ventureswell

"It’s better to feel pain than nothing at all. The opposite of love is indifference."

Sun, 20 May 2012 14:35:34 -0700

“It’s better to feel pain than nothing at all. The opposite of love is indifference.”

- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnTxjfVZlPs

what a song

"A Super PAC hell-bent on unseating President Obama this fall has unveiled their genius plan for..."

Fri, 18 May 2012 18:23:31 -0700

“A Super PAC hell-bent on unseating President Obama this fall has unveiled their genius plan for convincing America that its current Commander-in-Chief is unfit to lead. Get an “extremely literate” black Republican to appear on a commercial and refer to the President as a “black, metrosexual Abe Lincoln.” That would be a brilliant plan if a black, metrosexual Abe Lincoln didn’t sound like the coolest fucking person ever, and calling for an “extremely literate” black person didn’t sound totally fucking racist.”

- GOP Group Calls Obama ‘Metrosexual Black Abe Lincoln,’ Which Sounds Totally Awesome

yeah yeah, I get it.

Thu, 17 May 2012 20:29:54 -0700

yeah yeah, I get it.

nevver: Last Exit to Brooklyn

Wed, 09 May 2012 12:27:44 -0700

nevver:

Last Exit to Brooklyn

"When you do something noble and beautiful and nobody noticed, do not be sad. For the sun every..."

Wed, 02 May 2012 09:32:01 -0700

“When you do something noble and beautiful and nobody noticed, do not be sad. For the sun every morning is a beautiful spectacle and yet most of the audience still sleeps.”

- John Lennon (via david)

"I also stopped reading twitter and facebook regularly, because most of my online acquaintances are..."

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 14:26:29 -0700

“I also stopped reading twitter and facebook regularly, because most of my online acquaintances are nice, but I like to think about these experiences as shallow and yes, also I don’t give a shit about 99% of people I interact with online. I’ve met some great friends online, but once I find them I would prefer to spend that time and energy with the few I would do anything for. Also, clicking the like button 1 billion times will never give you an orgasm or a hug or a high five.”

- Happiness Takes (A Little) Magic | The Wirecutter

Photo

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 15:18:08 -0700

"Gadgetry means never having to feel that pain, or that spur. The web expands to fill all boredom...."

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 20:15:03 -0700

“Gadgetry means never having to feel that pain, or that spur. The web expands to fill all boredom. That’s dangerous for everyone, but particularly so for kids, who, without boredom’s spur, may never discover what in themselves or in their surroundings is most deeply engaging to them.”

- Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog: The web expands to fill all boredom

"Over the last 60 days, we’ve fundamentally re-thought every part of our business"

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 10:35:34 -0700

““Over the last 60 days, we’ve fundamentally re-thought every part of our business””

- Really? Who knew it was that easy.

Read Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson’s Letter to Employees About Layoffs - Digits - WSJ

Photo

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 22:26:00 -0700

Marketplace? Network(s). 4 questions about growth.

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 16:40:00 -0700

Think you’re building a “marketplace?” You’re probably building a network. The distinction is partly metaphorical, but the metaphors we use to understand our businesses affect the way we make decisions.

I thought of Startuply as a marketplace, and we built it that way. We would have been more effective if we realized that we first wanted to map (a) the network of startups hiring in various cities & (b) the talent that works with them, and then find ways to effectively tap that network and connect the right companies with the right talent at the right time.

For a long time I thought of Eventbrite as a nascent marketplace, too. Buyers and sellers, tickets and events, right? Sort of. We’re a network, with often-distinct subcomponents. An organizer creates an event, an attendees buy tickets (or register). All of the entities are nodes, and there are clear and explicit edges between them. Some of those organizers have other events, some of those attendees are connected to other events and other attendees. It’s those relationships that define our business.

The distinction between networks and marketplaces helps clarify the decision-making process as we decide what to invest in and how to execute.

