Svbtle Featured

To Each His Own

2013-05-20T08:23:46-07:00

Ever since the rumours about the Yahoo-Tumblr acquisition running over the weekend (which it turns out weren't just rumours), I've wanted to communicate my opinion on the matter. Until this morning, that opinion would've included gems like these:

“Hahahaha! ROFL! WTF! OMFG! LOL!”
“Tumblr has raised hundreds of millions of dollars in funding, has very little revenue. So why would Yahoo be paying that kind of earnings multiple for a business? Seems desperate…”
“This is another bad example for startups. Acquisitions like these send out the wrong signal that it is okay to raise millions in funding, but never really worry about revenue.”

And so forth. You get the point…

But I never published any of that.

See, I realized that ultimately my opinion didn't really matter, but more importantly, that this deal was down (mostly) to two individual entrepreneurs (along with their respective boards of course): Marissa Meyer & David Karp. And I needed to - **and wanted to* - respect that fact.*

It's easy to be an armchair critic. We all know that.

But what many of us don't know is how hard it is to be an entrepreneur. Much less, an entrepreneur having to sell your company.

I can only imagine the kind of emotional blood, sweat & tears that went into this deal in the last couple of days. Getting this done (both from Yahoo & Tumblr's perspective) takes massive balls.

I admire that.

And one day, I would love to have the opportunity of testing my own mettle in a similar situation. As an entrepreneur, that's the kind of stuff that I live for.

So regardless of whether I think this is a good deal, whether Yahoo overpaid, or whether Tumblr can generate any kind of appropriate ROI, I have major respect for the entrepreneurs involved in this deal. To each his own.

You Shouldn't Start an Ad Tech Company, But If You Do...

2013-05-20T07:31:43-07:00

I started working in ad tech in 2005 and during the past eight years, the ad tech ecosystem has progressively become more sophisticated, competitive and oligopolistic. It's hard to innovate in ad tech. But if you're looking to start a company in the sector, you'll need to amass proprietary data or develop a market place with unassailable liquidity to vie successfully in the market.

A Mental Model for the Ad Ecosystem

The structure of the ad ecosystem, greatly simplified, looks like the image above. On the left, the advertiser supplies dollars that flow to the right. The DSP, demand side platform, uses algorithms to inform an advertiser's media purchases; i.e., which websites and mobile apps will perform best? The advertiser and DSP purchase media on the ad exchange which is an electronic market place where advertisers can buy media algorithmically and in real time, called RTB for real-time bidding. On the other side of the exchange, the publisher uses supply-side platforms to find the best paying advertisers to buy their ad inventory.

There are hundreds of SSPs and DSPs, thousands of advertisers, millions of publishers but only a handful of exchanges: Google's DoubleClick, Facebook's FBX, Yahoo's RightMedia, MoPub, Adap.tv and a few others. These exchanges, like most market places, exert huge network effects because advertisers are attracted to the exchanges with the most inventory selection/liquidity. The exchanges see every transaction and have unparalleled visibility and data access into their respective ecosystems.

Data, data, everywhere

If there's one defining characteristic of online advertising, it's data. Advertisers buy data and license algorithms to find better inventory. Publishers sell their data and license other algorithms to find better advertisers.

In order to compete in an ecosystem of data, a startup has to bring one of three advantages to market: better algorithms to use on the same data as everyone else, better data than anyone else or a market place with the largest volume of ad inventory in a segment.

Better algorithms is the fastest way of getting into market as a startup. Similar to starting a new quant hedge fund, you develop a novel trading strategy that works and sell it to customers. But competition in ad-tech is just like the financial markets - as soon as others see your strategy working, they are likely to copy it. Over time, the marginal advantages of better algos erode. Unless a startup continues to invest heavily in algorithm improvement, it will forever be in a cat-and-mouse game.

Better data: Where algorithms can be conquered, proprietary data is unassailable. With access to richer ad performance data, more detailed user data, more granular conversion funnels, your startup has created a significant barrier to entry. Better data means better results. And if you're the only game in town, then you'll attract big advertising budgets.

Getting access to better data is very challenging. It means finding and partnering with publishers and/or advertisers on an exclusive basis for some period of time. And then leveraging that data to build a successful DSP/SSP/ad network.

Market places in ad tech, as in the rest of the tech industry, are beautiful things. They are natural monopolies, capital efficient and are strategically valuable. Building a new ad tech market place is the most challenging way of entering the market because of the strategic role these products play in the ecosystem.

The most successful startup market places (RightMedia, Adap.tv, BlueKai, MoPub) each took advantage of a discontinuity in the market place (inventory glut, video ads, rich user data, mobile ads) to develop a foothold in the market faster than the incumbents. Over a few years, each of these companies built liquidity into their market places and now are the leaders in their segments.

The Recipes for Success

As the ad tech ecosystem has bloomed, competition has increased dramatically. To best position your new ad tech startup for success and develop a long term advantage, you need to develop leverage by developing proprietary data sources or by creating a market place based on some technology discontinuity. In other words, bring something to market that no one else has and that is difficult to copy.

Yahoo! (And) Music

2013-05-20T06:23:11-07:00

Maybe it's not that noticeable to most people, but it seems to stick out like a sore thumb that Yahoo doesn't have a music link on their front page next to movies and sports.

You can stumble around Yahoo and find Yahoo Music which offers a blurred hybrid of their OMG site and generic music keyword related articles. So why doesn't Yahoo list their music site on the front page even though there's little doubt that their music page gets substantially more traffic than most sites striving to cater to their music minded audience?

It's probably because it's a static reminder of the past. Yahoo and music have a strained relationship at best. For example, one of the few original blogs, 'Early Edition', hasn't been updated since September of 2010. Other tabs on the site like iheartradio and Spotify mostly serve as a pass-through to other destinations. There is just very little for this, still, giant company to brag about when it comes to music and music coverage.

Yahoo Music used to mean something in the industry, the place people first thought of to view music videos and listen to songs on their music service, but that time is only a distant memory in the way MySpace seems like it was from another lifetime.

Here's what I'd like to see Yahoo do with their prominent online space to further the music industry rather than contribute to the cruft of it.

What if Yahoo was to do something different than others were doing and make a meaningful impact? If Yahoo acquired someone like NoiseTrade.com – a site that helps artists exchange their music for fan's contact info (email address) – they would instantly create a music discovery destination while driving the limits of a new digital industry. The main idea behind NoiseTrade is that an email address and vague location (zip code) is more valuable in the long run, helping artists contact relevant and interested fans, than a few dollars from an anonymous listener does in the short term. Based on how NoiseTrade easily found an audience of artists (and labels) that believe in using recorded music to help promote shows and merchandise sales, this type of endeavor could quickly scale up to Yahoo's size.

NoiseTrade has built a music community around good will, something that's pretty rare today. Maybe that's why even though all the music on the site is available for free, the tips that fans voluntarily leave can become fairly substantial to an artist's bottom line. Not to mention the site has always been profitable and continues to grow.

Since AOL's recent shuttering of properties like Spinner, it would seem a bit foolish for Yahoo to go down the well worn path of typical music blogs. It would also seem that Yahoo's time to offer a full (modern) music service has passed with plenty of competitors covering most aspects.

Now that Yahoo has officially acquired Tumblr and continues to rebuild from a dated company into current and future relevance there's no reason music shouldn't be apart of their plan. Being apart of the future means doing something new, rather than simply tweaking the colors of a product everyone else is already selling. Whether that looks like NoiseTrade or something new like Twitter did to harvest people's music interest from their tweets, Yahoo desperately needs to reinvigorate their music offering before any influence is lost.

Disclaimer: I do occasionally contribute artist interviews to NoiseTrade's blog, but don't have any financial stake in the company.

Comprehending Deep Time

2013-05-19T12:53:13-07:00

Last year an important study on great ape generation length effectively doubled the amount of time since our divergence with chimpanzees and bonobos. Many evolutionary anthropologists now believe that the human-chimp-bonobo divergence occurred between 7-14 million years ago, as opposed to 6 million years ago (the larger range is the product of speciation being a long-term process, as opposed to immediate). And earlier this year the European Space Agency announced new data indicating our universe is 50 million years older than previously believed (from 13.77 to 13.82 billion years old). Both of these studies force us to reconceptualize our reality: the first challenges our interpretation of human evolution, and the second challenges our interpretation of the universe’s history and development.

But how can we best understand these numbers and reinterpretations?

Attempting to comprehend the unimaginably long stretch of time that preceded the present is something many scientists must confront. This usually poses incredible challenges because our minds have evolved to conceptualize time on scales of years, decades, and centuries; as opposed to time on scales of millions or billions of years. In fact, even conceptualizing the timescales of human civilization is quite daunting. For example, Ancient Egyptian civilization lasted from 3,000 B.C.E. to 332 B.C.E., which for context is 13 times longer than independent United States history.

Evolutionary biologist and paleontologist Stephen J. Gould dedicated his life to understand phenomenon on deep time scales. He stated that:

The human mind may not have evolved enough to be able to comprehend deep time. It may only be able to measure it. An abstract, intellectual understanding of deep time comes easily enough, getting it into the gut is quite another matter.

I understand (and respect) Gould’s opinion on this issue, but I slightly disagree. I do not think that an abstract, intellectual understanding of deep time comes easily. When I was in college I spent hours thinking hard about deep time. In order to improve my understanding of phenomena on these time scales I frequently relied on metaphor and varying time scale comparisons. I also read books about the history of the universe that detailed events in reverse chronology. I felt as though reverse chronology accounts of our past eased me gently into ever greater time scales. Once I had absorbed an understanding of phenomena that occurred on scales of millennia, it was far easier for me to absorb an understanding of phenomena that occurred on scales of hundreds of millennia. After applying this approach, it became progressively easier to view all events in our contemporary world from the perspective of cosmic time.

Applying this approach also helps to understand studies that alter the master narrative of existence like the two papers mentioned above. How should we approach an understanding of the new human-chimpanzee-bonobo divergence time and the new age of our universe? I would argue that for proper context we should consult one of the most important intellectual tools humans have developed to understand deep time: the Cosmic Calendar.

Astronomer Carl Sagan popularized the Cosmic Calendar in the 1980s. This calendar is used to map the entire lifetime of the universe, and all significant events, onto a single calendar year. By employing this calendar metaphor, the human mind is able to approach un-human time scales in a human format.

