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Entrepreneurship-related people and organizations

Nathan Wailes - Blog - GitHub - LinkedIn - Patreon - Reddit - Stack Overflow - Twitter - YouTube

Entrepreneurship-related people and organizations

Jun 27, 2023

Information sources

 

Misc stories:

Aaron Patzer of Mint.com

2009? - Aaron Patzer describing his path
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGhedOHLTOI

2009.07.23 - Fortune Brainstorm TECH - Panel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_h5ZX9GPIk

2010.02.18 - VentureBeat - 4min interview
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hENM1T-SaX8

2010.05(?) - The Duke Start-Up Challenge
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNT5nmqmk3A&t=7m20s

2010.07.29 - The American Entrepreneur
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQRlHWIa8l8

2010.12 - Net@Night - Interview
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wixHKoXGJsQ&t=26m23s

2010.12.08 - Founder Institute in Silicon Valley - Naming & Branding for Startups
http://vimeo.com/17670720
- Choose an English name. He gives an example of his competitor "wasabe", which he couldn't find online even after searching for it for an hour.
- Choose a meaningful name (mint relates to finance but it also has a connotation of freshness)
- Choose an original name (he gives the example of copy-cat companies that ended in "-ster" after friendster became successful)
- Choose a name that is spelled unambiguously. (examples of bad names: "milo", "flickr", "kwiqapps", "simplyhired" [the ending 'd' can be hard to hear])
06:41 - He bought "mymint.com" for $3,000.
08:00 - He offered the hedge fund guy $75,000 cash and was turned down.
8:25 - The key is that the domain has to be lightly-used.
~9:00 - He said three things got the guy convinced: 1) the opportunity for an asymmetric return (ie he got equity), 2) limited chance for loss (ie preferred stock), 3) a promise to not allow any other NY financiers to invest, so the manager could brag to his Wall St friends that he was getting to invest alongside the best VCs in Silicon Valley and none of them could get in.
10:00 - He got the domain for the equivalent of $182,000 in equity in the round of financing he was in the middle of negotiating. The guy liked the business so much that in the next round he ended up putting in $300,000. So they got the domain and $300,000. The guy ended up making $2.5 million from that investment (so from $500k to $3mill?)
10:25 - Lesson: Don't settle for a subpar name. Pick the right name and go after it with everything you've got.
10:45 - 90%+ of all brand marketing people are fluff. The people who do SEO are charlatans. Some people who do some types of direct marketing (SEM) are OK. "Brand marketing is where you can get away with the most fluff."
11:27 - Brand marketers use a lot of jargon that's impossible to understand.
11:30 - "There is a logical way to figure out what the value proposition of your business should be and how you should be positioned against your competitors." He suggests you create a matrix (eg a 2x2 matrix) where you plot the most important features of a product (eg "# of things it can do" and "cost") and then plot where the competition is on that matrix. Then just look for gaps.
16:40 - Very interesting: he describes how they went to the Mountain View metro station and tested their slogan on them to see what their perceptions were. Go anywhere there's a queue.
~18:00 - He went back to IN and tested his explanation of his product on his parents' 60yo friends.
19:00 - In surveys people generally say they'll use it more than they actually do.

2011 - Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco - 5 min interview
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWctrFsydNo

2011? - the Founder Conference
http://vimeo.com/15644909

  • 2011 - Princeton - The $170 Million Idea: From Idea to Exit in 3 Years

    • spending 10-20% of your time

      • validate the idea

      • create a prototype

      • build the right team

    • he told everybody about the idea

      • he told ~80 people about the idea

    • within the idea, a gem resonated, the personal finance issue, where

    • virtually everybody mentioned that they had this problem

    • this reminds me of how facebook was a validated idea before mark started working on it.


2012.02.16 - TechCrunch - Informal 7min interview with Scott Cook (founder of Intuit) and Aaron Patzer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fjQxwvmgDw

2012 - e27.sg - 5 min informal interview
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buD6L6ybcyM

 

Alibaba / Jack Ma

Andrew Carnegie

Books

The Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie

Chronology of Success



1. Born to a poor family in Scotland. They had to leave their village when machine-looms made the father's hand-looms obsolete; they ended up settling down in Pittsburgh. Carnegie received almost no formal education.

Basically, he was in the railroad industry for ~15 years (the same amount of time that Walton was in retail before starting Wal-Mart) from the age of 17, worked harder than anyone around him, got promoted again and again until he was in a fairly prominent position, and only THEN started the project that really seemed to start to make him rich: a bridge-building partnership with some contacts he had made.

He was able to use his many years of experience in the railroad industry to make intelligent decisions about the direction of the business (e.g. concluding that the business was a profitable venture, choosing the best men in the industry for his partners, using non-obvious information to convince customers that his bridges were superior to that of the competition).

