hartbro

• 2013-03-18

  The First Law of Service

  The first of these is what I have come to call “The First Law of Science is simple, but powerful, and can be stated as a straightforward formula:

  S = P – E.

  In this formulation, ‘S’ stands for satisfaction, ‘P’ for perception and ‘E’ for expectation. If you expect a certain level of service, and perceive the service reviewed to be higher, you are a satisfied client. If you perceive the same level as before, but expected higher, you are disappointed and, consequently, a dissatisfied client.

  The point, of course, is that both the perception and the expectation are psychological phenomena. They are not the reality. In a benevolent world, both the perception and the expectation will have some connection to reality, but they are not reality. Accordingly, all service managers must pay attention to three things: what was actually done to or for the client, what was perceived by the client, and what the client expected. Fortunately, all three can be managed.

  Source: davidmaister.com

• 2013-03-17

  An Accelerator Bubble

  One study, conducted by Houston’s VC Aziz Gilani last year, showed that only two accelerators—Y Combinator and TechStars—had produced meaningful exits for company founders. Forty-five percent of the programs he included failed to produce a single graduate who raised venture funding. That squares with Kedrosky’s investing approach to accelerator companies: “If they’ve gone through a top program, it’s interesting,” he says. “If it’s not one of the top ones, it just tells me you’re alive.”

  Source: businessweek.com

• 2013-03-14

  Don’t worry that your job is pointless

  A problem with us as a tribe is that we tend to misunderstand the fact that most humans require conflict to reach for greatness. We, as technologists, perceive a natural conflict between what we want (whether it’s to live for 1000+ years, to fly to Japan for $50 on a non-polluting electric airplane, to have all of the world’s information accessible at a computer terminal, or just to have more interesting jobs) and the actual state of the world, which we see as dismally primitive. We don’t need a human enemy to have conflict and to inspire us to greatness; primordial entropy is our enemy. Most people don’t think this way. It takes a fight to unlock their energies. 

  …

  Most of our jobs are based on conflict. Hedge fund traders are trying to outsmart other hedge funds in a winner-take-all market. In VC-istan, it’s all about ad dollars (hence, I call it “ad-banking”). Most of the great technologies we use (e.g. the Internet) were funded by military projects: people wanting to out-innovate and out-technologize the Russians. It’d be better if we could do great things without all the negative side effects of conflict, but human organizations are lethargic and no elite has been immune to the temptation of parasitism.

  The pointlessness we perceive in our jobs comes from the fact that most of what we do isn’t about civilization’s advancement, but about helping one party compete against the other. Web development is mostly about making one business more attractive than the other guys, which has a zero-sum, arms-race feel to it. All of this conflict leads to multiplicity of efforts, left-against-right work, and weird indirections that sap our efficiency. It seems like this renders 95% of what we do pointless.

  Source: news.ycombinator.com

• 2013-02-05

  The $1B Club

  Pinterest, an online scrapbooking and social networking site with no revenue, became worth $1.5 billion in less than three years. Amazon.com went public in 1997 after only three years, but had a valuation of just $438 million. And it had almost $16 million in revenue for the 1997 fiscal year.

  Source: The New York Times

• 2013-01-16

  Witchcraft

  As Arthur C Clarke puts it, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. Here is my corollary: “Any sufficiently technical expert is indistinguishable from a witch”. People fear magic they don’t understand, and distrust those who wield that magic. Things that seem reasonable to technical geeks seem illegal to the non-technical. The non-technical think they understand MAC addresses and address blocking, but they don’t. Thus, Aaron [Swartz]’s indictment might seem a fair interpretation of the law, but it’s a wholly unfair interpretation of technology.

  Source: erratasec.blogspot.com

• 2013-01-15

  Technical Problems

  Our background, education, and experience bias us towards a technical solution even when a social solution would be more efficient, and more pleasing. Let’s try to correct for that. People are less finicky than computers, even if their interface is a little less standardized.

  Source: somethingsimilar.com

• 2013-01-08

  Finding Startup Ideas

  When starting a new business project, how do you decide what to produce? The common thing you hear is that an idea is necessary to start. I know a lot of wannabe entrepreneurs who are constantly trying to come up with their next big idea. They think great ideas are not only hard to come by, but also the biggest factor in determining your success (note: if you think like this, read Derek Sivers’ post on ideas).

  Sorry to burst your bubble, but an idea you come up with is a terrible place to start a new business. The reason is that businesses need to make money if they are to be sustainable. To make money a business needs customers. Customers don’t pay for ideas; they pay for their problems to be solved. So rather than looking for an idea for what to build, you should be looking for a painful problem that you can solve. People will pay to make pain go away. The more painful and frustrating the problem is, the more they will pay.

  So rather than sitting around dreaming up ideas, we want to find a painful problem to solve. That solution will become the idea for our business.

  Source: nathanbarry.com

• 2013-01-05

  Adults with Toys

  There’s also the paradox of treating people like adults by providing them with toys. Just as freedom is always accompanied by responsibility, so permission to play comes with high expectations to deliver remarkable results. A vibrant culture provides people with real opportunities to instigate and benefit from success. They must also be accountable for failure, though all parties need to accept that attempts to innovate don’t always produce the wheel. This is the kind of place where creative, ambitious people want to play. When imaginations are encouraged to run free, it can result in amazing products.

  Source: linkedin.com

• 2013-01-02

  August 14, 2003

  Infrastructure is invisible, as long as it works. And only when it fails do you realize just how much we are all dependent on it and how badly we are able to cope with such infrastructure being unavailable for any length of time. No power translates quickly into: no fuel, no water, no food and so on. If this had happened during the winter instead of a nice summer day the results would have been much more severe.

  Source: jacquesmattheij.com

• 2012-12-28

  Page Speed Matters

  I actually think poor site speed is one of the factors that caused the demise of MySpace. Think about it… a slower site means less friend requests, less status updates, fewer picture uploads, fewer ads being clicked on, fewer invites sent, etc., etc., etc. All of those actions contribute to what people would generally refer to as the network effects of a social networking product. Site speed reduces the momentum in the flywheel of network effects. With less momentum, you have less growth, and with less growth, you have an increased chance of losing. Facebook came in and was faster, simpler, and had better network effects. By focusing on critical elements like site speed, Facebook was able to succeed.  

  Source: quora.com