For the recalculated human-chimpanzee-bonobo divergence time we must now conceptualize a gradual split that occurred over a scale of 7 million years (14-7mya), as opposed to a relatively sudden split 6 mya. A speciation occurring over 7 million years is almost an unfathomably long period of time. Once modern humans had left Africa it took them ~50,000 years to colonize nearly every available landmass on the planet. That means the human-chimpanzee-bonobo speciation event took 140 times longer than human colonization of the entire planet!

On the Cosmic Calendar our previous understanding of the human-chimpanzee-bonobo speciation event occurred on December 31st at approximately 20:04 P.M. So with this framework the critical split leading to the evolution of humans occurred about 4 hours before the New Year! Under our new interpretation we can still imagine the split as occurring on December 31st. However, the key difference is that the split will be occurring over several hours: from 15:24-19:04 P.M. So the human emergence story is now occupying a slightly larger fraction of the famous Cosmic Calendar.

But let’s remember to put this in proper perspective. Biological evolution, and speciation specifically, can take millions of years. For the human mind this is nearly impossible to understand without a useful tool like a Cosmic Calendar. As I stated above, the speciation event between humans and our closest relatives took 140 times longer than the complete colonization of the planet. Yet we still only emerge on the last day of the universe’s time scale. Our distant hominid ancestors made it just in time for the New Year’s Party.

The universe’s age was also recalculated last week. For many people this may not mean very much. What is the difference between 13.77 and 13.82? This may seem like an inconsequential age extension of a universe we already knew was ancient. But let’s remember that 13.77 BILLION to 13.82 BILLION (~50 million years) is the difference between primates and no primates. Almost all of primate evolution, and certainly all-significant events within primate evolution, occurred within the last 50 million years! Approximately 50 million years ago, lemurs had yet to raft to Madagascar, New World Monkeys had yet to make their mysterious journey to South America, and apes did not exist at all!

The reason I discussed time scales related to great ape evolution (e.g., hundreds of thousands of years and millions of years) first was to ease you back into the world of billions. On the Cosmic Calendar the reimagining of a universe 50 million years older does not change very much: our galaxy still forms around the same time, as does our planet, and life, and all other significant developments in the history of our universe. This is because on the scale of the universe, 50 million years is comparable to a couple of months for a human. The equivalent of adding all of primate evolution to the Cosmic Calendar is inconsequential to the unimaginable expanse of cosmic time.

Why is this important to understand? Apart from being mind-bendingly cool and being a useful tool to help you understand scientific discoveries; it should also help you put your own life in context. Our entire order’s evolution is nothing on the temporal scale of billions of years. Our species emergence is but a preamble to the universe’s New Year’s Eve party. And modern civilization? We arrived a few seconds (13 seconds to be fair), before the ball dropped. When we start to discuss an individual’s life, we may be diving into the temporal scales of nanoseconds.

If those scales do not humble you, nothing will.

Discuss this on Hubski or let me know what you think on Twitter!

Why People Live

2013-05-18T21:46:20-07:00

This past week I learned that I have some incredible readers on this blog. No idea why you guys read this piece of shit. But I'm glad you do. Thanks.

As somewhat promised, here's a followup post to my Why Do You Live? post on Monday, featuring some of the fantastic responses from incredible readers.

First up, the fucking awesome Michelle Lara Lin, who I'm actually amazed I haven't met yet. How does everyone not know this ridiculously cool person already?

I can't admit I'm not biased in favoring this response because she's an absurdist too and runs a blog called The Stranger, because I am. But notwithstanding, she wrote a amazing post below interspersed with amazing pieces of artwork, so. Read it.

Hello Ben,

I've always loved reading your blog entries, but this Absurdist one was a delightful surprise. Camus is my favorite author. He turned my life around and gave me the strength to live and do all the things that I'd be afraid to do otherwise. So I am really excited to send you this email.

I wrote a long blog post called I'm scared of dying a long time ago. It was about overcoming the fear of death. It's a bit long, and I know you must be very busy. So in case you don't have the time to read it, I've prepared the TL;DR version:

Start:

I would think about death. I would be frightened over the thought that one day, my life would end… Everything that I worked for, everything that I built up would be gone. My life would be consummated without me, before my eyes, and ultimately, there would be nothing. Everything would disintegrate into this nothingness. That empty feeling, that nothingness, haunted me with sleepless nights and swollen eye bags. My parents were religious, and they offered it to me as a solace. My heart ached for a God. But I could never believe.

End:

I love life. And I do not believe that my life serves a purpose. I do not believe that my life has any meaning.

What do I live for? Why do I live?

I suppose I live to create and to fix things.

Creating: Nietzsche once wrote that we have art in order not to die of life. I think that is very true. Because in those moments when life becomes unbearable, you channel everything that is inconceivable, you channel all that emotional excess into art. I don't just mean conventional art (painting, sculptures… etc)– but even startups count too. Quotesome is the current “work of art” that I'm building.

Fixing things: I also see all these flaws with the world and I feel extremely itchy. I want to fix things. I can't stand that there are so many bad quote websites on the internet. I am outraged that women are still a flagrant minority in the tech world. I'm sick of double standards. I'm disappointed stigma surrounding mental illness. I can't sit around and accept things for the way they are. I am never content with the status quo. I really want to change the world.

Gaze your eyes upon Quotle, the adorable Quotesome Turtle. (I suspect that secretly everything Michelle said is bullshit and the real reason she gets up every day is to feed and cuddle with Quotle.)

Then go check out Quotesome, cause it's super cool.

Below is another fantastic response by Phillip Herndon, who wrote his own blog post in reply:

Hi Ben,

Your post on Svbtle the other day got me thinking. So much that I wrote something of my own

It's not a direct answer, but I play around with the question a bit. (It's a tough question!)

I definitely recommend checking out Man's Search for Meaning. It's stark, but optimistic in a way existentialism usually isn't.

Cheers,

Phill

I've been meaning to read MSM forever - this convinced me to up the priority on that. We pushed a bit back and forth here, and this is was my response:

I suppose the deeper question for me is always - why? In the absence of objective meaning, what justifies any subjective meaning we choose to have at any moment? For instance - why choose to be a teacher, or a student? It's generally a recursive question for me - whatever my answer is, I'll ask 'why' to that again. Ultimately, it seems we need to take something on its own merit as an axiom, and I've never discovered a satisfying enough axiom to base the meaning of my life on at any given moment.

And this was his great response to that:

Gotta push back on your why questions, though. If we start by agreeing that the universe is inherently absurd, it's kinda odd to hold ourselves to a different standard. Looking for moral axioms in an absurd world is a tough position to put yourself in!

You can look and see that generally people have a drive for meaning, as we have other drives. There's also a good argument, I think, that that meaning is not, cannot be, objective.

Asking why we choose one meaning rather than another is fruitless, though. As you point you we can always just ask why again. And any justification we come up with is likely to be post hoc.

We can go pretty deep with the whys, because humans are really good at dreaming up justifications and reasoning, but I don't think that means that all these things led to a decision. There's a lot of good work on social intuitionism, particularly some of Jon Haidt's stuff, that explores this a bit better than i could http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_intuitionism

I think that Frankl and Haidt might agree (going out on a limb here) that when picking a meaning in the moment the important thing is that it fits with your personal narrative and it satisfies your drive for meaning, not that it's an airtight axiom. After all, it can change as your experience with the world changes.

For some reason, that last bit about picking a meaning in the moment and having it fit with our personal narrative struck me particularly strongly, and actually persuaded me over to his line of thought and now I'm going to try to find that meaning that fits with my personal narrative right now. Thanks, man!

And then we've got a somewhat lighter answer (minus the immortality/making worlds bit) from my epic friend Jon Davis:

Yo Ben, responding to your blog post.

Most of my life goals, essentially the end game is to explore/create endlessly and get infinite enjoyment out of life.

Pre-living forever goals:

Find 5-6 close friends with similar goals and tackle life (or quick attack, aw yeah pokemon reference)

Learn 5-6 languages or effectively learn them all through technology.

Learn everyday

Make the world actively better is very significant ways.

and the big one, oh boy.

Live forever.

After living forever goals:

Master various strategy games, hopefully they involve multi-player VC worlds.

Create my own landscape, whether it be planets or virtual reality.

Adjust to do whatever you want, since you know, you live forever.

I guess the snippit would be to explore/create without end in every sense of those words. Or maybe just live forever and figure out the rest later :P

K, peace!

I love the bit about finding 5-6 close friends and tackling life together. Recalled to mind my reading about making our own tribes in Tony Hsieh's Delivering Happiness. Major kudos for that, and I'd love to make my own tribe.

Incidentally, Jon's looking for sweet peeps for his own hunting party of people, so if any of you guys seem to mesh unusually well with him, you should totally ping him up. He's a top 50 tournament poker player and pretty much kicks ass at life.

And to end since this is way long, here's an answer from France:

Hi Ben,

I have read your post with great interest..

I thought I could have something to share.

When I was about 16 years old I faced an existential crisis of sorts. I remember it very well. The night just before one of the final tests french pupils (sorry for my mediocre english, by the way) take at the end of highschool, I stayed awake several hours processing different things that had happened to me in the previous months, and wondered what was it all about… I had frequently wondered about “the meaning of life” before, but on that night I felt an urgent need to find a decent answer to that question.

At about 4 AM I decided it would be a good idea to fall asleep, and settled for a vague answer that let me unsatisfied: just try to leave to your children something “better” than what your parents left you, whatever the meaning of “better” may be. That was a somewhat darwinian, paternalistic idea.

In fact I simply wanted to “make the world better” though I disliked the apparent naiveness of that idea; doing it for my future children, and not for every future human being, sounded less vague. At times, I tried, without much hope to succeed to find a way to somehow quantify or rationalize things like welfare or happiness, because you can improve only what you can measure. I was bumping my head against a wall, and I knew it, but I wanted to give it a try.

But if life has no meaning, then why would your children care about what you leave to them? This reminds me of a post from Sergey Brin on Google +:

No place in the world has made me consider my place in the universe like Jellyfish Lake. Millions of creatures all drifting seemingly aimlessly, searching for light, for the energy to spawn so generations of their offspring may do the same years later. I take a small breath, sink toward the bottom, watching them in wonder and think are we really so different?

Of course nothing has any meaning at all, “meaning” is something our brain constructs.

