, Water & Dust Resistant

I think this speaks for itself. How many of us have inadvertently dropped our iPhone in a puddle, sink or (for the love of God, Why?) the toilet? Now you can snatch your phone out of whatever liquid environment it has unfortunately found itself and go right back to your mobile game or instragram feed. Although wear & tear tests haven't been performed on the iPhone X yet, I suspect this might be one place where the orignal iPhone might actually perform better given that the iPhone X is pretty much all glass; even if the glass is strenghtened and scratch resistant.

2MP

fixed-focus

12 MP

wide-angle & telephoto cameras

The iPhone has seen an incredible amount of improvment in its camera(s) over the past 10 years. The original iPhone was only capable of fixed-focus 2MP photos, while the iPhone X boasts 12MP wide-angle and telephoto cameras with dual optical image stabilization, optical zoom up to 10x, and a vivid portrait mode setting so you can take studio quality photos from your phone. Shooting video is also equally impressive with 4k video recording at 60fps, optimal image stabilization (no more jumpy videos!) and slow-motion video at 1080p. Just incredible progress here as the original iPhone camera was just an afterthought.

Samsung 32-Bit RIS ARM 620MHz

A11 Bionic chip with 64-bit architecture

The iPhone X A11 chip is one of the fastest chips in any of its devices. Early performance benchmarks put the iPhone X on par with the new 13-inch Macbook Pro. Multicore chips today are capable of performing hundreds of billions of instructions per second. In 2006, chips were about 1000x slower, capable of hundreds of millions of instructions per second.

Capacity

64GB
256GB

Storage has always been a bit of a touchy subject with the iPhone. As storage has almost entirely moved to the cloud over the past decade, local storage becomes more of a temporary asset than something to expect. Although we've still seen some remarkable gains in available local storage, the iPhone X is still lacking relative to its peers that boast expandable storage capacity. Still incredible to see how far we've come in a short time, though practically speaking we still can't fit many photos and videos on the iPhone X, they just happen to be 4K videos and 12MP. A 12 megapixel image is 4000 pixels wide and 3000 pixels tall. That's just under 1 METER wide at 150ppi!

Sensors / Components

Accelerometer
Proximity Sensor
Ambient Light Sensor
Microphone
Headset Controls

Accelerometer
Proximity Sensor
Ambient Light Sensor
Microphone
FaceID
Barometer
Three-axis gyro
Infrared camera
Flood illuminator
Dot projector (FaceID)

The original iPhone's accelerometer, proximity sensor and ambient light sensor were all impressive additions to a smartphone at the time. Now, compared to the iPhone X internal design, each of the orignal iPhone's components look like some amateur packed a few random radioshack components into the phone casing and pasted them togther. In fact, the now notorious notch of the iPhone X packs virtually an entire Microsoft Connect in to that little notch.

Size & Weight

114.3mm x 61mm x 11.7mm
4.8 oz (135 grams)

143.6 mm x 70.9 mm x 7.7 mm
6.14 oz (174 grams)

Price

$499 (4GB)
$599 (8GB)

$999 (64GB)
$1199 (256GB)

The iPhone has never been cheap. In 2007, $500 was considered incredibly expensive for a phone, and 10-years later, the new entry level $999 for the flagship iPhone X is just as difficult to swallow. As Apple pushes the envelope of what's possible with smartphones, they also push their suppliers right to the edge of whats possible, so pricing the phone above equilibrium improves their margins and can act to reduce immediate demand -- which works since supply is going to take 6-8 months to catch up with demand at lower prices.

Is the iPhone X "Revolutionary"?

Despite the iPhone's remarkable evolution over the past decade, despite all of the incredible innovation that has occurred on every single component and feature within this little device that you carry around in your pocket, the iPhone X is not a "leapfrog" product (Apple isn't behind any of its competitors, but I use "leapfrog" in the revolutionary sense). If Steve Jobs were around today I think he'd be the first to admit that. The display offers substantial enough visual differentiation that will likely succeed in driving new product sales but it is not a revolutionary product; it is still just an iterative (albeit larger iterative) improvement over past iPhones.

I still have a lot of hope for Apple, even without Steve conducting the orchestra. And while I think that the iPhone will still have a powerful presence in our lives during the next 10 years, I think it will start to be replaced by a collection of smart devices that are more seamlessly integrated into our physiology.

The Apple Watch paired with Airpods is potentially one of these combinations. ARKit with smart glasses could also possibly be the next great consumer consumer device.

Even though Steve is gone, the heartbeat of Apple's innovation is still apparent. It's faint, but it's there if you listen deep enough. This recent quote from Jony Ive I think starts to peel away at the outer layers of that vision:

We believe in a wireless future. A future where all of your devices intuitively connect. This belief drove the design of our new wireless AirPods. They have been made possible with the development of the new Apple-designed W1 chip. It is the first of its kind to produce intelligent, high efficiency playback while delivering a consistent and reliable connection.

The W1 chip enables intelligent connection to all of your Apple devices and allows you to instantly switch between whichever one you are using. And of course the new wireless AirPods deliver incredible sound. We’re just at the beginning of a truly wireless future we’ve been working towards for many years, where technology enables the seamless and automatic connection between you and your devices.

Jony Ive Apple keynote (recording), September 2016

Apple: Act II?

Steve wasn't the only visionary within Apple. In fact, it's possible (and widely cited) that Steve really didn't have all the ideas. But he was the conduit through which all of these visions came together. And so the real question in response to whether Apple has an Act II this next decade isn't whether they have the vision or the capabilities to execute on that vision. The question is whether such a large organization can operate with the same Harmony as they did during the earliest development of the iPhone without one of the best organizational conductors of all time. Only time will tell.

Startup Mistakes - Market

2017-08-09T00:00:00+00:00

Now that I’ve shifted my energy to investing in startups full-time, I spend a lot of time reflecting on my 10+ years as an entrepreneur and all the mistakes I made along the way.

The other day I had a thought that, if a startup could avoid making all the traditional mistakes that startups tend to make, then they’d have a higher likelihood of succeeding. So I spent a few hours reminiscing on all the times I had made what was likely the wrong decision as a startup founder and CEO and compiled an outline with the intent of helping our portfolio companies make difficult decisions.

While this type of general startup advice has been done to death, there are a handful of thoughtful essays that I believe are incredibly important to comprehend regarding the underlying principles and axioms of startups and startup success. The essay that many entrepreneurs come back to is Marc Andreessen’s seminal essay on markets entitled The only thing that matters.

This essay, as well as Paul Graham’s YCombinator motto: “Make Something People Want”, at their core are describing the basic economic principles regarding a population of people who are demanding a product or service (aka “they want something”). In the case of a startup, the exact thing they want hasn’t been defined yet – so you, the entrepreneur, has to “make” it.

Markets & Timing

In some cases, people are going to explicitly be telling you exactly what they want. However, markets are incredibly efficient and in these cases there will usually already be competing products in market unless you are incredibly lucky with timing.

This is why timing is so important. You invariably want to be right at the cusp of new demand - either by being the first mover to a market, or by actually creating the market entirely yourself. These new markets are generally amalgamations of other products or services or services that leverage new “enabling” technologies to shift demand to a new paradigm.

Take the “enabling” technology of mobile phones. Mobile phones enabled you to access information from anywhere in the world, and it also served to connect billions of people who weren’t otherwise connected to the internet or used it sparingly.

In 2007-2010, there was an explosion of new startup activity around Mobile, because the platform was enabling new, more efficient ways to do so many regular things that we humans needed and wanted to do everyday. Foundational things like order food, talk to friends & family, find information, interact with businesses, etc… became much more accessible and productive on mobile than ever before.

This enabled a number of valuable companies since the first mobile solution for any given problem space was very commonly transformative and therefore great products more easily achieved mass adoption simply because their new platform (mobile) was just that valuable when applied to pretty much anything.

Technology, like knowledge, is aggregative. It’s usually these enabling technologies that serve as stepping stones for our next waves of innovation. Today, these are things like cheaper, more resilient materials, cheaper and more efficient energy generation and storage, machine learning and artificial intelligence, and blockchain technologies to name a few.

If you build it…will anybody come?

Whether people will want what you’re building is a somewhat nuanced question that is difficult to entirely predict until you have the finished product and attempt to sell it, but you can derive signal on the question of demand by doing two things:

Talking to potential customers
Analyzing customer usage to examine if their words match their actions

If you do these two things consistently, over and over and in quick succession, you will usually arrive at a reasonably improved solution for the market and they will reward you by shifting their demand to your product. There are both artful and skillful aspects to doing both of these things, while concurrently ensuring you can deliver your end product with powerful economics (read: high gross margins, profitably).

This “talking to customers and learning from customers” is one of the core tenets of Steve Blank’s “Get out of the building” exercise on Customer Development in Four Steps to the Epiphany.

Paul Graham refers to getting out the building as one of those things that doesn’t scale.

The best market is one that doesn’t exist yet

What Steve Blank and Paul Graham allude to, but don’t explicitly mention is that you usually aren’t looking for a market that exists. It’s not going to magically appear in front of you when talking to a customer.

Markets are incredibly efficient. If a new idea was truly obvious, it would likely exist already (see: efficient market hypothesis).

In reality, you’re going to have to take pieces of different conversations and piece them together to create demand - to literally allow these tidbits of customer demand to “pull the product out of thin air” as Marc Andreessen so eloquently put it.

This is ultimately the best situation to be in, because you’re the first mover and can often leverage network effects, and economies of scale, and financing strategies to ensure you are the only player in the space (see Uber), thus ensuring concentration of demand and total monopolistic price control.

Because, as nice as it is to win, in reality, competition is for losers.

Caltrain Bike Tag Redesign

2017-08-02T00:00:00+00:00

Back in 2014 after Nitrous raised our Series A Financing, we found that we couldn’t hire fast enough in the South Bay. In my experience, unless you attended Stanford or have worked in the South Bay for a number of years, it’s difficult to meet people with the velocity required to hire fast enough to satiate venture-backed growth (that’s a loaded statement that’s worthy of its own blog post).

In any case, we decided a few months after raising our Series A that we’d expand our luck area by moving our offices to San Francisco. We picked a scrappy building at the corner of 2nd and Brannan, right next door to the team at Buffer (who have subsequently ditched offices entirely).

Since I had just signed a lease in Mountain View, it was decided that I would be making the daily 1-1.5hr commute. And since driving was out of the question, I decided I’d bike to the Caltrain and camp out in the cozy bike cars.

