Bootstrapping Top 10 List

Brad Feld:

3. Pick a domain and go deep: If your answer to "What kind of company are you going to start?" is something like "Well, I have a few different ideas..." stop immediately. You should pick one idea in one domain and go extremely deep on this idea. Optimally, it'd be something you already know a lot about so that you'll be leveraging your personal experience and presumably one of your passions. Hedging your bets by thinking about and playing around with a variety of different ideas is a huge waste of energy - you need all of your focus on the one thing you are going to do. Early in my life as a VC, I was in a meeting where an experienced VC asserted that one of the most important questions for a venture-backed company to answer is "What do you want to be the best in the world at?" I think this question broadly applies to all entrepreneurial endeavors.

Technorati tags: startup, bootstrapping

25 Startup Deathtraps

Frederick J. Beste III:

18. No Reason for Customer to Change

The best entrepreneurial efforts I've seen have flowed from the development of a competitive matrix, i.e., a comparison by vendor (competitor) of all of the major factors which buyers consider when making a purchase decision. If, in reviewing such a matrix, you cannot reach the conclusion that any fully informed buyer would be crazy not to seriously consider purchasing your product, the buyer has no reason to switch to you....and probably won't.

Technorati tags: startup, business, mistakes

Does Inequality Matter?

Polly Toynbee reviews Richard G Wilkinson's The Impact of Inequality:

Richard Wilkinson is a professor of social epidemiology, an expert in public health. From that vantage point he sees the world in terms of its physical and psychological wellbeing, surveying great sweeps of health statistics through sociological eyes. He has assembled a mountain of irrefutable evidence from all over the world showing the damage done by extreme inequality. However rich a country is, it will still be more dysfunctional, violent, sick and sad if the gap between social classes grows too wide. Poorer countries with fairer wealth distribution are healthier and happier than richer, more unequal nations.

Technorati tags: book review, social policy, economics

Driver Chases Car After Falling Out

Yahoo! News:

Opening up your door while driving isn't a good idea, especially on a busy highway.

Robbin Doolin, 31, of the Kansas City suburb of Grandview, learned that Friday morning when she leaned out her fast-moving car to spit.

She went tumbling out onto U.S. 71 in Kansas City, and to the amazement of other drivers, she hopped up and chased her car as it careened down an embankment toward a construction site.

Technorati tags: stupid, funny

Hearwear – The Future of Hearing

V&A: "Imagine having a remote control you could use to instantly block out the sound of noisy builders or a screaming child; or a product that allows you to hold a clear conversation in a noisy bar. The display includes stylish and attractive hearing products, some almost like jewellery, that people not only need but will really want to wear." (via Boing Boing)

Generalists Succeed as Entrepreneurs

Edward Lazear: "Among Stanford alumni, those who go on to start businesses took a more general course curriculum when they were at Stanford than those who never start a business,' he writes. Rather than take eight classes in finance, for instance, and an average of three in each of four other academic areas, entrepreneurs were more likely to balance their courses among a variety of disciplines." (via Dane Carlson)

Ouch!

Twodecode: "One of the reasons we opted for J2ME as a development platform was that we wanted to avoid developing different versions of the client software for each and every type of phone. We knew that multimedia support in J2ME was something to have a decent look at. We kind a lost sight of the fact that the decoding routines depended on floating point support. Now we see that a lot of phones have all the expected properties … except floating point support (CLDC 1.1)."

Update: PC of Twodecode writes in a comment, "Problem solved: wrote a library that emulates floating support. Up to the next problem."

Congratulations on fixing the problem, guys.

Using College Humor To Make Money Online

Yaro Starak: "$405,000 in revenue in December 2004, half of that coming from a website selling t-shirts…nice. The questions is why can’t we all replicate their story? Let’s analyse what exactly it takes to have this kind of success."

17 Mistakes Start-Ups Make

John Osher: "Mistake 2: Miscalculating market size, timing, ease of entry and potential market share. 'Most new entrepreneurs get very excited over an idea and don't look for the truth about how many people will want to buy it. They put together financial projections as part of a presentation to pump up their investors. They say, 'The market size is 50 million people that could use this product, and if I could only sell to 2 percent of them, I'd be selling a million pieces.' But 2 percent of a market is a lot. Most products sell way less than 1 percent.'"

