Smarter Stuff

Really Smarter Stuff

This is great stuff:

I found myself talking recently to someone from Hollywood who was planning a show about nerds. I thought it would be useful if I explained what a nerd was. What I came up with was: someone who doesn't expend any effort on marketing himself.

A nerd, in other words, is someone who concentrates on substance. So what's the connection between nerds and technology? Roughly that you can't fool mother nature. In technical matters, you have to get the right answers. If your software miscalculates the path of a space probe, you can't finesse your way out of trouble by saying that your code is patriotic, or avant-garde, or any of the other dodges people use in nontechnical fields.

(or as I've said, "If you lie in engineering matters, the bridge falls down.")

Paul Graham once again demonstrates his ability to think deeply (and write well about what he's thinking). If only he had an RSS feed!

Fallback: this "scraped" feed appears to be current.

Tech Talk for October

My October Tech Talk column is now available over at NorthBay biz. It deals with PhotoStamps, my switch to cable internet from DSL, and the incredibly stupid customer service system at SBC.

Turning Ideas Into Successful Products

I Googled for the phrase "turning ideas into successful products" (which might become the theme of this blog), and it returned this PDF reprint of a magazine article about 3 entrepreneurs who apparently did it: Lionel model train enhancements, engine overhaul kits, and designer tableware. Reading 2-page magazine spreads in a PDF on a computer screen is a bitch.

Unfortunately, it doesn't help with the "art vs. science" question I'm trying to answer.

What's Your Job Worth?

It's occasionally useful to think of your income as the yield from a capital asset (namely you).

If you make $50,000 a year, that's equivalent to 5% interest on a $1 million asset. Since it's relatively hard to accumulate $1 million in the bank, a paying job is not a bad thing to have.

(the analogy is slightly flawed, since $1 million in the bank will generate return (at some rate) forever, where as you eventually become unable to work due to age and/or death).

But when you're bootstrapping, this sort of math is even more interesting.

If your goal is to create something which throws off $50,000 a year (clear), you can actually justify spending a fair amount of time and money to create that income stream (which represents [sort of] a $1 million asset), as long as you have some degree of confidence that you're going to get to that point. And hopefully, that confidence is well placed.

Things to consider: the $50,000 is not risk-free (the business which generates it has to keep running in response to changes in market demand, production costs, etc).

The point is not to give up on an idea too soon. If you can create something which generates a reliable income stream, it's worth a larger investment (of time and money) than might be immediately apparent.

Would most people spend 6 months at no pay to create something which generated $100,000 a year for 10 years? Of course (assuming they could weather the 6 months).

Another point is that people who are good at turning ideas into profitable products/businesses are worth studying. Is it art or science or personality? One of the reasons I find Mark Cuban interesting. Norm Brodsky, who writes for Inc. Magazine, also comes to mind.

I guess I'm engaged in a research project.

America in danger

Fron PROMO Magazine:

Maker of Twinkies Files Chapter 11
Interstate Bakeries Corp., the makers of Hostess Twinkies and Drake's cakes, filed yesterday for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection citing declining sales, rising employee healthcare and higher costs for ingredients and energy among other factors.

America is in danger! Eat more Twinkies!!

Quotable

From David Weller

Inside every older person is a younger person wondering, "What the hell happened?"

This, of course, has nothing to do with the fact that I will turn 50 on February 12, 2005. I still feel about 35 (and my wife and kids would say I act about 12).

Origin of "Smarter Stuff"

Since my friend and occasional Web design helper Willa Cline has blogged me, I feel obligated to explain the slightly cryptic title of this blog to whoever wanders by.

(note - one of the disappointments of Typepad is the relative paucity of statistics about traffic, even here in the Plus version.)

When I left Mindscape in 1997 (my last real job), I was toying with the idea that computers were going to disappear into the fabric of things. I had an idea for a smart appliance (smart in the sense that interacting with it would be more natural than some things we've become used to doing in order to accomplish some tasks with computers), and the larger idea behind it was that computing cycles were sufficiently cheap that you could spend more and more of them on making devices more natural to use (and I don't mean 3-D zooming windows a la Microsoft).

