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Misc stories:



Dan Bricklin (VisiCalc)

  • 2016.11 - TED - Meet the inventor of the electronic spreadsheet
    • After I graduated from MIT, I went to work for Digital Equipment Corporation. At DEC, I worked on software for the new area of computerized typesetting. I helped newspapers replace their reporters' typewriters with computer terminals. I'd write software and then I'd go out in the field to places like the Kansas City Star, where I would train users and get feedback. This was real-world experience that is quite different than what I saw in the lab at MIT. After that, I was project leader of the software for DEC's first word processor, again a new field. Like with typesetting, the important thing was crafting a user interface that was both natural and efficient for noncomputer people to use. After I was at DEC, I went to work for a small company that made microprocessor-based electronic cash registers for the fast-food industry.
    • One of the really frustrating things is when you've done all your homework, you come in the next day only to find out that you made an error and all of the other numbers you did were wrong.
    • So, sitting there with 87 other people in the class, I got to daydream a lot. Most programmers in those days worked on mainframes, building things like inventory systems, payroll systems and bill-paying systems. But I had worked on interactive word processing and on-demand personal computation. Instead of thinking about paper printouts and punch cards, I imagined a magic blackboard that if you erased one number and wrote a new thing in, all of the other numbers would automatically change, like word processing with numbers.
    • The act of making a simple, working version of what you're trying to build forces you to uncover key problems. And it lets you find solutions to those problems much less expensively.
    • So I decided to build a prototype. I went to a video terminal connected to Harvard's time-sharing system and got to work. One of the first problems that I ran into was: How do you represent values in formulas? Let me show you what I mean. I thought that you would point somewhere, type in some words, then type in some somewhere else, put in some numbers and some more numbers, point where you want the answer. And then point to the first, press minus, point to the second, and get the result. The problem was: What should I put in the formula? It had to be something the computer knew what to put in. And if you looked at the formula, you needed to know where on the screen it referred to. The first thing I thought was the programmer way of doing it. The first time you pointed to somewhere, the computer would ask you to type in a unique name. It became pretty clear pretty fast that that was going to be too tedious. The computer had to automatically make up the name and put it inside. So I thought, why not make it be the order in which you create them? I tried that. Value 1, value 2. Pretty quickly I saw that if you had more than a few values you'd never remember on the screen where things were.
    • Then I said, why not instead of allowing you to put values anywhere, I'll restrict you to a grid? Then when you pointed to a cell, the computer could put the row and column in as a name.

Five9 / John Sung Kim

Francis Pedraza

Online presence

Misc

Questions for Francis

  • How'd you get connected with Peter?
  • Why do you want to get rich?
    • In one interview he says he wants to be able to travel

2013 - Francis Pedraza - Potential - How to realize your full potential and never accept failure

17:20 - He got his first investor through a guy he met at the airport.
- They then raised more money

2013.10.04 - How to achieve [big] goals? - Francis Pedraza

  • 1:50 - Every goal has the same structure:
    • What you want to do
    • Why you want to do it
    • When you want to do it by
    • How you intend to get there
  • 2:20 - Why don't people achieve their goals?
    • Two basic problems:
      • Lack of organization
        • They don't write down the things they want to do
        • They don't write down the steps
        • They don't have a planner to track the steps
      • Lack of support
        • They don't share goals with their friends
  • 3:40 - Why is it so hard?
    • 6:00 - Big goals tend to be things that have never been done before.
    • 7:20 - ...but they also tend to require the help of other people.
      • This is difficult because people will tend to think in terms of what has been done before.
  • 10:50 - He describes how he's already encountered difficulties with Everest. He mentions Coco Chanel having some quote about the advantage of being new to an area.
  • ~15 - he goes on for a while about how unknown unknowns are a big issue.
  • 18:55 - There are three questions life asks of us over and over again:
    • What do you value?
    • How do you express that?
    • What are you willing to pay for that?
  • 22:00 - He talks about when you want something so bad you're willing to pay any price.
  • 24:10 - When you're willing to make the 100th or 1000th phone call, you...are more likely to succeed?
  • 25:40 - He finishes with Kennedy's quote about "we choose to go the moon, not because it is easy, but because it is hard"

2014.01.14 - Forbes - The One Thing You Should Do After Meeting Anyone New (about Pedraza)

  • This is actually pretty interesting.
  • Pedraza mentions using RelateIQ.

