“Startups operate in a financial system that is inefficient, illiquid, and challenging to manage. More transactions of any kind or size help improve overall startup ecosystem health. Liquidity and transparency serve to grow the market and reward founders more richly.”
— Dave McClure. A more detailed model from Fred Wilson.
“Keep interest rates low so that people spend rather than hoarding—but only so long as there is involuntary unemployment. When an economy no longer has involuntary unemployment, further efforts to stimulate demand will merely cause inflation and asset bubbles.”
—Richard Posner paraphrasing John Maynard Keynesi. See also Aaron Swartz.
“Keynes’s great insight was that jobs are not like other goods. The people who get bought are also the people doing the buying. Reduced demand for jobs causes people to cut back on expenses, spiralling into further job reductions where other goods reduce prices to equilibrium.”
— Aaron Swartz paraphrased
“My job as a user experience designer has evolved. While it’s still my responsibility to prevent things from sucking, now it’s also my responsibility to add a little playfulness.
You can’t build playfulness into your designs without experiencing playfulness yourself. Play games and pay attention to what makes them fun.”
— Fred Beecher. Trevor Blackwell calls this tinkering.
“If we look at the percentage of overall labour force that is self-employed, the US ranks near the bottom among high-income countries. The likely explanation: our lack of national health insurance.”
“The ideal forum: a bunch of people who are individually working away on their own personal projects. Each participant has a vested interest; he or she needs to deliver results first, and is discussing it with others only second.”
Q: Most people find it morbid for someone young and healthy to think about their death.
me: I can never understand that. I am accomplishment-oriented rather than experience-oriented. I derive daily motivation much more from having a sense of accomplishment and impact on the world than from experiential pleasures, or even from having learned something. If you feel the same, it behooves you to think about the impact you will have on the world after you're gone, and how to best channel it. It's only experience that ends when you die.
Exhibit A: When a group of Stanford undergraduates took a standardized test and were told that it was a measure of their intellectual ability, the white students did much better than their black counterparts. But when the same test was presented simply as an abstract laboratory tool, with no relevance to ability, the scores of blacks and whites were virtually identical. This is stereotype threat.
Exhibit B: Students were asked a series of brain teaser questions. One group of students was told that the questions were invented at their university; the other group was told they were invented in a far away university. Thinking that the test came from far away somehow raised the creativity of the subjects. This is psychological distance.
Mike Davis: More than half the human race now lives in cities. Mostly in the squalor of slums and squatter cities.
Kevin Kelly: The city is a wonderful technological invention which concentrates the flow of energy and minds into computer chip-like density. In a relatively small footprint it generates a maximum of ideas and inventions. Slums are the skin of the city, its permeable edge that can balloon as it grows. Discomfort is an investment. In the favelas of Rio, the first generation of squatters had a literacy rate of only 5%, but their kids were 97% literate.
Michael Balter: In Anatolia nine thousand years ago, a stone-age civilization lived in high density without cities or slums for three thousand years. (via Ken Macleod)
Chris O'Brien: Andreessen has never started or operated a profitable business, except for one year with Netscape. LoudCloud/Opsware failed to turn an annual profit in its six years as a publicly traded company.
Ben Horowitz: First, with Loudcloud we saw the whole “cloud computing” trend way before most. Second, when the dot-com bust hit, we took radical steps to reboot, something a lot of founders might have been unable to do.