He was also able to see steel coming like a wave of the future (like a surfer), and he did a great job of launching himself onto it as it arrived. As part of the bridge-building business he'd bought a small iron-forging plant, and knew a lot about iron and steel because of their importance in building bridges and acting as train tracks (apparently iron train tracks used to break ALL THE TIME back then and would cause all kinds of train accidents; pretty crazy to think about).



The last 100 pages or so of this book seem pretty boring; just him talking about his philanthropy, all the friends he's honored by naming a building after them, etc. (everything starting with the chapter "The Gospel of Wealth")


Lessons


1. Keep your eye out for people with Carnegie's traits: disciplined, hard-working, thoughtful, etc. [I didn't get a strong sense of whether his ambition would have been visible earlier in his career.]

2. You can invest your time in PEOPLE just as you can invest your time in founding a company; Carnegie rose through the ranks because the guy he was working for kept getting promoted and always brought Carnegie along with him. This is the exact same kind of relationship that Generals Sherman and Grant had in the Civil War; Sherman had the opportunity to compete with Grant for control of the entire army but chose instead to forcefully decline any such ambition, instead loudly declaring his intention to work faithfully under Grant. Then as Grant got promoted he brought Sherman along with him, which ended up putting Sherman in the position to conduct affairs as he pleased (which led him to absolutely destroy the South).
- Working together and developing a friendship can propel both of you to higher ground than if you're competing against each other for the "higher" rank (and generating animosity between yourselves as a result). This actually kind of ties into my thought that "leaders" aren't necessarily any more worthy of praise and attention than the people "under" them.
- You might be better off looking for someone who is in a position to rise up but hasn't yet. I'll have to think about this more.


Q: What exact expertise did Carnegie acquire in his first 15 years that made him successful at future projects? Would there have been any way to acquire that expertise more quickly?

 

Notable Quotes

  •  "The battle of life is already half won by the young man who is brought in contact with high officials; and the great aim of every boy should be to do something beyond the sphere of his duties- something which attracts the attention of those over him."

Balaji Srinivasan

  • 2013.11.22 - Wired - Software is Reorganizing the World

  • 2016.06.24 - YouTube - The Machine Payable Web

    • 18:00 - He recs the book "The Sovereign Individual", he says it's one of Thiel's favorite books, one of Andreessen's favorite books, and one of his favorite books.

    • 18:15 - He mentions "Seeing like a State"

    • 37:00 - He got into bitcoin because his last business was driven out of business by us regulators, and he wanted to create some way to get around those kinds of restrictive regulations.

    • 37:50 - "if bitcoin takes off, we globally un-ban transactions" - Really? bitcoin transactions wouldn't be regulated just like fiat currency transactions?

Barbara Corcoran

As I stepped into my apartment I felt the Giffuni Brothers’ check burning a hole in my pocket. Should I buy a new coat or shouldn’t /? I looked down at my lavender Georgy Girl outfit; I knew it had walked down the street too many times to still look fancy-free. Should I or shouldn’t I? Well, I decided, if Mom could cover her old rocks with a coat of white paint, I could certainly cover my old outfit with a new coat! I hightailed it down to First National City Bank to cash my check and made a beeline for Fifth Avenue. I was going to buy myself the best coat in the best store on the best block in all New York! I asked the red-suited doorman at Bergdorf Goodman where I could find ladies’ coats and took the gold-paneled elevator to the second floor. The elevator opened, and I tripped into a full city block of new coats. A well-clad saleswoman offered her help, but I was too intimidated to accept her offer and thought of a really original response: “No, thanks, I’m just looking.” I puffed up my chest and dove straight into the sea of a thousand coats. Suddenly, I spotted her from across the room. She was the flashiest one in the whole place. There was nothing plain about her. She had curly brown and white fur around a high mandarin collar and a pair of matching cuffs. Her wool was thick, laid in an oversize brown and white herringbone pattern. Down her front she had at least a dozen diamond-shaped buttons chiseled out of what looked like real bone. Each button hooked through its own loop. Her huge shoulder pads rode high and her hem swung low, almost touching the polished wood floor. Everything about her screamed, “HERE I AM!” And for $319 plus tax, she was mine. My new coat became my signature piece and I never took it off. In it, I not only looked successful, I felt successful. My curious customers asked what kind of fur it was, and since I’d never spoken to the saleslady, I had no idea. “It looks a lot like my old dog, Prince,” I’d joke. For the next two years, I marched in and out of buildings up and down Manhattan wearing my expensive coat and flaunting my new image for all it was worth.

Corcoran, Barbara; Littlefield, Bruce (2011-02-09). Shark Tales: How I Turned $1,000 into a Billion Dollar Business (pp. 21-22). Portfolio Trade. Kindle Edition.

  • I've noticed I get a lot of comments about my blue sunglasses.