With the theory of evolution and the big bang theory, any inquiry about the meaning of life will inevitably drift to the meaning of the universe and of the laws of physics. Why is there an universe? That's the super-size version of the “What's the meaning of life” question.

Perhaps this quest for objective meaning shows a part of us that likes to be told what to do, to follow a plan of action, to obey to an imperative.

Perhaps conscious beings are precisely what gives a (subjective) meaning to the universe, or different subjective meanings?

Ultimately there is no finality, nothing has any end. You can ace a test because it is built to be completed with respect to some metric - you can answer every question within time limits - but you will have “completed” it from only one point of view - you answered right every questions in time. Under another metric (say the number of correct answers divided by the amount of energy your brain consumed in the process, or just the time it took you to achieve your score) you can not say you've “completed” anything.

This reminds me of one of my favourite tweets from Neil DeGrasse Tyson:

“As the area covered by knowledge expands, so does the perimeter of ignorance.”

Everything we do just calls for doing more.

I've decided that I would be living mostly for experiences - entrepreneurship, creations of all sorts, leisures, travels. I want to have a great time.

I'm 22 now, and I hope I will be able to look back, in old age, and see my life as a story of continuous moral and intellectual improvement. Today the Internet allows one to witness the immensity of the world, in terms of both material and intellectual content. I try to fill my life with variety - variety of varieties: places, people, activities… And if I am lucky enough to make a large sum of money in the process,I would spend it to do something really cool, like building a libertarian settlement in Antarctic, or curing death.

Here is a quote I love from Francis Scott Fitzgerald:

“One should be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”

Huge fan of that post by Sergey Brin - major props for pointing that out. I want to go to Jellyfish Lake now.

Thanks y'all for the sweet responses.

Addendum: After publishing this, I woke up to find another email in my inbox, professing to be the counter to the 'positive' responses above. It's great to see a response from a somewhat jaded man who's already lived a good portion of life, in contrast with most of the perspectives published above.

Here's the honest albeit dark counter to the positive responses you mention in 'Why People Live'. As I can't be the only one with this mindset and/or experiences… please, if it'll help anyone, use it as you see fit.

Answering your 'Why?'

Because that's what you do.

I suspect your line of 'because we are alive now, and if we try not to think about it too hard, it's easier to just go along with the motions' nails it for most.

Even allowing for all the hopes and aspirations we nurture, it's a rut along which we glide or stumble for much of the time we're here when things aren't going to plan and we're not genuinely enjoying things.

Personally, as an overweight old man with glasses and no hair (currently working on a(nother) not-yet-launched startup - which this time I genuinely hope I'll stick with and/or not get sideswiped by divorce/ill-health or other external factors largely not of my doing and beyond my control), aware of a marked decline in physical and mental ability I'm trying to take care of some stuff I should have done years back but didn't and finally get myself onto a productive even course in which I earn enough to live sensibly and enjoy myself whilst being here to help family and appropriate others.

As a backstop, I find it's easier and less guilt-inducing than taking an early exit by suicide.

The backstory is simple…

In mid-99 a 19-year marriage imploded when my then-wife left unexpectedly and without notice. Having heartily thrown myself into and enjoyed 'being a family', the split removed nearly all perspective and meaning from my life… so much so that I totally failed to handle being sole parent to three teen kids and within months found myself briefly detained in a locked-door psych ward, taken there by police to prevent self-harm.

I shortly thereafter slotted into another relationship (it was welcoming to be wanted again), albeit one in which genuine mutual love wasn't enough to overcome often fiery incompatibility and after a turbulent 6-7 years it withered when the lady left the uk (that's where I'm based and we were living) to return to her native US to put her son through high school.

Because of a shortage of money and other things we each had to deal with in our respective families, plans to spend intermittent periods together were never actioned and we grew progressively distant. The formal end came in late 09 when I entirely accidentally was invited into a relationship with an attractive and lively lady 20 years younger than me. And again, it's not been smooth - despite great similarity in many areas, specific differences on one issue (her now-age-7 son) have been very problematic.

Whatever.

Amid all this, in recent years I've become jaded and frustrated through declining health (post-burnout chronic fatigue) which leaves me notably less-able to successfully pursue entrepreneurial ventures. The net effect is of adding to the frustrations of a life not-well-lived.

If I could go back and change things I would, but I can't and so I live with what I have and have done, trying to do what I still can to enrich (metaphorically and financially) the lives of my partner and family.

I've reached a point at which I now know that I'll never do some of the stuff I wanted to and perhaps genuinely still want to… even where desire remains the resolve has weakened. I'd be kidding myself if I genuinely thought I could meaningfully make the world better.

So yeah, I'm still working at getting things right even though I suspect I may not. I'm 'driven' (ha!) by a desire/need to serve those close to me and try to do something genuinely worthwhile which helps make the world a little better than had I simply sat back and thought 'fuck it!'.

And so, in my slightly-zen dotage I try to satisfy myself with 'do what you can with what you have to build this op right, earn enough to take care of those close to you', try to use whatever influence you have wisely to help foster wisdom and compassion in others, and enjoy the simple things.

Enough.

You asked, I answered.

Be happy, live well - it's a waste of a life not to.

Bye-bye.

;-)

I'd love to hear if this does 'help' or resonate with someone. Perhaps likeminded people can connect.

Further addendum: Apparently the responder above is a happy person after all! Good to hear.

A little postscript (if that's the right word)…

Hastily written and not reviewed or edited, as as written it might convey a wrong (and certainly incomplete) impression.

Overall, despite the obvious at-times downs expressed therein, I'm happy. I don't curse the sunrises and, in living a simple life, am quietly satisfied by being given more time here.

Ok, so an ongoing inability to sort my commercial matters leaves me short of the necessary money to cover food/essential expenses and a few frills, and frustratingly lowers my self-esteem. But things could be one helluva lot worse - and of course are for many many others.

Age and 'can't do that currently/any more' seems to bring other compensations, not the least of which is inner reflection as I tend to look back (and fondly remember) rather than forward (and dream/plan great moves). There's real enjoyment therein.

Sometimes I wish I was 25-35, and other times am glad I'm not. Perhaps obviously, 'life is what it is' and that's the how I live it, often sanguine although sometimes unreasonably melancholy.

And that's perhaps my one-liner point… it's not all good and it is ok to feel crap about stuff. Take the good with the bad and flow - enjoy the ups and try not to get to flattened by the downs. The time we get here isn't (or shouldn't) read like a triumph-over-adversity self-help tome.

As someone else once said… 'you gotta bleed a little while you sing, or the words don't mean a thing'.

Thanks.

We are Obsessed with Race, not Racism

2013-05-18T13:11:44-07:00

Our obsession with race has surpassed and perhaps even magnified our problems with racism in America.

Let me explain what I mean. Since I'm white, I can't speak to the personal experience of racism, and I wouldn't try to do so. As an American, I am part of a society that has made identity politics a most incessant and obnoxious trope, and I have observed that the more opposed to this drivel people get, the more the boundaries of politically acceptable discourse solidify to exclude them (or should I say, us). There are things that just can't be said anymore, things that we need people to say because without dissent, race politics becomes an orthodoxy, and orthodoxies are dangerous. That said, I have travelled to a very many places and interacted with a great deal of people of all backgrounds, ideas and identities. Almost every person I have met has been full of opinions about racism, despite the fact that few of them are people whom I would consider to be racist themselves. And I'm beginning to wonder if our obsession with race has reached a boiling point and we might need to rethink how we approach issues of race in this country before it boils over and causes some real problems.

For reference, I always look to South Africa, where I studied abroad, and to the particularly virulent, open racism that persists there 20 years after apartheid. In South Africa, everybody talks about race, all the time. It's talked about with an openness and frankness that is surprising to an untrained American ear. I think we can learn a lot from South Africans in how they openly confront their racist past and spend every waking minute talking about it—as a result, there are no secrets, no closet racists, no sinister feeling of power behind a veil of magnanimity. In South Africa, racists white, black, and coloured proudly declare their racism. It truly lays bare the shocking reality of racism: that it exists in droves, that it is self-perpetuating, that it results in bad justice, erosion of social cohesion, etc—these are things we know. But because South Africans talk about it so much, because they confront it and it is politically acceptable for public figures to say some of the most shockingly racist things, I found it oddly refreshing and somewhat hopeful. That maybe there is a post-racial future in South Africa after all.

But it is hard not to contrast the South African free discourse over race with our much more regimented, yet simultaneously boiling, discourse in America. We have confined ourselves to a very narrow and troubling politically correct discourse where the only thing it is permissible to talk about is how bad racism is and how racist white people are, and it has become completely impermissible to talk about the identity politics and tokenism which have resulted from this myopic obsession. As a result, the conversation about race and racism in America is troublingly one-sided. When I am engaged in a discussion about race, it is almost always about racism, the ism being the domain of racists and a racist society (depending on your worldview, this defines a relatively narrow or a very broad band of Americans). But in all this talk about racism, we are engaging in a more important discourse, a discourse on and around capital-R Race. The difference is that while “racism” can be easily used to segment the undesirables in our midst, race is considered not only an important preoccupation but a necessary one in order to combat racism, and thus race, not racism, is what enters the national consciousness and infects our discourse. In short, we no longer are obsessed with racists, we are obsessed with race.

What form does this obsession with race take in our society? We are racial compartmentalizers. We count minorities in positions of power and obsess over racial balance. We talk about racial “firsts” (first African-American so-and-so). We still can't decide on a good definition of Hispanic. We try to “fix” racism with countless race-specific philanthropies and entitlements. When we encounter people or public figures that challenge our assumptions about race, the we get cognitive dissonance and the discourse gets wrapped up in it. Black men like Herman Cain and Michael Steele were commonly derided as Uncle Toms during their pinnacles of influence. (This isn't just a racial problem—we even blame women like Marissa Mayer and Sheryl Sandberg for not being feminist enough, which is eerily similar to the time when Sarah Palin was being attacked by the feminist movement who apparently wanted a woman in power, but only a certain kind of woman.) This systemic compartmentalization is rampant. We castigate white people with success for ignoring and/or not admitting their privilege. We castigate “minorities” (I hate that word) with success for not doing more to help other minorities. In the latter case, it is very discomfiting to see the expectations of people when it comes to diversity unhinged on those who are providing solutions.

