Vivek Wadwha, writing for TechCrunch, rebuts Guy's assertion that engineering degrees are most important.
Engineering degrees can be very technical and can actually narrow one’s horizons. To innovate, you need to understand customers and markets. To build a successful product—one that actually sells and makes an impact, you need to understand distribution and finance. So even in the lower echelons of technology, a broader educational background is a plus.
The truth is, the fastest path between two points is a straight line. When I go to college campuses to try to pass along stuff I wished I knew back in college, the #1 thing was that I wish I spent more time *creating* and less time *analyzing* startups and markets.
I do meet engineers who probably should get an MBA. They need to round themselves out, think more about users and markets and distribution. Get out of the lab or cubicle. These are the minority.
I meet far more people with a will and a dream, but no engineering/design capability to create it. This is why Guy is right when he says an engineering background is far more essential.
Kawasaki explained that his issue with MBAs is that they are “taught that the hard part is the analysis and coming up with the insightful solution”. In other words: implementation is easy and analysis is hard. “But this is the opposite of what happens in startups. Implementation is everything in a startup.”
Indeed, ideas are merely multipliers on execution. Everyone has ideas. We can all imagine a world where ____ is made better. But to make that dream a reality, ah, that is the rub. And that is why Guy is right.
Terry Gilliam's 1985 film Brazil was a groundbreaking work of dystopian social commentary. One of the names Gilliam wanted to give to the movie was actually 1984 1/2 -- a nod to both Orwell's dystopian novel 1984 and Fellini's 8 1/2. The main character is Sam Lowry, a clerk in the Ministry of Information's Records department. Like 1984's Winston Smith, love impels this forlorn everyman into the gnashing teeth of the machine.
As with Blade Runner, It is hard to date Brazil as a film over 25 years old by any means. It seems to hold a certain timeless quality. However unlike Blade Runner, a film 3 years its senior, Brazil is dark in tone and worldview instead of just visually. There is a certain crushing insanity of the crass bourgeois commercialism, whereas in Blade Runner things appear merely bleak but rational.
The rise of the personal computer and the Internet has been moreso about freedom of information. Yet our fears for Facebook, Google, and other players in the Information Age are couched in dystopian wording and imagery. "Dreams of world domination." Brazil's main theme is that of information control, where the state tightly controls information through bureaucracy and process. Multiple characters submit to this system and go to both banal and extreme lengths to obtain the information they need. Jill, the female lead, witnesses the arrest of an innocent father (result of a clerical error, fittingly), and selflessly fights to find out his whereabouts on behalf of the family. But she is sent from one department (Records to Information Retrieval) and back for the appropriate stamps of approval. Death by bureaucracy. Sam Lowry, the main character in Brazil, must even switch occupations entirely and transfer to a department of higher rank (Information Retrieval Dept) to get access to classified and inaccessible dossiers. All this under a specter of terrorism that never proves itself to be real. In contrast, the ongoing battle waged by angry bloggers against Facebook around privacy is actually over the an enforced *freeing* of information by the allegedly monolithic / Facebook. This is not a part of what the science fiction predicted. But we don't live in works of fiction, now do we?
All people who create dread the moment when someone trashes their work. Musicians, movie directors, or software engineers anticipate reviews and varyingly rejoice or are laid low by the choice words of their critics.
Of course, call a spade a spade. IE debugging and testing sucks. The developer experience is crap. Everyone knows it. But there's constructive criticism, and then there's wholesale burn-down-the-house rage. The truth is, the IE team is listening, and they want to get better. Lord knows we all do. I sure hope they do, it'll be a service to everyone. Those that know me well know my online alter ego is typically rantfoil. It was one of those relics of teenage years, when I first signed on to AOL Instant Messenger and needed a screen name. Well, rant I did. These days, I try not to rant as much because it's not healthy. Not for me, and not for really anyone. Thanks to Jeff and Ravi and my old Microsoft colleagues. The troll is me. I can only hope to do better tomorrow.
Spent a frustrating hour or two debugging an IE+Flash bug. Turns out I'm not the only one who needs to redouble our efforts on Internet Explorer support. In the process of debugging an IE error, I ran into the JS bug above, on Bing no less. Irony in action.
It makes sense that Internet Explorer doesn't act right or feel right. That its developer tools are shoddy and unacceptable. If you make billions of dollars on maintaining desktop hegemony... yeah, you're not going to invest heavily in things that disrupt that. You know, like this whole web revolution thing. Who suffers? Developers first, and ultimately, if you believe like I do that we truly live in the information age-- all of society. Innovation stifled for profit motive.
