Howard Anderson, founder of the Yankee Group and co-founder of YankeeTek Ventures and Battery Ventures, writes:
Good-bye! We venture capitalists like to think of ourselves as giants striding across the technology landscape, showering money on terrific young entrepreneurs, adding value, creating jobs, nurturing real companies. We are financial samurai. But I am giving it up. Why?
His reasons include technology oversupply, lack of hype, and market rationality.
Mark Fletcher, CEO of Bloglines, on webapp startups that keep their ideas secret:
Some people think that they need to stay in stealth mode as long as possible to protect their exciting new idea. I hate to break the news to you, but unless you’re Einstein or Gallileo, your idea probably isn’t new. I have this theory. The success of a web service is inversely proportional to the secrecy that surrounded its development. There are exceptions of course. But I also think this can be applied to other things. Segway, anyone?
BusinessWeek on the health risks of startups:
A study by MYOB UK, a London-based business-software maker, found that nearly 70% of the 400 entrepreneurs surveyed feel their companies are adversely affecting their health or personal lives.
Venture Capital Journal on toxic entrepreneurs:
Stewart Alsop, a venture partner at New Enterprise Associates in Menlo Park, has worked with a number of ball-busters in his career, and he has become convinced that in frustratingly many cases the harder an entrepreneur is to like, the more ruthlessly successful he or she becomes. “I call it my asshole theory,” he says. “The bigger the asshole, the better they do,” he laughs.
Forbes interviews Guy Kawasaki, author of The Art of the Start:
If merely telling someone your idea means that it can be ripped off, then you hardly have a defensible product. If secrecy is your main weapon, then it will be hard to find investors. By the way, what happens when you ship? Are you going to ask every customer to sign a nondisclosure too?
I’m declaring today “Worse is Better” day. Everybody seems to be wondering why crappy designs win.
Seth writes that almost everything is lousy, especially Phillips screws.
Hamish is considering switching to a Dvorak keyboard layout given Jared Diamond’s account of the undeserved success of QWERTY.
Lispers have spent years struggling with the question of why C, a programming language that is inferior to Lisp in so many ways, is so much more popular. The most famous guess came from Richard Gabriel in 1991: Worse is Better.
I’m not about to try to explain how bad design succeeds — Jared (am I allowed to refer to a Pulitzer prize winner by his first name) and Richard’s articles do a much better job of it than I ever could — but I would like to to offer some observations.
Americans no longer have to drive to Canada to buy Robertson screws. They can order them from McFeely’s.
Typist no longer need to buy a new machine or retool an old one to switch over to the Dvorak layout as they did in the days of the manual typewriters. A few clicks of the mouse, and they’re there.
Programmers, as they move to web applications, are no longer bound by the choices of their operating system vendor. They are free to choose the language they feel is best for their application.
Everywhere you look, the old barriers to good design are coming down.
Are we looking at the Fall of Worse is Better? Will only good designs succeed from now on and bad ones no longer become entrenched? Probably not, but it might mean that those who care enough can bypass the crap and use what they find best.
AMI Semiconductor, my employer, announced today that they are acquiring the semiconductor division of Flextronics.
That’s all I know at this point.
To any Flextronics employees that come across this post, welcome! As an employee of another company that was was acquired by AMIS, I’ll say they’re a fairly good employer… once you get past the self-deprecating potato-related jokes.
The University of Waterloo Alternative Fuels Team, otherwise known as UWAFT, took top honours at Challenge X, an engineering design competition for university researchers developing fuel cell technology. Congratulations UWAFT!
More details in the UW press release.
Brough Turner suggests modeling speech recognition after Google’s machine translation service, which translates from one language to another by finding the closest match in a huge corpus of translated documents. Google’s translation corpus consists of billions of pages of UN documents translated into every known language. If we can find a similar Rosetta stone for speech, consisting of a huge amount of audio transcribed into text, the same techniques could be applied.
Brough doesn’t name any libraries but hints that he has some ideas. I have some, too; say legal depositions, or closed captioning on TV.
Some inspiration for prospective entrepreneurs from Marshall Brain: How to Make a Million Dollars
You can buy lottery tickets or head for Vegas and hope for the best.
Or there is the well-worn path to a lawsuit. The problem is, a lawsuit can take a long time and you have to spend most of that time talking to lawyers. I’m not sure the rewards outweigh the pain.
It seems like there should be an easier way, and in fact there is…
Ken Dyck 