 

Benjamin Franklin

Books

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

a great book. it's concise, conversational, funny, filled with valuable lessons and great stories. i actually got the feeling that we could be good friends (i.e. it seemed to me that our values are close enough and that we'd see eye-to-eye on a lot of things). the whole thing was written as a letter (or letters) to his son, which is why it's a lot less dry than other autobiographies you'll see (where the author is clearly being careful to avoid making himself look bad).

highlights:

- franklin's attempt at correcting all of his faults
- his weekly meetings to discuss intellectual subjects
- his work ethic (working from dawn till dusk, seven days a week while establishing his printing shop)
- his chronology of success: made his way from Boston to Philly without much money, ended up working as an assistant to a printer, eventually opened his own printing shop and worked his tail off to do a good job of it, gradually gained more customers and Philadelphia became a bigger city (when franklin got there there wasn't much competition), he also became well-known for his published thoughts on things (iirc). don't quite remember how he got pulled into the revolution; i think it's just because he was already well-known by then.

 

Box / Aaron Levie

2014.10.30 - Stanford / YCombinator - How to Start a Startup - Lecture 12 - Building for the Enterprise
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFVDjrvQJdw
He comes off very well IMO, he seems to know his stuff.
02:10 - When they started they didn't know they wanted to do enterprise software.
04:15 - They got the idea in 2004, started in 2005.
05:30 - They noticed in college that it was really hard to share files.
05:40 - He had an internship that involved copying lots of paper.
06:45 - The first name was Box.net
06:50 - They noticed the cost of storage was dropping dramatically.
07:15 - They had more powerful browsers & internet connections.
07:25 - People had more locations they wanted to share files from.
07:40 - Look for broad changes that are happening.
08:10 - They put together a quick version of Box. They got funding from Mark Cuban before Shark Tank.
09:25 - They first moved to Berkeley, and then Palo Alto
09:35 - They had hundreds of thousands people signing up every month. (2006) They offered a free GB.
10:00 - They ran into a problem where they were over-serving consumers and under-serving businesses. They had more functionality than consumers wanted and less functionality than businesses wanted.
11:35 - They thought consumer would be really fun and enterprise would be really hard.
11:50 - The big problem in the consumer world is how to make money. You generally have two options: 1) have the user pay for the product, or 2) use advertising. In today's world the annual consumer spend on mobile apps is $35 billion and the total worldwide ad spend is $135 billion, so the consumer world has about $170 billion in money to go after. However, in enterprise, $3.5 trillion is spent on IT services every year.
13:20 - At the time there were rumors that Google would be coming out with a free version.
14:35 - It can take a couple YEARS to sell a product to a company, and then a few more years for them to implement it.
15:10 - When looking at enterprise software you often ask why the GUI is so bad.
15:30 - Another problem with enterprise is that you'll have to hire salespeople.
16:40 - Every investor in 2007 was telling them they wouldn't make it in enterprise.
17:08 - The
18:50 - They got lucky in that they had an investor who was also early in his own career and was willing to take the chance.
19:10 - They architected the product to work in one particular version of the world, and they happened to be right.
19:50 - Main topic: What has changed that has made enterprise easier to enter than before?
20:30 - He talks about "on-premise computing" but I didn't really understand.
21:45 - The big change is that CIOs are now taking advantage of cloud services. From their perspective, there are decades of investment that need to be shifted to the cloud.
23:20 - The reachable enterprise market has gotten way bigger.
24:20 - He distinguishes user-led vs IT-led purchasing decisions. Which makes me think Box is just getting used by individuals.
30:10 - Go to any business and ask what are the fundamental changes in (?) and ask what software will be necessary to power that.
31:50 - He starts to give advice about how to get started. He gives a really good caveat that things are messy.
32:30 - #1. Spot technology disruptions. Gaps between how things HAVE been done and how they CAN be done.
33:50 - Go to articles in the '90s and you'll see that all we're doing nowadays is trying things that have already been tried 10, 20, 30 years ago, but the time wasn't right.
35:00 - He gives an example of how the founders of PlanGrid realized that $4 billion are spent printing blueprints, but with the iPad all that could be done away with.
36:10 - #2. Start intentionally small. "If people call it a 'toy' you're definitely onto something." Start on a sliver of a problem and make the user experience totally amazing.
37:28 - Example: zenpayroll - They found that the payroll process was a pain. The sliver they went after for startups was just payroll. The incumbents look at something like zenpayroll and think, "Oh, that's small, we don't have to worry about it."
39:00 - #3. Look for things that incumbents can't do because it's economically and/or technically infeasible.
41:20 - #4. Look for businesses at the bleeding edge of technology to be your earliest customers.
43:20 - #5. Listen to your customers. Build what they need, which may not be what they ask for.
43:55 - #6. Modularize, not customize.
44:15 - #7. Focus on the user. It's easier to sell into an organization.
44:40 - #8. Your product should sell itself. But you still need salesmen.
45:30 - Read these three books:
- Crossing the Chasm
- The Innovator's Dilemma
- Behind the Cloud


