Paul Graham

From a 2005 essay titled "What Business Can Learn from Open Source":

Those in the print media who dismiss the writing online because of its low average quality are missing an important point: no one reads the average blog. In the old world of channels, it meant something to talk about average quality, because that's what you were getting whether you liked it or not. But now you can read any writer you want. So the average quality of writing online isn't what the print media are competing against. They're competing against the best writing online.

Cold and Mechanical

Jonathan Sterne, in a piece about the meaning of analog and digital. Emphasis mine.

In both Kittler and Massumi we find an odd historical proposition-that analog machines are somehow both closer to the way the human senses work, and to the operations of reality itself, than the technologies that preceded or succeeded them. Viewed with a bit of historiographic distance, this is at once an unsurprising and fascinating claim...The claim is fascinating because it proposes a truly radical periodization, where there is an approximately 100-year period in human history-roughly from the last quarter of the 19th century to the last quarter of the 20th-where the senses and the world were somehow in harmonious alignment with media...When critics use some permutation of analog to apply a hermeneutic of suspicion to the digital, they are making an argument about 100 golden years in human history.

This reading of the analog is, of course, retrospective. In [their] time, technologies that we now describe as analog (usually after the fact) were more likely to be understood as jarring or artificial: think of Bergson on film, Freud on the phonograph, or Gunther Anders on television.  Sonic or visual characteristics now affectionately described as warm and organic were described as cold and mechanical...In other words, the idea that analog media are more like the senses or more accurately limn the world’s workings are themselves a kind of retrospective imagination...

We should return some specificity to the analog as a particular technocultural sphere.  That is to say that reality is just as analog as it is digital; and conversely, that it is just as not-digital as it is not-analog.  Ultimately this goes back to an old argument, one made well by the last generation of technology scholars, ranging across methodological and political orientations, including Kittler and Massumi at other points in their writings: technology is part of the domain of human existence, not something outside it. The meanings we commonly attribute to the word analog did not even fully exist in the so-called analog era. Restoring some specificity to the term will help stimulate our technological imaginations (Balsamo 2011), and free us from the burden of a history that was only recently invented.

Hindsight

Roelof Botha, a member of the board of Square, talking with Fortune about Square's (costly) partnership with Starbucks:

It's dangerous to look at things with the benefit of hindsight.

This is hard for me to wrap my head around. I *think* that Botha is suggesting that one needs to be careful not to confuse correlation with causation, but I find the wording... problematic.

Haven't changed

John Tighe (a designer of airplane interiors), quoted in a New Yorker piece about the details of first class accommodations: 

“A good seat doesn’t show you everything it’s got in the first ten minutes,” he said. “It surprises you during the flight, and lets you discover things you weren’t expecting.” Such features can pay off in unexpected ways: passengers who like their seats tend to give higher ratings to everything on their flight, including movie selections that haven’t changed.

Just impress people. They'll like you more.

How do I make money?

Ben Thompson, writing about F8:

One of the key lessons I learned working with developers is that, at the end of the day, everything pales in comparison to the question: “How do I make money?” Developer tools are important, languages are important, exposure is important, but if there isn’t money to be made – or if more money can be made elsewhere – then you’re not going to get very far in getting developers on your platform.

Don't even try

Paul Graham:

Don't even try to build startups. That's premature optimization. Just build things that seem interesting. The average undergraduate hacker is more likely to discover good startup ideas that way than by making a conscious effort to work on projects that are supposed to be startups.

Power switches

From Business Insider's good, long profile of Larry Page:

In 1999, for instance, the method by which large Web companies such as eBay, Yahoo, and Google added server space had become fairly routine. They purchased servers and installed them in cages at giant warehouses owned by third-party vendors. The warehouse companies would pay for the power that kept the servers running and the air conditioning that kept them cool, and the website owners would pay for space by the square foot. Page figured if Google was going to pay per square foot, he was going to stuff as many servers into that space as he could. He took apart servers and began hunting for ways to shrink them. The first thing to go? All the off switches.

“Why would you ever want to turn a server off?” he reportedly asked.

Stripped of useless components and fitted with corkboard to keep wires from crossing, Google developed new super-slim servers. They looked ugly. But before long, Google would end up paying the same price to host 1,500 servers as early rival Inktomi paid to host 50. As a result, Google’s search ran a lot faster, and Inktomi, along with many of Google’s other search rivals, was left in the dust.

Tony Hsieh

Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, from a talk given to the Long Now Foundation: 

A company's culture and a company's brand are really just two sides of the same coin. The brand is just a lagging indicator of the culture. And with social media, and everyone being hyper connected, that brand is actually [lagging] less and less. So for example, if you ask a random person off the street "what do you think of the airline industry," you'll probably get back responses about bad customer service or apathetic employees and so on. And like it or not, that is the brand of the industry, even though no airline obviously set out for that to be their brand. 

