A few months ago I wrote down some thoughts about failure, our fear of failure and our ability (inabilty) to embrace it.
The other day I was talking to a founder in our portfolio.
They made a mistake inside of their orgnazation and everyone knew it. I was processing this issue with the founder…
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This is a book review of Zadie Smith’s collection of essays, ‘Changing My Mind", and I have yet to read the essays, so I can’t comment on them, but I want so bad to defend Zadie. The line “each man must be true to his selves, plural” really stuck out to me. I’d love to hear more about that one, ZS. On the to-do list!
Doctors at Sunnybrook hospital in Toronto, Canada have taken interactive gaming to the next level when they hooked up a Kinect console to their medical imaging computer. Now when in the operating room, doctors can have direct access to MRI scans, without having to disinfect, leave the operating room, consult the scans, and then scrub back in. This hack allows them to virtually manipulate the scans and retrieve the necessary information by pulling it up on screen with a wave of their hand. (via PSFK)
Update: Obviously, this isn’t an actual image of a real doctor actually doing this. Also, keep in mind, while this is cool, it is simply a matter of convenience and time. Now surgeons, in real time, while scrubbed in, can interact with an image while operating. That’s nice and convenient, not a game changer.
Hello, my name is “the future”. Nice to meet you. I’ll be sticking around indefinitely.
Just do it, Libya edition.
At the moment are Andrew Sullivan, for his politics, Paul Graham, Mark Suster, and Fred Wilson for their wisdom about start-ups and venture capital (in that order), and Zadie Smith for her effervescent (if at times wrenching) essays. I don’t have time – well, patience – for novels anymore. I’m about to go on spring break, and I plan on reading zero books, and getting through two software development kits. That isn’t a happy turn of events, but it is a digression. Mark Suster’s most recent essay titled “Whom Should You Hire At A Startup” should be required reading for every new founder or founding team out there. I have been on the receiving end (an employee) in two start-ups that went from under a dozen people – in the first case two people – and made combined almost 30 hires. There was one that fell into each of the various buckets described in the essay, and what stood out to me is this passage:
“You said, “Eff experience. I want to know whether you can deliver. If you can, you’re golden. You’ll go a long way. If you can’t – you’re toast. Are you up for it?” It’s Tristan Walker of FourSquare. They hired him when he was an MBA. He had no right asking for a senior biz dev role at one of the hottest companies in the US. But he was ready to punch above his weight class. And he pushed for it.
And heavy-weight he has become. He is out innovating people with 10 years’ his experience. He is hungry. He is an A player. His innovation and execution are proving his worth”
It’s easy to get stuck in protective mindsets, because so often risks don’t reap rewards. But making calculated risks, and understanding the difference between someone who blows smoke and somebody who GSD is worth its weight in gold. Based on my work thus far, I’m a ways away from being an A-player. But knowing where you want to go, and how to get there, is more winning than losing. And as I start to make investments and look at other teams, I’m learning more and more about what it takes to be an entrepreneur. And, importantly, I’m learning not to take failure personally, and to encourage others not to, either. Because you learn most impactfully and effectively when you’re failing, so long as you “always make new mistakes.”
Ethan Zuckerman is a leading thinker on the internet based at Harvard University. His blog, entitled My Heart’s in Accra, speaks to his long association with Africa. He arrived in Ghana from New England in 1993, on a Fulbright scholarship, to learn African drumming. Every few weeks he would wander down to the central post office in Accra and place a phone call to his future wife in the United States. The line was indistinct and the call cost $5 a minute. His Macbook 1000 died after two weeks in the humidity. On the other side of Africa, Joe Mucheru, a Kenyan who now heads Google’s Africa office, remembers the internet kicking off in Kenya in 1994. Yahoo! and Hotmail e-mail accounts became popular in 1998. The government held onto internet access as a cash cow. Everything was rotten and dormant. “I didn’t know you could make money from air,” said a Kenyan minister, delightedly. But corrupt governments could, simply by withholding access. A 64k modem cost $16,000 a month, if you could get one. By 2000, the price dropped to $3,600. Soon after, as a result of legal challenges and pressure from tech enthusiasts and entrepreneurs, the Kenyan government agreed to open up to competition. For those with the money to buy the new modems, the change was instant, both in terms of information and speed. The post in most African countries was expensive and slow. Parcels frequently went missing (they still do), and there was no home delivery, just post-office boxes. Similarly, African governments had never had the money or the inclination to set up libraries; even university libraries were shoddy, so up-to-date printed material was hard to come by. Then, suddenly, there was the internet, with a cornucopia of knowledge on gardening, or cancer, or the stars of “Friends”.