Bikes on bikes on bikes

My first day biking, I was confronted with a sea of bikes stacked on top of one another. I unwittingly parked my bike on the outside of one of the columns of bikes and found a seat in the cabin above.

At the Palo Alto stop, a number of bicycle commuters boarded and began inspecting the bike seats. At first I didn’t notice, until I heard one disgruntled bicyclist stop at my silver single-speed and shout “Who’s bike is this!?”.

I answered that it was mine, and he asked where I was heading. I told him I was going to San Francisco, and he introduced me to these little yellow informational seat tags that display the bikes origin and destination. These are meant to assist bikers in efficiently stacking their bikes so there isn’t a complex forest of wheels and handlebars to disentangle during the short period in which a passenger must disembark.

I thanked the biker for the information and asked the conductor for a bike tag. He grumbled something unintelligible and left, to return a minute later with one of the yellow tags.

Flipping through stacks

These yellow biketags became daily reading for me during my commutes. Each day I would shuffle myself into the crowded bikecar and wait impatiently as each biker inspected the tags before finding a home for her bike. Often, the handwriting wasn’t legible, the tags were upside-down or weren’t facing in a direction that made them immediately readable.

So I began thinking of other possible design solutions that could help the bike sorting problem. I scribbled down the following requirements of well-designed signage:

1. It should be identifiable via a sharp and unique color

This would make it easy to identify the location of the tag and draw the visual attention to the tag. The current tags do this reasonably well since they’re yellow.

2. It should display the bike's destination succinctly.

The current bike tags handle this by just having you write out the city destination in freehand. The issue is that some destinations are quite long which thus require smaller text, negatively affecting legibility.

Ideally, origin and destination are clearly designated and are paired with their ascending stop number (#1, #2, #3, etc…) which would also help those who don’t know that San Carlos comes after Redwood City on inbound trains, or that Hillsdale is before Belmont on outbound trains.

3. It should be easy to apply.

The first solution that came to mind was to use a sticker, but since the frame is cylindrical and differs in diameter depending on the bike, finding a consistent place to put similarly sized stickers would prove to be a challenge.

4. It should be hard to remove.

This is simply to avoid theft (though nobody should want to steal a biketag, San Francisco isn’t known for its lack of theft). This also might get annoying if you are selling your bike or otherwise want to remove the sticker.

5. It should be less than $10.

The current bike tags from Caltrain are free. I don’t know how much they cost Caltrain to manufacture, though I’d estimate they cost $0.10 - $0.30 a piece. An independently produced tag would almost certainly be more expensive.

6. It should be waterproof.

Again, here the current tags suffice. Since the writing itself is up to the bike owner, it depends on if they use waterproof ink to markup the tag. Given the relative lack of rain in the Bay Area, this isn’t too much of a concern.

7. It should be viewable on both sides of the bike.

Since a bike could be stacked with its right side facing outwards or vice versa, the signage needs to be viewable in both directions. This is handled reasonably well with the standard bike tag, since it dangles and is maneuverable. However, it’s often inconveniently angled when you’re attempting to read it a quick glance, which requires some finagling. This can be somewhat frustrating when repeating the task.

Solutions

Ok, so finally to the fun part: Designing the signage.The first solution I thought of was a sticker, and I set out to design a simple sticker.

This looked OK, but failed a bunch of the requirements. For example, it didn’t tell me where San Francisco or Mountain View were on the Caltrain line.

So I decided to add station numbers to the right and left of the station names. This way even new commuters who hadn’t memorized the station order would know whether they were placing their bikes before or after the wrong stop.

But as I designed more stickers, I realized that stickers had the major issue of consistency of placement. Not all frames are alike - different sizes, heights and shapes would make sticker size an issue and therefore make legibility a major issue as well. So it seemed that stickers were out.

Occam's Razor

After considering the design constraints, I came to the somewhat depressing conclusion that, all things considered, the current seat-tag solution is reasonably efficient given the design constraints posited above. They are yellow, reasonably legible, waterproof, somewhat challenging to remove, easy to put on the bike, and extremely inexpensive. The only significant improvement that I could think of would be to add the station number to the origin/destination to better distinguish between some of the lesser-known destinations which would decrease incorrect stacking.

Here’s a example on a white background from San Francisco (station 1) to California Avenue Station in Mountain View (station 14):

Of course, white tags can get weathered and quite dirty and aren’t as visually commanding as a yellow tag, so I designed a yellow counterpart:

I think this would work reasonably well. The only other improvements I could think of were to give a sense of the overall distance of the Caltrain line and where each stop is located within the entire line. I made some attempts to integrate the overall caltrain line but couldn’t do so without making things much more cluttered and noisy. So what I ended up with after a few hours of experimenting was pretty close to the current solution…

😄

Peak Laptop

2017-06-09T00:00:00+00:00

Moore’s law states that the computing power available on a chip doubles every year. Experts argue over whether we’ll be able to keep up this exponential pace for much longer. There are years where we seem to be falling short, only to then see another massive architecture improvement yielding outsized gains.

We used to see Moore’s law reflected in our personal computers at home, but that has largely slowed over the past 5-7 years.

The processing improvement from my 2005 PowerPC and my 2010 Xeon was astounding — close to a 5x or 10x improvement in overall performance. But lately, progress has hit a wall. The quad core i7 on my 2012 MacBook Air isn’t much slower than the Skylake i7 on my new MacBook that’s almost 5 years older. So what gives?

Internet Broadband Capabilities Slowing

Average bandwidth hasn’t made major strides in the US since the introduction of 720p HD Video in the mid 2000s. While high-definition 1080i has been available for quite some time, most service providers still don’t provide a quality user experience to stream full-HD content.

While 4k HDR offers a superior user experience, I just don’t see consumer demand pushing ISPs to make major investments in their infrastructure anytime soon. While most of us would love to have a 4k TV and to stream UHD video on a 1Gbps connection, we aren’t going to pay $3-4k for a TV when we can get a solid TV for less than $500 and can pay $50/mo. for a 100MB connection. Unfortunately, it’s “good enough” for the average consumer.

So why does this correlate with slower processing innovation on laptops? With the dearth of 4k content streaming, there just isn’t much of a need for the top-of-the-line processors / GPUs.

Cloud Computing

A decade ago, it was common to have 15 or more applications running in your dock. Microsoft word & Excel, Photoshop, iTunes, Messaging apps, Safari, etc… You needed the additional performance on your machine to keep up with all of the applications.

Now, virtually all of the day-to-day applications have moved to the cloud either via the browser or via apps on your phone.

Word and Excel => Google docs
iTunes => Spotify
AIM, ICQ => WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, etc…
Photoshop => Adobe CS Cloud
etc…

Even things like video rendering or massive data computation is now often outsourced to cloud computers.

With cloud computing taking on most of the heavy lifting in terms of raw processing power, we have seen a movement in personal devices towards “thin clients”:

A thin client (sometimes also called a lean, zero or slim client) is a computer or a computer program that depends heavily on another computer (its server) to fulfill its computational roles.

Chromebooks are an extreme example of a thin client - in addition to fairly basic processors, they sport limited local storage space, eschewing local hard drives for Google Cloud storage. The benefit is you can often buy a very useable computer for $200-300.

Design

The final piece is around portability and design.

The real innovation over the past 5-7 years in my opinion has shifted from focusing on processing power in bulky, heavy casing to providing practical features and beautiful design in a lightweight product that’s a joy to use and carry around all day.

We’ve seen this with portability (Macbook Air) and keyboard / input innovation with the new Macbook Pro touchbar.

The reason I’m upgrading my device these days isn’t for the processing power, but for the improved portability, better screen resolution and better battery life. The question is really just, given the improvements “is it worth it”?

Strangely, over the past 5-7 years, the answer has been no. This has triggered somewhat of a “viscous cycle” in the personal computer industry - where the lack of organic need / demand for improvements has meant less attention & less research & development, less competition, and therefore less innovation.

Where are we headed?

The next paradigm shift for computing is going to be in computing applications - the consumer application has largely lost its exponential improvements and is approaching more linear gains. The new computing applications that are gaining steam now are in GPU / AI / ML computation, as seen with Nvidia automotive “self-driving” chips and Google’s Tensor Processing Unit.

I think we’ll also eventually see a surge in nanotechnology that allows for human implanted computational mechanisms to diagnose and enhance our physiological and neurological systems. We’re just beginning to make progress there, so we’re probably about 20-30 years before any commercial applications go mainstream, but I’m excited about the space.

Advice to a friend

2017-06-08T00:00:00+00:00

I’ve read quite a few stories about — and by — the late journalist & author, Hunter S. Thompson. He’s such a complicated and dynamic personality, that I hesitate to hold any opinion of the man; only his work.

As I navigate life, I find myself introspecting about life’s purpose rather regularly, occasionally riffing on different existential philosophies with friends, usually over a few drinks or during a long drive (what better time to step outside and examine one’s path?).

So I was delighted to find Thompson’s correspondence to a friend, Hume Logan in 1958, in which he delivers to his friend one of the most genuine and comprehensive guide to self discovery and perhaps existentialism that I’ve ever found. I have found the letter to be a solid foundational reference on which to live one’s life, and have archived it here for future benefit:

Transcript
April 22, 1958
57 Perry Street
New York City

Dear Hume,

You ask advice: ah, what a very human and very dangerous thing to do! For to give advice to a man who asks what to do with his life implies something very close to egomania. To presume to point a man to the right and ultimate goal—to point with a trembling finger in the RIGHT direction is something only a fool would take upon himself.

I am not a fool, but I respect your sincerity in asking my advice. I ask you though, in listening to what I say, to remember that all advice can only be a product of the man who gives it. What is truth to one may be disaster to another. I do not see life through your eyes, nor you through mine. If I were to attempt to give you specific advice, it would be too much like the blind leading the blind.

"To be, or not to be: that is the question: Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles... " (Shakespeare)

And indeed, that IS the question: whether to float with the tide, or to swim for a goal. It is a choice we must all make consciously or unconsciously at one time in our lives. So few people understand this! Think of any decision you've ever made which had a bearing on your future: I may be wrong, but I don't see how it could have been anything but a choice however indirect—between the two things I've mentioned: the floating or the swimming.

But why not float if you have no goal? That is another question. It is unquestionably better to enjoy the floating than to swim in uncertainty. So how does a man find a goal? Not a castle in the stars, but a real and tangible thing. How can a man be sure he's not after the "big rock candy mountain," the enticing sugar-candy goal that has little taste and no substance?