Anti-Cancer Smart Bomb

Elizabeth Thomson: "Imagine a cancer drug that can burrow into a tumor, seal the exits and detonate a lethal dose of anti-cancer toxins, all while leaving healthy cells unscathed. MIT researchers have designed a nanoparticle to do just that."

Grab Your Prospect's Attention in 8 Seconds

Tony Parinello:

You have three big goals when it comes to developing an opening statement that works. You want to:
1. Make it sound conversational.
2. Deliver it with confidence.
3. Get a favorable interruption--one that will put your prospect in control as soon as possible.

Blog Utopia

Jason Calacanis: "I gotta tell, I’m much happier myself now. Our work is making people’s lives better (both reader and writer—even the advertisers), and my job over the last couple of months has moved from figuring out how to make the model work to—well—defending the business from being corrupted."

Forbes Best of the Web: Small Business Blogs

Forbes: "In addition to transmitting news, industry gossip and occasional rants, the best small business blogs offer interactivity, allowing readers to chime into the dialogue with their own bright ideas. There are, unfortunately, too many small business blogs peddling the same prosaic resources you can get from a simple google search." (via Matt Linderman)

Here are the winners:

Duct Tape Marketing
All Business Blog Center
Church of the Customer
Fresh Inc
Small Business Trends
BusinessWorks
Entrepreneurial Mind
Small Business Brief

How Good is Good Enough?

Johanna Rothman: "But here's the sad truth: you don't have to be the best. You just need to be better than your competition."

12 Signs of Startup Success

Frederick J. Beste III:

6. They have inner confidence. I noted earlier that optimism is cheap and it is. Optimism based on reason, however, what might be called "inner" confidence, is rare indeed. It's the difference between "knowing" you'll succeed because you're part of the $220 billion electronics industry, and knowing you'll succeed because your new product has nailed the competition right through the heart. It is, quite simply, confidence based on a knowledge of outstanding preparedness.

How Much to Pay Yourself?

Joseph Anthony:

It seems like a silly question, but it's one that owners of business startups have to answer. How much of a salary should they receive?

Depending on how the business is structured, the answer can be, "What the market will bear," "Just part of what I'd make otherwise" or even "Nothing at all — at least for now."

Shareware Starter Kit

Jeff Sandquist:

As they say on Slashdot.org :->

1. Write some Cool Software using Visual Studio 2005.
2. Incorporate the Shareware Starter Kit
3. Sell the software
4. Profit

The Blog Blob

Michael Hiemstra: "I was struggling far too long for this post's title. I started with a "A Window on Microsoft", but blogs are not exactly a window. More like a pinhole. And it's not like you are really looking in... it's more like you're viewing the bits that are oozing out of the pinholes!"

9-to-5 Financing

Tim Weiler:

I am absolutely 100% positive that sales of Syncura will wildly surpass my current salary. So what the hell am I doing strapped to my cubicle at work?

"You're supporting your wife and kid and ensuring that we don't get thrown out on the street", my wife tells me.

She's right. I can't quit until it's clear that I'm right about Syncura.

Startups' Seven Deadly Sins

Scott Clark: "4. Espousing entrepreneurial arrogance. When you have a one-person business, you are in charge of everything, but as your workforce grows you need to maximize productivity. Even if you think you know it all, you need to let go, train your employees within an inch of their lives and then concentrate on providing the tools they need to do the best job possible."

Attracting Talent

Alex Bendig: "If you cannot provide the top talent in your development team with challenges appropriate to their skill level, they will tend to believe they are wasting their time and talent. Overcoming boredom is not an acceptable challenge."

A Conversation with a VC

Jason Calacanis:

Associate: “Mmmm…. well, you’ve done a lot of cool stuff, but I mean what do you consider your advantage?”

Me: “Hustle.”

Associate: “So your business is based on hustle?”

Me: “Isn’t every business?”

Associate: “I’ve never heard that.”

Me: “They don’t teach hustle at Harvard’s MBA program?”

Associate: “I went to Wharton.”

Featuritis vs. Simplicity

Kathy Sierra: "What if instead of adding new features, a company concentrated on making the service or product much easier to use? Or making it much easier to access the advanced features it already has, but that few can master?"

