Silk Road

Thursday, June 2nd, 2011

Libertarian tech-geeks have been discussing digital currency for decades. Now Bitcoin is making a name for itself — as a way to buy illicit drugs over the Internet, of course:

Silk Road, a digital black market that sits just below most internet users’ purview, does resemble something from a cyberpunk novel. Through a combination of anonymity technology and a sophisticated user-feedback system, Silk Road makes buying and selling illegal drugs as easy as buying used electronics — and seemingly as safe. It’s Amazon — if Amazon sold mind-altering chemicals.

Here is just a small selection of the 340 items available for purchase on Silk Road by anyone, right now: a gram of Afghani hash; 1/8th ounce of “sour 13″ weed; 14 grams of ecstasy; .1 grams tar heroin. A listing for “Avatar” LSD includes a picture of blotter paper with big blue faces from the James Cameron movie on it. The sellers are located all over the world, a large portion from the U.S. and Canada.

But even Silk Road has limits: You won’t find any weapons-grade plutonium, for example. Its terms of service ban the sale of “anything who’s purpose is to harm or defraud, such as stolen credit cards, assassinations, and weapons of mass destruction.”

Getting to Silk Road is tricky. The URL seems made to be forgotten. But don’t point your browser there yet. It’s only accessible through the anonymizing network TOR, which requires a bit of technical skill to configure.

None of us should be the least bit surprised if Bitcoin is already being used to buy and sell stolen credit card numbers.

Posted in Business, Policy | 1 Comment »

The Most Supervised Generation

Wednesday, June 1st, 2011

This year’s graduating class has been ill-served by its elders, David Brooks says, because the graduates’ lives have been perversely structured:

This year’s graduates are members of the most supervised generation in American history. Through their childhoods and teenage years, they have been monitored, tutored, coached and honed to an unprecedented degree.

Yet upon graduation they will enter a world that is unprecedentedly wide open and unstructured. Most of them will not quickly get married, buy a home and have kids, as previous generations did. Instead, they will confront amazingly diverse job markets, social landscapes and lifestyle niches. Most will spend a decade wandering from job to job and clique to clique, searching for a role.

No one would design a system of extreme supervision to prepare people for a decade of extreme openness. But this is exactly what has emerged in modern America.

Worst of all, Brooks says, they are being sent off into the world with baby-boomer theology ringing in their ears:

If you sample some of the commencement addresses being broadcast on C-Span these days, you see that many graduates are told to: Follow your passion, chart your own course, march to the beat of your own drummer, follow your dreams and find yourself. This is the litany of expressive individualism, which is still the dominant note in American culture.
[...]
But this talk is of no help to the central business of adulthood, finding serious things to tie yourself down to. The successful young adult is beginning to make sacred commitments — to a spouse, a community and calling — yet mostly hears about freedom and autonomy.

Today’s graduates are also told to find their passion and then pursue their dreams. The implication is that they should find themselves first and then go off and live their quest. But, of course, very few people at age 22 or 24 can take an inward journey and come out having discovered a developed self.

Posted in Business, Education | 3 Comments »

Pirate Economics

Wednesday, May 25th, 2011

Let’s look at pirate economics:

In the first three months of this year, Somali pirates attacked 97 ships (and captured 15), compared to 35 attacked in the first three months of 2010. Last year, pirates got paid over $200 million in ransom. Most of that was taken by the pirate gang leaders, local warlords and Persian Gulf negotiators who deal with the shipping companies. But for the pirates who took the ship, then helped guard it for months until the money was paid, the take was still huge. Pirates who actually boarded the ship tend to receive at least $150,000 each, which is ten times what the average Somali man makes over his entire lifetime. Even the lowest ranking member of the pirate gang gets a few thousand dollars per ransom.

The general rule is that half the ransom goes to the financiers, the gang leaders and ransom negotiators. About a quarter of the money goes to the crew that took the ship, with a bonus for whoever got on board first. The pirates who guard the ship and look after the crew gets ten percent, About ten percent goes to local clans and warlords, as protection money (or bribes).