Arbitrary and meaningless

Squarespace CEO Anthony Casalena, talking with First Round Review about developing a high quality product:

We tend to see a lot of deadlines as arbitrary and meaningless. At their worst, they compromise design quality and burn people out so much that they stop having good, creative ideas. Sprinting is not our core differentiator.

Ahh, product life :)

But seriously: Remember that not all successful companies sprint. Develop products how you want to, and reflect on whether it's going well. 

Frosh > Frish

Dan Jurafsky, writing about the phonetics of the names we give ice cream flavors. Emphasis mine. 

In one marketing study, for example, Richard Klink created pairs of made-up product brand names that were identical except for having front vowels or back vowels: nidax (front vowel) verus nodax (back vowel), or detal (front vowel) versus dutal (back vowel). For a number of hypothetical products, he asked people which seemed bigger or smaller, or heavier or lighter, with questions like:

Which brand of laptop seems bigger; Detal or Dutal?
Which brand of vacuum cleaner seems heavier, Keffi or Kuffi?
Which brand of ketchup seems thicker, Nellen or Nullen? 
Which brand of beer seems darker, Esab or Usab?

In each case, the participants in the study tended to choose the product named by back vowels (dutal, nodax) as the larger, heavier, thicker, darker product. Similar studies have been conducted in various other languages.

The fact that consumers think of brand names with back vowels as heavy, thick, richer products suggests that they might prefer to name ice cream with back vowels, since ice cream is a product whose whole purpose is to be heavy and rich.

Indeed, it turns out that people seem to (at least mildly) prefer ice creams that are named with back vowels. In a study in the Journal of Consumer Research Eric Yorkston and Geeta Menon had participants read a press release describing a new ice cream about to be released. Half the participants read a version where the ice cream was called "Frish" (front vowel) and the other half read a version where it was called "Frosh" (back vowel), but the press release was otherwise identical. Asked their opinions of this (still hypothetical) ice cream, the "Frosh" people rated it as smoother, creamier, and richer than the "Frish" people, and were more likely to say they would buy it. The participants were even more influenced by the vowels if they were simultanously distracted by performing some other task, suggesting that their response to the vowels was automatic, at a non-conscious level.

People are *so* weird.

Accountability is a Team Concept

From a piece in Fast Company about the (DoD-funded) Software Engineering Institute:

Importantly, the group avoids blaming people for errors. The process assumes blame - and it's the process that is analyzed to discover why and how an error got through. At the same time, accountability is a team concept: no one person is ever solely responsible for writing or inspecting code. "You don't get punished for making errors," says Marjorie Seiter, a senior member of the technical staff. "If I make a mistake, and others reviewed my work, then I'm not alone. I'm not being blamed for this."

It's my belief that organizations run best when accountability - for both failures and successes - is shared widely. At SEI, where NASA flight software is developed, big failures can be catastrophic. In order to ensure the overall project success, all individual output is reviewed at multiple stages of development; if errors are overlooked, responsibility falls to the team – not to any individual in the process.

Weak ties that last

From a *long* article in TechCrunch about the San Francisco housing market. Emphasis mine.

San Francisco’s population hit a trough around 1980...But that out-migration reversed around 1980, and the city’s population has been steadily rising for the last 30 years.

This is a phenomenon that’s happening to cities all over the United States...

Its rapacious speed may even be accelerating. Witness hyper-gentrification in Brooklyn and Manhattan, or the “Shoreditch-ification” of London.

Why?

People are getting married later and are living longer. Nearly 50 percent of Americans, or more than 100 million people are unmarried today, up from around 22 percent in 1950.

The job market has changed as well. In 1978, the U.S.’s manufacturing employment peaked and the noise and grit of the blue-collar factories that once fueled the flight of the upper-middle-class disappeared. These vacant manufacturing warehouses turned into the live-work spaces and lofts that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s in cities like New York and San Francisco.

The concept of lifetime employment also faded. Today, San Francisco’s younger workers derive their job security not from any single employer but instead from a large network of weak ties that lasts from one company to the next. The density of cities favors this job-hopping behavior more than the relative isolation of suburbia.

A game played by robots

Ben Thompson, writing about Dropbox:

Business is not a game played by robots; it’s about real people building products that they believe in

When the Leadership can fail

Astro Teller, talking about the culture of failure at Google X:

When the leadership can fail in full view, "then it gives everyone permission to be more like that."

Cultures that allow for failure at the top are (in my experience) extremely rare. Success and age breed risk adversity (cf. this excellent post by Felix Salmon), and leadership positions tend to be filled by successful people. 

Willingness to fail is also, in my mind, the single most important factor to long term success. Failure offers lessons which are more learnable - and more causal - than success does. In the absence of failure, one's ability to learn is highly compromised.

To me, willingness to fail should be a top priority to everyone. Discussions of risk should be between all parts of an organization. A company's policy on risk & failure should be explicit, and its implications should be clear to all employees and stakeholders.