Daily Improvement

Bob Parsons: "It’s your job to make sure each and every employee in your organization understands that they all should have one simple charter. At the end of the day, in some small way, they need to be a little better."

Spolsky On Hiring the "Best" Programmers

Joel Spolsky: "Or, roughly speaking, if you try to skimp on programmers, you'll make crappy software, and you won't even save that much money."

Winning in an Industry that Sucks

Norm Brodsky:

But it appeared to me that, among people who do interior decorating, the habit of taking customers for granted had been institutionalized, and I assumed I was in for another such experience when we hired a decorator for a new apartment we’d bought in Florida last year. Her name was Rosalie Modansky. She wasted no time letting us know that she didn’t work like other decorators. Once we’d agreed on a budget, she explained that she charged a flat fee for her services. "I’ll guide you in the buying," she said. "I’ll take you places and show you things. But you can pick out anything you want from anywhere you want. It doesn’t matter to me. I don’t make money on what you spend."

Business Ideas by Greenspun

Philip Greenspun: "I've decided to amuse myself and, I hope, inspire some young hard-working folks, by writing up ideas for businesses that should be profitable. Here's the first one: http://philip.greenspun.com/business/chinese-rv"

Side-Businesses Software

Jason Fried via Dane Carlson: "The most innovative software designed over the next 10 years will 1. be web-based, 2. will come from small teams, 3. will come from self-funded companies, and 4. will be for the 'side-business' or 1-10 person business market."

Attractive Markets

Yaro Starak: "Every now and then I ponder these markets. Gambling and porn are industries famous for being very profitable online way before anything else. How well would a gambling or pornography blog do? Think about the affiliate programs, the commissions and easy sell to the target market. Then I remind myself that I don't really want to associated with these industries and go back to work on the cleaner ideas."

Revenge of the Nerds

alarm:clock: "While it would be impossible to support with data, we believe we have experiencing a reversal of this trend and are now seeing more and more successful startups run by geeks without suit supervision. Each week, as we document the startup landscape from search to enterprise software, it seem we come across more companies that are run by geeks."

The Long Tail of Startup Locations

BusinessWeek online via Anita Campbell:

"Micropolitan" centers, as some call them, which lie somewhere between a city and a rural town, now trumpet their mix of beautiful settings, affordable housing, and attractive lifestyles. With communication technology blurring geographic borders, entrepreneurs in search of the proverbial good life are building companies where they want to live, as much as where they think they should work.

Is Unusability Disasterous?

Donald Norman: "How important is usability? Answer, very important, but it alone is not enough."

Human-Centered Design Considered Harmful

Donald Norman: "If it is so critical to understand the particular users of a product, then what happens when a product is designed to be used by almost anyone in the world? There are many designs that do work well for everyone. This is paradoxical, and it is this very paradox that led me to re-examine common dogma."

Beating the Fear of Failure

Bob Parsons: "By quantifying the worst possible scenario and accepting it, you give yourself permission to fail. I’ve discovered that this simple thought process allows me to operate without the constraints imposed by the fear of failure."

The Value of Social Networking for Entrepreneurs

Paul Allen the Lesser:

Too many entrepreneurs try to do it alone.

But it's easy to work together with a group of entrepreneurs that helps everyone succeed. That is what YEO and other organizations like it are all about. There are many examples of this in history.

In 1727 Benjamin Franklin and 12 friends formed a group which he called Junto, where they discussed the topics of the day for their mutual improvement. For decades these individuals helped each other succeed and make contributions to society.

Bootstrapper on VCs

Greg Gianforte: "Raising VC money determines your exit strategy. You will either sell the business or take it public. What if you end up with a very profitable, modest sized business that you want to just run? That is no longer an option once you raise VC money."

The 37Signals Way

Jakob Skjerning's notes from a talk by Jason Fried of 37signals: "You’re small, act like it, don’t pretend. Let the big guys be confusing."

The Consequences of Following Your Passion

Francesco Marciuliano: "Sure, it's nice to know what you want to do for the rest of your life but where's the joy when it's a career that initially promises little outside of the opportunity to repeatedly defend your choice to anyone who footed your college tuition?"