2015.01.28 - Inc. Magazine - A Look Back on How Box's Aaron Levie Became Entrepreneur of the Year, 2013
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGjj45CgRwI
01:37 - He gives some interesting comments about what it's like at the beginning: "On day one everything about your day and your time and every moment you have is about building a product and getting it in the hands of customers. You're not focused on hiring, you're not focused on selling, you're not focused on scaling, you're just focused on, "I need to build a product and I need to get it in the hands of customers." And there's something very genuine and raw about that process, because you have to be able to create that product-market fit, and that's one of the hardest grinds there is, is that early stage."
06:47 - There's a couple of clips of him interacting with random employees at Box and it's clear he doesn't have any particular connection with them. It comes off as the kind of "blow sunshine up their asses" behavior Ben Horowitz describes in his book. I think he was probably just put under pressure by the film crew to do it.
08:41 - He gives a BS spiel about how he didn't start the company as a way of making money.
09:50 - "The best piece of advice I've ever gotten as an entrepreneur was from Mark Cuban, who said "Don't hedge your bets." That was a lesson very early on that we learned from him, which was, you can't ever balance two completely contradictory things as a means of hedging. You have to decide, "What are you going to believe in?" and put all of your energy behind that. And those are the kinds of strategic decisions and trade-offs that you make every day as an entrepreneur, and it's important that you create the level of clarity and conviction to go after an opportunity that isn't hedging lots of different ideas or lots of different approaches, because that's the surest way that you'll never be good at anything."

 

Bryton S.

  • 2016.11.09 - Q&A Session

    • Coding he did before he started a company:
      - He took CS classes in college.
      -- For example, algorithms classes.
      -- These didn't really prepare him for web development.
      - He was doing a lot of coding for the trading.

      Regarding the tech:
      - He created the spreadsheet library from scratch.
      -- Reason: He wanted to be able to approve changes as they happened and update data programmatically, and a lot of the software packages out there weren't very easy to use.
      -- He uses Ember.js
      - Web development is less about solving tricky problems and more about putting in the hours to get it done; you can have a rough idea of how long something will take to do.

      Getting the first version done:
      - He started coding in April.
      - Some days wake up at 10am, code for 12 hours on his mattress.
      - He can do ~1000 lines in those 12 hours.
      - He's pretty interested in the problem itself, and he likes the language; if not for that, he couldn't have worked as hard as he has.
      - He's started a LOT of projects that he never finished because he didn't find the problem interesting.
      - Having an actual customer to work with for the initial development was a helpful motivator.
      - "I can't imagine coding from home all day"
      - Finished coding it in four months.

      Getting his first customer:
      - His first customer was a friend of a friend: an eCommerce company had an office and they gave him a desk in exchange for the software.
      - It was almost not a good thing because he built it too close to what they wanted.
      - This company had too many desks and his friend was renting one of them. It was a month or two into development and he had a rough prototype.
      - This was a 5 person company who had gotten a pretty big office with 30 desks. (NW: It being a 5 person company may have made the decision-maker/CEO more accessible.)
      - He sent info about the program to the Princeton listserv, some guys were interested, his company was in San Diego, so B went to his office and showed him a presentation. 1.5 hours later he got an email saying they were interested.
      - He thinks it was crucial to meet people in person to close the deal.

      Regarding pricing:
      - He just asked the first customer before the presentation, "How much would you pay for this?" The guy answerd, "$3-5k/yr". And so in his presentation he said it would cost $5k/yr.
      - He read an article that says you should ask 3 questions: 1) What would you pay? (that's your lower limit) 2) What would be expensive? (that's prob. what you should charge) 3) What would be obscenely expensive? (that's your upper limit)

      Getting later customers:
      - 80-90% of business are referrals; his impression is that "no one does email" because you need to send 18 emails to get a meeting.
      - Self-service is hard because you're reliant on a lot of sign-ups / inbound marketing, which is really hard. It's hard to get people to organically visit your site.
      - [NW: I brought up the fact that Infer can't really do self-service trials for their original product because there's a costly setup process, and asked whether he had the same issue.] There is a configuration process that takes time; right now it's set up as self-service but he doesn't think that's a great model.
      - Self-service gets you basic editing but no one wants basic editing. The product is a lot more useful to customers if they can use the more-advanced features (eg workflows).
      - For example, a customer will have a list of orders and they want to select orders and press a button and the button knows to set the flag, or they have a db and want to expose it to customers so the customers can edit the db, but they don't want to build something complicated.
      - One problem he's seeing is that the tool is so general that he'll describe how one customer is using it and that use-case won't really apply to the prospective customer he's talking to.
      - He's finding that it's hard to describe it in an email.
      - He had five sales calls this week and had trouble finding a use case.
      - The first customer was really excited and introduced B to five other guys with the same problem.
      - He's also been trying to email Princeton 
      - Cold email and inbound marketing weren't very succesful.
      - He set up adwords last night, so it's yet to be seen how that'll work.
      - He posted the article on twitter, facebook, linkedin, custom accounts for that company. he also shared it on his personal social media acounts. He only got seven views.
      - He was so worried about the launch getting too much traffic, but no one showed up.
      - The problem with getting lots of traffic before you're ready is that it can really hurt you if you haven't worked out the kinks yet.
      - He's finding that customers will want some features that he doesn't have, so he needs to spend time coding them.

