Idea: Create a transactional database which stores data only in Tweets using hashtags.
Reason: Because it would be so incredibly dumb.
Intention: Maddness
Aside
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Category Archives: startups
we’re all fighting double digit inflation
STREETWISE!
Recognize.
I watched this on VHS. On a VCR plugged into a TV with something from Radioshack! With the man who made it happen. Wierd.
Occupy the 99%.
Respect.
Streetwise.
Freeez, that’s how I learned my vowels.
Is the end? Are you my friend?
Popcorn Love. But it’s more than that to me.
It’s more than that to me.
screw tightening the rewrite
A good friend of mine, and playwright, Matthew Paul Olmos, is working towards the presentation of a new play of his, “the nature of captivity”. It has been workshopped and developed as part of the prestigious Resident Artist Program at Mabou Mines and I have been lucky enough to watch this script transform over the last several years from being almost unbearably bad to becoming one of his most solid, informed, challenging, and well crafted pieces of writing.
What then to ascribe to ascribe this transformation? Part of it is due to, no doubt, the fantastic actors, directors, and designers who he has had working on it and forcing it and him to grow the script, story, and writing to fulfill itself. Part of it, though, is also due to the enormous effort that has gone on under the skin of the play; Matthew’s fundamental rebuilding of the framework, his execution of the second act, and his writing, rewriting and rewriting again has lifted the script into a new and exciting place.
In a recent interview with Adam Szymkowics, Olmos talks about the process of what it really means to rewrite. I here quote extensively from Matt’s answer to one of the questions:
Something I’m beginning to learn the long way is to not only embrace questioning, but be willing to make changes afterwards.
It is very easy, sometimes, to come up with a pretty good first or second draft of a play; you have many moments that work, there is an overall arc to the piece. All in all you think to yourself, “this is decent.” And in many ways you are happy with it. And in your own arrogant way, you think to yourself, “It’s already better than half the shit out there.”
And hopefully, if you are doing your job, you’ll work through the script with a director, actors, etc., and listen to them when they ask you questions, challenge what you’ve written, and communicate to you what they are getting from the piece. You’ll create an environment that aims not only to give you feedback, but asks every person in the room to ask really deep questions about what it is you’re doing with this play and what it means in the world around us.
And then there’s the playwright back in their bedroom, or barstool, with all these notes. And you begin to read over your script again, and some of the changes you have been thinking over…they just seem so big. And you become afraid to mess with the parts of the script that already work. So you begin to just only tinker. Or clean up certain scenes. You begin to question how well a reading went, and theorize that is why certain parts didn’t work. Perhaps you’ve already rented a space, or scheduled a public reading, and you think to yourself that with this one talented actress or this one skilled actor, the script will fly regardless.
I find that, often, writers are too afraid to turn everything they’ve written onto its head and address the true problems inside it. We don’t want to damage the sections of the piece that already work. So we try this patch’job, or pretend the missing pieces will not be missed. Or we think that the story we are telling doesn’t need to go any further. That this one aspect of whatever topic we’re writing about is enough. We let certain blames fall onto the characters onstage, as opposed to digging deeper and presenting a play that discusses why those characters are flawed to begin with. We let our script run along the surface because we are too scared and too lazy to try to write something much more complex and difficult.
It is our job both as writers and as people to always question, but not to stop there. Rather to dig into ourselves for answers, and when we find them, to have the courage to completely disassemble something we’ve worked so hard on. To not settle for something good, but try for something that scares the shit out of you instead.
What he’s talking about is essentially the much discussed screw-tightening vs. redesign of a site that we all know from the startup world to be so deadly to ideas, innovations, and iterations of product. Read more about it from Chris Dixon here and Charlie O’Donnell here. We spend our efforts messing with the small stuff because it’s too scary to get in there and do the work, the real work, that needs to be done. We settle for something good and let the things that scare the shit out of us escape.