Google Juice for Lisp Tutorials

Brian Mastenbrook: "It's come to my attention that it's hard to find good tutorials for Lisp programming using Google. I think it's time to rectify that situation by letting Google know about the good tutorials for Lisp, especially the good tutorials about Common Lisp, that are available. Won't you help me?"

Cheap Plastic Solar Panels

Jamais Cascio: "Researchers at the Danish group Risø have developed a polymer photovoltaic technology that would cost about 2% of current silicon PV panels: Risø claims that their new polymer pv should run about $15/square meter, as opposed to the $800/square meter they list for silicon. Moreover, this plastic solar cell has a useful lifespan of about two and a half years, which Risø claims to be a record duration for plastic pv."

VOIP in a Box: PhoneGnome

Joi Ito: "The PhoneGnome is box that you connect to your phone line and your Internet connection and attach a phone to. The magic happens when PhoneGnome figures out your phone number and auto-configures everything so that in the future, all calls to other PhoneGnome users go over the Internet instead of the phone line."

Bendable Concrete

Jeremy Faludi:

Flexible concrete might sound like a gimmick, but most concrete fails because it is brittle, so cracks develop over time, and eventually become catastrophic. U Michigan has reduced this brittleness to make a concrete "500 times more resistant to cracking and 40 percent lighter."

Open-Source Startups

Larry Greenemeier: "Many open-source startups aren't even creating their own software--they get off the ground by selling services to help businesses implement popular open-source projects."

Do-It-Yourself Trade Show Booth

Kondra Systems: "Like any other small company attending a show, we wanted a bit more splash to set us apart but had a hard time justifying the booth costs. So instead of going with a collapable wall with some custom artwork, we took the $2000 and decided to see how far we could stretch it by building our own custom booth." (via Make:Blog)

Cost-effective Solar Power Imminent

George Douglas:

"We have seen steady progress in photovoltaic concentrator technology. We are working with advanced multijunction PV cells that are approaching 38% efficiency, and even higher is possible over time. Our goal is to install PV concentrator systems at $3 per watt, which can happen soon at production rates of 10 megawatts per year. Once that happens, higher volumes are readily achieved," Hayden, Solar Program Coordinator at APS, said.

Microsoft Bans Podcasting... Just Kidding

Raymond Chen:

First, Chris Pirillo says (timecode 37:59) he's not entirely pleased with the word "podcast" in Episode 11 of This Week in Tech. The Seattle-PI then reports that the sentiment is shared with "several Microsoft employees" who have coined the word "blogcast" to replace it. Next, c|net picks up the story and says that the word "podcast" is a "faux-pas" on Microsoft campus.

Kevin Kelly:

This overpriced book [40 Principles: Triz Keys to Technical Innovation] contains a set of 40 design strategies for inventing. It is a summation of engineering design principles devised by a Soviet patent examiner in the 1960s who extracted these principles from a study of 200,000 patents. This guy, Altshuller, says that the 10% most innovative patents would use one of these 40 strategies for their novel solutions. Altshuller then went on to construct a system to help engineers consider these elemental strategies for the problems they were working on. His system is called TRIZ, and it has a cult following among process engineers.

Termite Lisp

Termite Lisp:

Termite is a language and system offering a simple and
powerful tool for expressing distributed computation. It
is based on a message-passing model of concurrency inspired
by Erlang, and on a variant of the functional language Scheme.

via Bill Clementson

Software Products on the Cheap

Rashmi Sinha:

Joe Krause recently wrote that "Its a great time to be an entrepreneur". Yes, it is. Joe talks about cheap hardware, free infrastructure software, cheap global labor markets, and search engine marketing. There is another reason that its a great time to be an entrepreneur - an excellent example of which is Joel Spolsky's latest project: CoPilot.

David Weinberger on H2O Playlists

David Weinberger: "On Wednesday, about 75 people crowded into a seminar room at Harvard Law to talk about H20 playlists, a Berkman project in beta that lets people build and share "lists" of online and offline resources. It grows out of projects started in 1998, including a structured forum ("Rotisserie") for mutliple classes to discuss shared readings."

Bright Future Ahead for Political Mudslinging

Jill Yablonski: "You can support someone because you like them or because you don't like their opponent. A new study published in the latest issue of Political Psychology examines this concept to find that people are less likely to change their preference when they cast their vote against the candidate they do not like rather than for the one they do."

