Month: November 2005

Larry Borsato is available for work.

He’s a smart guy who I’m sure won’t be available for very long given his credentials. If you are looking to hire a product management/marketing guy, you’d better act now.

After reading about polyphasic sleep on lifehack, Steve Pavlina decided to try it for himself and blog about the exprience.

For those of you unfamiliar with polyphasic sleep, it is a schedule that requires only 3 hours of sleep each day, taken in half-hour naps every four hours. This is in contrast to the so-called monophasic sleep schedule that has most of us spend eight or nine continuous hours each night in bed.

Naturally, the transition to polyphasic sleep can be quite a shock for people who have spent their entire lives sleeping through the night. And Steve has done us the service of finding out just what it entails in a series of blog posts:

• Day 1
• Day 2
• Day 3
• Day 4
• Day 5
• Day 6
• Day 7
• Day 8-11

To make the long story short, it sounds like the the change is difficult, but once you get past the hump it is possible to feel as alert and well-rested with only 3 hours of sleep each day as you might with eight to nine hours.

I find the idea of gaining an extra 5-6 hours a day very tempting, although I wonder what the long-term health risks might be.

A while ago, I blogged about a story in New Scientist where scientists had identified the “sleep” gene in fruitflies, allowing them to cut their sleeping time by 30%. The last line of the story reads, “There is a snag, though, since the lifespan of [the genetically manipulated fruitflies that slept 30% less] was about 30% shorter than normal.”

I wonder whether polyphasic sleep has the same trade-off. And if it does, is that enough reason not to try it.

After way too much fiddling around with the layout of it, I’m happy to announce the launch of Startup Fever, the new blog that I warned about in October.

The plan remains the same: all the linking to startup-related articles that I usually do will now be done at Startup Fever. This space will be used for more general blogging.

If you’d like to continue getting links to articles about startups, you should subscribe to the RSS feed, which you can do by clicking on the appropriate button below:

There’s also an option to receive subscribe by email. Just enter your email address in the form on the main page.

Joshua Steimle:

A lot of people think they’ve got entrepreneurial experience. After all, they started or ran a business, and isn’t that what an entrepreneur is? Maybe, depending on your own definition. Well, here’s mine. These are not all necessarily descriptive of what I’m going through right now, and they are not all things I’m proud of or would recommend for other people, and most of them certainly were not intentional, but they are all taken from my personal experiences. Some are humorous, some are not.

Bijoy:

Greg, the founder/CEO of RightNow and author of the new book, Bootstrapping Your Business, recently gave a talk at a TiE Institute event in Santa Clara. You can download a pdf (2MB) of the talk and view it on the website.

To EVERY bootstrapper (and entrepreneur thinking about starting a company): WATCH THIS – and watch it twice!

Fred Wilson quotes Herbert Simon:

What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.

Steve Pavlina:

I’ve decided to try a new experiment to see if I can attract a large sum of money into my life. I arbitrarily opted for $1 million, since that’s a significant enough sum that I’ll definitely notice it. So basically I’m going to attempt to become a millionaire. And most of all, I’m going to attempt it by using the intention-manifestation model to make it more fun and challenging. This means I’ll allow myself to be guided by intuition as opposed to rigidly planning out every detail. I’m also not planning to directly spend any of my existing cash to get it, except through reinvesting cash that comes by way of the experiment. So I’ll be starting with $0 seed money, and if I happen to need cash for some kind of initial investment, I’ll have to attract that cash too.

Tim Grahl (via Dane Carlson):

Fear in a suit walked into my office the other day.

This fifty-something sat in front of me and tried to sell me… I can’t remember.

I remember being filled with a horrible fear of that being me in thirty something years.

Don Dodge:

Entrepreneurs like to solve problems and improve things, which often leads to “solutions looking for a problem”. It is important to remember the difference between Consumer problems and Enterprise problems. Entrepreneurs fall into the “solution looking for a problem” trap when they try to solve problems from a technical perspective and don’t completely understand the business aspects.

I’m on vacation this week, which for me means spending most of my time working on odd jobs around the house, and very little at a computer. Naturally, and regrettably, that means less blogging.

Things should return to normal next week, Nov. 7.