From Josh Porters Metric Driven Design Presentation
It is an entirely human inclination, no? It makes sense that we shy away from that nagging voice in the back of our head that there’s a better way to write the second act and instead focus on optimizing a scene in the first act that gets some good laughs. Maybe it is because we have so much at stake. In our art, in our companies, and in our lives and loves, hitting the next, biggest known, hardest challenge is a task of incredible difficulty but which, or so we are told, promises untold rewards and success. I’m not sure where I come down on hitting the global maximum in the meta projects of our lives, but it certainly makes sense in the process of art and business. Chris Dixon and Charlie O’Donnell probably don’t know the MPO, and their lives probably couldn’t be farther apart, but here they are, attacking the same issues and hopefully inspiring both themselves and others to make the scary decisions and push towards that next level.
Performances of “the nature of captivity” are March 3 through 7 and are free. All you have to do is RSVP to rap@maboumines.org. For more info, check out Mabou Mines and Matthew Paul Olmos’ website. I’m going on Thursday, maybe I’ll see you there.
Goodbye Facebook
(This is a post about my decision to leave Facebook. I’ve been requested to note that this contains Spoilers if you have not seen The Social Network but intend to. If you are interested, please check out www.rallywho.com, a project that I have been working on which I hope will serve as a fun and useful tool for helping me get together with my friends in the real world. Thanks for reading.)
Last night, against all better judgement, I watched The Social Network. I knew I wasn’t going to like it. I knew it was going to make me angry. Or jealous. Or bitter. Or lustful. Or confused. But I didn’t know it was going to make me all of these things. And then some.
The end credits started rolling and the first thing I thought was: wait, I don’t get it. What was this movie about? It’s not about The Zuck, what he has done, the successes and failures that he has had in building one of the world’s most influential companies. It is also not about Facebook, a company which we can all agree has in one way or another altered our fundamental daily interactions, to a greater or lesser degree. So what, maybe is it about?
A guy, who tries really hard to be an asshole, burns all his bridges, steals intellectual property, and then becomes successful albeit slightly lonely. Maybe.
Again, I don’t get it. Is my heart supposed to go out to a man who we are left watching refresh a facebook page to see what he is missing? As if we don’t all do that anyway? Oh, I know, I’m supposed to feel bad that he has to pay money to settle with the guys he stole the idea from or fucked out of their rightful stake? No, that’s not it either…
Maybe I just can’t get over the fact that he has several billion dollars in his pocket by the end of the film. It is a violation of all those playwriting principles; I have no empathy for him, you can’t write a story about people who are too rich or too beautiful. Because there’s no such thing.
And the rest of it. It is stereotype against stereotype: the nerd, the VC-savy-techno-partier, the timid well meaning business partner/friend, the bitch girlfriend, the ruthless vc; the real story, I suspect, is so much much more interesting.
Lastly, something about the cult of personality infusing the whole Facebook phenomenon seems to me to be somewhat of a distraction in thinking about what is really happening. This shouldn’t be a story about Mark Zuckerberg. He’s not a genius, evil or otherwise. This should be a story about the systems in place that ruthlessly capitalize ideas. There are lots of people at Facebook making very important decisions about online privacy policies, the open vs. the closed internet, and the way VC’s invest and then take profit throughout the market. Focusing on Mark Zuckerberg is a distraction from that system. Something much more interesting, and to me, scary, is happening.
Facebook Relationships Visualized By Paul Butler, via Mashable
This is amazing! But Scary. And I want to know what it all means. And after The Social Network, I wasn’t any closer to figuring it out. I went to bed steaming about all this and in the middle of the night woke up and read this fantastic article in the New York Review of Books, Generation Why? by Zadie Smith. I think she nails it. The movie misses an angle which is much more thrilling and also much more vital.
Watching this movie, even though you know Sorkin wants your disapproval, you can’t help feel a little swell of pride in this 2.0 generation. They’ve spent a decade being berated for not making the right sorts of paintings or novels or music or politics. Turns out the brightest 2.0 kids have been doing something else extraordinary. They’ve been making a world.