Beware the Dancing Bunnies

Larry Osterman:

What's the dancing bunnies problem?

It's a description of what happens when a user receives an email message that says "click here to see the dancing bunnies".

Keith Ferrazzi on LinkedIn

Keith Ferrazzi: "One of the coolest things about LinkedIn is how easy it is to reconnect with past colleagues. After you input your past employers’ names in your professional profile, every time you log in to LinkedIn’s main page you’ll be automatically notified of current and past colleagues who are LinkedIn members."

How to Make an Impression

Sloan Brothers:

Unlike many of the other inventors who were shoving their cards into our hands, this gentleman kindly requested one of our cards and said in passing he’d be happy to send along a free sample to us. “Sure,” we thought, “like he’s really going to even remember that he just said that.” But it was a kind gesture nonetheless.

Well, two weeks went by. We hadn’t heard a peep from the many inventors who had shoved their cards into our hands. And then a very heavy box arrived via FedEx.

Free Waterloo Classified Listings

quadspot >> waterloo: free classified listings for the waterloo community.

Update: Comment from Michael Hiemstra:

Everyone note that "waterloo community" means University of Waterloo community. Read more about the startup of quadspot here.

Writing Tips

Michael A. Covington:

• The world is run by people who write.
• Clear writing leads to clear thinking.
• You don’t know what you know until you try to express it.

Free Advertising

Jeffrey Moses: "Contacting a competitor may seem counterintuitive to your small business’s growth, but next to the technique described above, this is the best way for a company to take on new work at little cost. Who knows? The competitors you contact might have an overflow and be grateful for your call."

My First Interview

John Cass, who is doing some very interesting work with his Corporate Blog Survey, talked with me about my recent bug reporting stunt:

I recently received some criticism of the blog survey case studies interviews in the marketing and PR forum of SoftwareCEO.com, a forum member had suggested I should not accept statements from large company employee like Microsoft at face value, and that their statements were probably just marketing boosterism. Inspired by this critic I thought I'd contact Ken directly to get his thoughts on the case study.

It was my first interview, and it shows in the quotes. Nonetheless, I had lots of fun talking to John about the bug report and pontificating on the state of Microsoft.

The Bob Parsons Story

Bob Parsons:

I worked as hard as I did because I loved the idea I was working towards creating. My father told me once (what a wise individual he was!) that for anyone to be excellent at what they were doing, they had to love it. He said that if you didn’t love you job, you would never be better than average. When I asked him why this was the case, he told me something I would never forget. He said, “When you love something, it tells you all its secrets.” This always made a lot sense to me. Those who love what they do, spend the extra time to learn the subtle nuances and all the not so obvious things that overall make a tremendous difference. The secrets I would soon discover were what made Parsons Technology come alive.

(via Randy Holloway)

Expect to Fail; Expect to Learn

Nichole L. Torres: "Some of the most successful businesses in the world only came to be after a few serious failures. From prototypes that don't work to a service that doesn't sell in your local area, a first business can quickly turn into a first failure. But can you as an entrepreneur come back into the fray and start again—successfully?" (via Dane)

Dealing with Startup Anxiety

Marshall Brain: "If you can look at your life, your business, your situation, whatever and you can say to yourself, 'I have a problem, and the problem is ____,' you are often 80% of the way to solving your problem."

I Can't Stop Thinking About Micropayments

I Can't Stop Thinking: "Saving money was never the point -- getting a hundred times as much music was! And file-sharing was not an indicator of a generation of thieves -- but evidence of a record and radio industry that had been forcing musicians and listeners to walk the plank for one too many years." (via Steve)

Long Tail Primer

Michael Hiemstra:"If you look at the long tail as a graph, traveling along the X-axis you would see a short period of very high values quickly tapering off to a much longer period of shorter values. For instance, if you record every time you hear your kids screaming for a month and line them up on a graph based on the actual severity of the problem from most severe to least severe, chances are you would end up with a good picture of the long tail. There might be one or two real reasons for concern with the majority of the issues having something to do with a bothersome brother or sister flipping channels on the TV or making the wrong type of face."

Market Competition is like a Game

Eric Sink:"In this article, I'm going to surface a few principles of software product competition by drawing comparisons to games."

