Month: August 2005

Bjorn Freeman-Benson: “Open source is a lot like this: if you want to attract a bigger development community around your project, you have to pay attention to providing context. The project team is heads-down, working hard, sharing a common mental picture, but potential contributors on the outside are, well, outside. So the team has to spend extra energy sharing their mental picture, their context, to help those outsiders start the journey towards insiderness.”

Technorati tags: oss, software, open source

A VC: “Early on in a company’s development, its to be expected that the numbers are going to be reset. When a business is moving so fast, when the strategy isn’t set in stone, when the market is still in its infancy, its not realistic to expect a company to meet the numbers. The goals are just that – directional expectations. When they are not met, you can’t just blow it off and move on to the reforecast, but you also can’t overreact and fire the entire management team.”

Technorati tags: startup, entrepreneurship, vc

Jeff Cornwall:”We tried several creative ways to find out if someone would fit in our culture. We had a very decentralized structure that was not dominated by our physicians. We had to make sure that we hired physicians and staff that fit into this culture. We would have them sit in treatment meetings and meet formally and informally with many of our staff. We would talk to our front line staff about each possible hire, and it was that group who often had veto power. Several prospective employees were not hired because they did not treat our receptionist with respect.”

Technorati tags: entrepreneurship, startup, hiring

Mark Cuban:”In Business, the odds are a little different. You don’t have to break the Mendoza line (hitting .200). In fact, it doesn’t matter how many times you strike out. In business, to be a success, you only have to be right once.”

Technorati tags: startup, business, entrepreneurship

Mark Shwartz:

For all its potential, a drawback of spintronics is that it doesn’t work very well with lighter atoms, such as silicon, which the microelectronics industry prefers. Enter Zhang’s new research. In the PRL paper, he and graduate students B. Andrei Bernevig and Taylor L. Hughes show how, in theory, silicon could be used in a related technology they dubbed orbitronics. By using orbitronics, Zhang says, computer chip makers could get the benefits of spintronics without having to abandon silicon.

Both orbitronics and spintronics involve a physical quantity called ”angular momentum,” a property of any mass that moves around a fixed position, be it a tetherball or an electron.

Technorati tags: physics, semiconductor

Rowan Hooper:

Loftus and colleagues gave 228 undergraduate students food questionnaires. The test subjects subsequently received feedback they falsely believed was personalised and had been generated by a sophisticated computer program. The feedback told them they had become ill eating fattening foods – strawberry ice cream and chocolate chip cookies – as a child.

The bluff led a substantial minority to believe they had felt ill after eating the ice cream – but not the cookies. The researchers think the suggestion did not work for the cookies because cookies are a more commonly eaten snack.

Technorati tags: diet, psychology, manipulation

OverMatter:”As inspired by Seth’s Blog: Part of the 30?, a modest suggestion of 30 books to get you pointed in the right direction for an MBA in Entrepreneurship (alphabetically by author)…”

Technorati tags: startup, entrepreneurship, reading list

Ian Landsman:

So you’ve started thinking about starting. What next?

Get a blog. It’s that simple. I really can’t express how much this simple act has done for me. It’s opened up many doors and is already providing me leads on a software product that won’t even be released for at least 3-4 months.

It’s scary I know. You’re going to make a fool of yourself. You’re going to post things with misspellings. You’re going to create sentences that sound like a 7th grader wrote them, and your readers will love you for it. Be open, be honest, be real.

Technorati tags: startup, microisv, software

Paulette Thomas: “Most important, as Mr. Bebo and his partners took their plan to the hospital chains around Philadelphia, they listened as much as they talked.” (via Mary Sullivan)

Technorati tags: startup, boostrapping, marketing

Yaro Starak:

The reality is that only a small percentage of businesses make their owner really wealthy, the rest stumble along earning an average wage. Of course many of those business owners earning an average wage love their lifestyle and only work as hard as they want to. Running your own business has the greatest potential to make you rich and may never make you rich, but here is the important part, your own business is very likely to make you a happier person if you keep your goals simple and aim for lifestyle over riches. Anyone can get rich but the contented people are rich without material wealth.

Technorati tags: startup, entrepreneurship, lifestyle