If there's ever a better exemplar of the problem of race in America, it's President Barack Obama. Obama is our first black president, but he's actually half black. It's interesting how his mixed racial heritage rarely gets as much attention as his blackness. It's as if there's an unspoken rule that being biracial is too confusing for a racial narrative. He must be black, or maybe conservatives wouldn't hate him as much, and he wouldn't be different than every president that came before. But he's also a possessor of a litany of American privileges that we usually associate with whiteness. He was raised in a white household by his white grandparents. He went to white colleges. How do we as Americans square that circle? Do we dare create a definition that challenges our inborn assumptions of race, or do we call him black and leave it at that? And if we have decided that a half-black man is either all black or all white, what sort of example is that supposed to set to mixed race children growing up in America, that they have to choose one or the other in order to have a place? Of course, if we make too much of a deal of his white heritage, we have also failed black kids in telling them that you can be successful if you're black, but only if you're actually white.

Our race discourse is about constantly deconstructing and reconstructing our racial narratives in order to make the most sense about ourselves. We all think about these things, even if we don't talk about it. We are conditioned from an early age to internalize notions of race and culture, to be aware of racism, to know our racist history, to understand it. We embrace “diversity” and engage in an uncomfortable amount of social engineering in order to achieve some utopian post-racial future. At the same time, we are conditioned to only speak about race in euphemisms, to avoid offending (which often means avoid discussing) and to tread lightly in the public sphere on the subject. We also are very happy to shut down discussion of race, especially by white people—an uncomfortable ad hominem lobbed at white people who dare to criticize identity politics in America.

A bigger challenge to egalitarianism is that we can't be satisfied as Americans all seeking for our piece of the American Dream. We can only be satisfied if every person fits neatly into a box on a census form and into a race coalition with its own community spokespeople. We need to conflate race and class, because the alternative is too unsettling. This is a problem because using “white” as a synonym for privilege ignores a very important factor of what constitutes racial “normality” in a society. It is fair to say that white people have a privilege in a white society. It is more accurate to say that X people have a privilege in an X society. Whatever X is in America, it isn't strictly white. There's a combination of looks, language, culture and history involved in X. There are plenty of white people with southern drawls who couldn't land a job on Wall Street even if they had straight A's. Our culture doesn't work like that. There are also plenty of black kids growing up in Fairfield County, CT who often act, talk, and subsequently succeed like any white kid growing up in the same circumstance. Incidentally, they are often accused of “acting white.” This is part of the problem: that we use such terminology speaks to a very sad conflation between race and class in contrast to America's multiracial, diverse reality.

X isn't necessarily the same thing as white, and indeed, if we want there to be any progress on the racial front, we have to insist that X shouldn't be white and it is possible, and desirable, to deconstruct the “white privilege” paradigm. This isn't unthinkable. The definition of “white” itself has changed in history. One of the more interesting books I read last year, Nell Irwin Painter's The History of White People, tells a fascinating story of how “white” has come to express different ethnic makeups in America. In the last 200 years alone, white has excluded, and then included in turn, people of German, Scandinavian and Irish origin. Imagine that in the late 19th century there was an entire contingent of scientists who didn't consider Nordic people to be white enough!

I would have to mention Michel Foucault at this point because the parallels of racial discourse in today's America to sexual discourse in yesterday's England are too obvious not to bring up. Foucault observes that the people whom we regard to be the most uptight about sexuality were the most obsessed with it. People who spent every waking minute restricting new sexualities and perversities and in doing so opened up sexuality to a whole new universe of intrigue in science, the law, and medicine, in what he calls the Perverse Implantation. Rather than sexuality becoming more subdued, it became more accessible, with the prudish Victorian discourse on sex merely a catalyst for an unprecedented interest in sex, and indeed, it is often misunderstood to have been prudish in the first place.

We have a similar situation in America with race: we spend every waking minute thinking about it and in doing so create more obsession. We can't get enough of race. Instead of pushing past racism, we are recycling racism into a new paradigm in which all facets of the racial puzzle are reconstructed, pushed into avenues of politics, art, science, the humanities, and thus continually re-examined, obsessed over. Call in the Racial Implantation. Instead of defeating racism, we are creating a new class of racists who, like the racists of old, believe their solutions to the race problem are progressive. They also tend to be inside an echo chamber where challenges to their outlook are deflected, often, ironically enough, with charges of racism.

Given these issues of race in our discourse, racism itself isn't surprising. I would be surprised to find myself in any modern society today without racism. It either is an extremely natural human instinct in complex societies, or it is going to be a very bad habit to break. I think everyone will disagree on the best “solution” to racism, the discussion of which I think may be part of the problem, but c'est la vie. You can't argue with the facts: America has racists, and whites sit at the top of the racial hierarchy. This makes a lot of people uncomfortable, including whites. White people, like myself, find it difficult to square their belief in an egalitarian society with the racial realities of our still predominantly white society. And that's something that we can and should address, and there are plenty of ideas on how to do so. But the first step to solving a problem is recognizing a problem. And the problem, I believe, needs to include our obsession with race. We need to realize that our race discourse has added to, and perhaps even compounded the racism problem. I would like to see racism become just one part of a larger discourse where we look at ourselves first and foremost as perpetrators of a perverse race logic. Only then can we really begin to address the dreams of a post-racial future.

Thanks to Danilo Campos and Frances Low for reading drafts of this.

The Future of Human Data Interaction

2013-05-17T09:19:31-07:00

On the day of Tableau's IPO, a company known for innovating in data visualization, I thought I would share the most impressive HCI concept I've seen in a long time.

In my view, Bret Victor is on the forefront of human computer interaction design. In the first two or three minutes of this video at Stanford, he demonstrates his home-built software that combines data analysis with visualization. It's magnificent and really hard to describe because it's so novel.

Drawing Dynamic Visualizations from Bret Victor on Vimeo.

Victor uses words to create and manipulate the drawing and it all seems so natural and fluid. The interaction with the software evokes a conversation between two designers over a piece of paper - which is exactly the kind of interaction that makes software seem human and natural. I hope we see an explosion of these types of tools in the future.

Have you seen other great examples of human computer interaction? Let me know on Twitter about them.

Designing the Whole

2013-05-17T07:13:42-07:00

When you first launch a product, pretty much every feature you add is (or at least should be) key to achieving your larger vision. You add new modules, pages, sections, overlays and form fields to strengthen and shore up your initial MVP. And, by and large, most of those additions stick. Your users are happy that the beta product they were using is getting all core functionality you promised and you're happy to see your baby start to grow up a little and walk on its own.

Then you decide to try out adding a feature that wasn't on the initial roadmap. And, just like before, you give that feature its own page, its own section, its own overlay, its own form field. Your muscle memory from the last few months of frantically designing and building your product tells you that's the easiest and simplest way to get something out the door and see if it works. You push the code to production and, hey, people are using that feature. Awesome!

Then you add another. With its own page, its own section, it own overlay. Then another. And another. And another.

A year later you have a navigational menu as long as your arm. Single-purpose pages. Multiple overlays on a single page. Five CTAs on a single screen. In short, you have a mess. Totally by accident.

As designers, it's our job to recognize when our products are being built additively, to step back from that single feature we're designing and ask how it fits into the overall vision and structure of the system. To design the whole instead of the part.

Every time we add a feature, we're trading in attention and traffic from another feature. Every new screen or form field decreases focus and adds noise. Sometimes adding a little noise is the right thing to do. Other times we should make a trade-off, subtracting pieces from one part of the system in favor of the new. And still other times it's our job to say no, that new feature or new copy or new form field just doesn't make sense as part of the holistic user experience. It's that intuition, empathy, and expertise that makes design valuable. And it's only through that lens that the products we build can truly sing.

Y Combinator

2013-05-16T17:24:38-07:00

From the official Y Combinator blog:

We also have five new part-time partners: Michael Seibel, Steve Huffman, Dalton Caldwell, and Andrew Mason. As the name suggests, part-time partners advise startups like regular partners, but part-time. Michael was cofounder of Socialcam (YC W12) and now works at Autodesk, which acquired it last year. Steve is cofounder of Hipmunk (YC S10) and before that was cofounder of Reddit (YC S05). Dalton is cofounder of App.net and before that was cofounder of Imeem. Andrew was cofounder of Groupon and till recently its CEO. We've known all these guys for years and we can already tell it will be great to work with them.

I'm proud to say that I have accepted a “part-time partner” role at Y Combinator. I have known PG & Jessica for years, and have tremendous respect for them. The upshot of taking this role is that I'm going to be spending a few hours a week helping out YC companies.

Given that running App.net is a full-time job, I had to carefully weigh the pros and cons of taking on an additional time commitment. After consulting with my co-founder and some of my advisors, I came to the conclusion that spending this time with early-stage startups will make me better at my job at App.net.

Specifically, the #1 thing we can do at App.net right now is ensure that we're building the best social platform for developers creating the next big thing. As PG has put it, understand your users. I like to think that being exposed to this many startups will help keep me honest.

I look forward to getting to know more of the YC community, learning as much as possible, and (hopefully) offering some useful advice and perspective.

mighty and napoleon are as important as google glass

2013-05-16T17:00:24-07:00

Last week, Adobe unveiled a smart stylus (codename Mighty) and a diminutive digital ruler (Napoleon). If you're interested in the future of interaction — if you've been paying attention to Google Glass, for example — you should be thinking about what Mighty and Napoleon have the potential to become.

Glass and Mighty/Napoleon aren't products, yet. (Though Glass is getting close.) But Google and Adobe have lots of credibility. Both companies consistently ship great products. With Glass and Mighty/Napoleon, both companies are aiming to do more than just iteratively improve currently available technologies. In different ways, Google and Adobe are trying to shrink the gap between digital and analog experiences in everyday life.

Here's Michael Gough's video demo of Mighty and Napoleon.

The hardware design here is really lovely. The stylus has three sides, with softened edges and a twist along its length. The ruler is sized for use on an iPad, with tool buttons in the center and graspable areas on either end.

The software is innovative and impressive, too. Adobe's been working on this stuff for a while. Elegant, pressure-sensitive drawing. Integration with the Adobe cloud. Lines and arcs that combine the physical input from the hardware with digital capabilities like snap-to guides and repetition of previous geometries. There's noticeable lag when drawing, but that's a limitation of the iPad. I'm hoping that efforts like Mighty will prove to manufacturers of tablets and phones that it's worth working hard to lower input latency. (I'd also like to see some other improvements to touch screen core technology, but that's another post.)