A Business Experiment

The Business Experiment:

The Business Experiment is a site meant to explore three concepts: wisdom of crowds, open-source business, and the distributed nature of work. The goal is to have the registered users of this site collectively start and run a real business. Business plans will be written. Financing will be sought (if needed). Employees will be hired. Systems of accountability will be put into place.

Fighting the Self-Serving Bias

Will Price:

Today's papers are rife with horror stories of projects failing - from the FBI's abandoned $170m internal IT project, to EDS' failing Navy contract, to incredible cost overruns and delays in the Pentagon's weapons development programs.

What does all this mean for venture capital and for executive teams?

Entrepreneur's Reading List

Paul Allen keeps an Internet entrepreneur's reading list. What other books would you add to the list?

How to Pay for Your First Hires

"I need to hire three employees to help get my business started, but I don't have enough financing to pay the salaries for all three. Should I try to raise more money before hiring anyone or should I hire just one employee and hope that I can make it work with limited resources?" Asheesh Advani answers .

Starting with Nothing

Inc. interviews Greg Gianforte:

In other words, bootstrapping clears away the clutter and makes you focus single-mindedly on the customer, which is what any smart entrepreneur needs to do anyway. It compels you to be creative, and it's an acid test for figuring out whether you've got a real business or just a plausible-sounding business plan. But bootstrapping is a safety net, too, because if you wind up with no sales, no customers, and no business, well, at least all you've lost is time, not money. "You don't make any fatal mistakes" is how Gianforte puts it.

Car Seats Ineffective, But Popular

Seth Godin:

Turns out that car seats for kids over 2 are no more effective than seat belts. The data is unequivocal on this. (see a quick clip at Freakonomics)

So if it's so clear, and if it means that Americans are wasting $300 million a year on car seats, what's going on?

Google's Master Plan

Google's Master Plan
Originally uploaded by jurvetson.

Ever wondered what Google is up to?

Waterloo Poker Party

Linda Johnson and Jan Fisher will speak of their recent success with Party Poker at a July 22nd Communitech event:

A few years ago Party Poker was one of many struggling on-line poker sites. Linda Johnson, Jan Fisher and their company Card Player Cruises were approached to revamp the marketing and player retention strategies and have turned Party Poker into the industry leader. On June 27, 2005 Party Gaming the operator of PartyPoker.Com completed the biggest public offering on the London Stock Exchange in over five years, taking its market value to about 5 billion pounds (US$9.1 billion).

Details here. (A tip of the hat to Jacqui at Watstart)

Software Patents Suck

Joi Ito: "I just believe that the notion that software patents somehow help venture businesses is a red herring and that software patents are primarily a tool for software monopolies to stay keep the little guys out."

Back to the Dark Ages

New Scientist: "[Jonathan Huebner, a physicist working at the Pentagon's Naval Air Warfare Center in China Lake, California] examined the number of patents granted in the US from 1790 to the present. When he plotted the number of US patents granted per decade divided by the country's population, he found the graph peaked in 1915."

TV Makes Average Kids Stupid

New Scientist: "Furthermore, the effects seemed to be strongest for those who had a median IQ level, probably because the outcomes for the children at either IQ extreme are less likely to be affected by TV watching."

Surprising Footprints

New Scientist: "Human footprints discovered beside an ancient Mexican lake have been dated to 40,000 years ago. If the finding survives the controversy it is bound to stir up, it means that humans must have moved into the New World at least 30,000 years earlier than previously thought."

Tempering Optimism

Pelle Braendgaard: "You could save up $20,000, quit your job and start full time on your business. However I have learnt the hard way that if you do this, you have to be ready to support your business even if things don’t move quite as fast as you want. Maybe your business is fine, just growing slowly. Is it really a good idea to quit your dream just because there is no money for rent or food?"

Counterpoint: Great Ideas Versus Great Teams

Pelle Braendgaard: "You’ve all heard the common advice that to startups that you need a good team. I’m sure that is right, however some times and at certain stages that team should consist of just you."

How To Do Something Great

D. Keith Robinson: "You need focus. Doing something great needs great focus."

Ultra-low-cost Startups

David Heinemeier Hansson: "Look at the project that costs $100,000 and figure out how to make it cost $20,000 over the shoulders of three guys. Do it out of your own pocket and you’ll be forced to reckon with constraints earlier and more intensely."