      How he's spending his time now that he's switched to selling:
      - Now he's mostly doing business stuff, maybe 3 hours of coding if he can find the time.
      - What "business stuff" means: Updating the deck, coming up with strategy, coming up with leads, updating the website, mainly thinking about the business model, thinking about features, thinking about how he wants to approach sales.
      - Today he had four or five meetings: people he's getting advice from, or customers, or investors.
      - I asked a tangent Q regarding the investors: He's not ready to raise a round because he doesn't have customers. If he holds out for another two months he can get a bunch more customers and prove out the product and get a better valuation.
      - He also consults two days a week.
      - He works seven days a week, but he travels sometimes, or if a friend wants to do something, but otherwise he doesn't have any downtime. If he's not with friends he's working.
      - He used to work until 1 or 2am, which wasn't very good, because you get tired. He sets alarm for 8am or 9am but he's not too strict about it. The coworking space closes at 12am and he uses that to force himself to stop for the night. The most important thing is to not burn out.
      - He's not afraid to take a break if he's not feeling it (typically this is if he went out drinking the previous day).
      - How to keep your eye on the big picture: He structures his day in terms of time. "Today I'm going to work from 12 to 4, and however much I get done between 12 and 4 is what I'll do." versus "I'm trying to get XYZ done today and I'll spend however long it takes to get that done.". That's better than focusing on particular features you want to get done. The focus isn't on finishing the task; it's on maximizing the progress per unit of time.

Chris Sacca

Twitter
https://twitter.com/sacca
2015-04-27 - Put some effort into your email intros. Saying "You two should talk!" without any context is a total waste of time. Respect your recipients.
2) Of course, all intros should be double opt-in. Dumping unsolicited, contextless shit into someone's inbox makes you a spammer.
3) Restate the context for why it is worth both recipients' time to connect, even though you already covered that in the double opt-ins.
4) Then include something flattering about each recipient to make them feel like they are off on a good foot with the conversation.
5) Good intros make stuff happen. They earn money, they land jobs, they can even lead to marriages. Bad intros just leave people hating you.
6) If you asked for the introduction, for the love of all things holy, it is your job to follow up as soon as the intro is made.


Experiences, not stuff
http://www.whatisleft.org/lookie_here/2 ... s_not.html


Some links that have piled up:
http://www.whatisleft.org/lookie_here/2 ... ick_o.html
- "Pitch suggestions from a VC. It never gets old because so few execute it well."
- Link: http://web.archive.org/web/200503020314 ... ous_w.html

He links to this at some point:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/bruceupbin/ ... heres-how/


This Valley Is Small
http://www.whatisleft.org/lookie_here/2 ... ear_e.html
- re: honesty


Startup School - An Inspiring Room Full of Hackers
http://www.whatisleft.org/lookie_here/2 ... hool_.html
- re: the first YCombinator class


Hints for proposing deals . . . (or, "My word, this inbox is a mess")
http://www.whatisleft.org/lookie_here/2 ... _busi.html

Christopher Columbus

Books

 

Websites

Wikipedia - Christopher Columbus

Ambitious, Columbus eventually learned Latin, Portuguese, and Castilian, andread widelyabout astronomy, geography, and history, including the works of Claudius Ptolemy, Cardinal Pierre d'Ailly's Imago Mundi, the travels of Marco Polo and Sir John Mandeville, Pliny's Natural History, and Pope Pius II's Historia Rerum Ubique Gestarum. According to historian Edmund Morgan,

Britannica - Christopher Columbus

(...) Columbus was the eldest son of Domenico Colombo, a Genoese wool worker and merchant, and Susanna Fontanarossa, his wife. His career as a seaman began effectively in the Portuguese merchant marine. After surviving a shipwreck off Cape Saint Vincent at the southwestern point of Portugal in 1476, he based himself in Lisbon, together with his brother Bartholomew [NW: Like Elon and Kimbal, Sam Walton and his brother, etc.]. Both were employed as chart makers, but Columbus was principally a seagoing entrepreneur. In 1477 he sailed to Iceland and Ireland with the merchant marine, and in 1478 he was buying sugar in Madeira as an agent for the Genoese firm of Centurioni. (...) Between 1482 and 1485 Columbus traded along the Guinea and Gold coasts of tropical West Africa and made at least one voyage to the Portuguese fortress of São Jorge da Mina (now Elmina, Ghana) there, gaining knowledge of Portuguese navigation and the Atlantic wind systems along the way. (...)