Microsoft makes about $10 billion per monopoly per year (Windows + Office). If the the company impedes the progress of web software by just two years (arguably given their market share, it is far more than that), that's $40 billion in pure profit. When the billions roll in, you do what you gotta do.
I love this snippet from a recent blog post on Study Hacks entitled Beyond Passion: The Science of Loving What You Do.
Research reveals that autonomy, competence, and relatedness are the key to loving what you do. So how do you get them? There are different answers to this question, but the strategy that I keep emphasizing on Study Hacks has two clear steps:
- Master a skill that is rare and valuable.
- Cash in the career capital this generates for the right rewards.
The world doesn’t owe you happiness. Your boss has no reason to let you choose your own projects, or spend one week out of every four writing a novel at your beach house. These rewards are valuable. To earn them, you must accumulate your own career capital by mastering a skill that’s equally rare and valuable.
via calnewport.com
It's a mantra, repeat it with me: The world doesn't owe me happiness -- The world doesn't owe me happiness -- The world doesn't owe me happiness -- The world doesn't owe me happiness -- The world doesn't owe me happiness -- The world doesn't owe me happiness -- The world doesn't owe me happiness.
We must earn it.
Wow, we are truly honored to be chosen by BusinessWeek for the Best Young Tech Entrepreneurs of 2010! Especially to be named alongside such fine startups as Scribd, Spotify and FourSquare. The work is far from done, but we are blessed with an amazing Posterous community to support us from the beginning. Thanks to all of the friends we've made since we launched in 2008. You guys rock.
Special thanks to Vince for taking the photo out on the roof of our old HQ in North Beach.
PS, Posterous is hiring. We're looking for designers and software engineers. Spread the word.
via venturehacks.com
Wow this is really must-watch / must-memorize / must-follow for all new entrepreneurs. Seriously.
In fact, read the transcript a couple times too. If you have never raised money before, this deck and this blog post will save your ass.
Everything Naval shares here has been 100% confirmed by our experiences raising angel and VC funding. What you don't know can hurt you. Don't make rookie mistakes. Your team, your idea, and your startup deserve better.
In Jeet Kune Do, one does not accumulate but eliminate. It is not daily increase but daily decrease. The height of cultivation always runs to simplicity... It is merely simplicity; the ability to express the utmost with the minimum. It is the halfway cultivation that leads to ornamentation. Jeet Kune-Do is basically a sophisticated fighting style stripped to its essentials.
Art is the expression of the self. The more complicated and restricted the method, the less the opportunity for expression of one's original sense of freedom. Though they play an important role in the early stage, the techniques should not be too mechanical, complex or restrictive. If we cling blindly to them, we shall eventually become bound by their limitations. Remember, you are expressing the techniques and not doing the techniques. If somebody attacks you, your response is not Technique No.1, Stance No. 2, Section 4, Paragraph 5. Instead you simply move in like sound and echo, without any deliberation. It is as though when I call you, you answer me, or when I throw you something, you catch it. It's as simple as that - no fuss, no mess. In other words, when someone grabs you, punch him. To me a lot of this fancy stuff is not functional.
A martial artist who drills exclusively to a set pattern of combat is losing his freedom. He is actually becoming a slave to a choice pattern and feels that the pattern is the real thing. It leads to stagnation because the way of combat is never based on personal choice and fancies, but constantly changes from moment to moment, and the disappointed combatant will soon find out that his 'choice routine' lacks pliability. There must be a 'being' instead of a 'doing' in training. One must be free. Instead of complexity of form, there should be simplicity of expression.
To me, the extraordinary aspect of martial arts lies in its simplicity. The easy way is also the right way, and martial arts is nothing at all special; the closer to the true way of martial arts, the less wastage of expression there is.In building a statue, a sculptor doesn't keep adding clay to his subject. Actually, he keeps chiselling away at the inessentials until the truth of its creation is revealed without obstructions. Thus, contrary to other styles, being wise in Jeet Kune-Do doesn't mean adding more; it means to minimize, in other words to hack away the unessential.
It is not daily increase but daily decrease; hack away the unessential.
As in martial arts as it is in design. The height of cultivation always runs to simplicity.
We’ve been there before, and intermediate layers between the platform and the developer ultimately produces sub-standard apps and hinders the progress of the platform.
--Steve Jobs re: Flash via taoeffect.com
Kind of interesting. Is he talking about Flash or is he talking about Java?
I spent a few years writing deeply complex user experiences in Java. Invariably it was a technology tax we had to pay to try to get proper native-like experiences on exactly this kind of thing -- an intermediate layer (Java Swing) between the underlying machine (Win32).
Writing desktop apps in Java was a real pain. Flash, while easier, is still another inefficient layer between you and the underlying metal. You're right, Steve. Lets not subject people to that anymore.