Tech Startup Reading List

Adam Sah:"Numerous friends ask for advice on startups-- truth is that it's 99% regurgitation from these five books, which I recommend reading in this order..."

Startup Halflife

Anita Campbell:"New research from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics suggests that most failures of American startups will occur in the first two years of their existence."

Pigeons and Fundamentalism

Seth Godin in a Fast Company article:

We don't expect a pigeon to wise up and change its behavior. But what about your boss? Have you ever had a boss who said, "I've looked at all the best thinking on [insert issue here: factory expansion, layoffs, global warming, stem-cell research, foreign trade], and I'm going to change my mind; my old position was wrong, and this is what we should do instead"? Or is your boss, well, more like a pigeon?

Company Vacation

Simon Woodside: "I just got off the phone with a receptionist at Sun Microsystems. Apparently the entire company is taking the week off. Huh?"

Word Games

Get past writer's block with the tools at Launguage Is A Virus (via 43 Folders).

Great Ideas Versus Great Teams

Joel Welsh: "Maybe you haven’t started up your dream business yet. You’d love to be an entrepreneur and strike out on your own. So, what do you spend your time thinking about? Most people think about the idea for what their business will do to make money. I submit that instead we should be thinking about who we want to be in the foxhole with."

Office Funagalo

Tony Plant in a People Management article (via Johnie Moore):

Having observed a lot of meetings and team activities I have concluded that many workers speak "Office Funagalo". Author McCall Smith tells us that Funagalo, a language invented for giving instructions in African mines, is good for telling people what to do: it has "many words for push, take, carry, load, and no words for happiness"

How Many Co-founders?

Allen Morgan: "If you want to raise money from VC’s, here’s a really tough, really important question you ought to ask yourself very early in the process: 'How many co-founders should I have?' Having the wrong 'answer' to this question can make your life difficult in some subtle (and odd) ways."

SICP Virtual Study Group

A tip of the hat to Pete Wilson of PseudoLogic for pointing me towards sicp-vsg: "A virtual study group for Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs".

Eclipse 3.1 is Out!

Eclipse 3.1 was released last week.

School's Out!

Joan Isabella: "You may be painfully aware that the school year is over. If you work out of your home, the noise level is a dead giveaway. No matter the age of your children, your work and their needs are most likely colliding. I’ve talked to entrepreneurs who are trying to tough it out through the summer months to save on the childcare bills, and others who have hired full-time help to get through the school break. Changes in schedules alone are bound to cause tension in the home. Don’t let the school vacation wreak havoc with your summer. Keep these tips in mind, and add your own personal experiences and ideas too."

Get Started

Joe Kraus: "There’s never been a better time to be an entrepreneur because it’s never been cheaper to be one."

Multicore Angst

Hannibal for Ars Technica:"Now it's time to face the multithreaded, multicore music. In the new world, a world of which both the Xenon and the Cell are a part, programmers have a whole lot more work to do, in terms of both splitting their applications up into threads and of optimizing those individual threads."

Fusion Reactor Goes to France

New Scientist:"The long and sometimes bitter dispute about the siting of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) ended [when] Japan withdrew its bid, as reported last week. The 30-year project will now be built at Cadarache in southern France."

Your Mother Lied...

Emma Young for New Scientist:"Regular doses of vitamin C will not prevent a cold in most people - though they might reduce its duration slightly, according to a major new review of existing research."

Security is a Dream

Debora MacKenzie for New Scientist: "Terrorists could poison more than 500,000 people, and more than half would die, by putting as little as 10 grams of botulinum toxin in a milk truck."

Live from Leamington

Explanation of the recent dirth of posts on this blog: Mandy and I celebrated our anniversary last Monday with a visit to Bhima's Warung (amazing, as usual). On Wednesday we celebrated Mandy's birthday with a trip to the Mandarin Chinese Buffet in Burlington (filling, as usual). On Thursday we drove to Leamington for a family event over the long weekend (and I thought the Mandarin was filling!). Mandy returned to Waterloo today, leaving me in Leamington for the week so I can visit with my sister who made a rare trip to Ontario from Vancouver.

Hopefully, I'll have some time between our many feedings to make a few posts. Here goes nothing.