The tag line was this:

People don't want computers; they want Smarter Stuff^™

Anyway, I realized that speech recognition technology, no matter how accurate, doesn't deal with the issue of semantics (although I had a nice little workaround for that, which I call "The Family Feud Effect").

Products in this general space, like Wildfire, seem to have evaporated. Reading Russell Beattie's blog about mobile technology, though, makes me entertain thoughts of reviving this idea.

I still own the domain: www.smarter-stuff.com

RSS and Tivo

It occurs to me that RSS (for blogs) is similar in some ways to Tivo (for television).

1. They both allow you to access the content on your schedule.

2. You can restrict the universe of content (all blogs, all shows) to only those blogs/shows in which you are interested.

Not sure what that means, except that the themes of time shifting and subscription appear once again.

Broadcast + Time Shifting = Publication?

It's interesting to look at services/products which gain wide adoption to try and identify the benefits/features which make them popular. RSS is clearly an answer to the huge information flow represented by "writing on the Web".

Nobody wants to miss out on information which is of interest to them. Some information sources are reliably useful/informative/interesting/entertaining, and so we subscribe to them. Harder is the problem of discovering the useful bits in a signal with a lot of noise.

Bootstrapping

I'm having an ongoing discussion of bootstrapping with Adam Duvander, since we're both in generate-a-new-idea-and-bootstrap-it mode.

The very first writing I saw on the topic was this post by Ken Hess. Ken founded Banner Blue software, which is probably best known for Org Chart and Family Tree Maker, and later sold it to Broderbund. I met Ken when I interviewed for a CTO-like position at Pocket Express, a company he formed to take advantage of the PDA market explosion (now defunct).

Anyway, Ken also wrote a book called Bootstrap (I really need to figure out how to do that whole Amazon link thing), which talks about his journey and details his methodology. He has a section devoted to the book on his Web site. My favorite part of the materials on his site deals with Creating Success. What I remember most about meeting and talking with Ken was his extremely methodical approach to software product development. The book has a lot of examples.

What prompted my recollection of Ken, however, was this post from Russell Beatie,

So it seems that if I can't bootstrap the business, I shouldn't look for investment

which I interpreted as "if you're a strong enough concept to get VC money, you're a strong enough concept to bootstrap yourself." Add this to Ken Hess's proposition that bootstrapping is a superior alternative to taking OPM (other people's money) under most circumstances, and it really makes you think about the situations in which venture capital is a requirement (e.g. large initial capital requirements, need to grow at an accelerated rate). This Inc. Magazine column by Jerry Colonna asks the same question.

Which leads to the "Are you Ben & Jerry's or are you Amazon.com?" question so eloquently asked by Joel Spolsky.

I'm reminded of a comment from Ann Winblad of Hummer-Winblad (a venture capital firm) to the effect that one of the most important things in their evaluation of a company was whether (in addition to the ability to have a big piece of a potentially large market) the company had an actual (preferably paying) customer, as it validated the concept.

Ideas, of course, are a dime a dozen. The trick is (a) to have actual customers, and (b) execute the idea. If you can figure out how to execute from idea-to-revenue reliably (see The MouseDriver Chronicles), then you can build a business out of hitting singles (see Moneyball for the importance of looking at the root causes of success).

Of course, writing long and link-laden posts like this doesn't do a damn thing for the execution part.

[later - I just wanted to add this link to Feld's Bootstrapping Top 10. I also wanted to mention Seth Godin's Bootstrapper's Bible as another resource.]

Shameless Self-Promotion

You can read my column for the September 2004 issue of NorthBay biz here: Scary Story.

A list of (nearly) all my NorthBay biz columns is here. I've been writing for the magazine since January, 2001 -- at that time, the magazine was Sonoma Business Magazine -- but they didn't put their content online prior to the June, 2001 issue.

As you can see, writing a column doesn't necessarily bring either fame or fortune.