In 1484 Columbus began seeking support for an Atlantic crossing from King John II of Portugal but was denied aid [NW: age 33-34]. (...) By 1486 Columbus was firmly in Spain, asking for patronage from King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. After at least two rejections, he at last obtained royal support in January 1492 [NW: Like entrepreneurs getting rejected by VCs. He was ~42.]. This was achieved chiefly through the interventions of the Spanish treasurer, Luis de Santángel, and of the Franciscan friars of La Rábida, near Huelva, with whom Columbus had stayed in the summer of 1491. [NW: Connections are important!] Juan Pérez of La Rábida had been one of the queen’s confessors and perhaps procured him the crucial audience.

 

 

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.

David Gobaud

 

 

Drew Houston of DropBox

 

Drew Houston's HN comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dhouston

 


2011.10.18 - Forbes - Dropbox: The Inside Story Of Tech's Hottest Startup

The next day he shot a missive to his staff: “We have one of the fastest-growing companies in the world,” it began. Then it featured a list of one-time meteors that fell to Earth: MySpace, Netscape, Palm, Yahoo YHOO -3.45%. 

  • And now in 2015 there are articles talking about Dropbox falling to Earth...

 

 

2015.08.21 - Wired - Slack Is Overrun With Bots. Friendly, Wonderful Bots

  • Slack is becoming a platform for bots?

2015.08.24 - Thoughts from Alex Danco - Dropbox: the first dead decacorn

  • This is a very well-written article.

A startup’s greatest fear initially isn’t competition from others – it’s simply the worry of being ignored and irrelevant. Past a certain stage of growth, and now you’re worried about your competitors – what if they can built it better, cheaper, faster, stronger? At yet another point, though (I’d argue around the $1B valuation mark) your peers aren’t your biggest concern anymore. If you’re worth a billion dollars, you’re probably doing enough things well that your direct competitors can’t take you to the cleaners overnight. Instead, your nightmares shift to a fate even scarier than being outcompeted: being eclipsed. Specifically,being eclipsed by someone at one level of the stack above or below you.

What does this look like in practice? It’s what Microsoft did to the PC manufacturers, and then what the web browser did to Microsoft. It’s what Android/iOS did to the handset makers, and what Facebook is trying to do to them in turn. To those being eclipsed, it’s terrifying because the change happens so gradually and then so suddenly: Compaq was one of the best PC makers around until all of a sudden Windows was what mattered, not the machine it ran on. Then a bit later on, Windows ruled the world and Microsoft was King- but all the interesting stuff started happening inside the web browser. My point being: Compaq didn’t get creamed because somebody else came along and made a better desktop PC. They lost because all of a sudden Windows was what was important- and other PC Manufacturers like Dell were better suited to thrive in the new reality of modular commodity.

  

I preface my unicorn prediction with all of this to emphasize once again – when billion dollar tech companies die, it usually isn’t at the hands of their direct competitors. It’s simply because they go from one day being the best at what they do, to the next day being still the best at what they do except it doesn’t matter. When these companies are really big – i.e. in the $10B+ Decacorn range – it matters.

 

The problem for Dropbox is that our work habits are evolving to make better use of what’s available; specifically, the awesome power of the internet. And on the internet, the concept of a ‘file’ is a little weird if you stop and think about it. Files seem woefully old-fashioned when you consider organization tools like Evernote, task management tools like Trello, and communication channels like Slack. Files are discrete objects that exist in a physical place; the internet is … pretty much the opposite of that. And while it made sense that the birth and early growth of information and the internet would contain familiar, old-school ideas and organizing systems, and some point the other shoe was bound to drop. To me, Slack feels like the first truly internet and mobile-native productivity platform – especially as it expands beyond messaging and into workflow automation, helper bots, and who knows what else. Dropbox might be the pinnacle of file management, but Slack is the beginning of what comes next.

 

 

2015.09.22 - The Verge - The case against Dropbox looks stronger with each passing day

Duncan Bannatyne

Books

Anyone Can Do It by Duncan Bannatyne

Enterprise Rent-A-Car

Books

Life Under the Corporate Microscope

This is an account of the rise of Enterprise Rent-a-Car by a guy who started there very early and ended up in some very high position for a bit (he's now a millionaire); the founder of Enterprise is now a billionaire, but I don't think there are any (auto)biographies of him out at the moment.