There is no shortage of eager young Somalis seeking to join the pirate gangs. Most will not get much more than weapons, food, and the use of a speed boat. If they want to make more, they have to capture a ship and hold it for ransom. The dozen or so pirate gangs, led by men who were local warlords or tribal leaders, get really rich. There are plenty of local warlords and merchants who will finance new pirate gangs, in return for up to 50 percent of whatever that gang gets in ransoms over a certain period. The money men will advance several hundred thousand dollars, often selling needed weapons and equipment, as well as providing technical advice. For the pirates, it’s a business.

There are three basic strategies for dealing with pirates:

You can do what is currently being done, which is patrolling the Gulf of Aden and shooting only when you see speedboats full of gunmen threatening a merchant ship. The rule appears to be that you fire lots of warning shots, and rarely fire at the pirates themselves. This approach has saved a few ships from capture, and the more warships you get into the Gulf, the more pirate attacks you can foil. But it won’t stop the pirates from capturing ships. Establishing a similar anti-piracy patrol off the east coast of Africa would cost over half a billion dollars a year, at least.

A second approach is to be more aggressive. That is, your ships and helicopters shoot (pirates) on sight and shoot to kill. Naturally, the pirates will hide their weapons (until they are in the act of taking a ship), but it will still be obvious what a speedboat full of “unarmed” men are up to. You could take a chance (of dead civilians and bad publicity) and shoot up any suspicious speedboat, or larger mother ship. Some of the pirates would probably resort to taking some women and children with them. Using human shields is an old custom, and usually works against Westerners. More pirate attacks will be thwarted with this approach, but the attacks will continue, and NATO will be painted as murderous bullies in the media.

The third option is to go ashore and kill or capture all the pirates, or at least as many as you can identify. Destroy pirate boats and weapons. This is very dangerous, because innocent civilians will be killed or injured, and the property of non-pirates will be damaged. The anti-piracy forces will be condemned in some quarters for committing atrocities. There might even be indictments for war crimes. There will be bad publicity. NATO will most likely avoid this option too. The bottom line is that the pirate attacks, even if they took two or three times as many ships as last year, would not have a meaningful economic impact on world shipping. Total cost to shipping companies (ransoms, extra fuel, security equipment and services) is over $5 billion a year.

For example, the international anti-piracy patrol in the Gulf of Aden costs $300 million a year, a fraction of a percent of the defense budgets of the nations involved. Politicians and bureaucrats can stand that kind of pain, and will likely do so and refrain from doing anything bold in Somalia.

Posted in Business, Crime, Economics, War | 2 Comments »

‘Most Likely to Succeed’ Burden

Friday, May 13th, 2011

Nearly one-third of those named “most likely to succeed” in high school regard it later as a curse, according to a recent poll of 1,369 members of MemoryLane.com.

On the other hand, more than a third consider it an inspiration.

Posted in Business, Education | No Comments »

The Facebook Class

Wednesday, May 11th, 2011

At Stanford in the fall of 2007, B. J. Fogg offered what became known as the Facebook Class:

Almost overnight, the Facebook Class fired up the careers and fortunes of more than two dozen students and teachers here. It also helped to pioneer a new model of entrepreneurship that has upturned the tech establishment: the lean start-up.

“Everything was happening so fast,” recalls Joachim De Lombaert, now 23. His team’s app netted $3,000 a day and morphed into a company that later sold for a six-figure sum.
[...]
Early on, the Facebook Class became a microcosm of Silicon Valley. Working in teams of three, the 75 students created apps that collectively had 16 million users in just 10 weeks. Many of those apps were sort of silly: Mr. De Lombaert’s, for example, allowed users to send “hotness” points to Facebook friends. Yet during the term, the apps, free for users, generated roughly $1 million in advertising revenue.

Posted in Business, Education, Technology | No Comments »

David Barton

Saturday, May 7th, 2011

Hardcore lifters sometimes take a twisted pride in their ogre-like ugliness and the ugliness of their dank dungeon-like gyms. They scoff at mirrors and ferns. A gym is a place for chalk, iron, sweat, and blood.

