The coolest thing about bbsing in the 80s was a side effect of running the over phone lines: because long distance charges were expensive, you ended up dialing local bbses and organizing meetups with other local users. That was fun and feels like something important that is lost with current social networks
not sure if thinking of the solution ('advancing the state-of-the-art) is appropriate yet. Two questions to ask yourself:
1)how well do you understand your customers (are you your customer)? Have you talked to at least 10-20 potential customers to understand what their big problems are?
2) Why do you believe that 'advancing the state-of-the-art'
is needed to solve a meaningful problem? Maybe there's an easier problem you can solve for them, use the opportunity to learn and iterate.
I liked this quote - "I think the essential way to do anything great, you have to have some incremental development philosophy because you're just going to be wrong with your grand design that you don't iterate on."
It's surprisingly hard to beat investing in real estate in growth markets like SV because of the leverage afforded by the ratio of down payment to home price....
For example in Los Gatos, appreciation has been 5% on average for many years, and so the 200k you put down on a 1m house will typically appreciate by 50k. 25% roi in year 1, increasing each year. Of course, property appreciation doesn't happen in a straight line, and houses cost money to maintain (property taxes, etc) but the larger point is valid.
Traveled to India ~2+ years ago. Landed in Delhi - couldn't make out the city at all from the air due to pollution. We drove to Agra (3 hr drive) and there was smog pretty much the entire way there.
This seems like a promising opportunity for startups to tackle...I wonder if there are any out there, would love to hear more.
This is amazing, thank you. For those of you who didn't read the Usage guide:
"Use the keyboard shortcut (Ctrl-. by default). It’s worth memorizing this."
btw, I'm not sure why but Tabli isn't searchable on the Chrome store for me.
Empathy vs problem-solving is a false dichotomy. Having empathy helps to better understand the problem, and this understanding can lead to better solutions.
What do people think about an alternate path - read a few good books, create something useful on a github page?
My hiring bias skews towards people with a good engineering background or concrete examples of meaningful contributions to non-trivial coding projects.
Sure, vocational school is fine while demand for programmers is outstripping supply. But those who lived thru 1999 and the resulting downturn have seen that these things can turn on a dime and a 6-month certificate may not provide much job security.
Awesome article, especially regarding your relationship with food. Way to go zt.
If you haven't seen this TED talk (http://www.ted.com/talks/sandra_aamodt_why_dieting_doesn_t_u...) about why dieting doesn't work, do so - the speaker talks about being intentional with what you eat.
Also: Manresa is a great reason to skip out on a diet!!
It's not clear how much Yahoo is investing at that valuation, but I hope that the stated reason of re-creating an Alibaba type investment is not the primary driver. Despite the success of Alibaba, a single data point is not a trend (even a spectacular one like Alibaba), and I'm not sure that Yahoo's core competency is/should be picking winners.