2014.05.01 - Cultivate effortlessness

Sun Tzu: Thus it is that in war the victorious strategist only seeks battle after the victory has been won, whereas he who is destined to defeat first fights and afterwards looks for victory.
(...)
The alternative to hard work is hard decisions.

Hard work is absence of strategy. Or rather, it is an avoidance of strategy. I am working hard because I am avoiding hard decisions. Instead of making decisions — about what is important and what isn’t, about what needs to be done now and what can be done later, what is and isn’t working — I am choosing to do everything.

I had a self-destructive pattern in college that illuminates this principle. At the start of every semester, I would look at the courses on offer, get interested in too many, and take more than I should. A month or two later, an oppressive load of assignments would prompt a crisis, in which I had to finally confront the decision I had put off in the first place: which courses mattered?

I could either drop no classes, suffer the oppressive load of assignments, compromise on quality, get worse grades, and put my GPA in jeopardy, or I could drop classes, enjoy myself more, produce higher quality work, get better grades, and maintain my GPA.
In other words, I could either keep working hard or make hard decisions.

Freeway Rick Ross

George Hotz / geohot

His online presence

Misc articles

Keishi Kameyama

  • https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-23/billionaire-porn-king-reinvents-himself-as-japan-s-startup-guru

    • After dropping out of accounting school sometime around 1980, Kameyama says he considered almost any work that promised to pay well. There was a very brief adventure as a semi-nude dancer at a gay Chippendale’s club. Once, he tried to get a job at a hospital washing cadavers.

      By the time he was in his late twenties, Kameyama was the owner of several rental movie shops. But when Japan’s version of Blockbuster Video set its sight on his town, he knew it wouldn’t last.

      To survive, Kameyama decided to try making movies instead of renting them. He set up his porn factory in an empty supermarket, where he used thousands of household video recorders to copy from master tapes, running night and day.

      He was able to convince most video stores to stock his product by making them an offer too good to refuse: “Here’s a box of 100 tapes, pay me only for what you sell.” It was a deal that didn’t require an army of salesmen to pitch. And, because viewers rarely complained about picture quality, unsold tapes were easily re-used.

      The next big idea was a cash register Kameyama developed that looked like a tablet computer. He gave it to customers for free, in exchange for their sales records -- data that made him better than anyone at tracking the preferences of Japan’s porn consumers.

      The biggest innovation, though, was going online. That wasn’t an obvious choice in 1998, when DVDs were still new and fewer than one-in-five Japanese households were even connected to the internet.

Ladislao Jose Biro (Bic)

  • http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2016/09/28/who-was-ladislao-jose-biro-how-did-he-invent-the-ballpoint-pen-a/
    • He was a sometime journalist, painter and inventor who was frustrated with fountain pens blotting and smudging. He got the idea on a visit to a newspaper printing press, which used quick-drying ink and a roller. "It got me thinking how this process could be simplified right down to the level of an ordinary pen," he later said. Biro's first idea for the ballpoint pen was to use the quick-drying newspaper ink in a fountain pen. This however didn't work as the ink was too thick and slow-moving to reach the tip of the nib.  So he created a ballpoint nib which was coated with a thin film of ink from the cartridge as it made contact with paper and spun in its socket. Biro initially tested the invention with fountain pen and printing ink, both of which had the wrong consistency. Biro enlisted the help of his brother György Bíró who was a chemist to create ink that was just the right viscosity. The pair gave their name to the invention when they patented it the "Biro" on July 15 1938. After escaping the hostile occupation of Hungary, Biro made his way to Argentina, where he eventually secured backing to turn the biro into a commercial product. The pen's first backer was the British accountant Henry George Martin, according to the Biographical Dictionary of the History of Technology. The first major buyer of the newly created pen was the Royal Air Force. During the Second World War the organisation ordered 30,000 of the tools, which would work at high altitudes unlike traditional fountain pens. After the war it entered commercial production.






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