That’s a god damn story! The internet has transformatively altered how we process and control our worlds to the point where the people who truly understand and manipulate the technology and culture behind the internet have the ability to create their own worlds, their own worlds to fill the voids in the real one they’re living in.
As I followed Zadie Smith through the essay, I continued to think that she was really onto something. Until I got to the last part, here reproduced in full:
Toussaint was writing in 1985, in France. In France philosophy seems to come before technology; here in the Anglo-American world we race ahead with technology and hope the ideas will look after themselves. Finally, it’s the idea of Facebook that disappoints. If it were a genuinely interesting interface, built for these genuinely different 2.0 kids to live in, well, that would be something. It’s not that. It’s the wild west of the Internet tamed to fit the suburban fantasies of a suburban soul. Lanier:
These designs came together very recently, and there’s a haphazard, accidental quality to them. Resist the easy grooves they guide you into. If you love a medium made of software, there’s a danger that you will become entrapped in someone else’s recent careless thoughts. Struggle against that!
Shouldn’t we struggle against Facebook? Everything in it is reduced to the size of its founder. Blue, because it turns out Zuckerberg is red-green color-blind. “Blue is the richest color for me—I can see all of blue.” Poking, because that’s what shy boys do to girls they are scared to talk to. Preoccupied with personal trivia, because Mark Zuckerberg thinks the exchange of personal trivia is what “friendship” is. A Mark Zuckerberg Production indeed! We were going to live online. It was going to be extraordinary. Yet what kind of living is this? Step back from your Facebook Wall for a moment: Doesn’t it, suddenly, look a little ridiculous? Your life in this format?
The last defense of every Facebook addict is: but it helps me keep in contact with people who are far away! Well, e-mail and Skype do that, too, and they have the added advantage of not forcing you to interface with the mind of Mark Zuckerberg—but, well, you know. We all know. If we really wanted to write to these faraway people, or see them, we would. What we actually want to do is the bare minimum, just like any nineteen-year-old college boy who’d rather be doing something else, or nothing.
At my screening, when a character in the film mentioned the early blog platform LiveJournal (still popular in Russia), the audience laughed. I can’t imagine life without files but I can just about imagine a time when Facebook will seem as comically obsolete as LiveJournal. In this sense, The Social Network is not a cruel portrait of any particular real-world person called “Mark Zuckerberg.” It’s a cruel portrait of us: 500 million sentient people entrapped in the recent careless thoughts of a Harvard sophomore.
from Generation Why by Zadie Smith as published in the New York Review of Books
Wow.
I finished that last line, looked up at the ceiling and felt dirty.
I’ve always had a love/hate with Facebook and I have struggled to find the appropriate way of framing the discussion in my own mind. Until now. I got up, out of bed, walked downstairs and deleted my facebook account. Permanently. Now, if only I can avoid logging into the site for 14 days, either intentionally or by accident, it will be gone.
I went up, went to sleep, and have only felt the slightest pang of remorse since. Writing this little post has also been rather a bit of fun, and maybe The Social Network was a worthwhile film for me afterall. And maybe we can all avoid getting trapped in another easy groove. Maybe we can understand our technology platforms from a new perspective. I’d really like to share this epiphany with my friends.
Hmm… now, how do I do that again? I guess I’ll tweet it. And can someone else share it on Facebook for me?
(Update: Great comments on this post from the great community at Hacker News – very interesting to see everyone’s thoughts, thanks! http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2115814 )
(Update 2: I wanted to make sure that people knew the extended quote was from the Zadie Smith essay, so I updated it with another link in addition to the one I had originally included. Thanks again for the response, it’s been really interesting to read everyone’s comments.)
Leveraging the Upside
At Ignition2010, there were two highlights. A lunch seminar with Chris Dixon and Steve Case’s one-on-one. As stand alone events, they were great, but I think that when taken together, the main take aways from those two sessions really shed some light on how I personally understand my role in the internet business at this moment.
