startups

4 posts under this tag.

Star
Where there are peaks there are valleys... 2
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7
Aug
09

...Is how Peter DruckerWP drives it home. “It” here was not originally the free market, though what a great defense for it it makes, no? Drucker was illustrating, rather, his brave belief that strong people always have strong weaknesses, that it is foolish to concern oneself with what a man cannot do instead of what he can, that the man who “leaves least to be desired” is invariably the mediocrity, that one builds on strengths, not on weakness. Moreover, that making strength productive and weaknesses irrelevant is “the unique purpose of organization.” A great short book, The Effective ExecutiveAM.

Courage 2
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7
Mar
19

What is courage? Courage is what it takes to overcome fearELZR.

By describing how my own failures of courage feel to me, I hope to help you recognize such failures in yourselves. I seek to encourage you. I mean that literally. I seek to extend your courage by making you aware of your need for it and by describing some symptoms of its failure. I will offer some ways to reduce your need for courage, to marshal what courage you can muster, and to husband your store of it.

Ivan SutherlandWP, Technology and Courage

I don’t even remember how it was that last Thursday morning I ended up reading Sutherland’s classic article. But I’m glad I did. It was exactly what I needed. Thank you Mr Sutherland.

What would you do? 2
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7
Feb
13

...with a 65 by 20 meters (213 by 65 feet) lot in the ”primer cuadro”—the very heart of downtown, the area around main square—of a small, hundred-thousand peopleELZR town? (Ciudad GuzmanWP, that is)

We’re thinking of turning it provisionally into a parking lot, hence the above plan, but we’re still looking for an interesting business (other than the obvious answer of starting yet another hotel). Any ideas?

Inventors 2
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6
Dec
06

This is, I think, a pretty good glimpse of one of the roles I want to play the next decade—don’t give up on me! :)

Something else is going on here. To a large extent, value on the Internet is not being created by businesses, as much as they want all kinds of credit and money for creating this wonderful value. Inventors, folks who are coming up with new tools, are creating it. Some of them are well harnessed by businesses, but it turns out that businesses don’t have to exist for them to harness themselves with the Net and get these things out there. For example, the person who created Eudora is a University of Illinois fellow who did it basically for himself and people he knew. In terms of quality, Eudora is visibly beyond any other email program. It makes you wonder what’s wrong with companies, what prevents them from doing the right thing when a random person puts his exquisite tool out on the Net for free. This happened with Eudora, and later with Mosaic, which led to a commercial version, Netscape Navigator.

The inventors of these tools are not crazed codgers in basements. They are, by-and-large, young people with a sense of social and cultural responsibility who want things to be better for everybody. They are as valuable as our snazziest scientists, but are not accorded the respect or rewards of the snazzy scientists. They are taken for granted more than they should be. Something is wrong if we think inventors are a lower order of being than theoretical scientists.

Stewart BrandWP in Chapter 3, The Scout of John Brockman’s DigeratiAM