My grandma started practicing zen meditation in the 1950s, when it first was introduced to the US. She taught my mom, who's now a teacher, and introduced me to the practice when I was sixteen.
Meditation, I find, confers a number of benefits. It's energizing and relaxing. It improves my sleep. It hones my listening and observation skills. It makes me more aware of the thoughts in my head -- which can be deafening at times -- and will help me quiet them.
I find that the time and effort I spend meditating is tremendously valuable and enriching.
SF is a great place to build a startup, but a lousy place to live. I never felt like I could really be myself there (despite meeting hundreds of supposedly like-minded people).
Bostonians are far less friendly on the surface, but man, you can really get to know them. People are nerdy, intellectual, informed (and not just about tech), opinionated, and largely quite sane.
The pace of the city is slower, too, in a way that I appreciate. When I go to a tech event here, I'll often meet someone and spend an hour locked in conversation with them. That kind of deep, engaged conversation never happened in SF, where people are perpetually on the go, and cutting from one thing to the next.
Outside of work, Boston (and by this I specifically mean Cambridge and Somerville -- or "Camberville" as we call it) is the best place in the country to be a nerd. The place is filled with swing dancers, LARPers, grad students, cult movie screenings, comic book and game shops, and quite possibly more CTY alumni than any other city.
Simultaneously, we've got a lot of general culture, too -- lectures, theater, good food, and so on.
Stuffy and introverted? Sure, a bit. But you can get past that quickly, and discover a wonderful place to live.
You're absolutely right. This was one of our biggest failing points from the time we started. We built a cool, graceful, elegant solution... that ultimately solved little.
4) Yes, you're right. Naysayers do abound. I refer to the world's "collective" opinion because, yes, it's all too easy to find a token naysayer who's eager to shoot you down.
That said, once you have a beta out, or some kind of working concept, the world becomes your sounding board -- where else, after all, will you get your users and customers? While it's important at some point to ignore what people think, it's just as important to keep at least half an ear open to their thoughts and opinions. I believe that you can learn more by listening deeply and attentively to people than by ignoring them.
5) As I said in the post, teams work for a number of people. They're one of the most common structures for getting companies off the ground. In the case of companies with strong technical needs, they can be particularly helpful, as different people can bring different skill sets and perspectives that may prove to be instrumental.
That said, I challenge the widely-held assumption that a founding team is necessary, vital, or inherently "better" than starting a company by yourself, and bringing people on later.
I hold that a single person, charged with focus and determination, can launch a concept with speed and single-mindedness that's difficult to replicate in a team environment. A team, despite the benefits it confers, adds added complexity to decision-making, and can dilute an idea as easily as it can rally behind it.
You can only bring on people later if you are successful, but becoming successful on your own is so damn hard and psyche destroying, if you don't see some success in a reasonable amount of time, you won't get there alone.
Do your next startup alone and come back and tell me if having two other bright and motivated people standing next to you is a bad thing.
You're right -- "founder" is a tough measurement. A lot of times -- as in the case of my own company, RFOP -- one person starts a company, sees a bit of success, then quickly brings on a small group of peers who join with the "co-founder" moniker.
As a company grows, it quickly evolves from a solo effort to (some variation of) a team effort. This can mean bringing on employees, or people who join as "co-founder." At PayPal, for instance, more than a half-dozen of the first employees were accorded "co-founder" status, which is why the company appears to have so many.
Further complicating the matter, many companies change their story after they reach success, presenting a company as a joint effort or team project, rife with co-founders and collaborators, when the truth is closer to one visionary bringing an idea to life, and assembling a team thereafter.
For instance, Digg. I was at a dinner a few years ago and had the pleasure of sitting next to Owen Byrne, one of the people mentioned above. Owen wrote the original code for Digg. He told me that Kevin Rose found him off of ELance. Until then, he was a fairly unknown Canadian programmer. His success has surely increased since taking on what started as a $2,000 contract gig, but I hesitate to call him a "co-founder."
99 times out of 100, companies build teams in order reach success. However, in many of those circumstances, that kernel of success starts not with a small team reaching consensus, but a single visionary with a single vision.