As Michael says in the video, the magic is in the combination of hardware and software. More and more, that's true for all our digital devices. It's certainly true for Glass, which is an ambitious attempt to shrink and productize display, communications, and interface hardware, and which will also require an almost completely new software interface design.

In one important way, Glass and Mighty/Napoleon are mirror images. The Glass world is a virtual space – a display only you can see. Glass is an always-on, private, virtual overlay on top of the real world. Mighty and Napoleon are tactile, physical, and shared. They're a real-world extension of and overlay on your tablet's digital environment.

These two approaches are complementary and they're two of the most important building blocks for the next generation of computing experiences. The promise of Glass is, I think, fairly obvious. The promise of the digital/physical hybrid approach that Mighty and Napoleon represent is not yet quite as well understood. But think about it this way: we're very, very good at using our hands. We're good at using tools. We're good at manipulating, leveraging, reasoning about, sharing and showing physical objects. If all our interfaces are entirely virtual, we're ignoring all those skills and affordances.

The iOS interface taught us to use our fingers to directly manipulate pixels. But as a species, we're tool-users. Mighty and Napoleon give us tools that extend what our hands can do by themselves. You won't always use a pen and a ruler, but when you need a pen and a ruler, your fingers aren't good substitutes. Steve Jobs famously said, “if you see a stylus, they're doing it wrong.” But I'd argue that if you see a stylus done wrong, they're doing it wrong. Getting a stylus interface right – hardware and software, both – is hard (just like getting a multi-touch interface right was hard). But Adobe's demos are a pretty good argument that they're on the right track.

Work on “wearable computing” and physical, spatial interfaces goes back many years. As it happens, wearables and spatial interfaces were both pioneered at the MIT Media Lab, at around the same time.

I first saw Brad Rhodes and Thad Starner using systems like the Remembrance Agent in 1996. It was completely clear, watching what the wearables folks were doing, that one day we'd all use the descendants of their nifty, home-brew hardware and software

And around the same time, John Underkoffler was showing off room-sized spatial interfaces, complete with multi-surface work environments, object tracking, and tools like Napoleon.

The important idea here is that these two approaches — the virtual and the physical, as well as augmenting reality and using real-world tools to extend our digital environments — are siblings. They're two sides of the same coin. Two components of the future. They grew up together and now they're about to go mainstream together. Fun stuff.

Currents Decide Where Jellies Go

2013-05-16T16:04:44-07:00

The team at Jelly just raised their Series A. Here's why I'm squeamish:

With this capital raise, Jelly has the means to hire more great talent and continue building what we think of as the natural next step for our connected society. We will share more about Jelly from a product perspective when we move beyond early prototyping.

The quote reminds me of the dot com bubble, when companies and experienced entrepreneurs raised good money (on nothing but hypotheses) to bring a product to market, and demise.

Haven't books like The Startup Manual, The Lean Startup, and Running Lean taught us that “If we build it, that doesn't necessarily mean they will come”?

David Cohen definitely taught me as an entrepreneur, my assumptions are wrong, and Paul Graham repeats, “Code and talk to users” like a prayer.

Jelly's approach breaks nearly every rule of The Customer Development Manifesto. It makes me cautious.

And to beat my case into the ground, look at Color.

Jelly has a great team, and awesome investors (read SV Angels' David Lee's content here), but Evan Williams has to focus on Medium, Jason Goldman on Branch, Jack Dorsey on Square, and Reid Hoffman on all the other cool shit he does, (like supporting Questbridge, the awesome organization responsible for my full-ride to Brown). And yes, they'll mentor and advise, but no entrepreneur knows the answer. Only customers and feedback reveal that.

I know Biz rocks at marketing, has a great background, and guided Twitter to where it is today. But was he the one iterating Twitter in the early days to find a compelling value proposition?

I hold no doubt that once Jelly becomes public, it'll rise and gain traction, but that traction won't be organic. It'll derive from Jelly's PR and not from its value proposition. Jelly's metrics will be skewed, and it'll have to wait until the buzz dies to acquire actionable data for its inevitable pivot.

And when it decides to pivot, two things will slow it down. First, its funding. Large amounts of capital provides a cushion that results in staying on the wrong trail for too long. Secondly, its large user base. Making large pivots, plenty difficult as is, becomes more so when angry users are in the picture.

I'd stick to the customer development model any day.

Don't believe me? Check out these other Svbtle posts by much smarter people.

The New Stealth

Don't Launch Your Product

Early Stage Marketing

Startup Launch Pr

Tell me what you think on Twitter

Learn what we teach the teams in Brown Venture Labs

Chrome's requestAutocomplete()

2013-05-16T10:05:08-07:00

Another Google I/O, and another raft of awesome products. One announced API that I'm particularly excited about is requestAutocomplete(), a feature which is landing in Chrome Canary for Windows and Mobile (with OSX support coming shortly). What this API does, in a nutshell, is give you programatic access to autocomplete (or autofill) data.

Autocomplete was originally designed to make it quicker to fill out forms, but what if we could remove the forms altogether! Back in June I proposed just such an API - a way to programmatically retrieve autofill data stored in the browser. The proposal has evolved, improved, and is now going to be baked into future versions of Chrome.

What does it look like? Essentially it involves calling requestAutocomplete() on a form element. The form doesn't necessarily need to be shown to the user, but the browser uses it to detect which input types to autocomplete.

<button id="checkout">Checkout</button>  

<form id="payment" hidden>
  <input autocomplete="cc-name" name="myname">
  <input autocomplete="cc-number" name="ccnumber">
  <input autocomplete="cc-exp" name="ccexp">
</form>

<script>
  (function(){
    var form = document.getElementById('payment');
    var button = document.getElementById('checkout');

    if (!("requestAutocomplete" in form)) return;

    button.addEventListener('click', function(){
      form.requestAutocomplete();
    });

    form.addEventListener('autocomplete', function(){
      // The form contains the data. We could either submit it, or read the data
      form.submit();
    });
  }).call(this);
</script>

Once requestAutocomplete() has been called, a permissions info dialog will be displayed by Chrome, prompting the user to share their information with the page.

What does this mean in practice? It means that we can replace most forms with two-click signups and two-click payments, dramatically improving usability and conversion rates.

The fact that most people already have autofill data already in Chrome, and that Chrome is an evergreen browser automatically updating itself, should mean adoption of this API will be swift. Once businesses see improved conversion rate data (something we're working on demonstrating), then integrating with this API should be a no brainer. My hope is that other browser vendors will follow suit and also implement support.

You can find the preliminary API docs on chromium.org.

Coding and Cooking: The Connection between Jacques Pepin and Database Migrations

2013-05-16T07:25:27-07:00

When I was a little boy, I watched a cooking show on Sundays called “Jacques Pépin.” Over the course of 30 minutes, Jacques would orchestrate a symphony of raw ingredients into a dish that I yearned to smell and taste. That chicken paillard looked sumptuous.

Over the past few weeks, I've been coding in Rails 3 quite a bit, building a collection of tools to be more effective as a VC. And oddly enough, I think back to Jacques Pepin quite often.

The Jacques Pepin of the Rails world is Ryan Bates, creator of RailsCasts. Watching Ryan's shows I've learned how to build AJAX search, deploy an identity management system and code beautiful charts in ten minutes each.

There's something intoxicating, exciting, and liberating about watching someone convince you of your capacity to perform a seemingly challenging feat, whether cooking or coding, by showing you how easy it is to do. It's a testament to the power of video in teaching.

Buttressing Bates' tutorials, StackOverflow has become my essential tech support community. Paste an error message into Google and the first link is bound to contain a fellow coder's struggles and eventual solution to the problem I'm now facing.

The combination of tutorial expert video and support community is immensely powerful because it shares the expertise of a master with many while scaling the support and help needed by a mass audience. I believe this form of teaching will become ubiquitous for this reason. It's already happening in coding with Railscasts and StackOverflow, university education with 2U, gaming with Machinima and many others.

Jacques Pepin never did tell me how I botched that homemade mayonnaise. But there's someone on the web who has watched the same episode, made the same mistake and found a solution who might.

Genius of our time

2013-05-16T05:11:39-07:00

Bret Victor's latest presentations Stop Drawing Dead Fish and Drawing Dynamic Visualizations are breathtaking to say the least.

At a macro level, a prototyping tool like the one Bret Victor demoes is a game changer for 2 reasons:
- It dramatically shortens development time
- It allows to reach the overview stage faster

When building software, you usually spend (waste) a lot of time iterating. Designing and coding the very same screen again and again until you reach a point where it is satisfying.
When you get there, you usually realize that all this cascading views you created need some additional work for your application to be consistent as a whole.
It's a painful process because it doesn't matter how good you are, it remains sequential: design / code / test / iterate.

That's why companies like Facebook extensively use Quartz Composer. Getting as close as possible to the first version of an application in the design phase lets you minimize engineering time, iterations and balance the workload between engineers and designers.

However, be it Quartz Composer, After Effect, web technologies, the hundreds of web-based prototyping tools available or even Keynote, they're all inappropriate.
They only partially solve the problem because they only allow partial prototyping. You can flesh out a few transitions and animations but you can't see the whole picture and reach the point where you realize there is an obvious simpler solution. The obvious simpler solution can only occur to you when you reached what I would call the overview stage.
That's when the first fully working iteration of your software is in your hands. It is usually the moment where the magic happens in software, when you have a chance to go from good to great. Iterate one more time or leave it as it is because it is good enough.

By reaching the overview stage before any line of code is typed, the dynamic drawing app not only shortens development time thus engineering resources but also provides designers with an early global vision on their work and how all the piece fit together. It gives them a chance to iterate without code and keep control on the design.

From experience, my real work at Sparrow mainly consisted in optimizing engineering resources by making the good calls design-wise. Unfortunately, it means design always comes second and is highly dependent on the development's pipeline. Not much room for experiments.

The true value of Victor's tool is to be found at the micro level.
The real waste when building software, apart from inevitable lost coding days, is aborted design ideas.

