Fred Wilson Interviews Jack Dorsey

Fred Wilson (Union Square Ventures, AVC) and Jack Dorsey (Twitter, Square) had a really interesting conversation at the NYU Entrepreneur Festival.(Video on Fred's blog)

A few notes from the talk:

• A good company favors a VC with good questions & intelligent perspective over a VC with just a check. Checks are easy to come by, good insight is rare.
• Fast prototyping: Twitter v. 1.0 took two guys two weeks to code. Square took four weeks to MVP.
• "It's good to have friends with problems." Problems tell you where the business needs to go.
• Making something look pretty (or changing marketing) is easy. It's the deep stuff (the "soul") that's hard to get right.
• Obstacles are impermanent: example, Visa's objections to Square. (see also Randy Pausch's Last Lecture, re: brick walls)

Links for Later 2-5-13

1. Best long reads about Adam Swartz; Larry Lessig's talk on Adam's Law
2. Mark Suster interviews Clayton Christensen about the future of education
3. Kieron Gillen's playlist for Young Avengers
4. Roko's Basilisk as creepypasta
5. Peonies
6. Nine Inch Nails vs. Carly Rae Jepson, "Call Me a Hole"

Links for Later 11-16-12

1. Elle Luna: "User research doesn't produce user-centered design." Advice for designers in startups.
2. William Langwiesche joins the French Foreign Legion (for a profile)
3. Kelly Starrett, physical therapist and CrossFit coach
4. "His works in number, bulk, and uselessness are not surpassed in the whole field of learning"

Links for Later 10-16-12

1. The Desert of the Real: when quantum finance shows up, things get weird
2. Medical devices pipelined from academia to industry
3. Why the tea party won't just die
4. Vikram Pandit ousted at Citigroup. Citigroup stock still down 89% from peak.
5. Art heist: Where was Thomas Crown at the time?
6. William Carpenter interviewed by Days of Yore
7. La Serrrata ("the closing"), the downfall of Venice, and the self-destructive impulses of the 1% by Chrystia Freeland

Barry Michels and the Flowing Shadow

Links for Later 5-22-12

1. DC brothel longread
2. Lesson plans for $700,000, Alex
3. Branson: Dress like a human
4. Seal / signet rings from the classical revival
5. How to support R&D&D&D (Research & Development & Demonstration & Deployment) or, When the Military-Industrial Complex was a Good Thing
6. The story of the transition of Laura Jane Grace, nee Tom Gabel, of Against Me!
7. How to improve expert prediction

Disruptive Tech Watch

By shifting from batch manufacturing to continuous production processes, drug production time can be cut from 12 months to 6 hours, according to Novartis's CEO, Joseph Jimenez.

Peter Thiel's Class on Tech Investing

Blake Masters is taking notes on Peter Thiel's Stanford course, which includes a wealth of good information on how to approach and deal with VCs.

Is Venture Capital Broken?

Returns fell after the dotcom bubble burst in 2000, and now the industry average tracks the broader equity markets.  Here, Noah Smith discusses some of U Chicago Professor Steven Kaplan's research on the matter. The upshot: there's alpha to be found among the VC's, but it's really hard to be one of those positive alpha fund managers. The addition of more funds just results in lots of really bad funds with negative alpha. There's another possible reason, having to do with the rationalization and increased liquidity of the early stage tech market, but that wouldn't account for the persistently good returns of the top funds, so the alpha theory seems to have it.

Links for Later 4-18-12

1. The disused platforms at the Wilson L Station explained
2. Twitter's latest idea: the Innovator's Patent Agreement
3. Thomas Friedman, Duncan Black's choice for Wanker of the Decade
4. If you complain loudly enough about military intelligence, they will put you in charge
5. The Tools Book trailer
6. CISPA=SOPA II
7. Death by swan
8. Tiger parents of Rome

The Genius Greenhouse

Jonah Lehrer wonders how 5th century BCE Athens and 16th century Florence became such hotbeds of genius, and comes up with a three part plan: 1) people mixing, where lots of people and ideas are constantly on the move, 2) promote education and other "meta innovations" and 3) support risk-taking.

As T. S. Eliot once remarked, the great ages did not contain more talent. They wasted less.

Check out the rest of the article in Wired. He's got a forthcoming book on creativity as well. I've already pre-ordered my copy.

Adam Swartzbaugh at Kenyon

Adam Swartzbaugh of the Genesis Network (and the US Army) stopped by Kenyon (and OSU) to talk about social entrepreneurship. He was a big hit with the students, in part because he talked about how his failures and setbacks motivated him to succeed, and in part because he put the responsibility for taking action on the audience.

Elsewhere: interviews with Adam in the Collegian before and after his visit.