The answer—and, in a sense, the tragedy of life—is that we seek to understand the goal and not the man. We set up a goal which demands of us certain things: and we do these things. We adjust to the demands of a concept which CANNOT be valid. When you were young, let us say that you wanted to be a fireman. I feel reasonably safe in saying that you no longer want to be a fireman. Why? Because your perspective has changed. It's not the fireman who has changed, but you. Every man is the sum total of his reactions to experience. As your experiences differ and multiply, you become a different man, and hence your perspective changes. This goes on and on. Every reaction is a learning process; every significant experience alters your perspective.

So it would seem foolish, would it not, to adjust our lives to the demands of a goal we see from a different angle every day? How could we ever hope to accomplish anything other than galloping neurosis?

The answer, then, must not deal with goals at all, or not with tangible goals, anyway. It would take reams of paper to develop this subject to fulfillment. God only knows how many books have been written on "the meaning of man" and that sort of thing, and god only knows how many people have pondered the subject. (I use the term "god only knows" purely as an expression.) There's very little sense in my trying to give it up to you in the proverbial nutshell, because I'm the first to admit my absolute lack of qualifications for reducing the meaning of life to one or two paragraphs.

I'm going to steer clear of the word "existentialism," but you might keep it in mind as a key of sorts. You might also try something called Being and Nothingness by Jean-Paul Sartre, and another little thing called Existentialism: From Dostoyevsky to Sartre. These are merely suggestions. If you're genuinely satisfied with what you are and what you're doing, then give those books a wide berth. (Let sleeping dogs lie.) But back to the answer. As I said, to put our faith in tangible goals would seem to be, at best, unwise. So we do not strive to be firemen, we do not strive to be bankers, nor policemen, nor doctors. WE STRIVE TO BE OURSELVES.

But don't misunderstand me. I don't mean that we can't BE firemen, bankers, or doctors—but that we must make the goal conform to the individual, rather than make the individual conform to the goal. In every man, heredity and environment have combined to produce a creature of certain abilities and desires—including a deeply ingrained need to function in such a way that his life will be MEANINGFUL. A man has to BE something; he has to matter.

As I see it then, the formula runs something like this: a man must choose a path which will let his ABILITIES function at maximum efficiency toward the gratification of his DESIRES. In doing this, he is fulfilling a need (giving himself identity by functioning in a set pattern toward a set goal) he avoids frustrating his potential (choosing a path which puts no limit on his self-development), and he avoids the terror of seeing his goal wilt or lose its charm as he draws closer to it (rather than bending himself to meet the demands of that which he seeks, he has bent his goal to conform to his own abilities and desires).

In short, he has not dedicated his life to reaching a pre-defined goal, but he has rather chosen a way of life he KNOWS he will enjoy. The goal is absolutely secondary: it is the functioning toward the goal which is important. And it seems almost ridiculous to say that a man MUST function in a pattern of his own choosing; for to let another man define your own goals is to give up one of the most meaningful aspects of life—the definitive act of will which makes a man an individual.

Let's assume that you think you have a choice of eight paths to follow (all pre-defined paths, of course). And let's assume that you can't see any real purpose in any of the eight. THEN—and here is the essence of all I've said—you MUST FIND A NINTH PATH.

Naturally, it isn't as easy as it sounds. You've lived a relatively narrow life, a vertical rather than a horizontal existence. So it isn't any too difficult to understand why you seem to feel the way you do. But a man who procrastinates in his CHOOSING will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance.

So if you now number yourself among the disenchanted, then you have no choice but to accept things as they are, or to seriously seek something else. But beware of looking for goals: look for a way of life. Decide how you want to live and then see what you can do to make a living WITHIN that way of life. But you say, "I don't know where to look; I don't know what to look for."

And there's the crux. Is it worth giving up what I have to look for something better? I don't know—is it? Who can make that decision but you? But even by DECIDING TO LOOK, you go a long way toward making the choice.

If I don't call this to a halt, I'm going to find myself writing a book. I hope it's not as confusing as it looks at first glance. Keep in mind, of course, that this is MY WAY of looking at things. I happen to think that it's pretty generally applicable, but you may not. Each of us has to create our own credo—this merely happens to be mine.

If any part of it doesn't seem to make sense, by all means call it to my attention. I'm not trying to send you out "on the road" in search of Valhalla, but merely pointing out that it is not necessary to accept the choices handed down to you by life as you know it. There is more to it than that—no one HAS to do something he doesn't want to do for the rest of his life. But then again, if that's what you wind up doing, by all means convince yourself that you HAD to do it. You'll have lots of company.

And that's it for now. Until I hear from you again, I remain,

your friend ...
Hunter

The next great device

2017-05-28T00:00:00+00:00

We’re at an inflection point with computer vision. The advent of specific infrastructure for machine learning will yield exponential improvements in computer vision applications. Google’s tensorflow ML algorithms and TPU recently achieved better image recognition results than humans. And the gap will only continue to widen from here.

Vision is perhaps the most vivid and actively used of all human senses. I’m incredibly excited about Augmented Reality applications with the availability of Vision APIs, and am happy to see that Apple & Google are facing off in owning vision as a platform for new applications.

Google announced their Cloud Vision API last month around Google I/O, and Apple highlighted their Vision API during the WWDC keynote yesterday.

So what does it mean when the world becomes one giant search box? Well, first this means that the camera is the input of the future. Instead of having to type or speak your queries, you’ll simply point your camera at something and then get contextually relevant information to act upon.

Google generated a lot of buzz last month showcasing a few use cases with the new Google Lens application.

Google Lens looks amazing. But it is immediately clear when watching the demo that your phone is not the right device to interact with the visual world.

The obvious devices for processing the visual world are smart glasses and contact lenses. Since the tech for smart contact lenses is still likely a few decades away, the next mass-market form factor is likely to be a set of glasses, e.g. Google Glass 2.0.

Why did Google Glass fail?

There are always a confluence of supporting technologies that need to be efficient from a technological and price perspective for a device to become mass-market. The first iteration of Google glass just wasn’t perfect on a few different dimensions:

Privacy

Society needs to be ready to assume we’re being recorded at any moment of our lives. I loathe living in such a world, but we are definitely moving in the direction where we could be recorded at virtually any moment while outside of our private residence.

When Glass launched in 2013, camera applications for mobile phones were just becoming mainstream. Now, it’s incredibly common to livestream your day via Facebok Live, Instagram Stories, Snapchat Stories, etc…

Form-factor

This is more important than people think. The Google Glass form factor was akin to the Segway. Wearing glasses without lenses looks as unnatural as gliding across the ground without moving your legs. I believe there needs to be a transitive form-factor where the wearable more closely resembles traditional glasses.

Snap Inc. (the “Camera Company”) has bridged this gap well with their effortlessly cool Snapchat spectacles. Of course, it doesn’t hurt to have cool Gen-Z teens sporting them instead of balding VCs.

I could write an entire post on the Google Glass form-factor - I actually think the minimalist approach was the correct one, but they should have required lenses (even if most of them didn’t have a prescription). More on this below.

Real-world use

This was perhaps the biggest missing piece for Google. Glass needs a community of developers to uncover all of the valuable possibilities with a visual interface. Google did have some interesting applications available, but I believe the platform needs to be more open and developer incentives more clear.

Why will smart glasses become mainstream now?

I predict Google will launch Google Glass v2 at Google I/O 2018. Here’s why:

Cloud vision API

The cloud vision API is mature and ready to go mainstream. This generates a lot of buzz from the development community and seeds the Google Glass app store with real-world applications.

Developer community

Google Cloud has made great strides in the past few years generating buzz for their development platforms. Their work on the computer vision API, tensorflow, the Google Cloud TPU, etc… will yield positive results with the developer community, and they will increasingly win marketshare for Voice and Visually driven applications.

This gives developers another incentive to be locked-in on Google’s infrastructure. This creates a virtuous cycle where more developers build better applications, which improves Google Glass functionality, which generates more demand, which garners more developers building great applications, etc…

Form factor

The hardware required for a great wearable has gotten much smaller, so the form factor becomes considerably easier (nothing bulky). Better, lighter materials, longer battery life, etc… I think Google will get this “more right” in a future release. Google Glass actually didn’t look half-bad when they were attached to a pair of spectacles.

Price

I believe the efficient price for smart glasses is going to be approximately the cost of an iPhone, around $750-1000. Our fingers are definitely far superior for navigation than voice, so I don’t see these replacing phones, but rather supplementing them. Of course, there is no better screen than something projected directly on top of our vision.

Developer Marketing

2016-10-27T00:00:00+00:00

This is an evolving list of marketing initiatives that I’ve used on past projects. Some of the items on this list are more relevant for developer-focused companies, so YMMV.

Email Marketing

Put an email newsletter signup on your homepage. Thoughtful emails to an engaged audience will convert better than facebook or twitter posts. We have used Mailchimp in the past and push new subscribers to our mailchimp list upon signup via their API.
Send out new feature updates to your mailing list; Ideally you should link to a tutorial or doc on how to use the new feature. Do this once a month or once a quarter depending on your velocity. Eventually you’ll want to separate email subscriptions for “general announcements” and “product updates”, because responsible email sending is awesome.
Once you have a sizable email list, reach out to complementary products and services and setup co-marketing emails with other email lists. Usually this takes the form of a short featured section for your new feature in another company’s monthly newsletter. Don’t abuse this – you can quickly erode trust with your users and damage your brand if you’re promoting your company to irrelevant audiences.
This point is somewhat obvious – but don’t use the list too often. Monthly newsletters are common, plus the additional big announcement. Anything more than that is spam.
Keep your emails short and to the point! Make sure your call to action really stands out – figure out what you want the user to learn or do before you design the email and write the copy.

Documentation

Don’t forget that documentation is a form of marketing. If you’re building a development product that requires a lot of manual work (e.g. any CLI tools), your docs are incredibly important. They should be beautifully designed, thorough, and easy to navigate.
Your onboarding / introduction docs are perhaps the most important docs. Consider A/B testing and constantly improve these docs and the onboarding process.
For developer focused documentation, docs should have optional authentication that can pre-populate user keys / identities for easier cut-and-paste of commands.
Setup analytics on your docs and review these regularly. Your most popular docs & tutorials will signal which features are the most important to users. Your most popular FAQs will help instruct where to improve the product and where users are having trouble.
If you have a reasonably large user base, encourage users to ask questions on Stack Overflow. This can help alleviate support requests for a small team. Most of the time there are other users who know the answers to the questions. The answers will then be indexed by Google and users will be able to easily find answers themselves via the internet.