Ev Williams of Twitter, Blogger

Articles / Videos

 

FedEx / Fred Smith

Books

Changing How the World Does Business (re: Fedex) by Roger Frock

 

Five9 / John Sung Kim

 

"Freeway" Rick Ross

  • FreewayRickyRoss.com

  • 20?? - VH1 - Documentary on the crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s

  • 2015.01.05 - YouTube - ReasonTV - "Freeway" Rick Ross on How He Introduced Crack to the U.S. and Made Millions Off the War on Drugs

  • 2015.01.16 - HipHop DX - Freeway Rick Ross Offers Jail Advice To Bobby Shmurda

    • “What I did with prison is I turned my prison cell into a college,” he said. “An old guy told me in prison, ‘You can get your college degree two places: you can get it at Penn State or the state pen.’ With my situation I found out that I was gonna wind up getting mine from the state pen. So I turned my prison cell into a university. I read over 300 books. By the way, I was totally illiterate when I went to prison, had never read a book. I read over 300 books before I left, I don’t know how many magazines, newspapers. I read the L.A. Times everyday. I read the Wall Street Journal everyday. I read the USA everyday. Sometimes I’d read the New York Times. I educated myself and I think that’s what he should do. By the way, I’m gonna give you my three favorite books, same books I sent to Boosie, if I get your address I’m gon’ send’em to you: The Richest Man In Babylon, Think And Grow Rich, and As A Man Thinketh. You can’t go wrong with them three books. If you take them principles they gon’ make your jail cell a lot easier.”

  • 2015.11.16 - YouTube - Freeway Ricky Recalls Being Sold $70,000 Worth of Cake Mix

    • He gives a really good description of how he got started. He was Basically he just went around and found a first customer, and that customer spread the word. So it was all word-of-mouth.

    • He never drank alcohol, smoked cigarettes, smoked weed, or did any kind of drug before he got into selling, and except for a two-week period, never did any drugs after he started selling. He only tried using for a week or two and it drained his money so quickly that he vowed to never do it again.

    • He says he had Nicaraguan suppliers vying for his business because he was more professional: he had the money, he wouldn't rip his suppliers off, and he wasn't a murderer.

 

Gary Vaynerchuk (VaynerMedia)

I found out about this guy from Travis Kalanick, apparently Travis is a big fan of Gary and/or they're friends.

George Hotz / geohot

His online presence

Misc articles

  • Quora - How, at only age 17, had George Hotz already acquired enough skill to be the first to unlock an iPhone?

    • As someone who was closely involved with Geohot (or Egohot as some of my colleagues like to call him) with iPhone, I can tell you George Hotz did not know anything about hacking at age 16.

      Most of the hacking is done in a community as a group, in this case IRC chatrooms where like minded people collaborate and share ideas with each other. The already established iPhone dev team back then was very open and sharing information and IDB’s with everyone (those are Interactive Disassembler [IDA] files containing application binary and assembly code annotations). From there George Hotz collected as much information and already established work from the iPhone dev team as he could. And in doing so learning the skill of the trade: reverse engineering the components that make up the iOS system. Once you have a full idea of what the application does, you can look for vulnerabilities or basically bugs that the original programmer left in by accident. These are usually things like stack or buffer overflows, use-after-free and so on. The process is usually the same, be it iPhone or anything else.

      However, instead of sharing back to the hacking community, George Hotz kept most of his findings to himself and tried to be the center of attention. This is why he got the nickname Egohot. So there is this huge community effort to share information and there is George Hotz basically leeching information from this community without giving much back. To hack something like iPhone there are huge amounts of work and a fundamental ground laying effort that needs to be done. So to say something like “George Hotz is the first to unlock iPhone” is a huge insult to the community as it asserts that George Hotz did all this work on his own, which is not true; It has always been a community group effort. What George Hotz accomplished is something like the Olympic 100m race. The community has done the first 99m for him, and George only had to run the last 1m. Unfortunately, even that last 1m was not entirely George’s own effort. There was a Russian hacker involved that did most of the final sprint involving the baseband application reverse engineering. George was just there at the right time and the right place. And as mentioned before, George did like to be the center of attention, so when his collaborative effort with the Russian hacker finally paid off and the baseband was unlocked, he made sure the world would know he, and he alone, did it first by notifying the news outlets with his version of the story.

    • This is an interesting story because George seems to be an expert now (he livestreams himself working on stuff, which would seem hard to fake), so maybe this experience gave him the motivation to continue learning about this stuff to the point where his reputation is now earned.  It reminds me of Mark Cuban giving his salespeople a nice car and then telling them he'll take it away if they don't hit their quota: the fear of losing the car motivates his salespeople to work harder than the promise of the car would.

