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.

Yahoo! Mail - can it be saved?

It pains me to see Yahoo! becoming the butt of jokes in the start-up community, particularly as for so many of us they were an inspiration, once upon a time.  But, sadly, common wisdom round these parts is that they’re walking dead, losers, a place good companies go to die.  I sincerely hope they can claw back from that.

Like almost everyone who’s been online for more than a decade (two decades for me) I have a Yahoo! Mail account.  But I hate using it.  It stays alive as the repository for old messages I don’t want to lose and as a place where various signups and memberships still contact me.  Indeed I use it still as an address for signups I fear may be spammy.

I was wondering how Yahoo! Mail could win me back as a user.  It won’t replace GMAIL but maybe they could still be a genuine secondary mail account for me.  The conclusion I came to is simple.  If they provided a good tool to easily sort through and file old messages, weed out spam or unwanted membership communications, it could regain utility.  I don’t mean wading through page after page and trying to sort and select and delete.  There must be a better way to do that.

I cannot be the only person who looks at 17,000 unread emails and closes down again thinking it’s not worth fighting with.

Live blogging Startup Lessons Learned Conference #sllconf

Good breakfast done. Eric Reis up on stage….

…great opening - Eric Reis dismantling all of the myths and misconceptions around lean startup

• lean startup is about learning
• lean startup doesn’t mean small
• lean startup doesn’t mean cheap
• lean startup doesn’t mean bootstrapped
• lean startup does mean disruptive