Content Marketing

Write Quora answers on questions relevant to your product. Most users find new products and services through “demand fulfillment”: They have a problem to solve, and they search google for an answer. They end up on Quora or Stack Overflow or someone’s blog post. Ideally, with answers on Quora, you have authoritative people outside of your company write answers.
Write StackOverflow answers on questions relevant to your product. Again, ideally you have authoritative people outside of your company write answers.
Write regular thought leadership pieces. These should be relevant to your audience. You should be regularly cultivating relationships with journalists and other industry blogs to see if they are looking for content around certain topics.

Community Marketing

Solicit customers to write blog posts & tutorials on their own blogs. It’s better for SEO to have authoritative sites linking back to you on specific topics
Include live chat functionality on your website to engage new leads. You should use something like Intercom and supplement the 1-1 conversations with community chat rooms using Slack.
Get listed on ProductHunt, BetaList, StackShare, and Slant.co
Create a discourse forum for your users to interact with one another and for feature requests. Note that you should expect to need to manage this forum regularly or you run the risk of vocal users potentially damaging your brand’s reputation.
Discourse forums and Stack Overflow answers are good places to keep answers to long-tail questions. This helps keep your documentation site clean and easy-to-navigate, while still providing answers to as many questions as possible.

My Git Workflow

2015-08-29T00:00:00+00:00

This post is mostly meant as a reference to myself for future contributions to my projects. The following is meant for a feature-based git workflow using branches.

Create a new feature branch:

  $ git checkout -b new-branch

Work on branch, & commit changes regularly:

  $ git stage -p
  $ git commit -m ‘commit message’

Push remote branch regularly:

  $ git push origin new-branch

Checkout master, get upstream updates:

  $ git checkout master
  $ git pull --rebase

This last git pull --rebase will get you all new branches. To only pull from master, type:

  $ git pull --rebase origin master

Checkout feature branch and rebase master:

  $ git checkout new-branch
  $ git rebase master

Force push new git history to remote branch:

  $ git push -f origin org-signup

Go to GitHub and make a pull request:

Switch to your branch on GitHub:

Click the Compare & Review button:

Review the PR changes and add a description of the PR

Create the PR

Merge the PR on GitHub

Once you and your colleages are happy with the feature branch, you can merge it into your master branch.

You can merge the pull request through GitHub, by clicking the “merge pull request” button at the bottom of the pull request. This will only be available when GitHub predicts there won’t be any merge conflicts.

Delete Local Branch:

  $ git branch -D new-branch
  Deleted branch new-branch (was 83efg8h).
  Note: The uppercase -D option is a shortcut for --delete --force. If you want to delete a local branch that must be fully merged in its upstream branch, use -d which is a shortcut for --delete.

Delete upstream (remote) branch:

  $ git push origin --delete new-branch

This option was added in Git v1.5.0, and is a more verbose alternative to:

  $ git push origin :new-branch

Rich Search Results

2014-10-12T00:00:00+00:00

Google initially started as an intermediary. You submitted a search and it suggested the best sources of information: Webpages sorted by relevance according to its PageRank algorithm. After trillions of searches, patterns of information requests emerged. Weather, Sports Scores, Biographic information, travel information, food recipes, etc…

A solid user experience reduces friction when presenting a solution for the end-user. It seems natural that Google would reduce the amount of clicking and reading you need to perform to find the exact information you are looking for. Google realized that its users weren’t necessarily looking for webpages to do more of their own research, but that they wanted immediate answers. I wrote about this Search UX a few years ago in a post about “intent driven design”.

Specificity

With specific searches about quantifiable, specific, or consistent information, we are able to present the user a solid information result without requiring them to qualify the information themselves (which requires additional effort).

What’s under the hood?

So how is Google doing all of this? How do they know what I’m looking for and how do they surface the most relevant data to me?

The answer, is a combination of linquistic analysis and mapping of common data into standards refered to as the Semantic Web.

The Semantic Web is built upon a foundation of standard data formats described by something called the Resource Description Framework (RDF). Basically, its aim is to describe the common data models that we want to interact with regularly.

Unfortunately, RDF was complex and didn’t gain mass adoption. Google sought a simpler standard that it could use to improve its search results. In 2011, Google, Yahoo and Bing announced Schema.org, an initiative to standardize data markup on webpages.

Schema.org uses a new standard for structured data markup called Microdata which derives much of its design from RDF and Microformats.

Adoption must be improving rapidly, as I’ve personally witnessed an influx of Rich Snippets powered by Microdata in my search results. I’ve attempted to catalouge them below. If you want to add an entry, feel free to submit a Pull Request on Github.

Customizing Discourse

2013-10-30T00:00:00+00:00

Discourse is a powerful, open source forum application built on top of ruby on rails & ember.js.

After playing around with some sites already running the software, I decided I wanted to play around with customizing Discourse to see if I could migrate a popular forum I host to use Discourse.

Setting up the Development Environment

Discourse is a robust application with a lot of moving parts. The Discourse Docs suggest using Vagrant for development, but Vagrant seems like overkill as I don’t want to install VirtualBox and Vagrant on my machine and take hours downloading and installing the required software. Vagrant is a great tool, but the separate images take up too much space on my SSD and setting up the VM takes too long. For this tutorial I’m going to use Nitrous.IO which hosts free, pre-configured development environments in the cloud (I also help build it).

1. Create a new box

Discourse runs multiple services and consumes a fair bit of RAM and storage. I’m going to boot up a box on with 768MB of RAM and 1.5GB of storage to get me started. Discourse recommends 2 GB of RAM and I would recommend you use at least 1GB RAM if possible, but I’m going to try this configuration out. I can always allocate additional resources on Nitrous.IO later.

2. Fork Discourse

If you want to do any customizing of discourse (why wouldn’t you?), you’ll want to fork the discourse repo:

Click here to Fork Discourse

Once you’ve forked the repo, you can jump into the Nitrous.IO IDE and clone discourse to your Nitrous box.

3. Install Dependencies

    sudo apt-get install redis
    sudo apt-get install postgresql

4. Configure Rails App

First, we’ll need to move into the discourse folder and run bundle install:

    cd workspace/discourse
    bundle install

This is probably going to be the most time consuming task of the entire post since discourse uses about 10,000 gems. Of course, we’re not complaining…

    cp config/database.yml.development-sample config/database.yml
    cp config/redis.yml.sample config/redis.yml

5. Configure Postgres and Install Seed Data

Next, we’ll create the development and test databases. We’re going to just keep the legacy vagrant user, even though we’re not using vagrant. You can just copy and paste the following commands one-by-one into the terminal on your Nitrous.IO box:

    createuser --createdb --superuser -Uaction vagrant
    psql -c "ALTER USER vagrant WITH PASSWORD 'password';"
    psql -c "create database discourse_development owner vagrant encoding 'UTF8' TEMPLATE template0;"
    psql -c "create database discourse_test        owner vagrant encoding 'UTF8' TEMPLATE template0;"
    psql -d discourse_development -c "CREATE EXTENSION hstore;"
    psql -d discourse_development -c "CREATE EXTENSION pg_trgm;"

When you’re done, load the seed data:

    psql -d discourse_development < pg_dumps/development-image.sql

Finally, we’ll want to load the database migration in rails:

    bundle exec rake db:migrate db:test:prepare db:seed_fu

6. Starting up Discourse

Now we’ve got our app cloned, gems installed, database created and seed data imported, we’re ready to run the app and check out the preview. In the app’s root directory, run:

    rails s

Then, in the preview menu at the top of the web IDE, click preview > Port 3000

And you’ll see that we’re up and running! w00t!

(Note that the first time the app loads, it might take anywhere from 10-20 seconds. This is because discourse has a large amount of client-side code that needs to be downloaded before the app can run)

7. Customizing Discourse

This is a fully functional development environment, and you have your own fork of discourse running so you can customize it as you please, then merge upstream changes as the discourse team continues to improve the system.

Let’s go ahead and kill those rounded corners on the tables, they’re so not web flat.0:

Change line 43 of app/assets/stylesheets/desktop/topic-list.scss:

		@include border-radius-all(0 0 0 0);

Line 85:

		@include border-radius-all(0 0 0 0);

Line 88:

		@include border-radius-all(0 0 0 0);

And we have square corners on all the topic lists. Very web 3.0, if I don’t say so myself…

That was easy.

Commuting

2013-07-27T00:00:00+00:00

There are two things you should understand to reduce stress, and improve productivity in your life: Compound interest, and that every minute you spend commuting is a minute you can’t do something else.

Lately I’ve been thinking about what I would consider the “perfect” commute. I concluded that this fabled commute would have the following charactaristics:

It would be Short
It would be Healthy
It would be Productive
It would be Safe
It would Provide Work / Life Separation

Today I’m going to focus on the time spent commuting, and specifically the amount of time you could save by shortening your commute over the course of a month, a year, and your entire career.

Ideally we would want no commute. So that would entail living at your office, or working from home, but for the sake of this example we’re going to assume we want to live at least 10 minutes from the office.

If we had to have a commute, it’s clear we’d want to commute by train. Trains offer the most predictable schedule, the opportunity to sleep or work, and are generally more safe than other methods. Buses also offer benefits, but are slightly less safe and susceptible to traffic jams and accidents. Bikes are more healthy, but are also more dangerous and you can’t work or sleep on a bike (unless you are amazing =p).

However, according to a 2011 study by the US Census Bureau, over 86% of Americans commute by car (76% of them alone!).

Everytime I’m sitting in traffic on the 101 outside of San Francisco, I can feel my life wasting away. But somehow I find myself driving again, stuck in traffic again, and cursing at myself for taking my car, again. So I decided that I wanted to look at some average commutes, and just how much time in aggregate we’re wasting commuting over long periods of time.

Let’s look at the case of 2 colleauges at some fictional software company, Innotech, named Peter, and Michael. Peter drives an hour to work everyday on the freeway in his Ford Focus. Michael bikes to work.

Peter’s commute takes him an hour each way. Since he’s driving, he’s completely unproductive, just sitting in traffic and driving along a boring freeway littered with stripmalls and traffic lights.

Michael bikes 20 minutes. There is no traffic.