I suppose they’re reacting to people like David Barton and his customers:

On a recent Thursday night, the 38,000-square-foot David Barton Gym on Astor Place was throbbing to the Scorpions’ “Rock You Like a Hurricane.” Up the white-plaster staircase, candles flickered in the virgin springwood-paneled yoga room. Down below, a line of porcelain doll heads grinned over the moodily lighted lobby as lithe young things churned past the reception desk, designer gym bags in tow.
[...]
“We call this Victorian punk,” Mr. Barton, 46, said of the décor in his raspy, staccato, Mickey Rourke voice, his right biceps spasming, as it constantly does. “It’s like some punk rockers took over an old East Village church and made it cool.”

Few things at a David Barton gym look uncool. Since Mr. Barton opened his first gym in Chelsea in 1991, he estimates that he has grossed $230 million with six fitness centers in New York, Miami Beach, Chicago and elsewhere that feel more like nightclubs (noirish lighting, live D.J.’s, spalike locker rooms) than workaday gyms.
[...]
His first gym, in the unlovely basement of a 1970s apartment building on West 15th Street, was an instant hit among the neighborhood’s burgeoning gay populace. It featured a relentless house-music track, lush spotlighting and wall-to-wall mirrors that seemed to magnify a culture of muscle worship.

“I’d never worked out before, and that gym pretty much changed my life,” said Amanda Lepore, the transsexual party hostess whose surgically enhanced body Mr. Barton has featured in ads. Mr. Barton would let Ms. Lepore and other downtown club figures work out free in exchange for the buzz. “David showed me that I could sculpt my body with weights,” Ms. Lepore said, “which is better than plastic surgery, because you can control it more.”

Other clubs followed on the Upper East Side and in other cities, including Miami Beach, where the opening of the David Barton gym in the Delano hotel in 1995 helped brand that hotel as one of South Beach’s hot spots and where, later, its move to the Gansevoort South was seen as something of a coup for that hotel. Toned down somewhat from the flamboyant Chelsea original, the subsequent locations still succeeded in defining an entirely new kind of gym experience, one that felt as much like hitting a glitzy party as logging an everyday workout.

“David Barton created the prototype of the gym-as-nightclub that has been widely imitated,” said Taylor Hamilton, a senior analyst covering sports and fitness for IBISWorld, a market research company. “They’re probably the highest cachet gyms in the U.S. other than Equinox.”

In 2004, Mr. Barton fulfilled a dream to move his Chelsea flagship to a higher-profile site: the former McBurney YMCA, a century-old landmark on West 23rd Street. It became his most nightclubby gym, with the weight room swathed in theatrical shadows, D.J.’s pumping dance music at night and a fiber-optic light show in the steam room.

Tales of hijinks in the men’s locker room became the stuff of gay urban legend.

Posted in Business, Fitness | No Comments »

BISimulations’ VBS 2

Friday, May 6th, 2011

I don’t know how the Bohemia Interactive Simulations PR team got the New York Times to cover the origin of their Virtual Battlespace (serious) game, but they did:

In 1997, the Spanel brothers began working on a commercial first-person-shooter game with an open platform and design tools, asking users to build more weapons, vehicles and terrains.

Ondrej Spanel had an advanced degree in landscape generation and animation, so terrain rendering became a central feature.

After several failed attempts to find a publisher, the brothers signed with an American distributor that soon went out of business and sold its catalog to Ubisoft, which cancelled the brothers’ contract.

“We were kind of hopeless,” Marek Spanel said.

When the game was eventually published by Codemasters in 2001 as “Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis,” the brothers’ fledgling company, Bohemia Interactive Studio, had grown to a staff of eight. “It was a small team. We were very dedicated. We had no family, no life,” said Mr. Spanel, who now has a 7-year-old son and two daughters, 5 and 3.

The brothers chose as the game’s theme song the heavy metal tune “Lifeless” by the Australian Internet band Seventh, whose lead singer, David Lagettie, was obsessed with military simulators. Mr. Lagettie, 42, had been an industrial air-conditioning mechanic near Canberra. The son of a Vietnam War veteran, he grew up enthralled by military flight simulators. He wrote “Lifeless” in memory of a close family friend, Sgt. Tom Birnie, who was killed in Vietnam.

He suggested that the Spanels turn Operation Flashpoint into a military training game.

The open design and mission editor, it turned out, provided just the flexibility the military needed. Mr. Lagettie helped the Spanels customize Operation Flashpoint into a military simulator they called VBS, which the Marine Corps started purchasing in 2001. The American, British, Canadian, Australian and New Zealand armies now also use the software.