  • Minor / tangential: 2015.12.16 - Barron's - Mobileye Drops 6% as Citron Calls ‘Short of Year’ Following Bloomberg Article

  • 2015.12.17 - autoblog - Elon Musk unimpressed by iPhone hacker's DIY autonomous car

  • 2015.12.17 - Mashable - Tesla issues 'correction' on article about George Hotz's self-driving car

  • 2015.12.18 - DailyMail - First person to hack an iPhone says he's built a self-driving car in ONE MONTH, but Elon Musk slams the claim as 'inaccurate'

  • 2015.12.21 - the truth about cars - George Hotz and Our Self-Driving Future

  • Minor / tangential: 2016.01.06 - Barron's - Mobileye CTO Boasts of A.I. to Rival Alphabet, Facebook

  • 2022.03.08 - Hacker News - Ride or Die: George Hotz against the institutions

    • I went to high school with George Hotz. He was nothing if not an iconoclast even back then, someone who refused to do anything he didn't really feel had any value. I remember one year we had a combined English and History class assignment that was meant to introduce us to the kind of research papers that academics in the humanities and social scientists write in higher ed. We were meant to read widely and conduct research over the course of many months and turn in a well cited paper between ten and fifteen pages in length. Instead, George decided to loudly dictate his entire paper in the engineering class we had the period before the assignment was due, basically just riffing on Harry Potter and LOTR, to the amusement of everyone in the computer lab. He then converted the entire Word doc into Zapf Dingbats and submitted it with a printed out decoder mapping the symbols to their English letter equivalent, like some puzzle on the back of a cereal box. Dunno what he received as a grade, though I do know the assignment counted for a considerable piece of our overall grade for both those subjects that semester.

Haagen-Dazs / Reuben and Rose Mattus

The Emperor of Ice Cream by Rose Mattus

Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Emperor-Ice-C ... 0974885703I absolutely love Haagen Dazs; it's one of my favorite products, and seemed to anticipate the now-huge market for premium/natural ingredients (that's the basis for Whole Foods, for example). This was written by the wife and cofounder; it's a good book that seems to have mostly flown under the radar of the business world: the amazon page only has 1 review, and I'd never heard it mentioned before in any lists of business books. To be honest it isn't as engaging as some of the other autobiographies I've read (I can't quite put my finger on why), but it does have a lot of good information in it. I actually have an autographed copy which the recipient apparently never read (because the book was in like-new condition when I got it).Thoughts from the book:- they struggled very hard to compete against the huge ice cream makers; eventually they were able to be successful by going into a niche market that the big guys weren't paying attention to. It's a lot like a small animal deciding that it's not worth going after the same patch of food as a much bigger animal, and instead looking around for a patch that no big animal has seen yet. In Haagen Dazs' case, they went after the premium niche: extremely high quality ice cream that would be sold for a higher price.- two big things that separates Haagen Dazs from other ice creams are 1) the addition of eggs, and 2) a much lower proportion of air-to-ice-cream. I didn't know this before, but apparently most ice creams are about 50% air (by volume). Just by accident, one day Reuben Mattus discovered that ice cream tasted way better with a lower amount of air. Now HD has about 20% (according to Rose).- it seems that the Mattus family had a harder struggle to success than the Waltons. I want to spend some time thinking about what separated the two families' stories.. . . One thing is that the Waltons were borrowing HEAVILY for many, many years to expand quickly. Sam Walton talks about borrowing from one bank to pay back another. The Mattus family also borrowed, but it doesn't seem they borrowed to the same extent as the Waltons. The Mattus family also seemed to borrow for risky ventures, like a never-before-done business idea (e.g. ice cream vending machines in the subways), rather than for an expansion of a proven idea (e.g. the Waltons borrowed to open new stores, which they KNEW from experience that people would prefer to whatever else was in town). The Mattus family had to give up the vending machine idea when 1) a kid tried to steal some ice cream and got his hand caught, resulting in a lawsuit, and 2) they discovered that they didn't have a way of repairing the machines. I guess the underlying lesson here would be, "To grow quickly, borrow money to bring your proven product to new people. It may be slower-going if you try to further-cultivate your existing base of customers through new ideas.". . . Another thing is that Sam Walton aggressively sought out all existing good ideas in his industry from the very beginning; he came across one of the major ideas of his business, discounting, relatively early on. Walton said in his autobiography, "Most everything I've done I've copied from someone else" (or something like that). Reuben Mattus, on the other hand, seemed to rely more on himself for inspiration; it wasn't until well into his career that he came across the ideas that finally made his business take off (adding eggs and lowering the air content). He didn't come up with the ideas himself, though: one was an accident and the other was an idea he got from French ice cream makers. He may have benefited from following a path more like Walton's, aggressively seeking out every bit of information that existed all over the world about making ice cream and related products (from which he could get ideas).