1 Hour vs. 20 Minute Commute

With a 20 minute commute instead of 1 hour, Michael has 80 more minutes each day than Peter. 80 minutes is clearly significant, but let’s look at the bigger picture to see just how much that adds up to in a year:

There are conservatively 20 workdays / month. By commuting only 20 minutes instead of 1 hour, Michael saves a lot of time each month:

Time Saved in a Month by reducing your commute from 1 hour to 20 minutes:

1600 minutes
26.667 hours
3.333 workdays

Let’s say you’re Michael in this scenario. By reducing your commute each day, you’d have a head-start of 3 1/3 work days per month and 26 2/3 work days per year. That’s over a FULL MONTH (in workdays) your colleagues are spending commuting while you can be doing anything else. Go watch a movie, go for a walk, get ahead at work, spend more time with your kids, WHATEVER. It’s completely up to you.

ANYTHING is better than sitting in traffic. The train is considerably better, since you can work / sleep on the train. Biking is a good alternative to driving, but the exercise has diminishing returns after the first 20-30 minutes.

For some additional entertainment, let’s look at reducing your commute even further, from 1 hour each way to only 10 minutes. This means you save 50 minutes each way or 100 minutes per workday to your average colleague.

Each month, That’s the equivalent of:

2000 minutes
33.333 hours
4 workdays

Over the course of a year thats:

24,000 minutes
400 hours
50 workdays

That’s equal to 2 and a half MONTHS of extra time you could save yourself by reducing your commute (in workdays).

I know some people who have been commuting at least 1 hr each way for 20 years. This means they’ve spent 50 months commuting, a full 4 years of their life.

So the next time you’re choosing where to live or work, and shrug off an hour commute as “only an hour”, step back for a minute and look at the bigger picture. Ask yourself, what could you do with an extra 4 years?

Cloud Development

2012-12-03T00:00:00+00:00

As technologists, we are dedicated to optimization. As such, we outsource tasks to cloud services who handle them more efficiently. We use Github for repository hosting, Heroku for web application deployment & hosting, Travis for CI, SendGrid to send application email, and Firebase for realtime apis.

Within the web application ecosystem, code hosting and code deployment have been optimized considerably over the past few years. What used to take days of ops work on Linode or Slicehost now takes seconds with Heroku. Managing a remote git repository (or, svn back in those days) took some time to setup and wasn’t nearly as efficient for teams.

Application Ecosystem

Application hosting
Code hosting
Project runtime

But what about our project runtime? While it’s true that your customers don’t see your runtime, it is a crucial component because it is the foundation of your application. Twitter famously had some major issues early on during their rapid growth that might have killed their meteoric rise. They eventually switched from Ruby & Rails to Java and the JVM. The transition wasn’t seamless and wasn’t a trival task by any means.

Today, the world isn’t much better off when it comes to development environments and managing your project’s runtime. Managing development environments remains a major cause of frustration and wasted time for many developers and development teams.

Typical development environments suffer from a number of architectural issues that hinder productivity: Development environments are not easily replicated and shared across machines; they are not versioned; nor are they kept in sync with their production counterparts. This results in the following common problems:

Keeping two development machines up to date on the same project can be a significant burden. We’ve all tried to keep our work and home computers in sync, but waste countless hours doing so.
Pushing applications to production servers that run different versions of the stack can increase the occurrence of runtime errors in production. (Otherwise known as “Dev/prod parity”).
On-boarding new employees is unpredictable and time-consuming. Even when using Chef or bash scripts to handle many of the mundane tasks, somebody on the team needs to maintain these scripts and troubleshoot them when they’re not working correctly.
Keeping dev environments in sync across team members is challenging. Designers and other non-core engineers who need access to the full-stack should almost never spend time setting up and managing their development environment.

While there are a few other teams tackling a similar problem, we differ from them in our approach to coding on the cloud. Action.IO doesn’t try to reinvent anything or force you to change your workflow. Instead, we let you use the tools that already exist on your system more effectively. There’s a ton of secret sauce baked into the system, and I’ll post some updates to this blog as we roll them out to the public.

For now, if you want a glimse of the future of development, sign up for our private beta.

Foundermetrics

2012-08-08T00:00:00+00:00

I’m sure many of you have heard of Moneyball, Michael Lewis’ 2003 best-seller that was recently the basis of a Major Motion Picture. The book details the selection process of professional baseball prospects, and how the traditional methods of scouting have given way to an increasingly mathematical analysis of player performance known in the baseball world as Sabermetrics.

Historically, baseball scouts focused primarily on physical stature to predict future success. Scouts used physical prowess as an indicator of any of “5-tools”: the ability to run, hit (average), hit for power, throw and field. They assumed that if a player looked like a superstar athlete, then, even if he wasn’t, they could eventually mold him into one.

There is clearly logic in their methodology. An athletic body is usually a signal to athletic ability, and athletic ability (speed, power, agility, etc…) factor into the performance of any player in any sport. But one of the fascinating things about the game of baseball, is how consistent execution, not athletisicm, is the primary determinant of success.

The consistent nature of baseball lends itself to the world of statistics. The regular season alone accounts for 162 games, where players get a handful of defensive attempts and at-bats each game. Each at-bat is a microcosm of statistical analysis, where every pitch has different speed and break, each ball struck travels a discrete distance, to a specific location, and with its own unique circumstance (number of runners on base, the time of day, wind, temperature, etc…).

As management in charge of professional baseball teams turned away from traditional scouting and analysts poured over the statistics, they discovered that they could predict with legitimate certainty the outcome of many of the small events that take place in every game. With statistics, they knew not only a player’s batting average, but their batting average against curveballs, thrown by left-handed pitchers, at night, when the temperature is below 60F degrees.

It follows that eventually the General Managers and Scouting departments of Major League Baseball organizations – those tasked with predicting success – migrated their assessment tools from their gut to their computers, notably, statistical software packages.

The fascinating corralary to all of this, is that to make statistically significant judgements on historical data, one must have a large enough pool of data. Statistical assessments based on tens of data points are less accurate than thousands, and thousands of data points are less accurate than millions. This is known in probability theory as the law of large numbers.

Naturally, the longer a player has played, the more accurately we are able to predict success. Many sabermatricians argue that a college baseball player’s chance of success is greater than that of a high-school player. I can’t refute that claim, but I do know that College baseball players have a wealth of statistical data to allow Major League Baseball scouts to better assess their expected performance in the big leagues. So, even if the average College player won’t necessarily perform better in the major leauges, there is less risk in investing in College players because your predictive model of success for College players would be more accurate given more information (less variance, R squared -> 1).

A16Z == B7S

Let’s pretend that analyzing baseball prospects is similar to investors analyzing startups. In this game, VCs are tasked with discovering and assessing entrepreneurs (clearly, VC Partners are the General Managers, and associates are the scouts). If sabermetrics has shifted baseball prospect selection towards experienced, collegiate players, where do technology investors stand on young vs. old founders, and where should they stand?

When it comes to young founders, my immediate assumption is that technology investors are an awful lot like traditional baseball scouts; they’re interested in raw talent. Which is fair, because its tough not to be “raw” when you’re really young. But what are the Tech Investor’s “Five Tools”?

Intelligence
Programming ability
Ability to stick with one problem (focus, perseverence)
Salesmanship ability (writing, communication skills)
Successful Hacks

I have to admit, I don’t really have an answer. Since Baseball has discrete performance boundaries, it’s easy to compare how hard 2 players throw, and then say which throws harder. With startups, it’s more difficult to relate young founders because the comparative variables aren’t as objective as the performance metrics on the ballfield.

My instinct tells me that investing in young entrepreneurs is extremely risky business. However, I can see a few important attributes common to many young founders:

Infinite energy & conviction
Ability to generate unlimited Press Coverage
Life flexibility (business-first: single, no kids, move easily)
Unpolluted theory of mind (no previous assumptions, no limits, think big / delusional)

These things are great if you can exploit them and sell out fast. The problems come when building a business. Most successful businesses require longevity, and through this weight of time most founders will eventually succumb to the human condition. Unless they are a ruthless, autistic cyborg, they will likely at some point in time:

Fall in love
Have children
Gain perspective (become less delusional)

Oh boy. I love the energy in young founders. But then I look at this list again. Think back to the first time you fell in love. Not to say that old love is less significant, but, old love tends to have perspective and won’t throw away a business because its girlfriend is moving to Florence to study Art History.

And as the old playground song goes: after love, and maybe marriage, come babies and expensive baby carriages.

My perspective here isn’t completely valid, as I don’t have kids– but if I spend even 1/10th of the time my parents spent raising me, it might have some serious implications on the amount of time I can commit to my business.

Most older entrepreneurs have been in love. They know how to temper their emotion. Maybe they’re divorced, maybe they’ve had 3 kids. Life isn’t full of surprises. Maybe that’s boring, but it’s predictible, and predictability is as core to investing as it is selecting baseball prospects.

Young founders would seem to be a better fit for early stage companies, where their infinite energy and delusional conviction can help shape a company’s culture and push it into a valuable growth phase. Once the company has hit product market fit, it’s suitable to bring on older talent who can optimize the shit out of the company until there’s a suitable exit available.

Then, after an IPO; after scraping any remaining residue of youth and innovation from the whiteboards; after the hackathons are full of only posers and all the real talent has fled to the next revolution; the products stagnate, the culture rots, the bears on wall street rip every remaining piece of flesh from your withering bones, and all that’s left is your huge office campus across town that you’re now forced to sublease to some 19-yr old Harvard prodigy and who’s going to tear down your office wall and put a 10,000 gallon aquarium in your private bathroom.

I just hope you’ve cashed out by then.

Delusion

2012-07-01T00:00:00+00:00

I recently read a mind blowing article about Voyager I, the 35 year-old space probe that is on the cusp of becoming the first man-made object to exit the solar system.

The irony of this event, as the article points out, is that we cannot tell exactly when voyager has reached interstellar space, because, well, nothing has ever been there before. There is no historical event that would help prove it has crossed the outer boundary of our solar system because we really don’t know where that line exists.

Being an entrepreneur is facscinating because we are all a little like Voyager I, in that we operate in the outer boundaries of our own reality. We are constantly inventing new and better ways to work, to live, to interact. In effect, we are our own Makers– expanding and redefining reality for ourselves and those around us.

What differentiates entrepreneurs from Voyager I is that Voyager I is simply along for the ride. It is a passive observer of space over time. Alternatively, entrepreneurs are directly responsible for defining our own new realities as we move ever forward; shaping each new device and application in our own conceived image of the future.

Entrepreneurs who consistently define new trends are occasionally referred to as “prophets” or “visionaries”. But many other visionaries are regarded as delusional until their theory, product or service has acheieved mass adoption.