So. Chris Dixon. Thursday afternoon. Three surprises. One: he’s cuter in person than he is online. Two: people are idiots. Three: there’s a good reason not to be worried about the internet bubble: this one or any other one.
Lets break it down. Number 1. The cuetness:
He actually looks like that! But even more so. QED. I wonder if I should get some glasses like that? I don’t wear glasses, though. But, maybe I should start?
Number 2: Idiots. Is this really a surprise? I guess not, I guess I should know by now. I guess I just am still surprised to sit around a table with an enormous opportunity to have an interesting conversation and instead have people ask questions about the value of accredited investors in a semi/public market and what Chris thinks are the defining characteristics of a founding team of entrepreneurs and if they don’t have those characteristics, should they still found a company? What is the expected answer to these questions? It’s like asking David Mamet what he likes to use his knife for. I blame myself – I should’ve asked about the Hunch API which was what I was interested in hearing about. Next time. And to his credit, I think Chris answered these questions as thoughtfully and politically as he could’ve. (A side note: the summary of his answer was: the most important thing about a founder is that they are comfortable building things that work – the business side of it can be hired out but if you can’t build something that captures people’s attention, interest, and engagement, then you’re out of luck.)
Number 3: The bubble. To this point, if we are in the middle of a bubble or if we are about to be, Chris had something very simple to say. He is an “internet optimist”. Which means that he believes at some point or another the internet will change and improve every single component of our lives. And if you look back before the first .com bubble/bust, the projections that analysts were making about ecommerce and the value of B2B transactions turns out to have been pretty much right – it’s just that the companies they thought were going to be able to capitalize on these projections were wrong. So, to extrapolate, right now, Groupon is playing in an extremely important space, social shopping. At some point, the internet will fundamentally change how we shop, both online AND offline. Groupon appears to be poised to be able to do that. Thus, their 6 billion dollar valuation. In under 2 years. Whether this is overpriced or not doesn’t really matter. Someone is going to come along and win this space. And if it’s not Groupon, then it will be someone else. And if you are an entrepreneur and an internet optimist, you play the game regardless of if there is a bubble around it. Because you believe that, over the long term, it’s going to work and if you are in the right place at the right time, you will have the opportunity to shape the discussion and the evolution of a major and impactful force in the lives of consumers.
Interesting. It was a good lunch. And the roast beef sandwiches were OTH.
Fast forward, Friday morning. The one-on-one with Steve Case. Also interesting.
In describing what happens to corporate cultures as they transition from upstarts into members of the Fortune 500 establishment, he noted the transformation from a focus on attack to a dependence on defense. In his words, the primary concern of leadership becomes more about hedging the downside instead of leveraging the upside.
This observation has been tweeted extensively, but phrased slightly different. It was the particular words he used that really stuck with me. Because they aren’t just relevant to the AOL/Time Warner situation, and they’re not just important to entrepreneurs or to interpratating Google’s Groupon purchase, but they feel right at home on a very personal level. Am I hedging the downside in my life? Or leveraging the upside? Not in a business sense, but as a husband? As a dad? As a guy walking down the street? What an interesting lense to see this all through… Something about it all seemed dead on at the moment and still does.
Interesting. It was a great session and a great way to start the morning. And the coffee was HOT.
And so what about Chris Dixon AND Steve Case, the intersection of these two? What about being an Internet Optimist AND Leveraging your personal upside? What about competing and investing over the long term, understanding and committing to the work because you’re optimistic about it, and understanding that this is your upside and that you’re going after it? It means it doesn’t matter if this is a bubble or not. It means I don’t care if Groupon is overvalued or not. Or if the engineering pay raises across the industry actually mean there is real value being created. It means, I don’t care. I’m doing what I’m doing because I want to be doing it, and isn’t that just about one of the most luckiest wonderful happy things possible in the world?
Interesting.