When thinking about building product/feature X, here are four questions that I find helpful to ask:

1. Will this help us map, analyze, and understand our network(s)? DAUs (or your analog) isn’t enough. Understanding network structure - how your users relate to each other and different aspects of your service - can unlock tremendous value.

2. Will this grow the scale of our network(s)? Reach still matters.

3. Will this grow the density of our network(s)? The more interconnected your users, the more value you can deliver. Certain aspects of network density are also closely related to switching costs; isolated and sparsely-connected users and sub-networks are easier to lose. 3rd-party relationship graphs like Facebook and Twitter can be insanely useful, especially early on, but are becoming commodified: relationships unique to your service are most valuable.

4. Will this help us tap our networks? How quickly can a new node (buyer, seller, item for sale) be connected to a value-generating node or network component?

One important thing to note is that at the end of the day, it isn’t just about scale & density. MySpace had a big fucking graph with billions (trillions?) of connections. What’s most important is the rate of growth of new connections. If our users, for example, aren’t continuing to build new relationships - following venues, tracking events, buying tickets - we’re dying.

You don’t let graph thinking rule your product plans, but it’s another useful lens to have in your bag.

I suspect this stuff will become less abstract pretty quickly.

bright/quiet

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 19:49:45 -0700

bright/quiet

Photo

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 22:45:38 -0700

You get to decide what to worship

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 12:17:00 -0700

This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship.

Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship—be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles—is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.

They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing.

- David Foster Wallace

via More Intelligent Life

"The results indicated that there was a “a significant negative relationship between the money..."

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 11:07:55 -0700

“The results indicated that there was a “a significant negative relationship between the money countries extract from national resources and the knowledge and skills of their high school population,” said Andreas Schleicher, who oversees the PISA exams for the O.E.C.D. “This is a global pattern that holds across 65 countries that took part in the latest PISA assessment.” Oil and PISA don’t mix. (See the data map at: http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/43/9/49881940.pdf.)”

- Pass the Books. Hold the Oil. - NYTimes.com

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Thu, 08 Mar 2012 14:47:47 -0800

"If only the movie companies would cease being nutjobs insisting on flogging their DRM-hobbled nags..."

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 12:19:13 -0800

“If only the movie companies would cease being nutjobs insisting on flogging their DRM-hobbled nags when the black market has x264 racehorses for less. They’re not competing on price, they’re not competing on convenience, they’re competing on the expected value of litigation. Now *that’s* a business model!”

- Four short links: 8 March 2012 - O’Reilly Radar

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Wed, 07 Mar 2012 10:28:47 -0800

"I was born in 1948. I can’t recall a world before television, but I know I must have..."

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 08:10:00 -0800

“

I was born in 1948. I can’t recall a world before television, but I know I must have experienced one. I do, dimly, recall the arrival of a piece of brown wooden furniture with sturdy Bakelite knobs and a screen no larger than the screen on this PowerBook.

Initially there was nothing on it but “snow,” and then the nightly advent of a targetlike device “the test pattern,” which people actually gathered to watch.

Today I think about the test pattern as I surf the web. I imagine that the World Wide Web and its modest wonders are no more than the test pattern for whatever the twenty-first century will regard as its equivalent medium. Not that I can even remotely imagine what that medium might actually be.

”

- William Gibson, from “The Net is a Waste of Time.”

(transcribed by hand from a kindle - as kindle sharing is entirely deficient - in the MIT media lab, of all places. then I found the article online.)

From the most excellent collection Distrust That Particular Flavor.

"In life you’ll be faced with many situations like this – moral dilemmas. You’ll learn that there are..."

Sat, 03 Mar 2012 21:19:00 -0800

“In life you’ll be faced with many situations like this – moral dilemmas. You’ll learn that there are many bad actors. You’ll find that there are very few people who still believe in honor. When you find those people they’ll be lifetime friends and business associates.”

- Always go home with the lady who brought you to the dance - Mark Suster