Perhaps a prerequisite of becoming a successful entpreneur is having the courage to be an outcast, a heretic, a deluded, crazy person. Go against the grain. Dream of a bigger, better world. Then go out and create it, even if everyone thinks you’re crazy.

I’ll leave you with my favorite passage from Walter Isaacson’s biography on Steve Jobs:

Some people say, “Give the customers what they want.” But that’s not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they’re going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, “If I asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, “A faster horse!” People don’t know what they want until you show it to them. That’s why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.

Intent driven design

2012-06-08T00:00:00+00:00

I used to be a URL fanatic. I used to type every web address I visited letter by letter. I used to yell at my parents for opening Yahoo and searching for “Hotmail” in the big search box instead of just typing “www.hotmail.com”.

These days, with Chrome’s integration of search into the address bar, I’ve found that I’m pretty damn lazy. When I want to visit Facebook, I hit CMD+L, type “fa..” and hit enter. Then I click the first Facebook link in the search results. It’s faster. If I wanted to, I could default the address bar search to use “I’m feeling lucky” searches and drop me right at the first result without any clicking. Then I’d be really lazy. But Google optimized Chrome because they realized something in their research on user behavior:

People don’t use address bars.

Some absurd percentage of web sessions start with search. I don’t know where I’ve seen these numbers, but I swear that some research firms estimate that over 80% of sessions start with a search. With Google Chrome’s popularity and the handy search integration into the toolbar, this is probably even higher.

Full URLs are pretty worthless these days. We’re not typing full URLs into web browsers anymore. We’re searching for things based on keywords we’re interested in.

For example, I’m not visiting “redsox.com” anymore. I’m searching “redsox score”, and getting this:

I’m not visiting Flight Tracker, I’m searching “SQ21” and getting this:

Gmail even recently started including rich markup when they identified flight information in my email:

Less clicks, more information, standardized format.

Microformats

Well structured information makes great user experiences possible. Flight information and sports scores are just the beginning of an entirely new generation of search experience that will heavily rely on semantic information via Microformats and Facebook’s Open Graph protocol.

To get a taste of some of the possibilities of life with microformats, check out Google’s new Recipe search engine:

Very cool when you know which ingredients you want to use and how much time you have to cook.

The incredible thing is, that this example is just scraping the surface of the new revolution in search results. I think that search results are going to become incredibly powerful over the next 3-5 years, with things like Microformats and Facebook’s Open Graph providing the foundation of these improved search experiences. This is a win for everyone– but presents interesting implications on the power of the web in the future.

Many sites live and die by Search Engine Optimzation and their ranking in Google search results.

But what if we didn’t even need to visit those sites anymore? What if google knew how to present the information we were looking for? What would websites look like then?

They probably wouldn’t even be websites, but just data feeds. In fact, if we want instant information in a consistent format, we would just search for it, let google or facebook present it the way they felt was best, and then be on our way.

SOPA

2012-01-20T00:00:00+00:00

Dear Old Media Executive,

Come on. You’re better than this– running to your cronies in Washington to throw every 13 yr old and file hosting hermit in the slammer?

You’ve tried this before – I remember in 2005 when I was in college, seeing some loose-leaf pamphlets on the post-it board in the mail room threatening jail time for illegal downloading or hosting copy-written material. I think by now you’ve realized, it didn’t scare anyone straight – it just reminded us of the new album or movie we wanted to download when we got back to our room.

As the years passed, you saw the landscape moving even further beyond your reach. And instead of meeting the challenge with innovation, you’ve decided instead to play Caesar.

The maximum penalty would be five years in prison for a first offense of streaming 10 pieces of music or movies within six months.

I’m writing you to tell you that you’re fighting the wrong fight.

Piracy isn’t an issue of legality, it’s an issue of economics. People pirate digital media for a number of different reasons, but predominantly economic ones. Kids pirate content because they don’t have a fully matured sense of morality (which is why they’re tried differently in most courts), and because they usually have no disposable income. DVD peddlers in Chinatown and in foreign countries pirate content to feed their families or because they can’t afford the content – or because they don’t value the content in relation to other durable goods that are less price elastic.

The rest of us pirate content simply because we clearly feel the value of digital content has decreased as it has become considerably cheaper to distribute and consume. Here’s why we think digital content should be much cheaper than it was in 1995:

1. Distribution is cheaper / free.

CDs? DVDs? Print outs, posters, billboards? Gone. (Trees rejoice!) Shipment costs to merchants? Gone. Incorporating 50-100% cost markup from Walmart / BestBuy / Circuit City (well, in 1995)? Gone.

2. Creative marketing is far more cost efficient.

Traditional marketing has been turned on it’s head, and most creative online campaigns can generate customers for enormous discounts on the pre-digital age models. There are digital agencies who have this down to a science. If your internal team can’t figure it out, hire them.

You’ve got cash? Good. Acquire new digital services that are figuring out ways to engage consumers on the cheap.

3. Continuous engagement

In 1995, every new movie and album release required the same “needle in a haystack” marketing problem – in that it was like you had to start over every time you had a new release to find your consumers. With the advent of social networking and personal interest profiles, that’s all changed. By converting fans of movies, musicians, and television shows to Twitter followers and Facebook fans, you can interact with and engage your consumers 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. After they watch a movie or download a song, you have plenty of opportunities to convince them to buy something else– with insights provided by Facebook’s ad platform and page insights, you even know individual items your fans like so you can recommend them things they want! Heck, if you entertain them and throw them something special every now and again, they’ll probably even tell their friends, which is an ancillary marketing benefit.

4. Consumer targeting is lightyears ahead of where it was 10 years ago.

How many consumer studies / screening tests did you need to do back in the day to tailor your marketing campaigns? How much research to determine when and on which channels and radio stations to run your movie trailers? The ability to laser focus your marketing efforts on a single demographic is considerably easier today. Generating feedback through twitter and facebook and through online surveys is considerably cheaper and more effective as well. The good news? You’re not completely hopeless.

Hulu and VEVO (both joint-ventures between numerous large media companies) are tremendous success stories. They weren’t exactly “innovative” in the broader spectrum of new technologies, but you demonstrated that you could shift models quickly and you have benefited greatly. ComScore reported in Dec. 2011 that Hulu served more video ads than any other online video platform, and VEVO and Warner Music were the #1 and #2 channels respectively on Youtube by # of views. Don’t stop there, get creative with new business models.

Julian Sanchez of the Cato Institute argues that record labels aren’t doing quite as bad as they think. This is because even though digital downloads might be decreasing, that the overall average expenditure on music remains constant and that expenditures are just shifting:

[R]ecording industry numbers show large increases in concert revenues corresponding to the drop in recorded music sales. That suggests that, as people discover new artists by sampling downloaded albums online, they’re shifting consumption within the sector to live performances.

In other words, people have a roughly constant “music budget,” and what they don’t spend on the albums they’ve downloaded gets spent on seeing that new band they discovered.

Some independent artists have created very viable business models entirely on their own. Comedian Louis CK and English Rock Band, Radiohead implemented “pay what you want” models on content they produced themselves, with remarkable results:

Fred Wilson on Louis CK’s Experiment
The Radiohead model (2007!!)

You might say:

But we made Louis CK and Radiohead famous! We spent millions promoting their shows and music.

And, to a certain extent, you’d be right. You used to be a promoter and distributer. But, you’ve been replaced by the internet. Now, She handles promotion and distribution. Facebook and Twitter are the new distributors. Spotify, Boxee, and Netflix are the new media platforms. They’re the innovators and they’ve got the support of hundreds of millions of people around the world.

You’ve failed to realize that the world is considerably more connected than it was in 1995 and that traditional bureaucracy is a withering enterprise. Innovate or die.

Sincerely,

The Internet

Harmony

2012-01-04T00:00:00+00:00

Apple’s product design team is remarkable — I think you’d be hard pressed finding someone to dispute that. What makes Apple’s designers remarkable, is their ability to empathize with the consumer — or as Mike Markkula wrote in The Apple Marketing Philosphy:

Point No. 1: Empathy

Apple should strive for an “intimate” connection with customers’ feelings. “We will truly understand their needs better than any other company,” Markkula wrote.

Instead of cramming features into a device to feed the greedy consumer, Apple’s designers and engineers dig in deeper and go further than offering just veneer. They pay attention to how a device feels in your hand, how it feels in your pocket, or how it feels while resting on your bedside table at night.

When asked why I use an iPhone, I usually respond that it just “feels” right. I don’t know why that’s my response other than it’s always the first thing that comes to mind. I think most iPhone, iPad or Macbook users would understand my response without any further explanation. Intuitively, we understand that this “feeling” is really a collection of a bunch of really smart design decisions.

Dustin Curtis, recently wrote a popular post celebrating Apple’s design intuition. In the post, he describes specifically why cradling an iPhone vs. holding a Samsung Galaxy S II “feels different”. He writes:

Touching the upper right corner of the screen on the Galaxy S II using one hand, with its 4.27-inch screen, while you’re walking down the street looking at Google Maps, is extremely difficult and frustrating.

It was difficult and frustrating because you have to fumble with one hand to accomplish the full suite of everyday tasks. Dustin continues in his post to commend the Apple design team on their decision to build a 3.5” screen instead of a 4.21” screen. While most brands were thinking “bigger is better” when it came to screens, perhaps Apple understood the nuance from a deeper perspective of a more comprehensive understanding of the intersection of form & function.

Image credit: Dustin Curtis

When I look at these two phones though, I don't see the 180cm size difference, I see the residue of an entirely different hierarchy of design within the organization.

At Apple, designers are at the head of the table. Even though Jony Ive is soft spoken, Steve ensured that a holistic design process was paramount and perhaps the guiding factor of product design.

At Apple, it is the designers' world, and everybody else is just playing in it.

Contrast that with the role of the designer at Samsung, and I bet we get a much different perspective where the priorities of other departments (partnerships, finance, etc…) take a higher priority than the design department. Here’s a hypothetical conversation of how design works at Samsung:

Samsung Head of Partnerships Hey designer, we need to add this new feature into the OS because of the partnership we have with Fox, and it doesn't look good on a small screen.

Designer Hmmm...if we make the screen bigger it will cause other problems. I know videos will look better, but the phone won't be useable with one hand. Changing the screen would change the way apps are launched, our homescreen design, and navigation on every application...

Samsung Head of Partnerships Well, I'm sorry but I already got approval from the CEO — we have a big video partnership with Fox and Youtube for the product marketing push, and he says the screen has gotta be bigger for his demo at CES. We think we need to increase the size by 30%.