As toolmakers, we have to do everything we can to get pictures out of people's head and into the world […]. If people are thinking in picture, we can't force them to take a detour through symbols to get to their picture

Today, a designer in charge of making a software engaging, understandable, easy to use and pleasurable has no direct control over the implementation details and no precise knowledge of what's really possible.
Here, I am just talking the usual designer day-to-day routine of refining interactions and interface.
Innovating when you have no control or deep understanding of how things work behind the scene is almost impossible. Imagine coming up with the pull-to-refresh idea with no programming background.

The only way for a designer to control the implementation details is to stand over the programmer's shoulder and fine-tune what he's building. This requires patience on both sides and time, a resource many small companies don't have. Design remains mediated.
The other way out is to be Loren Brichter and master both design and code. Unfortunately, this is pretty rare. This explains why most software usually end up being good enough or ok but not great despite considerable efforts.

The dynamic drawing tool transfers power (and responsibility) from the engineer (back) to the designer who is finally able to control all parameters and deliver a fully alive drawing of what he wants. He is not in a position where he's stuck approximating anymore. He can flesh it out from the beginning to the end.
This makes a huge difference.

From blindly manipulating symbols = programming, we're on the verge of being able to draw the living picture in our heads.

Bret Victor is this close from offering designers the tool they've long stopped dreaming of. It is his revolution.

FYI: there is one last presentation to be released on May 28 Media for Thinking the Unthinkable, be sure to watch it and get your mind blown.

I Hate Motivational Anythings.

2013-05-15T21:31:09-07:00

I was invited to yet another motivational meetup to “help me reach my dreams”.

I didn't go. I've never been. I'll never go. Here's why:

If you can't get off your ass when it is still a perfect dream in your head, when the world hasn't shit on it six different ways you never imagined, when you haven't even written down the idea and not only realized it isn't that great but that it doesn't even make sense, when it's just you and the whiteboard, look out because this is the moment it is easiest.

It only gets harder from here. If you need something to help you do the easiest part then you are in big trouble.

If you find yourself beating around the bush of your 'dream' but never making any real headway, still working at your day job, never becoming emotional about the problem you are trying to solve I have some Hard Facts Lunch Club for you[1]:

Don't get up. Don't do it. This isn't your dream.

A workshop wont save you. An app won't save you. An executive coach won't save you.

The only thing that will save you is yourself. The same you that should have stood up and started cranking already. The same you will put it all on the line against hundeds of uninformed arguments. The same you that will look your friends in the eye as they write you checks. The same you that will finally meet your hero only to have them slam their fist on the table and shout “I will never fund a company like this in my life. I swear to god, not a dollar of my LPs money, not a cent of mine!' The same you that will meet people smarter and younger and better funded than you working on the same idea with more traction at 2am at a bar at SXSW.[2]

The point is this: If you can't do it when its easy, what makes you think you can do it when its hard? It gets really, really, terribly hard. Failure is hard. In startups, even success is hard!

If you want to do a startup as a journey for self-fulfillment, happiness or monetary success, I'd recommend riding your bike across New Hampshire.

The only reason to do a startup is because you are completely and totally consumed not just with ideas, but actions. Because you can't help staying up all night just to make that next meeting perfect. Because you learned to code since you couldn't find someone to join you yet and had to get it out there.

You don't need motivation. You need a reality check.

[1] Follow me on twitter @aten and I'll invite you to HFLC. Mr. @ReillyBrennan and I are overdue for another one. You can only tell the truth. The real truth. No matter what.

[2] These all happened to me while working on Swift.fm, my last startup acquired in Jan 2012.

Google Goes Subscription With Google Play Music All Access

2013-05-15T13:14:36-07:00

Google joins the streaming subscription game with their updated music service All Access, competing against Spotify and Rdio. Though new and shinny, don't expect much from the service, at least not initially.

As intriguing as a music subscription service from Google may seem, there are plenty of reasons why you shouldn't get your hopes up without a healthy dose of skepticism to match. A few years back, also an I/O announcement, Google unveiled the first Google Music which has since turned out to be a huge dud, more than anyone could have predicted. At the time, the climate was such that Google was joining Amazon to provide a music locker of a users uploaded music library, a way to get around the need for licensing music in the cloud. Ultimately though, very few cared to jump through the amount of hoops needed to integrate the service into the way they listened to music.

Rumors of a 'confirmed Google music subscription service' spread just a day before the announcement with the biggest news being that they'd gotten all the major music labels onboard. Pricing is set at $9.99/month, with those signing up in the first month getting access for $7.99/month. Unlike Spotify, Google Play Music All Access currently has no free tier. There is a 30 day free trial available.

The biggest issue Google faces with their music initiatives, and reason to be skeptical, is that they're always competing against the rumors of what other companies may or may not be doing, primarily Apple. They tend to swing in the dark with things they think they should be doing, rather than having a clear path and reason for getting into music in the first place. Google's All Access experience on day one is similar to the day before, that's to say it's Google Music just with access to music outside your personal library. There's the obligatory radio service that tries to guess what songs you'll like, along with the ability to swipe those you don't care for out of the playlist. There's nothing more compelling than the service you currently use. This effort also won't convince those not already using a music subscription service.

Google Play Music store has done little to nothing to further music sales. Their Artist Hub is a bold and brilliant move for independent artists, but no one takes advantage of the service. The opportunity for unsigned artists to sell directly through Google Play could be a huge win, yet most still opt for Bandcamp or other services. Independent artists currently selling through Google Play Music can indeed flip a switch and allow their music to easily show up in All Access.

If the only thing Google brings to the table with this move into subscription music, is the threat of competition, it will have been worth it. They just can't do the bare minimum with features and apps, however, and expect to gain any traction in a difficult space. Currently the only option to share a song is through Google+, demonstrating some of the out-of-touch thinking going on with Google and music.

Social Network Alchemy: The Five Ways of Turning Users Into Gold

2013-05-15T05:04:15-07:00

Derek Powazek questions the intrinsic economic viability social networks in his post “What If Social Networks Just Aren’t Profitable?”. It's a logical question to pose in the aftermath of the Digg sale and the wobbly Facebook IPO.

There is one clear lesson from Digg's sale: the technology that powered a once-massive social network is worth about $500,000.

The Big Digg Lesson

The Atlantic summed up the essence of of social networks' business models brilliantly. It's not the technology that's intrinisically valuable, but the activity on the network that attracts users and advertisers and produces a data by-product. Once users commit to a network, the network must develop a revenue model based upon the content created by the users. In so doing, social networks can generate huge revenues quite profitably.

But these networks don't all go to market the same way. Below is a draft taxonomy of social network revenue models. Comments welcome.

Media Social Networks (MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest) - Media networks' primary insert ads into the experiences of potential customers. MySpace generated hundreds of millions of dollars by selling home page take overs and remnant ads. Facebook generates billions by providing more granular targeting across a much larger user base. Leafing through the pages of history, this is no different than the business of phone books: create a listing of people's name and contact details and businesses will soon follow paying for inclusion. To date, ad dollars have formed the largest fraction of social network revenue dollars. Pinterest is a bit different in that advertisers will be able to drive transactions directly from whatever advertisement or sponsorship products Pinterest builds. But this is still a media business, just with a performance oriented advertiser base.

Data By-Product Social Networks (LinkedIn, PatientsLikeMe) - Data by-product social networks offer free services to the main user base but sell some data product to a different customer set. LinkedIn and PatientsLikeMe have cultivated vibrant communication networks. To generate revenue, they collect, filter, serve and sell the data users create to interested parties: recruiters and professional networkers in the first case and pharmaceutical companies in the second case.

Premium Subscription Social Networks (Yammer, AxialMarket, Gerson Lehrman Group, XBox Live, World of Warcraft, Dating Sites) - Sometimes access the community is valuable enough to the end user to warrant charging a monthly subscription. Yammer charges for secure, managed enterprise social networks. Axial collects fees from financial professionals to access user created deal flow. GLG collects fees to access subject matter experts. Gaming networks like XBox Live and World of Warcraft offer matchmaking and game hosting services. Dating sites offer access to a network of candidates for a fee and often will charge for relevant digital goods or rights to communicate with other members.

Pro Bono Social Networks (Chat, Email) - Email hasn't generated much revenue since the days of dial-up when a subscription to Aol included an email address and chat account. Email and chat have since become commodified and are operated at or near a loss, ideally winning user loyalty on behalf of adjacent properties. If you use GMail, you'll likely use Google.com more often.

Freemium Social Networks: (Line) It's hard to argue with Line's strategy of virtual goods and stickers. Line's 150M users spent nearly $60M on these goods in Q1. By leveraging a network effect and capitalizing on its users' desires to express emotion and individuality, Line has grown tremendously.

To Be Determined Social Networks (FourSquare, Tumblr, Quora, Instagram) - For many of the newest social networks, revenue models are still nascent. Discovering the most natural form of monetization within a community is challenging. Some networks never need to find it (Instagram). Others spend years searching for it. Perhaps this group's revenue models will fall into the above categories. Or perhaps they will create a new form of revenue model.

Social networks have only existed for about 7 years. In that time, we have witnessed the growth of a few hegemonies and scores of niche players. We have retrofitted revenue models from previous eras of Internet businesses. But the data quality and density found in social networks are unlike most other computer systems. Networks are still exploring the alchemy of converting social media data to gold. One day, it will be a science.

US Healthcare is an Embarrassment

2013-05-14T14:47:40-07:00

We often hear that America spends an exorbitant amount of money on healthcare, but people rarely stop to think how much it is or what that means. In 2011, the United States spent 17.9% of its GDP (over $2.6 trillion) on healthcare.

That number is insane.

To give it some context, our peers in the 18% range are Liberia and Sierra Leone. In the 10-11% range are countries like France, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Portugal and New Zealand. Down closer to 7-8% are Uruguay, Croatia, Hungary, Chile, Cyprus, Bulgaria, Vietnam, Poland, and Turkey. Between 3-5% are countries including Singapore, Sri Lanka, United Arab Emirates, Algeria, India, and Thailand.

We spend about $8,800 per citizen, which is surpassed only by Switzerland, Norway, Luxembourg (which all have higher per capital incomes), and is more than double what most of the developed world spends.

If we could cut spending by just 1% of GDP, that would save us over $150 billion per year. Cutting 7%, getting us in line with our peers in the developed world, would save over a $1 trillion per year.

This is a graph I constructed with data I pulled from worldbank.org, plotting life expectancy at birth against a country's healthcare expenditure as a percentage of GDP. Why is the United States sitting at the intersection of the developed world and Liberia and Sierra Leone?

