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What you focus on, increases

There’s a discussion on a mailing list I belong to about piracy and the iPhone. One of the responders I thought was really insightful. The basic premise is “what you focus on, increases”–at least in your mind–so it’s better not to focus on negative things. In this example, by focusing on the small problem of pirated iPhone apps, bigger opportunities are missed. I’ve reprinted the part below:

> There are a variety of sayings along the lines
of “what you focus on, increases”. I’m not saying that more people
will pirate your software just because you’re paying attention to the
pirates, but at least the problem increases in your mind! The more
you think about it and worry about it and try to fight it, the bigger
it becomes (subjectively speaking).

I try to look at it another way entirely. The time and effort I’ve
put into my software is a “sunk cost”, and the revenues I receive from
sales cannot really offset that cost in a direct way; unlike
consulting, where revenues are tied directly to expended effort, in
this case it’s basically a different category on the balance sheet.
Any person who buys a copy increases my revenue. Anybody who doesn’t
buy it, *including*pirates*, has no effect on my revenue. Of course
I’d like to increase the number of buyers, but singling out the
pirates as the market segment I’d like to expand into seems like a
lost cause.

A lot of people installing pirated apps are people who just can’t or
won’t buy software (since we’re talking about iPhone apps that go for
a few dollars, I guess that “can’t” doesn’t even apply, it’s almost
exclusively “won’t”). Even in a perfect world of indefeatable piracy
protection, those people probably *still* wouldn’t buy apps. They’d
just stick to the thousands of free apps that are out there.

Posted on May 6th, 2009 | Filed under iphone | Comments Off

Long Executing PHP Scripts Can Cause Other Pages to Hang When Using session_start

Imagine you’ve got a PHP script that takes an hour to execute. Imagine it uses session_start(). If you then try to call another file that also uses session_start(), session_start() will hang as long as the first script is still executing.At least this is what I’m seeing. I haven’t delved into the mechanics yet of session_start(), but in my situation the problem was easily remedied by not including session_start (which wasn’t necessary) in the long executing script.

Posted on May 1st, 2009 | Filed under PHP | 1 Comment »

Bigger Telescopes are needed to Solve Global Warming

On August 31, 1854, a Londoner living on Broad Street fell ill with cholera and died. In three days, 127 other Londoners would also contract and die of cholera. By September 10th, over 500 people had died and panic was setting in on the London streets. Doctors studied the dead but could not solve the epidemic.

Then John Snow, a British Physician, gathered a huge sample of data and determined that people who drank from a certain water pump on Broad Street died, and those that didn’t, lived. The well was boarded up. Problem solved.

Because John Snow studied a large sample size of patients, he was able to determine the relatively simple cause and cure.

If we’re going to solve the global warming problem we need data like John Snow’s. If Dr. Snow had spent all his time studying just one patient, whatever “cause” and “solution” he would come up with would likely have been incorrect. It was only after looking at a large sample size of hundreds of patients that he was able to come up with a cause and solution much more substantiated than a guess.Right now, nearly every global warming article I read about the cause, consequence, and solution, is guessing. In the global warming problem, the patient is the earth. Everyone is overanalyzing the heck out of one patient and as a result all the conclusions have as much bearing as random guesses.

If we want to take this problem seriously, we need to be like John Snow: we need to collect data on dozens, if not hundreds of patients. Only then will we be able to make rational decisions about the problem.

So, we need to start looking outward to other planets. We have some nearby data in the form of Mars and Venus. Mars is damn cold and there’s no life there, so likely a hotter planet is a positive thing to a certain extent. Venus is damn hot and there’s also no life there, so likely if earth heads in that direction we’re screwed. But that doesn’t leave us with a whole lot to go on. We really need to find patients more similar to us, and hundreds of them.

I know very little about astronomy or telescopes. But I’m pretty sure that those are going to be our best tools to fight global warming. All the doctors in the world couldn’t have stopped the cholera outbreak if they studied one patient. But one doctor, studying hundreds of patients, was able to solve the problem.

Likewise, if we can give one astronomer a big enough telescope, he could probably solve global warming for us. Maybe he’ll find out that the chances of turning into Venus are extremely slim and the problem isn’t a problem at all. Or maybe it is a problem, but other earth like planets have solved it somehow. It could be just as simple as boarding up a well.

Posted on April 25th, 2009 | Filed under Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

Some of My Favorite Software Programs

In no particular order.

Windows:
Firefox
Chrome
Mindjet MindManager
PHP Designer
Navicat
SSH Shell
DropBox
Excel

Mac:
Mindjet Mind Manager
Komodo
Navicat
TextMate
DropBox
Firefox
Safari
Numbers(iWork)
iWeb & Pages

Blackberry:
GMaps
GMail
BlackberryMessenger(BBM)

Web:
Gmail
HackerNews
Wordpress

Posted on April 17th, 2009 | Filed under Tools | Comments Off

The Truth about Web Design

Here’s what I’m going to assume: craigslist, Google, and eBay do not have very pretty designs. How can a website be so successful if the design isn’t pretty? My position is that because design doesn’t matter a whole lot. Utility and function matter a whole lot more.Why doesn’t design matter a whole lot? What would you rather look at: Imagine trying to compete with that. My premise is that you go to a website for the utility of it. Design is far secondary. There are plenty of prettier things to look at in the real world.Of course, you can make a website that is pretty to look at, that people will love spending time on. The way to do that is to make it look like the real world: Facebook photos, YouTube videos, etc. People will spend a lot of time on those sites because pictures and videos look pretty. But if you make a website with a whole lot of utility, design is secondary. (And if your goal is to make a website that sells something instead of providing a service–then sometimes ugly designs win–in that case the trick is to try a lot of variation to see what works).