So you can see how a CEO’s hubris for a demo or a partnership might disrupt the product & design team by forcing them to adapt to other non-product oriented demands.

But maybe it’s not just partnership people throwing the designer off-track — I can almost hear the phone call between the designer and the director of finance sitting in his office 20 floors up:

Designer Argh...we can't fit this chip and the battery into their allocated space in the case — we need to talk to supply chain to order the smaller battery. I know it's more expensive, but the larger battery will affect the entire enclosure and changes the experience of every aspect of the device.

Finance Director Sorry, we can't get those smaller batteries, they don't fit into our cost models price.

Designer So what do I do?

Finance Chief Make the phone bigger? I don't know...but we can't afford the smaller batteries, sorry.

At Samsung, the design department isn't conducting the orchestra, they're just another one of the instruments.

The truth behind building something like the iPad or the iPhone is that there is considerably more than just design at play. There is, a harmony of all aspects of business: Finance, Internal Manufacturing, Supply Chain Management, Engineering, etc — It’s not “design” or the designers themselves, but where they fit into the corporate ecosystem that makes Apple remarkable.

Design is Apple’s foundation, and I’m sure many Apple designers go toe-to-toe with the Finance and Supply Chain guys to force the device to evolve the way they want it to evolve. But that doesn’t mean that designers at Samsung or other manufacturers don’t get it, it just means that at their companies, the hierarchy of internal departments is out-of-whack. Apple has — from day one — put its designers on a pedestal. More specifically, Steve Jobs put them on a pedestal. Design isn’t just built into the product it’s built into the whole freaking company.

Most businesses just aren’t structured this way. Usually, business are profit-first, not product-first. They’re usually run by people who want to build their bank accounts, not amazing products. Usually, the head of design hasn’t been knighted by the Queen of freakin’ England.

This harmony at Apple I’m sure didn’t come easily. But then again, Apple never really felt like a corporation, and Steve never felt like a “CEO”, at least, not to me. And that was also by design.

RIP Steve.

Apple wasn't built in a day

2011-11-01T00:00:00+00:00

One of the things that struck me when I was reading Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs was how slowly things seemed to move in the book.

I think when many of us peer into the window of success we often think that its sculptors had everything figured out and were executing flawlessly during their ascent to greatness.

Reading about Steve’s life is the first time (and reading his sister’s Eulogy is the second) that I have felt Steve Jobs viscerally on a human level. For some reason, when I pictured him crying to Jerry Wozniak in the foyer of his home the night Woz Jr. announced his decision to stay with HP, something struck me.

I saw a fragile man, a man who maybe wasn’t sure of Apple’s future without the best engineering talent. In that dimly lit living room where I pictured Steve sobbing, probably sitting indian style and barefoot on Jerry Wozniak’s living room floor, I saw a tiny sliver of Steve Jobs that I had never seen before. Steve Jobs was vulnerable, and ultimately, he was human, just like the rest of us.

Humans fail. Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and countless others all have, and will continue to fail. But to me, what makes someone remarkable is their ability to persevere and the passion that enables them.

So if you glean nothing else from Jobs’ biography, then remember this: Apple wasn’t built in a day. Keep working hard.

Why startups win

2011-07-11T00:00:00+00:00

This quote from The Godfather II is a great example of why it is startups who disrupt industries. There are few things stronger than passion and the will to succeed.

MICHAEL I saw an interesting thing happen today. A rebel was being arrested by the military police, and rather than be taken alive, he exploded a grenade he had hidden in his jacket. He killed himself, and took a captain of the command with him.

[ROTH looks concerned]

JOHNNY OLA Those rebels, you know, they're lunatics.

MICHAEL Maybe so -- but it occurred to me. The soldiers are paid to fight -- the rebels aren't.

ROTH What does that tell you?

MICHAEL They can win.

Handwriting

2010-10-10T00:00:00+00:00

I just noticed something when making out an address on an envelope:

My handwriting has regressed to a level equal or perhaps lower than its quality in grade school.

There are so few tasks these days that require hand-written skills, that I doubt this is an uncommon occurrence. I would venture to say that perhaps the most common occurrence of handwriting these days is when taking notes in grade school – though even in those instances, it is becoming much more common to carry laptops.

As laptop prices continue to drop, and ipads and other tablets make their way into offices, schools and the doctor’s office, schools might choose (and perhaps intelligently so) to focus all of their attention on typing skills instead of handwriting skills. I would argue that typing skills are far more valuable in the marketplace these days than handwriting anyways.

Without the foundation of penmanship courses (do schools even do this anymore?), children won’t even learn the foundation of hand writing skills to maintain the legacy of notes, hand written letters and the like. With a generation with paltry writing skills, there will be even more demand on digital services, which will eventually replace even the most trivial of tasks that used to be handled with a pen and a few scribbles.

And then, maybe in another hundred years, handwriting will be regulated only to a sort of retro-artistic movement. We’ll admire old hand written letters and marvel at the antiquity of pen and paper only from within protected cases at museums.

Twitter & RSS

2009-09-09T00:00:00+00:00

The theory behind RSS has roots from earlier days of the internet (~1995); the copyright was established just a few hundred feet from my freshman year dormroom right as I was beginning my studies at Harvard.

I remember the simplicity of the technology striking me, and brainstorming ways to capitalize on it. I played around with a few RSS readers in college but ultimately abandoned them. That’s not to say that RSS didn’t catch a solid following– it did, but there wasn’t ever really a mass-market RSS reader, considering all of the sites that were offering up RSS updates.

So why didn’t RSS catch on with the masses, the non-internet non-geek majority?

Creating RSS feeds wasn’t idiot proof.

There wasn’t (to my knowledge) a mass-market foolproof way to create RSS feeds for every website. I’m not sure what the adoption and implementation of feeds was. I’m too lazy to do the research now, but I’d guess RSS feeds existed in roughly 2-5% of total available websites, and perhaps 30-50% of the top trafficked sites. The irony is that the most trafficked sites didn’t really need to offer RSS feeds. Their users were visiting the site most days anyways.

I can’t remember the sites I frequented before 2004. Facebook was launched in early 2004. Social networking allowed everyone to essentially have a website. Suddently, I could sign into facebook everyday and check out new shit. It became my new content consumption hub.

But facebook isn’t really a replacement for RSS. There are still sites that I frequent and want to be kept up-to-date with the new activity.

Enter Twitter.

Twitter was like RFSS. Really fucking simple syndication. Twitter solved the implementation issue. I didn’t even need a website to post things. I didn’t need a CMS, I didn’t need to figure out how to get people to subscribe to my feed to let them know of happenings. I could have a brand, I could post some really, really simple updates and let people know about what was happening. And it didn’t stop at businesses. I could follow friends, celebrities, businesses, politicians.

So yes, RSS is probably dead now. Twitter doesn’t have yet the ability to post more complex metadata, to embed videos, pictures and other engaging content directly into my feed. But I’m sure they’ll get there.

I will miss RSS.

Facebook Killer

2009-08-06T00:00:00+00:00

Facebook is amazing. I mean, I love facebook just like everyone else does and they do everything really well.

But technology moves fast, and every decade or two, the market leader gets replaced. The bigger the company, the stronger the foothold (ahem, microsoft) but in the end, the service that provides the most true value to the consumer will win.

One of the only platforms I use more than facebook is email. Facebook has tried to build their own email platform (rumors of “@fb.com” email addresses abound), but I can’t see how facebook could build a real email competitor within its already complex platform. They could cannabalize the “Hey let’s grab lunch!” emails and make them facebook messages, but for work / productivity purposes, just forget about it.

One of the steps that Google seems to be taking, and in fact, they’ve talked about it, is allowing a vast array of multimedia integration into email. This makes them similar to facebook, in that you can share links, post videos, etc… and get a little preview in your email client’s window, without having to go anywhere. Simple formulas yield success.

In a post earlier this year before the Google Wave announcement, I wrote about email being the foundation of consumer internet interaction.

The post focused on the potential email has to be the facilitator to all things social (if this is in fact where google is headed).

In fact, my gmail account is quickly becoming my de-facto personal, reputable identity online. I use it for everything…subscriptions, payments, private messages (email), personal information storage (files on google docs), sharing and reading links (google reader), IM messages (google chat), etcetera, etcetera…

The issue that I had with facebook in my earlier post, is the exact thing that has helped them grow so quickly. Sometimes, sharing is too much, there are too many people who are going to see something that I post. Most of my 650 some-odd friends, I don’t care about. I mean, 650 people? Seriously? I couldn’t name 100 of them if I tried let alone care about what they’re doing every day. I use the “hide newsfeed items from XXX” almost every session, now I have a workable newsfeed, but what about hiding the things that I post to the people I also don’t care about? Managing privacy lists to whom you share, can sometimes just be too bulky. The user workflow just doesn’t do it for me. Too many features, very little “foundation” other than the homepage stream.

I think that Facebook can win the identity game for social purposes, and google can win it for non-social (work?) purposes.

Twitternation

2009-03-17T00:00:00+00:00

I really like twitter.

Facebook sometimes seems to be a victim of its own success. Its trying to please too many people and isnt focusing on its core services– even though mark has dictated that is its mission in the past. Maybe this is true, and in essence focusing on refining the feeds, facebook connect, and iPhone integration are likely considered “core” services. But what about the actual features that people use daily? Photos, inbox, status?

More and more I’m realizing however, that twitter does what I need for my daily social consumption. A picture here and there, a small status update, a link. I dont really need the preview, I trust who I’m following. Not to mention, most of the things that my college and highschool friends post isn’t always incredibly interesting.

Facebook still owns the “album” sphere, by virtue of their social tagging infrastructure. It’s great, and probably wont be replaced for a long, long time. Plus, I’m not arguing that facebook isn’t the obvious owner of the social graph. This post isn’t meant to take anything away from Facebook; but to appreciate the value of simplicity.

Facebooks owns my social graph. Twitter owns my interest graph. They’re different, and perhaps, equally valuable. Depends on my mood, I guess.

Creative Destruction

2009-01-19T00:00:00+00:00

I’m not usually one to accept change blindly. Once a routine is set in place, I’m usually keen on protecting it, especially if things aren’t broken.

Typically, this would be a bad thing when leading a company. However, I have other strong traits that counteract this need for routine and comfort.

I am, perhaps, one of the least patient people I know. I might not begin shouting at you if you’re taking too long to explain a point, and I might not swerve through traffic to ensure I arrive 2 minutes earlier than I otherwise would have, but I don’t have much patience for incompetence.