What this graph doesn't show is that these costs are running away. We spent 17.9% in 2011 compared to 16.6% in 2008, and all experts predict this number will continue growing.

Obviously, life expectancy is a rough indicator of the effectiveness of a healthcare system and there are a lot of conflating factors. But you'd expect this most basic goal of healthcare - keeping people alive - to improve with higher expenditure.

An endless list of problems

Moral hazard is a huge part of the problem; the third-party payer system is crippling our economy. When medical bills are footed by insurance companies the pricing system gets completely out of whack.

Drug companies charge $50,000 for a single chemotherapy treatment, an IV drip whose cost is defended by years of research and development. An MRI in the US can cost anywhere between two and eight thousand (good luck finding out exactly how much) - in France, by comparison, it costs a few hundred.

A single-party payer system, or more pejoratively, “nationalized healthcare”, has drawbacks. For example, wait times for elective treatment go up (just ask a disgruntled Canadian), and the government has to become integrally involved, which Americans tend to react negatively to (despite the fact that the data says it's better in almost all dimensions).

But the truth is that there's good reason for healthcare to be nationalized. I'm no great liberal; I am all for taxing cigarette smoking, motorcycle driving, and maybe even obesity. But why do people not see that healthcare is one of the few areas that makes sense - theoretical, academic, and practical sense - to have a highly involved government?

Healthcare is an inherently irrational market, where patients routinely act based on emotions rather than logic, and where the costs of decisions made by one person fall on someone else's shoulders. Externalities run high, payoffs and outcomes are unclear at best, and the philosophical backdrop for the whole system is closer to liberty than to capitalism. Everything about my economics degree tells me this is the textbook entry point for government.

Aside from the system itself, the worst offenders are probably insurance and pharmaceutical companies. But doctors are not without blame either. Hospitalized patients feel incredibly price inelastic (since the money doesn't come out of their pocket) and will pay for basically whatever their doctor recommends. Even the best-intentioned doctors may tend to recommend treatments that are more expensive and will give them a bigger payout, especially if they think that treatment is marginally more effective (and not all doctors have the best intentions).

Despite our obscene healthcare expenditure, almost 50 million Americans still don't have health insurance. Why do we have the general understanding that free speech, gay marriage, and social equality are part of a civilized and compassionate society, but somehow universal healthcare is not? We all agree that everyone has the right to food, water, and air; why do we draw the line before basic medicine and healthcare? As a worldview, I think it's barbaric.

And why are we still on a system where healthcare is tied to employment? This is a 70 year old mechanism that was installed during World War II to avoid regulations on wages and prices. This worked well back then, when employees stayed at one company for decades or life. Today's average American changes jobs a dozen times over a career, and so tethering healthcare to employment makes little sense. When Americans lose their jobs, they and their families are taken out of the healthcare system, which becomes a complete mess when they have preexisting conditions (although Obamacare is slated to fix this).

What can be done?

At this point you can probably guess that I support nationalized healthcare, but I recognize that that won't happen. There are too many people in positions of authority that are incentivized to block this change. Even more difficult to overcome is the national sentiment of “this is America where we work to buy our own healthcare, leave socialism to those lazy Canadians.” These self-described capitalists apparently refuse to look at healthcare data in the rest of the world.

We can still make meaningful changes within the system. We can figure out how to align incentives so doctors and drug companies aren't incentivized to over-treat patients (or, more sinister, prevent the cure of profitable diseases). We can address the tricky problems with end of life care, which drain hundred of billions of dollars per year to keep many patients miserable and bed-ridden. We can change regulations for pharmaceutical companies, create clearer pricing schemes at hospitals, and reduce friction throughout payment systems. America's obesity is clearly a huge part of the problem, but regulating calorie consumption doesn't go over well (thanks for trying Mayor Bloomberg).

I also think there are new innovations on the way that could dramatically change healthcare costs. Real-time blood monitoring, where an implant in your bloodstream could send a notification to your iPhone when something was wrong, promises to reinvent preventative medicine (which admittedly has its own set of problems). Software technology companies are in the process of streamlining and automating healthcare systems, which will save billions.

Right now, I think the most important thing we can do is begin a cultural shift to make people care about the problem of healthcare expenditure, which begins by articulating the issues. It's lucky that we live in a country where popular consensus dictates policy, but it's a shame that Americans don't know enough to fight for substantive changes.

The New Stealth

2013-05-14T12:07:57-07:00

The next big hit may not have been written about in Techcrunch or discussed on HackerNews yet but could be secretly live right now in the AppStore or on the web.

Buying Facebook ads in Ohio. A/B testing designs, content and flows in the Philippines. Creating shell companies to submit test apps under. Companies you know may have amazing products you will love available to you right now but you've never heard of them.

Welcome to the new stealth.

Companies used to go stealth to keep their competitors guessing, but recently stealth has fallen out of vogue. Customer development and lean philosophy value feedback and data over PR hits so fewer companies spend years getting ready for the big launch.

But when you are well known or well funded, releasing incomplete or beta projects can be a disaster. Bad reviews can distract a team. Bad metrics can scare investors. Whether internal or external the bar for quality is so high its hard to release a product you aren't completely proud of.

So why not do both? By launching without any press, releasing in secondary markets or testing publicly under fake names allows companies to learn about their products while still keeping their option to use press to drive adoption of a beautiful high quality product in a classic launch.

Another benefit of the new stealth is it allows you to truly test organic growth. Without coverage or association you can truly see your products' viral adoption, test recruitment channels and optimize conversion funnels on their own. The new stealth can give you clean data uncluttered by people outside your customer base driven to your site by tech press.

Finally, use of product at scale can help ensure all aspects of your tech are functioning correctly before you hit the front pages of the tech-web. Nothing compares to 10,000 or 100,000 people using your service to make sure it actually works.

Better products, optimized distribution and use at scale all before “launch” are driving adoption of the new stealth. That means the next big thing may already be out there, if only you knew where to look.

Those who teach...

2013-05-14T09:09:21-07:00

I was broke in college. I remember giving a friend a ride once to Chicago because we both had internship interviews there, and I had a car. It's a 2.5 hour trip, and I was on empty, so we stopped to get gas. When I went to pay, I found my credit card maxed out. The ATM was useless. I had $3 in my checking account.

F me.

So you'll understand, when I applied to be a Chemistry teaching assistant (TA) my Senior year, it wasn't for the love of teaching. It wasn't for the love of Chemistry. I just wanted the free tuition and stipend it paid.

And I thought, “It won't be too hard. I have to teach once a week, and hold a couple office hours, where usually no one shows up and I can get some work done? Nice.”

I got picked for an experimental program to teach Chemistry 101 at the University of Illinois. Typically, students attend a professor's lecture with 300 other kids 2 or 3 times a week, and meet with a TA once a week to take a quiz or go over a few problems. But I was chosen to help kids receive a more intimate educational setting like they may have had in highschool. I'd teach 30 Freshmen. 4 days a week + office hours. They never met with a professor. I was all they had. Class was at 9 a.m.

F me. :)

Those office hours where no one would come? Not mine. I had a few kids having some real trouble. They needed them. They needed me.

In the end, the student reviews told me I didn't turn out too bad as a teacher. I helped some kids that really needed it, and that felt good.

But the crazy thing I noticed was how awesome I got at Chemistry 101.

Three years prior to this, I took a similar class. Same book. I remember struggling with some of the same problems these Freshmen faced.

So I would re-read the entire chapter they were on, knowing I was going to have to talk about it tomorrow. And then I'd try to stump myself with the hardest problems I could find. I couldn't get them wrong. I took the Freshmen's quizzes and their tests. I got 100% of the problems correct.

Somehow, this act of teaching made me understand core principles of Chemistry like I've never understood before. Maybe I had never tried to. But now, here, I have to turn around and explain those same principles to someone else, especially to kids failing at the basics. You're forced to get clear.

And that's a reason why I like to teach so much about what I do as an entrepreneur, as a developer, as a writer. It feels good to help. But it helps me an incredible amount too. It helps me clarify thoughts and ideas I have about myself and about my work.

Even if you feel new at something. Maybe a job. Or a new startup. Or it's your first book you want to write.

Teach. Setup a lunch and learn. Try to answer questions you hear people have on places like Stack Exchange. Start a blog! Share open examples of something you've learned: code, spreadsheets, emails, anything. It might take awhile to build an audience, but you'll quickly reap rewards from the clarity teaching brings you.

I learned a lot in that Chemistry class. I learned just how much those who teach, do better.

That was an agonizing walk back to the car to ask my passenger for a loan. Lucky for me, she had bills already out, and was planning on paying for gas the whole time anyways.

College and life have had plenty of obstacles like that empty gas tank. They didn't feel good to go through, but they didn't last forever, and often provided plenty of things to learn.

This too shall pass.

P.S. I'd love to meet you on Twitter: here.

Or leave your email to get my next blog post in your inbox.

Your Startup's API Could be Its Disruptor

2013-05-14T07:23:36-07:00

How deeply do you consider the impacts of building a public API for your startup? It's no small decision: you could be enabling your disruptor.

APIs are incredibly powerful tools for enabling partners, building ecosystems and engendering success among customers. For example, Salesforce's Force ecosystem, which enables developers to build products atop customer Salesforce installations, increases the value customers derive from Salesforce selling more seats and retaining customers longer. Google's Maps API enables developers to spread Google Maps, building the brand, increasing distribution and all the while improving ranking by sending back user feedback signals.

But for many startups, in particular proprietary data and network based businesses, APIs create one of the most effective ways to sap competitive advantage, enabling viable competitors to emerge.

Twitter released their API broadly to developers who built competing front-ends and was forced to revoke access lest developers disintermediate Twitter's relationship with its users. Facebook's API term evolve constantly in response to perceived threats like Path and MessageMe. LinkedIn's API is much more restrictive to prevent conflicts of interest from arising.

In each of these five cases, the API provider has to consider the API's balance of data trade: the net input of data vs net output: how much data value are you giving away compared to what you receive in return.

In Twitter's case, Twitter provided developers a content stream that would grow developer user bases for clients. But, in the end, Twitter developers couldn't provide enough value back to Twitter to build a case for the API.