Obviously I'm biased, but Kevin had little if any vision other than finding a new job. And he was much less known then he is now, after a careful, well-crafted and expensive PR campaign. And yes, I was an "unknown coder" but also an MBA, Ph.D candidate, and I spent years haranguing the business editor of our local paper about how corrupt the news business was. Many people I respect have summed up Kevin in a single word - "shallow."
And to reiterate, elance was not involved in digg. That also was part of the PR campaign.
I remember getting one of those email postings from elance a year or two ago, where it was explicitly mentioned about Digg being started through elance. What is the real story then?
That's impressive. I did do a couple of small jobs for Kevin nearly a year and a half before digg, so I guess they can claim we were introduced through it. But there were so many new fees and restrictions on providers that it was just a nightmare to use by the time digg appeared, that I had moved on.
I disagree with your assessment of sociology as a discipline "filled to the brim with Humanities-Style-Thinking."
Sociology uses rigorous, analytical, and quantitative methods to shine insight on the modern condition. It allows one to better understand the condition of the world, and by extension, one's place within it. And it has contributed significantly to my intellectual growth.
When I've felt a lack of community in my life, for instance, Robert Putnam showed me that civic and social participation in America have systematically declined for the last six decades.
When I've aspired to get into a good school or ahem a prestigious startup incubator, Robert Frank explains how concerns of status and position have a salient effect on my decision making.
When I express a preference for a particular kind of music or type of food, Bordieu shows that preferences that I take for granted are in fact strongly correlated with my culture, socioeconomic background, gender, and profession.
When I pay money to send a virtual gift to a friend, Baudrillard shows that I'm motivated by "sign value" rather than "use value" -- that what an object represents matters more than what it actually does.
And that's just the beginning.
Sociology gets a lot of criticism, perhaps because it's such a broad field. However, it has done more to shape my understanding of the world than any single other discipline, and I'm far from speaking alone.
Well, you listed several prominent sociologists and stuff they claimed. That doesn't in any way, shape, or form prove that their claims are true or even based on falsifiable hypotheses and experimentation like the sciences we trust, i.e., physics and medicine.
This is probably because sociology is one of those disciplines, and I use the term loosely, that really isn't yet close to being able to have its referents captured, chopped up, classified, quantified, analyzed and put into little boxes.
In fact, if I didn't know better, I'd say the observations you point to could have been made by your run-of-the-mill keen observer of humanity, like a Tom Wolfe or Shakespeare.
Josh Porter (a social design expert and author of the blog Bokardo) told an interesting story about Amazon. He was doing some user testing for a competing e-commerce site, and the tester he was interviewing asked if they could go to Amazon.
"Sure. Is it to compare the prices?" he asked.
"No," replied the tester. "It's so I can check the customer reviews."
I'm impressed by the extent to which Amazon has cultivated trust. They tell you what customers like you think about virtually every product on their site; they help you find products you might like more than the one you're browsing; they give you the chance to buy a cheaper used version of the product from a third-party. And so on.
Throw in their speed, low prices, and reliability, and it's no wonder they've captured such a strong slice of the e-commerce market.
I felt the effect of being in Silicon Valley the moment I moved out here. The area is not only teeming with endless talent, energy, and enthusiasm, but (and this is important) we have an entire culture that makes this talent, energy, and enthusiasm possible in the first place.
When I moved to San Francisco from Chicago, I felt the change immediately. People simply get me out here. They understand why I'm doing what I'm doing. They ask intelligent, insightful questions. They give me invaluable advice. They share their knowledge freely. And they do all of this because they believe in -- and belong to -- the same amazing culture that I now do.
Funny story: I was sitting at a bar out here in Bushwick, Brooklyn, just finishing up my dinner and sipping on a nice stout. Woman next to me glances up from her book and says, "You aren't a programmer, are you?"
"Um.. yes, actually. I do user interface development. How'd you know"
"Oh, I just moved here from the Valley... I guess I just know the type when I see it."
Northeast Kingdom - Troutman and Wyckoff, right between the two entrances to the Jefferson stop on the L. We've got a Dunkin over by the Dekalb stop, but Wyckoff Starr is better (starr & wyckoff) ;)
The flip side of that is there's a complete lack of any criticism, and to me it feels like that will be its downfall (Detroit met its downfall, and so will Silicon Valley). A recent case in point is the whole DiggBar controversy. I'd suggest that the criticism has come entirely from outsiders or people "not of the valley," Meanwhile there's been a whole tide of "digg is taking over the world," "digg is growing up" from the usual denizens of the echo chamber. And then there's Robert Scoble - a one-man black hole of uncritical praise for all things SV. Add to that the complete disappearance of IPOs or anything resembling an exit (in fact the big trend now seems to be the opposite of exits -- Stumbleupon, Skype) and this piece feels a bit pollyanna-ish.