That said, I’m all for change within organizations. After all, you cannot innovate without change, and often, it’s only when we’ve lost everything or completely demolished what stood previously that we can rebuild smarter, and stronger than before.

This can make or break a big company, and while their immense presence within a sector might protect them for awhile, ultimately it will also lead to their downfall because they will not be able to compete with the smaller, more agile and more adaptive companies. The ability to deconstruct and reassess is incredibly important when innovating, and cannot occur without proper insight and the courage and confidence to know and pursue what feels right.

Creative destruction isn’t about being number 1, about winning, or about being a billion dollar company. Rather, it is about forward progress and about focusing on how to apply creative insights to push the company forward.

Facebook, Friends?

2009-01-07T00:00:00+00:00

I waste a lot of time visiting social networking sites perusing updates. For the sake of understanding the wide array of news, social, and other information sites I consume on a daily basis, I’ll give you a sample days worth of data consumption:

On My Macbook:

reddit (8-10 unique sessions @ 8 minutes per session)
facebook (2-3 unique sessions @ 7 minutes per session)
google finance (2-3 unique sessions @ 2 minutes per session)
miscellaneous blogs
AIM conversations (2-3 unique conversations @ 4-5 minutes aggregate time per conversation (average))
googletalk conversations (1-2 unique conversations @ 4-5 minutes aggregate time per conversation))
surf report / surf pictures (3-5 unique sessions per day / 7 minutes per session)
twitter (1 unique session a month. ha!)
other referred links (2-3 unique session per day @ 3 minutes per session)
reading common/subscribed blogs (1-2 per day @ 8 minutes per session)
email (20-30 emails a day @ 2 minutes per email (average))

On My iPhone:

facebook (2-3 unique sessions @ 1 minute per session)
SMS (5-7 text messages a day)
phone calls (2-3 calls a day @ 5 minutes per call (average))

These are my communication and information consumption devices. I’m not going to add all of those up, but my guess is it’s in the range of a few hours (2-4) per day of seemingly random information consumption and communication. Add some work hours, some in person conversation, working out, sleeping, eating, television, and beer, and you’ve got 24 hours.

I’d be willing to bet that your day is pretty similar. Maybe you spend more time (8-10 hrs) or maybe you spend less (1-2 hrs), but you’re spending alot of time consuming information and communicating.

What about the stratification of your list though? Do you visit alot of different sites? Maybe you read a few fashion blogs, or maybe you just spend all day looking at photo albums on facebook. Maybe you send 100 texts a day, or maybe you talk on the phone for hours. I dont know exactly what your breakdown would be, but I know that you spend alot of time, and the way you consume all of this information isn’t perfect.

So what’s out there to make your life easier?

I’ve always wanted to get more out of RSS feeds. I just haven’t been able to. I can’t quite put my finger on why this is, but I suspect it has something to do with the interface of the RSS readers. I just never find myself opening my RSS reader. When I do, it’s fine for reading some articles, but I only have about 3-4 constant blogs / sites that I like to read, and they’re not very hard to type into the URL bar in firefox.

Facebook helps with social interaction. The friends lists are freaking gold, and I bet maybe 5% of facebook users actually utilize them. Facebook could do so much more if they promoted friend’s lists, which maybe I’ll incorporate into this blog post if I dont think I can build something cool with the idea (which i probably can’t, so if you’re a smart web apps programmer then email me ajsolimine at gmail dot com). The newsfeed does vaguely promote friends lists (if you click the little arrow at the right, you’ll be able to sort by lists), but I doubt many people have invested the time into organizing their friends. Facebook has proxied friends lists by creating a decent set of newsfeed controls where you can choose to see more or less of a certain item type (photos, status updates, etc…) or more or less publication resulting from a certain users action.

But that’s kinda a pain in the ass. I know about 2-3 people I dont want to see regularly, and about 7-8 that I do, but besides that, it’s all a crapshoot. I know facebook probably keeps track of who I do view, and autonomously updates my consumption score for that person’s information by a bit. I know this because I see people that I want to see fairly regularly and I see alot of photos (although, then again, about 75% of the engagement on facebook is probably b/c of photos anyways).

Friends lists would improve engagement considerably, at the cost of decreasing discovery of content provision outside of those lists. That is, the information you would be consuming inside of facebook with friends lists would be less dilutive in the sense that you wouldn’t get the “noise” of seeing any events from users that aren’t really relevant to you.

Theoretically, this shouldn’t happen, but we all know that of the 1,293 facebook friends we have, we really only care about less than 100 of those people’s events.

Creating friends lists and prioritizing them would make content consumption so much more fluid. Recommendation engines would thrive, events would be considerably easier to create and utilize, as well as group discussions via group messaging. Group chats with certain lists for project brainstorming, classes projects, or just general fraternizing would be facilitated with friends lists (from a techical standpoint, they would be chat rooms, message threads, etc… that are created from the source (user) and available via Access Control List rules dictated by friend lists).

As many times as people sign into their facebook account, I dont think any of them think of facebook as their social or information storage account. For that, always look to people’s email applications.

If you look at the above list of my daily information consumption habits, Email was the one node that isn’t defined by striated pull patterns– that is– I didn’t log into a site with any information, I was always logged in.

My email account would be the perfect module to receive all of this information. Want new functionality? Create new tabs for new application add ons. Maybe I have a few chats open with groups or users in a chat tab that syncs with my AIM and google talk accounts. Messaging? Obviously in my email inbox. Alerts all come into the main inbox, while other filters provide easier access to blogs I am subscribed to, new links my friends have posted, new conversations with certain friend lists, new photo album alerts, new events posted to certain friend lists, polls, and more. Facebook was close here, but I still don’t see them as a destination solely due to the fact that they did too good getting people to connect.

It seems like such a chore now to go through all of my friends to organize them. Sure I have the little autocomplete widgets, and all I need to do is think of my friends names to begin categorizing them. But that’s seems like a daunting task.

Maybe that’s why twitter is actually appealing. I only have a few friends, so I’m not intimidated to blast things to twitter. Maybe not having a huge audience isn’t so bad after all…

Information

2007-10-07T00:00:00+00:00

I was flipping through some channels after I arrived home from the office today, and found myself captivated by an animal planet program about migrating caribou. I didn’t watch long enough to fully understand the reasoning behind their constant migration, but I did witness a mother give birth to a baby caribou, only to trot away instantly from her newborn without hesitation.

It was amazing to me to watch the baby caribou stand immediately and begin walking around. I’m still figuring out how to walk and balance effectively and I’m almost 25 years old. Amazing world we live in. To cut to the meat of the story: Baby gets lost, mother abandons baby after 10 minutes of looking, baby tucks itself behind a rock to endure the cold evening and withers away into the crisp grass only to eventually become soil for the new grass that will feed new baby caribou the following summer.

In witnessing this fast-foward circle of life, I somehow managed to relate rotting caribou flesh and death back to the internet.

We hold these truths, to be self-evident, that all information is created equal.

This paraphrased statement from the Declaration of Independence, clearly isn’t true when applied to the internet. Much of the information created is ignorant, hateful, uninformed, baseless or simply irrelevant.

Men are ‘created’ equal, but over time they diverge fairly significantly in depth and breadth of knowledge. Information isn’t created equal because it is the product of men who are more or less educated, knowledgable, or who perceive the world differently than their brothers and sisters.

If we therefore assume that information is not created equal, should inferior information on the internet decay, like the frail, newborn caribou in the bitter Yukon forest?

Can information on the internet die?

Absolutely. Information should degrade like any other element.

But what about the solid truth that is spoken? Those words that resonate throughout time, that are so pervasive, that they seem to be always relevant, and always meaningful? Should those words then degrade too?

My answer to that would be yes, they should degrade if they are challenged and they lose. Those great information producers of all time will endure. Socrates, Nietzsche & Plato, Lincoln, Kennedy & King. Their words have endured. Their words, their information, will endure because of their universal application.

The words worthy of application and worthy of publication in a major platform should be promoted and should be learned and read. It will be a tremendous success of information aggregation and information distribution platforms to engage the world and judge and learn the effects not through orders of magnitude, but through orders of quality and goodness, to ensure the true great information elements resonate and maintain their throne while unworthy and seemingly weak claims swiftly meet their demise and decompose into the soil for the next generation of potentially monumental thoughts.

hitting .406

Product Gravity

Buying Options at Seed

Founders Dilemma

COVID-19 Survival Tips for Restaurants

The New Reality

Current Restaurant Economics

1. Discovery: Create an Instagram Menu

2. Order via DM & Text / Pay via Venmo

3. Repurpose Waitstaff for Delivery

4. No More Dine-in: Ditch Your Real Estate

5. Leverage Pre-orders!

6. Only Your Best: Limited Menus are Your Friend

7. Group Buys: Get Your Biggest Fans to Market For You

8. Reward Your Loyal Customers!

9. Communicate Safety Protocols

Overall

Cars and real estate

Gas stations

Autobody shops

Parking lots, garages and roads

Request for startups

315.360.000 seconds

1. Self-sovereign data / identity

2. Data interoperability

3. New Cities

4. Micromobility & Local Transportation

5. Sustainable Food

6. Home Health Diagnostics

7. The Next Mass Consumer Device

8. New Sources of Capital & Liquidity

9. Resurgence of Personal Websites & RSS

To revisit in 315.360.000 seconds

New Cities: Community

New Cities: Governance

New Cities: Public Safety

New Cities: Telecommunications

New Cities: Healthcare

New Cities: Sanitation

New Cities: Education

New Cities: Economy

New Cities: Transportation

New Cities: Electricity

New Cities: Housing

New Cities: Transportation Infrastructure

New Cities: Geography

Geographic independence

Accessibility

Geological risks

Defense considerations

Proximity to resources

Energy considerations

Climate

Vegetation / Arable land

Soil quality

Minerals

Time zone

Environmental impact

New Cities

Guiding Principle

Can You Create a City?

Why now?

Death by a thousand cuts

Crypto's Gateway Drug

Digital Wallets Adoption in Emerging Markets

Crypto Canon

Foundations

Infrastructure

Money

Organizations

Economics

Assets

Things to Add

The Liquidity Dilemma

Open Source Database Schemas

Largest US Companies by Market Cap (2018)

The Reality of Centralized Data

Crypto & Data Sovereignty

Shared Database vs. Shared Database Schema

Dapp-centric JSON Schema Validation