Posted on April 14th, 2009 | Filed under Web Startups | Comments Off

Twitter Search Wins Again

Twitter Search is starting to replace a ton of websites that I used to visit.

I used to check ESPN.com for sports scores. Now I use Twitter Search. It’s *significantly* faster. Just checked the UNC/Michigan State score and saw it’s a blowout early. No need to load up the slow espn.com homepage.

I used to check NBC.com, Hulu and other websites to see if the shows I want to watch are new this week. Now I use Twitter Search. Seriously, every Thursday I search “the office” nbc, to see if it’s new.

I’m even using CNN less now. I wanted to learn more about the earthquake in Italy. I used Twitter search and found a link to a page with photos and a lot more.

When I experienced my first earthquake in San Francisco last week, within 1 minute I used Twitter search to confirm that it was actually an earthquake.

Twitter Search is trending up in my own life. I think the odds are high that it will be *huge*. I think the odds are high it will become THE source for news.

Posted on April 6th, 2009 | Filed under Web Startups, Web 2.0 | Comments Off

A Good Angel

I had a meeting with an angel investor the other day. When we got to talking about numbers, I shot out what amount I was trying to raise and at what pre-money valuation.

The valuation I gave was very low. The reason I gave that valuation was because I was trying to close a deal shortterm, and figured a low price would encourage an angel to jump on faster.

However, the response I got was the opposite. The angel told me that I would be selling myself short down the line and diluting my equity position too early. He suggested I more than double the premoney valuation, so after a Series A or B, the founder(s) are still very motivated to build the company.

It’s not often that you offer a deal and someone says, “the price should be more than 2x as high”. But if you think about it, in the long run it makes a lot of sense.

Look for angels that will look out for you and that will offer you free, good advice. Not only will the advice often be extremely helpful, but down the line it’s those type of people you would want investing in your company.

Posted on April 5th, 2009 | Filed under Web Startups | 1 Comment »

GetDropbox Version Control Just Saved the Day

I deleted an important file by accident and just noticed. Luckily I kept it in Dropbox. Just went to the site, browsed to the folder, clicked “show deleted”, then clicked “restore” on the file I needed. Restored!

Awesome.

Posted on March 31st, 2009 | Filed under Tools | Comments Off

YCombinator Gives You the Upper Hand

In my other post about YC, I listed a number of things I liked about the program, but I didn’t know exactly what the biggest, order of magnitude change was. Now I think I do.

YCombinator gives you the upper hand in future dealings with investors and venture capitalists. Venture Capitalists and some angels invest in deals day in and day out. That’s all they do, so they are very good at it. Many of them are sharks(but certainly not all–in fact some of them are really “angels” that will essential to your success) who are trying to take advantage of you.

Raising money is like dating, and VCs go on 10 dates a day while this one is your first in X years. They have a huge upper hand and they know it.

But then as part of YCombinator, you have access to a tight knit group of over 100 companies that started just like yours and want to help you navigate the fundraising waters. They tell you who the sharks are and who the angels are. They tell you what the sharks smell like and how they attack. They tell you what attracts the good guys and how to get them interested in you. They really demystify the venture capital and fundraising process and make it work for you.

YCombinator gives you all that in addition to all you learn about building products people want, hiring, legal, and all that stuff.

But I knew a lot of that stuff 4 months ago. I would guess I’m better at it now and have a much bigger network to learn from and work with in the future, but the one thing I think I have now that I lacked before is a much more sophisticated understanding of the fundraising and VC process. I don’t think you could get that from anything but YC.

Posted on March 31st, 2009 | Filed under Web Startups | Comments Off

Irrational Numbers

There’s a post currently on Hacker News that discusses irrational numbers. A long time ago irrational numbers really bothered me. I remember I had a teacher in high school who gave us extra credit for reading books about math that dealt with specific topics like pi or irrational numbers. These books gave me nightmares :). I still don’t really understand irrational numbers but haven’t thought about them in a long time. According to Wikipedia:

In mathematics, an irrational number is any real number that is not a rational number—that is, it is a number which cannot be expressed as a fraction m/n, where m and n are integers, with n non-zero. Informally, this means numbers that cannot be represented as simple fractions. It can be deduced that they also cannot be represented as terminating or repeating decimals, but the idea is more profound than that. As a consequence of Cantor’s proof that the real numbers are uncountable (and the rationals countable) it follows that almost all real numbers are irrational.^[1] Perhaps the best-known irrational numbers are π, e and √2.

Here’s what I think now that I didn’t understand back in the day. Say someone showed me the picture of the triangle above and said “write down the exact length of the hypotenuse in decimal form”, I might try and use Pythagorean’s Theorem and say C^2 = A^2+B^2 so c = 2^.5…Then if I tried to write the 2^.5 in decimal form of course