“If it wasn’t for that song,” said Mr. Lagettie, “VBS wouldn’t exist today.”

The military simulation business has sustained the company.

Now, the Bohemia Interactive Group, based in Prague, has a staff of 140. For the 2009 fiscal year, game revenue was about $6 million, while simulation sales were about $7 million, Marek Spanel said.

Posted in Business, Games, War | No Comments »

Wall Street’s Cult Calculator Turns 30

Wednesday, May 4th, 2011

Wall Street’s cult calculator, the HP 12c financial calculator, turns 30 years old:

Sales of the device, which debuted in 1981, haven’t slipped even after its manufacturer, Hewlett-Packard Co., introduced more-advanced devices or even, two years ago, a 12c iPhone application, which replicates all the calculator’s functions, the company says.

“Once you learned it on the 12c, there was no need to change,” says David Carter, chief investment officer of New York wealth-management firm Lenox Advisors, who has owned his 12c for 22 years and still keeps it on his desk. “It’s not like the math was changing.”
Thirty years after the launch of the 12c, it’s still commonplace for financial analysts filing into a conference room to set down their calculators next to their papers and cellphones.

Indeed, the 12c, which costs $70 on H-P’s website, is H-P’s best-selling calculator of all time, though the company won’t reveal how many units it has sold over the years. (A standard calculator costs about $10.) Its chief competitor is Texas Instruments’ $28 BA II Plus, which is the only other calculator test-takers are permitted to use on the official CFA exam.

The 12c is slim, black and gold, and rectangular, just over five inches wide by three inches high. It runs on an unconventional operating system called “Reverse Polish Notation,” which eschews parentheses and equal signs in an effort to run long calculations more efficiently.

That may be one reason users are reluctant to switch. “I’ve become so addicted to it that I am unable to use the iPhone calculator correctly,” says John Lynch, chief equity strategist at Wells Fargo Funds Management Group in Charlotte, N.C.

It’s also built like a tank:

To test the 12c’s durability, engineers practiced dropping it onto concrete floors, says Dennis Harms, who led the original 12c design team and still works at H-P. “I’ve heard stories of them surviving snowblowers,” he says.

Posted in Business, Technology | 2 Comments »

Whose Size 8 Are You Wearing?

Friday, April 29th, 2011

Tanya Shaw’s company, MyBestFit, is tackling the crazy quilt of women’s clothing sizing by setting up body-scanners in malls. The free 20-second scan comes with a printout of which sizes should fit that customer best at various stores:

The retailers pay a fee when they appear in the results, but they cannot pay to be included in the results; the rankings are based solely on fit. (The company saves the data, with ID numbers but not names, and may give aggregate information to retailers as feedback.)

Don Thomas, who manages the Eddie Bauer store at the King of Prussia Mall outside Philadelphia, said the system was helpful to shoppers. “Nine times out of 10, if left on their own, they will choose the wrong size pant,” he said. With a printout, “if it says they’re a 4 or a 6, they’re a 4 or a 6, generally. So it’s really good for the customer who’s time-starved, which we all are.”

Ms. Shaw says there are plans for 13 more scanning machines in malls along the East Coast and in California by the end of the year.

The sizing variations are a big contributor to $194 billion in clothing purchases returned in 2010, or more than 8 percent of all clothing purchases, according to the National Retail Federation.

The scanners are a modern solution to an old problem. Studying dress sizes in Vogue advertisements from 1922 on, Alaina Zulli, a designer focusing on costume history, found clothing sizes have been irregular for decades.

A woman with a 32-inch bust would have worn a Size 14 in Sears’s 1937 catalog. By 1967, she would have worn an 8, Ms. Zulli found.

Today, she would wear a zero.

It’s almost as if the retailers don’t want to present honest sizes…

Posted in Business | No Comments »

It’s All Material

Friday, April 29th, 2011

When he graduated with a degree in classics, Robert Greene (The 48 Laws of Power) had no idea how the real world worked:

I was immersed in studying philosophy and literature and languages. And so when I started working, essentially in magazines, I worked at Esquire magazine and a few others. I had no idea of how things operated in the real world, and I was very much shocked by all of the egos and the insecurities and the game playing and the political stuff. It really kind of disturbed me and it upset me. I can remember when I was about 26 or 27 years old one particular job that was kind of the turning point in my life.

