2013 Jul 5

Boiling Frogs in College

My friend Jake Novak wrote a guest piece on CNBC the other day about the inexorable increase in college tuitions. While I don't want to get into the question of who is to blame - and thus avoid the left-right policy debates, since much of this readership is rather diverse - Jake had one really insightful and initially puzzling point. I quote: "In fact, the Census Bureau found that between 1993 and 2011, the average student loan debt for Americans with a bachelor's degree jumped by more than 82 percent, to $27,547.

2013 Jul 5

It Always Comes Down to the People

Ben Horowitz, partner at Andreessen Horowitz, had a post this week criticizing the new organizational structure at Zynga. The founder, Mark Pincus, is stepping down from his CEO role to the Chief Product Officer role, while Don Mattrick, the former head of the Xbox business for Microsoft (although I believe his remit included gaming for PCs as well), is the new CEO. So far so good, except that Pincus remains the Chairman, so Pincus reports to Mattrick reports to Pincus?

2013 Jul 4

The Blessings of Independence

On this July 4th, the American holiday of independence, let all readers around the world give thanks for the events of the late 18th century. While Britain is undoubtedly the grandfather of modern liberty, rooted in its 13th century Magna Carta declaration, and the works of its great liberal thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment of the 18th century such as Smith, Hume and many others, and they in turn were inspired by the Hebrew Bible, with its declarations of freedom from Egypt, "

2013 Jul 3

The Shortage Fallacy

Someone recently sent me a disturbing article from May in the Washingtonian about nutrient shortages at hospitals in Washington, DC. According to the article, there are illness of malnutrition there not seen in many developing countries, especially for very early NICU children. I recommend reading the article in its entirety (when do I not?), despite its disturbing nature. The article, besides bringing to questions of social priorities (and hence policies and hence politics), sheds light on shortages.

2013 Jul 3

The Long Decline of Snail Mail?

TechCrunch reports that Outbox, the digitizer of snail mail, just raised a $5MM Series A investment round. When you sign up for Outbox, for $4.99/month, they swing by your house three times a week, pick up all your mail, scan it and send it off to you. If it is a package, they deliver it to your door. It is in early Beta in two cities, but undoubtedly a good part of that $5MM is for expanding coverage.

2013 Jul 2

Dealing with Lonely Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship is lonely. That statement, short and hardly sweet, is probably the single most common characteristic I have seen to any type of venture: independent consultant, small business (a.k.a. lifestyle business) founder / owner, startup creator, growing business CEO, and even large company owner. In the last few days alone, I counselled an entrepreneur who mentioned how who mentioned to me how it was full of loneliness. If you are challenged by loneliness, if you must have a high social content for validation and support - which is not a weakness, just a different personality, one very well suited to most high-achieving salespeople I know - then you either need to avoid entrepreneurship, or find ways to manage it.

2013 Jul 1

Managing Expectations, Expecting Irrationality

Behavioural economists are an interesting breed of people. They take classic economics, but add a large element of "human behaviour" study, usually known as psychology. The most famous of these is Dan Ariely, whose bestseller, "Predictably Irrational," is an excellent read, although some of his conclusions violate his premises. Behavioural economics shows that people are not quite as rational as classic economic theories would expect, and sometimes behave in irrational (but usually predictable) ways.

2013 Jul 1

Victory Comes From Corrections, Not First Successes

Late last night, Steve Blank tweeted the famous quote from Henry Ford (a notorious anti-Semite and Nazi sympathizer, which does not take away from his market prowess, let alone manufacturing genius), "Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently." As I wrote earlier, agile development, in the words of Josh Mahowald, chief architect for cloud of Genesys, is nothing more or less than the opportunity to fail quickly and in small ways, and thus be available to correct, rather than spectacularly and later, when correction is extremely expensive, often impossible.

2013 Jun 30

Lessons from a Swimming Pool, Part II: Sometimes, ROI Just Doesn't Matter

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I spent a lovely few hours at the swimming pool with my family during their summer opening day event. There were lots of great inflatables with water for the kids: dragons on the water, slides into the water, etc. Since it was the first real time off for the kids, and it was a well-publicized summer opening event, the place was packed. There were easily 2-3x as many people as there normally are, leading to lines for each inflatable (total of about 8) of several minutes at least.

2013 Jun 29

Testing Saves Money... Lesson from a Swimming Pool

The other day, I took my kids to the local swimming pool / health club. In honour of the first real Friday of summer - all of the high schoolers are finished, the elementary schoolers are just about done - they had a "happening", with inflatables, slides into the water, inflated dragons on the water, slides on the grass with water running down them, lots of fun for the kids.