Links for Later

1. Jacob Soll, one of this year's crop of MacArthur Fellows, talks about the history of accounting, how Machiavelli helped found political science, and what a library's good for.
2. Three from Krugman: the eurovenn, Was Failure Inevitable? & the basics of the IS-LM
3. Love for a wounded soldier
4. Kiana Davenport's struggles with her publisher, and her publisher's struggle with self-publishing on Amazon
5. Neal Stephenson: Innovation Starvation

The Polymath's Path

Noah Davis interviews Paul Hoffman, who ran Discover when he was 30, and who has had a number of interesting careers since then. His college roommate "had already discovered a sub-atomic particle in high school," which put him off a career as a physicist, and his father was a speed-reading English professor who "read three novels a day" and "had a photographic memory," so fiction was out as well. A fascinating career followed.

What would you tell a 22-year-old kid?

First of all, I would say, don't sweat it. It's really easy to say that in retrospect, but I really do mean that. You can make mistakes. You can take a job and six months later you can decide that it's hell. "It's not for me. I'm not interested in this." That's totally okay. In fact, that's easier now because the paths are not so well defined. People that present their careers as entirely successful from the age of 15 and on, most of it's fiction. Okay, maybe that's true in a couple people, but that's a couple people. There are several billion people on the planet who have managed to make their careers in other ways. You can't be afraid of failure. Even if you look at these incredible successes—people who were multimillionaires by the age of 30—often they did something that wasn't a success at first. Passion is so important. You have plenty of opportunities to bounce back if something doesn't work. If you see something out there that you really want to do, just go for it.

Links for Later

1. The Guardian's list of 100 greatest non-fiction books


2. George Saunders on writing part 1 part 2


3. Steve Blank and Ben Horowitz debate the existence of a tech bubble


4. Personality seepage


5. The art of the feud

Links for Later

1. Interview with Adapt author Tim Harford
2. Critique of Adapt at Whimsley: Trial and error ain't everything
3. Critique of The Great Stagnation: It's the redistribution, stupid
4. Geithner: Stimulus is 'sugar for the economy'. Putz.
5. Intertwingularity, the Noosphere and Idea-Sex
6. Android SDK homepage
7. Cesar Hidalgo's network map of exports and industries

One, Ten, One Hundred

A great approach to experimentation, from a talk given at MakerFaire by the Mentos & Coke guys:

Two of the stars of the event were Stephen Voltz and Fritz Grobe who are famous for their viral Coke and Mentos videos. I enjoyed a talk they gave on their approach to innovation as it applies to performance art. Their method follows the 1-10-100 principle. It takes one experiment to spark a concept. By experiment 10 one should have fleshed things out and have defined a direction. By experiment 100 one hopes to have found something that is sublime… The four rules that they espouse are: 1) seek variation – explore the possibilities. 2) be obsessive – keep focused until one finds something special.3) be stubborn – don’t give up until you work through the problems. 4) set limits and work within them – unconstrained innovation meanders and wonders, only by setting limits does it force one to dive into the depths of a concept. Their thoughts are somewhat reminiscent of “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”, where the key idea is to have an obsession with quality and to always have a good pot of coffee close at hand.

Tyler Cowen's TEDx Great Stagnantion Lecture

Also, Steve Denning critiques The Great Stagnation.

Links for Later

1. story of a lost e e cummings poem
2. Garance Dore at the AmFar benefit
3. Halcyon comes up with Altly, an alternative to Facebook
4. Loft from Loftylovin
5. Bradley Cooper: "Since Limitless opened, my agent calls me every morning and asks, 'Do you feel any different?' And I'm like, 'Nope. Do you feel any different?'"

Two Kinds of Imagination

Two kinds of imagination: the strong, the promiscuous. One can exist without the other. Homer’s and Dante’s were strong, Ovid’s and Ariosto’s promiscuous. An important distinction when praising poets, or anyone, for their imagination. A strong imagination fast makes a man unhappy because his feeling runs so deep, but a promiscuous imagination cheers him because of its variety, because it nimbly visits then leaves all its objects and does so with a heady heedlessness. The two have very different characters. The first weighty, impassioned, usually (nowadays) melancholic, with deep emotion and passion, all fraught with life hugely suffered. The other playful, light, fleet, inconstant in love, high spirited, incapable of really strong, enduring passions and mental pain, quick to console itself even during the hardest times, etc. These two characters also yield clear portraits of Dante and Ovid: you see how the difference in their poetry corresponds exactly to the difference in their lives. Even more, you see how differently Dante and Ovid experienced exile. The same faculty of the human spirit is thus mother to contrary effects, qualities so different as to make the imagination seem virtually two different faculties. I don’t think that the deep imagination inspires courage, because it makes danger, pain, etc., so much more real and immediate than reflection does. What deliberation tells, deep imagination shows. And I believe that an imagination that does foster courage—such poets certainly don’t lack imagination, because enthusiasm always goes hand in hand with imagination and derives from it—belongs more to the deliberative, promiscuous type.

-Giacomo Leopardi
Daybook

(via 3qd)