I am not going to tell you which job this was. I don’t want you Googling it and figuring out who I’m talking about. But, basically, the job was that I had to find stories that would then be put into either film or a magazine, whatever. But I was basically judged on how many good stories I found. So in this job, I thought, I am a very competitive person, and I was doing better than anybody else there. I was finding more stories that ended up getting produced, because I felt that’s the point. You are trying to produce. You are trying to get work done. Isn’t that the most important thing? Isn’t that why we are all here?

Suddenly I found that my superior, this woman, who’s name I won’t mention, made it very clear that she wasn’t happy with me. That something was wrong. I was doing something wrong and I couldn’t figure out what it was.

So going on what I was mentioning, that theory of mind, this power that we have, I sort of put myself in her shoes. And I’m thinking, what is it that I’m doing that is displeasing her? I am clearly producing. And I figured out, well, maybe it is because I’m not involving her in what I’m doing, in my ideas. I need to run them by her. I need to make and involve her more so she feels like she is a part of the research that I am doing.

So I would go into her office and I would tell her where my ideas were coming. I was trying to engage with her, figuring that was the problem. Well, that didn’t seem to work. She was still clearly unhappy with me. Maybe didn’t like me. So, I thought, going further, well, maybe I’m not being friendly enough with her. Maybe I need to be nice to her. Maybe I need to go in and not talk about work, but just talk, be nice and talk like a human being.

Okay. So that was strategy number two. I started doing that. Still didn’t have any effect. She still seemed really cold and kind of mean. I figured, all right. She just hates me. That’s just life. Not everybody can love you. That’s just it. I mean, what the hell? I’ll just do my job. Then one day we are having a meeting in which we are discussing our ideas, and she suddenly interrupts. She says, “‘Robert. You have an attitude problem.”

“What?” “You’re not listening to people here.” “I’m listening.” But, I mean, I produce. I do my work. You are going to judge me about how wide my eyes are open and how I’m listening to people? She goes, “No. You have a problem here.” “I’m sorry. I don’t think I do.”

Anyway, over the course of the next few weeks she just started kind of torturing me about this idea that I had an attitude. And, of course, naturally, I developed an attitude. I started resenting her. And a couple of weeks later, I quit, because I just hated it. I probably quit a week before they were going to fire me anyway. And I went home, and over the course of several weeks, I thought really deeply about it. What happened here? What did I do wrong? I mean, she just didn’t like me? I think I’m a likable person.

I figured, I came to this conclusion. I had violated a law of power 12 years before I ever wrote the book. Law number one: Never outshine the master. I had gone into this environment thinking that what mattered was doing a great job and showing how talented I was. But, in doing that, I had made this woman, my superior, insecure that maybe I was after her job or that maybe I was better than she was. And I would make her look bad because the great ideas were coming from me and not from her.

I had violated law number one. And when you violate law number one, you are going to suffer for it, because you are touching on a person’s ego and their insecurities. That is the worst thing you can do, and that is what had happened.

So in reflecting over this, it was kind of a turning point in my life. And I said, “I’m never going to let this happen again. I’m never going to get emotional.” Because that it what happened. I basically reacted emotionally to her torturing me and developed an attitude. I’m never going to let that happen again. I don’t care. I’m a writer. I don’t care about these jobs that I get. I am just going to become a master observer of the game of power. I am going to watch these people as if they were mice in a laboratory, with some distance.

I developed a motto. A motto that I still use to this day, and that motto is, “It’s all material.” Everything that happens is material. Material for a book. Material for a novel, for a screenplay. I want to be the master observer of this world.

This suddenly allowed me, now, to not only observe the power games going on in the many different kinds of jobs that I’ve had. And I can tell you, I’ve had jobs from working in journalism. I worked in a detective agency. I worked for a music producer. I worked for film. Everything possible.