Plugging a PC into the world wide web was only part of the story. Cheap Chinese black-and-white television sets hit the African market around the same time. For $50, poorer families in towns and cities suddenly had access to what had previously been an elite colonial medium. That stirred up the continent. Then came mobile phones. In 2000 Kenya’s largest mobile-phone operator, Safaricom, had 20,000 customers. Executives at Vodafone, which then owned Safaricom, reckoned that number would grow to 400,000, peaking around now. That was before cheap phones and prepaid airtime. Safaricom now has 12m customers and is the most profitable business in east Africa. Its biggest achievement has been M-Pesa, a service which allows people to send each other money over their mobiles. M-Pesa will move at least $1 billion in Kenya alone this year. Michael Joseph, the South African-born executive who masterminded Safaricom’s rise, claims it as “the greatest-ever innovation in the mobile-phone industry”.
arig:
NYTimes.com: Save Money on Digital by Buying Print?
The New York Times just announced their new digital pricing for subscription access to its online and mobile content.
I completely support paying for content, but did you know that you’ll pay less money for the digital editions of The New York Times if you also subscribe to their weekend print edition? Here’s the math:
– NYT All Digital Access (Online, Mobile, Tablet): $35/month
– NYT Weekend Print Edition which includes All Digital Access: $25.20/month
So, if you want full digital access to The New York Times, it looks like you’ll save $9.80/month by becoming a print subscriber to their weekend edition.
Does this make sense to anyone?
I can dig it. Read it on the iPhone and iPad while commuting and working and travelling, settling into the hard copy when Sabbath-ing. I’m down for that part, assuming paying for content is worth it to me (which, alas, in this case, it will be).
My roommate just reminded me of the legend that Ernest Hemingway was once part of a bet that he couldn’t write a six word story. He came up with “For Sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.” His (roommate’s – not Hemingway’s) college buddy actually wrote an entire New Yorker article in only six words, which was a plum delight to read.
At any rate, this naturally prompted the inevitable gamesmanship and we spent a few minutes trying to one-up each other with six word stories. Here are some of the good ones that emerged:
“Is this pork? Ah, fuck it.”
“She was SIXTEEN? Wow, my bad.”
“Just follow the white rabbit, damnit!!”
“The dot dot dots ruined you.”
Anyway, back to work, loyal readers. (You see what I did there? And again, just then too, right? I see where this is going… Oh no: now I can’t escape! Wait, do contractions count as two??)
“Think of the difference between George H W Bush in Kuwait and George W Bush in Iraq. Much of the right still longs for the swagger of the latter. The more discerning ones know better.”
This is a sober and well-presented analysis of the conservative mentality in the face of a nation being eclipsed by the future. I have to admit that I am becoming more of an Edmund Burkian every day. I love BHO, and he could barely do wrong in my book, but I see him through the lens of Edmund Burke. I don’t think they share that much in ideology – Obama isn’t a libertarian, of course, though he is more of a center-leftist than anyone on either side wants to believe – but they share much in temperament. And temperament is an underrated and crucial aspect of politics. Stay cool, stay cool forever.
“To feel the love of people whom we love is a fire that feeds our life.”
~Pablo NerudaBrigitte Bardot & Sacha Distel
Cosign.
Musings 