You must have seen a strange slice of the Valley. People here think much more critically about startups than in the rest of the US. People in Nebraska aren't worrying about Twitter's business model.
You must have spent some time 'out west' during the Viaweb acquisition. How much did you see of the valley in those years? I lived in San Francisco in 1999 and early 2000, and thought things were actually pretty crazy. I don't think I knew anyone who wasn't doing something related to computers, and there was a very unhealthy "free money! wheeee!" attitude amongst a lot of people, so much of it was being sloshed around in a way that obviously wasn't sustainable.
Also, there were virtually no children, no old people, not many "middle class" people... it all just struck me as very out of kilter.
That's not to say that there aren't lots of good things, or that the area is a bad place or somewhere people shouldn't go, just that it has its downsides too. I got the feeling that it has never really cast off the 'gold rush' mentality: get in, get rich, get out. Sure, some do stay and make it their home (you, for instance), but so many move on that I never felt much sense of community, something that I do enjoy over here in Italy, and have found more of in other towns in the US.
> People in Nebraska aren't worrying about Twitter's business model.
They're busy getting rich with more traditional stuff that they understand:
> People in Nebraska aren't worrying about Twitter's business model.
Very true, but we should not be so dismissive of non-startup small businesses. I'm new here, and have worked at tech startups since I got my CS degrees and started my career a few years ago.
Starting a new business on the basis of a great idea and hard work is nothing new. All around me, I see examples of small businesses being creative within their domain, and they are growing profitable businesses using the same tools we use (in theory: great graphic design, viral/word-of-mouth marketing, accessible customer service, and hard work) without any promise of making it big. These businesses see a niche and try to serve it uniquely.
I appreciate SV and the hungry tech culture as much as anyone, but we're not operating on fundamentally different principles.
By voting me up, you guys have proved me at least slightly wrong. The one thing that Northern California is demonstrably great at (over the long term) is providing room for the outsider. It seems like that's being eroded lately.
PG might be on to something here. I used to live in Austin back in the mid-90s. It has has great weather, a great university and several startups that went onto become big (Dell, Pervasive, etc). And yet Austin has failed to compete with Silicon Valley and in the last decade might have even become less relevant in the tech sector.
I've really been amazed at the caliber of people that I meet through the Hackers and Founders meetup that are from Austin. There's really a great little sub-culture here of ex-Austinites that are interested in founding startups.
I wouldn't be surprised. I saw James Hong from HotORNot talk about virtual gifts a while ago. You know what one of the biggest sources of revenue on their site was? Flowers.
You could send three different kinds of flowers to someone -- a cheap one ($1), a medium priced one ($3), or an expensive one ($10. Yes, $10 for a stupid little flower icon.)
People bought flowers by the hundreds of thousands; they became one of the biggest drivers of site revenue. Moreover, and this is interesting, James said that when someone sent a flower to a person, they were considerably more likely to get a response when sending a message.
Well yes obviously they're a profitable industry, I don't deny that. I'd be the first to hunt down numbers to back up what you say, I was in the card industry myself for awhile. But I wasn't answering the question of 'are they a good business' I was answering the question 'would I pay for today's virtual gifts' which I understood to be your submitted topic. And I was being honest: in my experience virtual gifts have never appealed to me as a consumer. I likened them to gift cards because gift cards provide no added utility while reducing liquidity - they're a huge consumer sham. But as to whether these items are profitable, absolutely - they're spectacularly profitable!
My grandma started practicing zen meditation in the 1950s, when it first was introduced to the US. She taught my mom, who's now a teacher, and introduced me to the practice when I was sixteen.
Meditation, I find, confers a number of benefits. It's energizing and relaxing. It improves my sleep. It hones my listening and observation skills. It makes me more aware of the thoughts in my head -- which can be deafening at times -- and will help me quiet them.
I find that the time and effort I spend meditating is tremendously valuable and enriching.