In having this distance and looking at the world like this, suddenly I had power. I wasn’t emotionally involved. I had some distance, and I could deal with things. From that, I developed “The 48 Laws of Power,” when I was finally given the opportunity to write the book. What I decided in “The 48 Laws,” and it’s a very much a part of me, is that this is the reality that we must all deal with. That we are social creatures. That we live in environments where there are all kinds of complicated networks. We are, in a way, defined by how we handle these environments, this reality.

Posted in Business, Media | No Comments »

The 1972 Chouinard Catalog

Thursday, April 28th, 2011

The 1972 Chouinard catalog was remarkably influential in shaping the sport of climbing:

The backstory to the company is a “scratch your own itch” tale. It starts with pitons, the metal spikes climbers drive into cracks. They used to be made of soft iron. Climbers placed them once and left them in the rock.

But in 1957, a young climber named Yvon Chouinard decided to make his own reusable hardware. He went to a junkyard and bought a used coal-fired forge, a 138-pound anvil, some tongs and hammers, and started teaching himself how to blacksmith. He made his first chrome-molybdenum steel pitons and word spread. Soon, he was in business and selling them for $1.50 each to other climbers. By 1970, Chouinard Equipment had become the largest supplier of climbing hardware in the U.S.

But there was a problem. The company’s gear was damaging the rock. The same routes were being used over and over and the same fragile cracks had to endure repeated hammering of pitons. The disfiguring was severe. So Chouinard and his business partner Tom Frost decided to phase out of the piton business, despite the fact that it comprised 70% of the company’s business. Chouinard introduced an alternative: aluminum chocks that could be wedged by hand rather than hammered in and out of cracks. They were introduced in that 1972 catalog, the company’s first. The bold move worked. Within a few months, the piton business atrophied and chocks sold faster than they could be made.

So what kind of catalog do you put out when you’re reversing your entire business? Chouinard went with a mix of product descriptions, climbing advice, inspirational quotes, and essays that served as a “clean climbing” manifesto.

It takes guts to kill off your old product and to produce a manifesto introducing a new way of doing things — but climbers have guts.

Posted in Business | 1 Comment »

What They Don’t Teach You at HBS

Wednesday, April 27th, 2011

Ben Casnocha shares his list of highlights from Mark McCormack’s What They Don’t Teach You At Harvard Business School:

The importance of reading people and studying body language. Be wary when someone strikes a pose or when their casualness is a little too studied.

The most important question of all when assessing a person’s ego: How secure is this person?

People often reveal their innermost selves in the most innocent of situations. (E.g. dealing with a waiter.)

Business is a constant process of keeping your own guard up while encouraging others to lower theirs.

If I am presumed to be knowledgeable about a situation, I will often say something within the first minute or two of a meeting that might indicate otherwise. At the least it’s disarming; and generally the less knowledgeable one appears the more forthcoming and revealing the other party will be.

When a crisis occurs or is in the process of occurring, don’t react. Just say you’d like to think about it.

Once you’ve sold, shut up. And don’t try to dot every i and cross every t. Confirm the understanding later in writing but don’t dampen the enthusiasm once deal closes in person or on phone.

In sales, people have a need to say no, so let them say no to a few (trivial) things. A few well-placed no’s create the environment for “yes.”

Ask when we can meet and how soon — and then show up. The farther you have to fly, the more impressive it is.

A large group is more than one. Sell to one person. Find the key guy and sell to him. If you try to sell into more than one person at the same time, you are introducing into the sale the dynamics of their interrelationships, which can do nothing but detract from your purpose. The key guy will know how it sell it into the organization.

A woman approached Picasso in a restaurant and asked him to scribble something on a napkin, and said she would be happy to pay whatever he felt it was worth. Picasso complied and then said, “That will be $10,000.”  “But you did that in thirty seconds,” the astonished woman replied.  “No,” Picasso said, “It has taken me forty years to do that.”

99% of the world should be working for somebody. Not everybody should be entrepreneurs.

Posted in Business | No Comments »

From eDiscovery to Siege Weaponry

Tuesday, April 19th, 2011

A group of sharp guys got together and decided to do a Silicon Valley start-up — but they weren’t quite sure what to do.

They started sketching out some ideas for email organization. Then Gmail released its priority inbox.