Not 10 times as hard

From TechCrunch's excellent article about Google X:

No idea should be incremental. This sounds terribly clichéd, DeVaul admits; the Silicon Valley refrain of "taking huge risks" is getting hackneyed and hollow. But the rejection of incrementalism, he says, is not because he and his colleagues believe it's pointless for ideological reasons. They believe it for practical reasons. "It's so hard to do almost anything in this world," he says. "Getting out of bed in the morning can be hard for me. But attacking a problem that is twice as big or 10 times as big is not twice or 10 times as hard."

You Can't Complain

Tamara Mendelsohn, talking with TechCrunch about how the culture of Eventbrite operates:

"You can’t complain here,” Tamara explained. “If you see something wrong, you must fix it."

This is how things should work.

Departure from the default

Daniel Kahneman, in Thinking, Fast and Slow. Emphasis mine:

People expect to have stronger emotional reactions (including regret) to an outcome that is produced by action than to the same outcome when it is produced by inaction. This has been verified in the context of gambling: people expect to be happier to gamble and win than if they refrain from gambling and get the same amount. The asymmetry is at least as strong for losses, and it applies to blame as well as to regret. The key is not the difference between commission and omission but the distinction between default options and actions that deviate from the default. When you deviate from the default, you can easily imagine the norm - and if the default is associated with bad consequences, the discrepancy between the two can be the source of painful emotions. The default option when you own a stock is not to sell it, but the default option when you meet your colleague in the morning is to greet him. Selling a stock and failing to greet your coworker are both departures from the default option and natural candidates for regret or blame.

In a compelling demonstration of the power of default options, participants played a computer simulation of blackjack. Some players were asked "Do you wish to hit?" while others were asked "Do you wish to stand?" Regardless of the question, saying yes was associated with much more regret than saying no if the outcome was bad! The question evidently suggests a default response, which is, "I don't have a strong wish to do it." It is the departure from the default that produces regret.

The Wrong Idea

Lou Lenzi, GE General Manager of Industrial Design, talking with The Atlantic about outsourcing: 

“What we had wrong was the idea that anybody can screw together a dishwasher,” says Lenzi. “We thought, ‘We’ll do the engineering, we’ll do the marketing, and the manufacturing becomes a black box.’ But there is an inherent understanding that moves out when you move the manufacturing out. And you never get it back.”

Take note of this. Look around the hardware world today, and you'll see dozens of consultancies & outsourcing platforms that are dedicated to making manufacturing a black box. Their aims are good: to alleviate the strains of launching a hardware product. But the results can be highly problematic.

Designers who aren't knee deep in the making of their products are taking huge, unknown risks. Out of sight/out of mind is a recipe for avoidable mistakes.

Old (ish) goals

Me, last June: 

i have spent a while recently thinking about what, exactly, i have liked about my career. a few points:

1. i like being appreciated.
2. i like being compensated.
3. i like being a little over my head. i prefer to stay right on the edge between the things i know i don't know and the things i don't know that i don't know.
4. i like collaborating with people who are better at what they do than i am.
5. i like having an understanding of long-term objectives, and i like being a significant factor in the achievement of those objectives.
6. i like working with people like myself.
7. i like being fully responsible for the execution of a project, however large or small.
8. i like working on a new thing that will change some part of the world.
9. i like working in emerging markets.
10. i like working on things that people like me want, and want to interact with intimately.
11. i like for the product values and interests that i have to overlap significantly with those of my collaborators and our product's users.
12. i like being rewarded for my ability to identify, assess, analyze and solve problems, and i like it when those problems require me to learn about a new area of the world.
13. i like clear objectives - and clear metrics by which they can be judged - over aesthetic, or "gut" feelings.
14. i like working on general purpose technologies.
15. i like working on cross-functional teams, and having responsibilities in many categories of business

I like this. Probably worth updating.

What should we all do

Steven Sinofsky, talking on the a16z podcast about how real-time metrics tracking has changed the nature of management (edited for readability):

If you think about the average large company meeting, the vast majority today start off with somebody showing up and passing out a printed version of a work product. You just don't see that in a company of less that a thousand people. And the interesting thing about it is that it's not just that everybody got emailed the attachment for the meeting. It's that [managers] are looking at things like live data. So when managers at a small company look at their current telemetry of their app, their site, their service, they're all looking at the actual tools that are used by the marketing team to manage that information. They're not looking at a snapshot from even a few hours earlier. So you cut out all of this "well, those numbers aren't ready, let me go do them." You don't have presentations where a picture of the numbers are embedded in the presentation. 

These are these huge cultural shifts in how you manage an organization. What a manager's role is in a meeting is not to be reported to, because if you wanted to know, you should just go visit the place that everybody on the team is using to keep track of their information. 

Then when you get everybody together, it shouldn't be to argue the pros and cons of how the information was gathered or is it the right number... It should be: We all agree, this is the number. What should we all do to change that number?