Phil Windley on Paul Graham‘s recent talk: “The reasons companies have fixed hours is that they can’t measure productivity. The idea is that if you can’t make people work, you can at least prevent them from having fun. If they’re not having fun, they must be working! If you could measure what people really did, you wouldn’t care when people worked.”
Technorati tags: startup, paul graham, blogging
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
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
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
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.
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
Ken Dyck 