Then they started looking into automating the legal discovery process. Talking to potential customers was frustrating:

We built a pretty good prototype for a kind of problem we suspected lawyers might have, but we lost our way even as we found a target. We found ourselves going over the same questions with different potential clients and getting different answers, and not quite understanding why. We built features that made sense to us, but our test users just shrugged.

In those initial tests, what your users say doesn’t matter:

It’s how they say it.

Are they asking all kinds on inane questions, grumbling about the colors, and telling you everything you did wrong while you can’t pry them away from your demo? Success.

Are they smiling, nodding enthusiastically, telling you what a great idea it is, and then wandering off and not answering your email? It’s not working.

Apparently it wasn’t working. So, they pivoted to making
siege toys:

I didn’t realize that this was happening to us until we gave up on the legal software startup. Mike pulled out some plans he had for a snap-together trebuchet, and we started building it in TechShop on a lark. As we put it together, we started having back-and-forth idea sessions faster than we’d ever gotten anything done with the first company.
[...]
That happens because when you believe in your product, and you own the idea behind it, you’re reacting to your own mistakes on gut feel and getting it right faster than you can talk it through with your cofounder. You’re watching your test users use your product wrong and figuring out how to fix it even as they’re complaining about something else.

That’s not just a nice place to be, it’s a necessity. There are so many other things grabbing your attention when you’re trying to do a startup that you can’t painstakingly work out the right answer by careful analysis. You need to be able to think up and be confident in a new idea or improvement in the middle of doing six other things.

It’s more important than any other business indicator—addressable market, competitive advantage, disruptive technology—none of that matters compared to believing what you’re doing.

And that’s why we’re lucky that we moved from a $6,000,000,000 market to a $60,000 one, from serious software for real business to a simple toy for kids. Because we were flailing and we didn’t know it, and now we’re doing something, we’re doing it right, and we can feel it. Without that feeling, we wouldn’t have had the confidence to start a Kickstarter project, wander into important people’s offices holding laser-cut siege engines grinning like idiots, and bother random people on the Internet until they started passing our site around.

I’m not saying that just believing in your idea will magically make you successful. But I am saying that if you don’t have that simple, unshakable certainty, you’re looking at a nearly impossible uphill battle. And I would—and did—trade a “billion dollar” “opportunity” for a maybe-side-business that I know I can make work.

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Kosher Coke Lacks Small Things

Tuesday, April 19th, 2011

Kalim Kassam recently reminded me that Coca-Cola puts out Kosher Coke around Passover:

Kosher Coca Cola produced for Passover is sold in 2-liter bottles with a yellow cap marked with an OU-P, indicating that the Orthodox Jewish Union certifies the soda as Kosher for Passover, or with a white cap with a CRC-P indicating that the certification is provided by the Chicago Rabbinical Council.

While the usual Coca-Cola formula is kosher (the original glycerin from beef tallow having been replaced by vegetable glycerin), during Passover Ashkenazi Jews do not consume kitniyot, which prevents them from consuming high fructose corn syrup (HFCS).

So, what’s kitniyot?

The Torah (Exodus 13:3) prohibits Jews from eating leaven (chametz) during Passover. Technically, chametz is only leaven made from the “five grains”: wheat, spelt, barley, shibbolet shu’al (two-rowed barley, according to Maimonides; oats according to Rashi) or rye; although there are additional rabbinic prohibitions against eating these grains in any form other than matzo.

Among traditional Ashkenazi Jews, the custom during Passover is to refrain from not only products of the five grains but also kitniyot. Literally “small things,” such as other grains and legumes. Traditions of what is considered kitniyot vary from community to community but generally include maize (North American corn), as well as rice, peas, lentils, and beans.

Posted in Business | 6 Comments »

Hybrid Locomotives

Tuesday, April 19th, 2011

The Economist reports that train-makers are shifting toward Prius-like hybrid locomotives, but it neglects to mention why until the last paragraph:

Emission regulations for railways have recently been tightened in Europe and will become even stricter in the future. From 2012 diesel trains will have to reduce their emissions of nitrogen oxides by 39% and of soot by 88%. Hybrids may be the only way to meet these requirements.

It also neglects to mention that most diesel trains have been diesel-electric for quite some time; they just lack the massive array of batteries needed to run those electric motors without running the diesel generator.

Posted in Business, Policy, Technology | 1 Comment »

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