I enjoy hackathons...

Here is my Hackathon pitch. I re-built something I tried to build last year, from scratch by building a social commerce object feed system at the back end and then plugging it together to make an ebay on facebook. It still has the old ugly look of my first effort, but design should be easily solved now it works properly at the back end.

Depressingly prescient quote:

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time—when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.”

— Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (1995) page 25

Life after changing the world

The biggest problem entrepreneurs have is focus. When you’re an idea factory it’s unsurprising that even when deep into a startup you are passionate about the ideas don’t stop coming. Personally I cope with this by having a notebook and new ideas go into the back of the notebook not to be pursued until the current one has run its course.

So I don’t have any doubt that I will achieve the goal of building something great. Something impactful. But I do like to remind myself what I’d do afterwards - as part of the broader question why.

Rooftop Cinema: Big Trouble In Little China

There are many, many cool things about living in the San Francisco Bay Area. Of course if you are a high-tech entrepreneur and are compelled to do startups for a living, driven by a passion to change the world, there’s nowhere like Silicon Valley (whatever the dreams of so many pretenders around the world).

One of the coolest new things, for me: A small gathering of movie enthusiasts on a North Beach 5th floor roof, with the panorama of the city spread out in front of us as the backdrop to a projection screen, on which we watch movies once a month. Kim was invited to the first showing, last month and kindly got me invited too. That was Blade Runner and I’ll post about it as a follow up to this.

Is reliability a fatal issue for the PC industry?

My mother’s laptop started having power issues a few weeks back. I told her I suspected it was the battery as I’d had similar issues with a previous laptop. She took the advice of the Fry’s man that in fact she just needed to buy his new power adapter and all would be well. It seemed so for a little while but it’s seriously malfunctioning now. I suspect it has something to do with the fact that she was sold a power adapter at the wrong power with the wrong current, but it’s been a long time since I did any Electronic and Electrical Engineering at university, so what would I know?

Never interfere in a boy and girl fight

“People often ask me if I have any words of advice for young people. Well, here are a few simple admonitions for young and old: Never interfere in a boy and girl fight….”

— Words of advice for young people, William S. Burroughs

I tend not to give advice nowadays. I listen. I will express an opinion sometimes (okay, often). But I won’t tell you what to do. The reasons are simple. People will do what they will do. They will have a complex set of reasons and stimulae behind their actions, and some degree of agency in them (just how much is in interesting topic for debate in another forum). However if they act in alignment with my suggested course of action and they arrive at a position they’re unhappy with, they will always blame me for telling them what to do. If things work out hunky-dory they will celebrate their decisive genius.

William S. Burroughs knows no such restraint and in his wonderful little riff “words of advice for young people” that I have an on old CD somewhere he leads off with the great advice I can buy into:

“Never interfere in a boy and girl fight”

It amazes me how people in Silicon Valley have so much difficulty following this.  If you’re an entrepreneur focus on building a great company and changing the world. Whether Arrington or Calacanis is right really isn’t of concern to you and you can never know. Whether Conway or McClure is right is irrelevant to you if you don’t build anything that either of them is interested in hearing your pitch on.

The 4 waves of the PC era - what's coming next?

I have been noodling for a while over this post by Om Malik: http://bit.ly/bNwuUP

WHAT’S HAPPENED? WHAT’S COMING?

I wanted to throw my own oar into the pond on this one, as it’s a topic I’ve been thinking a lot about over the last year or two, as we’ve turned our vague ideas about where “Apps” were going into a beta-product allied to a bold vision for the future.

You can slice and dice trends in many ways. The truth is there’s something fractal about the nature of trends - the closer you look at them the more they splinter into smaller and smaller fibres of subtrends, movements, products etc. People are eager to jump from the neatly titled Web 2.0 into something they can call Web 3.0 while labeling the dot.com boom some sort of Web 1.0. This is fundamentally wrong because the web was only part of why so many people suddenly wanted the Internet - indeed for most just getting an email address was the initial intent. All schemas to describe the complexity of technological progress are inherently flawed in their omission and simplification, but I have found it helpful is to think of four waves.