Your problem sounds mostly psychological. You may have a case of anxiety disorder (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anxiety_disorder). See a professional counselor if this is bothering you to the point that it is robbing you of your happiness.
Facebook is not accessible in China now -- at least not in its full form as we know it. Facebook will have to morph significantly to enter China (filtering, cooperating with authorities, cultural barriers, etc.). It will be interesting to see how this process works out.
Agreed. You have a 30-35 year career: so put this in that perspective. 2 years is not that much of a deal in the longer run. Are you not having fun with your startup? If you are having fun learning, coding, and meeting other entrepreneurs then your outlook will be more positive.
IMO, perspective is everything: focus on the positives. You are 30 and you are half way through to achieving what most people cannot achieve in a lifetime. The times when I feel most sad/depressed is when I am working long hours for 7 days a week. So when I take a break and come back after having some fun, suddenly everything looks positive and encouraging:-)
A lot of startup activity is centered around the internet. Limiting internet usage that will mean that people won't be able to use our web services just because their monthly bandwidth quota is up. This is a barrier to the web-centric view that Google/Facebook/Twitter/etc have been propounding. This is not a step in the right direction.
I wonder if the McDonald's Vs. the local restaurant model applies here. To me it seems like quite a few local restaurateurs are wealthy and they don't have to scale massively to become millionaires. If you are just interested in running a small business and to serve a small section of the society you could still become wealthy, no? And the Web 2.0 (and the accompanying lower barrier of entry) brings perfect opportunities to follow this scheme. I know at least one friend who has a regular income from the App store following this model. But he is not a millionaire by any means. I am curious if there are really people out there who are wealthy simply by serving 20-50K people on the web with no potential/plan to scale.
PS: This is not to say zoho follows this model by any means.
I think people are underestimating how much of a barrier usability is w.r.t. making video calls. The reason people like voice calls is because it gets the job done quickly. I am not sure how Apple has implemented video calls. But imagine if their implementation is as follows:
1) You call somebody via a voice call
2) The call goes through and you start talking
3) The apple clients on both devices detect that they are connected to WiFi and they start setting up a video call connection in the background while you are still chatting
4) In about 10s after the conversation started, you start getting a video feed.
Wouldn't that be awesome? Wouldn't you use this free feature if it came at no cost? I know I'd LOVE it.
Other than the points highlighted above (and cost of video call), the big question is how are video calls done in Asia. Does it require the user to spend more than 3-4 secs to set up a video call (check if the other person has video call support, is he on the same network, do some prior WiFi settings, etc.). If so then that is a big barrier. And Apple definitely has the usability smarts to break that down.
> My success — and that of my people — depends largely on being the master of obvious and mundane things, not on magical, obscure, or breakthrough ideas or methods.
Follow the URL if you don't believe me;-)
EDIT: Ah! I see why you say that. I copied from the wrong place (from the comments) but the above quote was what I intended to highlight. Sorry about the confusion.
This list is so not relevant for a tech-intensive company. Tech-intensive work requires a manager to recruit and handle people who are smarter than him/her. Not the other way around.
> My success depends largely getting obvious and mundane things done, in spite of my people's shortcomings.
You mean managerial success depends on managing the power point slides instead of making sure that your server-side is architected to properly streamline asynchronous tasks?
This is definitely an option that should be considered.
I had a similar situation: I was moonlighting on a very promising startup for 2 years. My partners were supposed to do the fundraising, biz/development, or pitch in money. But it didn't happen at a level that I consider competitive. In the end things started to get worse: they don't understand the tech components very well but still had strong opinions. And that starts to become a -ve contribution. So I split from them and I am working on a few things on my own. Looking back in hindsight I feel vindicated.
I'd recommend that you cover all the conversation topics that others have suggested above. If it does not work out then cut your losses and move on. It may seem like a big deal after having invested time and emotions with this person but you should do what is right for you.
Asides: I feel that if an idea involves tech development then techies should work on it by themselves for a few months and then bring in the biz/dev guys. That way you know exactly what you are looking for and bring in the right guys that suit your business (connections, industry knowledge, etc.). Moreover you get to evaluate the biz/dev guys more closely since you can be with them when then demo the prototype. The only caveat here is that you need to have some prior startup experience so you can sort out the high level business aspects (users, customers, reveune models, etc.) on your own before you specialize your code/prototype too deeply.
You seem to be in the right track about the mind/body connection. Daniel Siegel has this to say about Intuition (see the "The Mindful Brain"):
Intuition seems to involve the registration of the input from the information processing neural networks surrounding our vicera; for example, the heart, lungs, and intestines. Our body's wisdom is then more than a poet's metaphor, it is a neural mechanism by which we process deep ways of knowing via our body's parallel distributed processing surrounding these hollow organs. This input registers itself in the middle prefrontal cortex and then influences our reasoning and our reactions.
This was the only index on Intuition in that book. Going by this definition of intuition, you should feel it in your chest or abdomen not your knees. But I'm really new to this, so I'm not going to claim to know anything:-)
That took me on a discovery path of the philosophical approach to mindfulness. There seems to be a whole body of literature analyzing this from various angles. In particular, Varela seems to very influential. He is also cited in Daniel Siegel's book called "The Mindful Brain" (I was just referred to this book by a student of Psychology). Good stuff.
I wish mindfulness was based on some simple guiding principles/laws like with classical mechanics. But as with a lot of Biological processes, it seems to be a large complex system. Varela's "Theoretical Biology" book sounds interesting but I suspect it is a complex model of the body+mind rather than a simple one.
It is one thing to have the right to free speech and another thing to exercise it. Most people show restraint all the time (don't criticize excessively, highlight the positives in your kid, tell your wife/GF that she is looking good on a bad hair day, etc.).
Why is it so hard to extend the same courtesy to Muslims?
The API seems pretty simplistic. Does it choose the different supervised learning algorithm underneath without input from the user or does it just use one supervised learning algorithm? Their website does not give any algorithmic details.
I listen to books on my iPod when I commute. I catch some online reading sometimes at work. I meditate and get some exercise 3 times a week. And I hang out with sharp people.
But I guess there is no all encompassing formula. Some people here seem to have other avenues.