Month: July 2005

Marshall Brain: “If you can look at your life, your business, your situation, whatever and you can say to yourself, ‘I have a problem, and the problem is ____,’ you are often 80% of the way to solving your problem.”

I Can’t Stop Thinking: “Saving money was never the point — getting a hundred times as much music was! And file-sharing was not an indicator of a generation of thieves — but evidence of a record and radio industry that had been forcing musicians and listeners to walk the plank for one too many years.” (via Steve)

Michael Hiemstra:”If you look at the long tail as a graph, traveling along the X-axis you would see a short period of very high values quickly tapering off to a much longer period of shorter values. For instance, if you record every time you hear your kids screaming for a month and line them up on a graph based on the actual severity of the problem from most severe to least severe, chances are you would end up with a good picture of the long tail. There might be one or two real reasons for concern with the majority of the issues having something to do with a bothersome brother or sister flipping channels on the TV or making the wrong type of face.”

Eric Sink:”In this article, I’m going to surface a few principles of software product competition by drawing comparisons to games.”

The Business Experiment:

The Business Experiment is a site meant to explore three concepts: wisdom of crowds, open-source business, and the distributed nature of work. The goal is to have the registered users of this site collectively start and run a real business. Business plans will be written. Financing will be sought (if needed). Employees will be hired. Systems of accountability will be put into place.

Will Price:

Today’s papers are rife with horror stories of projects failing – from the FBI’s abandoned $170m internal IT project, to EDS’ failing Navy contract, to incredible cost overruns and delays in the Pentagon’s weapons development programs.

What does all this mean for venture capital and for executive teams?

Paul Allen keeps an Internet entrepreneur’s reading list. What other books would you add to the list?

“I need to hire three employees to help get my business started, but I don’t have enough financing to pay the salaries for all three. Should I try to raise more money before hiring anyone or should I hire just one employee and hope that I can make it work with limited resources?” Asheesh Advani answers .

Inc. interviews Greg Gianforte:

In other words, bootstrapping clears away the clutter and makes you focus single-mindedly on the customer, which is what any smart entrepreneur needs to do anyway. It compels you to be creative, and it’s an acid test for figuring out whether you’ve got a real business or just a plausible-sounding business plan. But bootstrapping is a safety net, too, because if you wind up with no sales, no customers, and no business, well, at least all you’ve lost is time, not money. “You don’t make any fatal mistakes” is how Gianforte puts it.

Seth Godin:

Turns out that car seats for kids over 2 are no more effective than seat belts. The data is unequivocal on this. (see a quick clip at Freakonomics)

So if it’s so clear, and if it means that Americans are wasting $300 million a year on car seats, what’s going on?