Similarly, Facebook revokes access to developers with whom they perceive a negative balance of data. Facebook's social graph is it's most valuable asset - ceding it to others via API would be disastrous. But weaving themselves into the fabric of the web through oAuth and identity increases the net data into Facebook while allying partners across the Internet with Facebook.

LinkedIn's restrictive API is essential because they are a data business. They sell data to interested recruiters. Too lax of an API might enable wily recruiters to skirt payment requirements and ultimately copy the relevant data for themselves.

APIs are great strategic tools. They can reinforce and grow businesses, partner ecosystems and customer value. But improperly deployed APIs can also undermine the business you're building. Ensure your balance of data trade is always overwhelmingly positive before releasing your API.

h/t to David Hammer for helping me think through this post

Read The Manual

2013-05-14T05:58:10-07:00

Did you know the iPhone has a notification light for calls and messages?

…You can have iPhone flash its LED (next to the camera lens on the back of the iPhone). This works only when iPhone is locked or asleep. Available for iPhone 4 or later.

Turn on LED Flash for Alerts: Go to Settings > General > Accessibility > LED Flash for Alerts.

It's right there in the manual (PDF link), plain as day. We've been ditching manuals for years in favor of self intellect, but it seems in today's climate even those with the tendencies to consult the official manual have traded it in for just 'figuring it out.' Do you ever wonder what you're missing by not reading the manual?

Do you have a new Samsung Galaxy S4? Did you know there's an easy mode to put some of the most common apps front and center? Ironically, getting to easy mode isn't.

To change to Easy mode, touch Apps > Settings and touch the My device tab. Touch Home screen mode and select Easy mode (Starter mode) > Apply. The Home screen is reconfigured with a simple layout.

The HTC One has a bunch of compelling camera features like the ability to merge several shots into one picture showing an action sequence, or being able to create a highlight slideshow from the night's videos and pictures. Unfortunately if you don't read the manual or take HTC's feature video tour, you might never find these benefits of the sleek phone.

While Twitter doesn't have a manual per se, they do have a lot of guidelines they'd like people to follow. Only the most adventurous, however, might ever find the dos and don'ts for using Twitter's logo. For example, the company has specific guidelines for how much space they'd like you have between their logo and your text, specifically a hashtag or username.

Heaven help you if you choose to browse Gmail's help guide looking for interesting tricks. The coma-inducing text is both boring and incredibly overwhelming. Buried in there though is something most probably didn't know or had forgotten. Gmail has the ability to see the last locations and IP addresses of devices accessing your mail.

To see your account activity, click the Details link next to the Last account activity line at the bottom of any Gmail page.

The help article goes on with how to decipher the information Gmail's account activity gives you. In fact, it's the kind of information that could give a casual user the impression of a hacked account.

Miscellaneous

Don’t lay your AirPort Express on its side (PDF link).
You can now place your Hulu Plus subscription on hold for anywhere between 1 to 12 weeks.
[Rdio website] Holding down the Command (on Mac) or ALT (on PC) button when you click any of the buttons below will play the new thing, but also move the currently playing music down one slot in your Queue, and resume it when what you've clicked on finishes.
Under the artist tools section, NoiseTrade.com features a new digital clipboard for artists to capture fan's email addresses at shows and still send them a song or album for free.

What do you live for?

2013-05-14T00:31:04-07:00

As someone who subscribes to absurdism, this is something that has always fascinated me. This isn't so much an essay so much as just a question: what do you live for? Why do you live? I'd love to hear your thoughts, and you can email me at yu (at) benyu (dot) org. I may publish some responses anonymously if there is enough interest.

My thoughts on the matter can essentially be summed up as I see objective meaning in life to be highly improbable. If evolution is true, as it overwhelmingly seems it is, the long path to our creation was sparked without intention.

Something happened, the universe came to be, some dust gathered together and formed the sun and the planets, and somewhere on earth, somehow, abiogenesis occurred, and a couple billion years later eukaryotes came about, and another billion years after that fish and stuff emerged, and then eventually apes had lots of sex and we emerged as the result.

No reason behind it. So, taking that as a starting point, why do we choose to live? What is the end that makes the means (life and everything that comes with it) worthwhile?

Life is a hard thing. It's a lot of work, and at the end of it, we die*. After we die, there is presumably nothing, and so at face value there seems to be little difference in the end whether we die today or a thousand years from now, and also what we accomplish in that time.

Is it for the legacy we leave behind? The children that continue our story? But what matter is it to us now, now that we're dead and everything is beyond irrelevant? And what happens after humans are all gone from this earth? What is the point then?

Is it hope? Hope for humanity's future, hope for the truth of meaning, hope for an afterlife, hope that our lives are not in vain after all?

Is it sheer curiosity? The desire to see what comes next in humanity's ever-changing course?

Is it hedonistic desire? Our desire to maximize our happiness and pleasure? Evolution has gifted us emotions in the hard battle against extinction, and perhaps they are working as well now as ever.

Is it fear of death?

Or is it simply because we are alive now, and if we try not to think about it too hard, it's easier to just go along with the motions of life in the absence of any great impediment?

Something else? Please let me know; I'd love to hear it.

*Perhaps a tad ironic that this post comes immediately after a post on immortality, but hey, if we want to live forever, it'd probably be good to figure out why :).

Cosmic Natural Selection

2013-05-13T14:32:16-07:00

If you regularly read this blog, you already know that I believe adaptive evolutionary processes explain system order in the universe. There does appear to be a unity between how systems evolve (whether they be chemical, biological, cultural, technological, etc.). In this sense, selection-like processes generate order in the natural world that many cultural groups assumed was intelligently designed. But can selection be extended to explain the universe itself?

Before humans knew that there were other planets in the universe, many people believed that Earth could only be explained by intelligent design (e.g., God). However, we now know that the Earth's existence can be explained by probability. There are likely way more than sextillion planets in the observable universe, so it is not necessarily surprising that one suitable for complex life exists. In fact, it would not be surprising if billions of planets suitable for complex life existed just within our own galaxy.

But people who make the God-of-the-gaps argument never really go away. Now that it is intellectually bankrupt to argue Earth (or life, or our star, or our solar system, or our galaxy) was intelligently designed, many turn to the universe itself. As physicists have pointed out, our universe is well-designed for the emergence of intelligent life (although not that well-designed).

Therefore, it is the job of 21st century science to uncover the mysteries as to why our universe appears to have the physical constants it does. At the moment, the theory is far ahead of the empirical evidence (unlike the situation in evolutionary biology). A dominant theory proposed to explain our universe's physical constants is Cosmic Natural Selection (CNS). This theory, first explored by physicist Lee Smolin suggests that:

black holes may be mechanisms of universe reproduction within the multiverse, an extended cosmological environment in which universes grow, die, and reproduce. Rather than a “dead” singularity at the centre of blackholes, a point where energy and space go to extremely high densities, what occurs in Smolin's theory is a “bounce” that produces a new universe with parameters stochastically different from the parent universe. Smolin theorizes that these descendant universes will be likely to have similar fundamental physical parameters to the parent universe (such as the fine structure constant, the proton to electron mass ratio, and others) but that these parameters, and perhaps to some degree the laws that derive from them, will be slightly altered in some stochastic fashion during the replication process. Each universe therefore potentially gives rise to as many new universes as it has black holes.

The analogy with how selection operates in biological systems is impossible to miss. Given that this is how complexity is generated by other natural systems, it seems logical that this could be the case of our universe (within the multiverse). In fact, a study published this month in the journal Complexity posits that Smolin's CNS theory would mathematically be in concordance with the production of universe's increasingly likely to produce black holes (and therefore universe's conducive to complex life).

Let that sink in. If Smolin's theory is true, our universe exists the way it does because of a cosmic natural selection between universe's within a multiverse of universes with different physical laws.

But all theories need empirical evidence. There is currently no evidence for the existence of either a multiverse or successive generations of universes that transmit their fundamental constants. And it's possible we won't have that evidence in the near future (or ever).

Either way, I'm optimistic. Advances in physics theory are likely to further support the idea of a multiverse and the CNS. And I wouldn't bet against CNS being lifted from theoretical obscurity. The idea has a certain Copernican principle to it. Just as scientific inquiry revealed that our planet, solar system, and galaxy were not particularly special, it seems increasingly likely that scientific inquiry will do the same for our universe as well.

Discuss this on Hubski or let me know what you think on Twitter!

Your best option is to be the best

2013-05-13T11:25:03-07:00

“People overvalue optionality. It’s one thing I learned in chess. You just need to have one good option, instead of going for Option A or B or C or D.” - Peter Thiel

There's a peculiar tradeoff we all must constantly make between keeping our options open and focusing very hard on one thing. From our earliest days in school we are told to make decisions that don't close any doors, and this sentiment generally sticks with people for a long time.

America's education system promotes liberal arts degrees for a huge part of the population, keeping us like generic stem cells until we are 22. Our international counterparts tend to begin differentiating at 18 when they graduate high school. Professionally, the country's top students seem to have an insatiable demand for banking and consulting jobs, which are valuable in large part because of the opportunities they lead to (industry, private equity, business school).

The urge to not close any doors and keep one's options open for as long as possible - to diversify - is understandable. If you give yourself lots of chances to succeed, you'll be more likely to succeed, right?

At first blush this makes sense, but I think there is good reason to avoid taking this approach.

First is the superstar effect, which says there are huge gains to be had as you approach the top of a field. In a highly differentiated world, it's more valuable to have deep expertise in one or two areas than general proficiency in five or six.

Second is the counterintuitive truth that the best way to open lots of doors is to do one thing really well. The most successful people in the world have such strong operating leverage that they are able to get meaningfully involved in any endeavor they choose. They almost all got there by being extremely focused and good at one thing.

Naturally, the way I most often think about this tradeoff is with startups. When building a company, founders have a choice about how to handle the tradeoff between focus and optionality. Normally, the best startups look for one very good option and then find ways to make that happen. It's surprising how often I hear founders say they aren't sure what their business will look like yet, but they have lots of great options so something will probably work out.

Remember that on some level you can only do one thing at a time; it's better to get offers from your first choice job or school than your second through fifth choices. It's also normally better to be in the 99th percentile in one thing than the 90th percentile in two or the 80th percentile in three.

If there are free options you can layer into your life without losing focus you should take them; I'm not saying you should intentionally pigeonhole yourself. Instead, I'm trying to be a tugging force toward focus since I think people typically overvalue optionality and end up on the wrong side of the optimal balance.