To the aspiring manager nothing throws a chill more than seeing idle people at work. There they are - the shiftless dregs - doing nothing: staring out the window at the Korean taco truck, reading an article on Smashing Magazine, checking the fantasy basketball standings. Surely there is something they should be doing. Something to add to shareholder value. Aren’t we paying these people? Why are they loafing about? Why aren’t they coding up some APIs?

Managers are rated on how they manage people. “Good” managers get people to produce, while “bad” managers can’t get anyone to do anything. Often managers are held to a single overriding standard - did your people make lots of stuff or not?

Someone who is judged by how many web pages, bug fixes, lines of code, double stuffed burritos, cinnamon decaf soy chai lattes, or cars the people under them produce will do just about anything to make sure that metric is met or exceeded. No one wants to appear unreliable to their boss.  (We’ll discuss why performance reviews are a terrible idea some other time.) 

If more is better, then every iota of energy should be devoted to the work. Idle time is the enemy. Idle employees means you, the manager, are not doing your job. The worst sin is allowing anyone to be idle with nothing to do. The horror!

The frightened manager has a mighty selection of tools to pick to combat fiendish idleness. The best tool they have is the schedule. This is the hammer that will drive every nail while crucifying the poor son of a bitch who can’t pull his own weight and crank out shareholder value. Those people estimated the work, they committed to it, and BY GOD, IT IS WRITTEN ON THE SCHEDULE.

The schedule is the purging ray of sunlight into the abyss of the employee morass. With enough effort and sufficient concentration every moment of every able bodied hand is directed to productive channels. From the moment they walk into the office, the schedule ensures that they will be busy. There will be no wasted time. Victory, at last!

A Victory, you say?

Thinking as above (and the performance appraisal system that reinforces it) paradoxically degrades output over time, it does not increase it. In fact pushing systems to capacity creates delays. Creating “slack” in the system (and in every case when we say “system” we actually mean “real people”) is in fact a productive measure, if not a humane one. 

The biggest factor in how people adapt to a workload where they must engage/disengage/re-engage their mental faculties throughout the day is context switching. A context switch means that someone must deliberately reorder their mental map of their current work to re-map to a different model of work. This remapping costs time - not just the time it takes for the moment of the switch, but also including the time lost as a person must re-adapt to the new model. Human context switching is evil. Manager should seek ways to help employees eliminate jumping from one job to the next like a drop of water on a hot skillet.

To a naive manager the directive to create idle time is a shocking and painful epiphany. But it’s critical to understand that idle time is important. Schedule slack increases chances that the right person is ready at the right time for the right job. Slack also provides a buffer against piling multiple priorities on a single person, which only makes the person complete all work later.

It’s also important to understand that the purpose of your endeavor is not to make sure everyone is busy. The goal is to make money - to produce value for which your customers are willing to pay. Ask yourself - is it more important to have 1 task 100% done, or 9 tasks 90% done? Which is going to bring real value to your customers?

Once you’ve shaken off the illusion of 100% utilization, reexamine your tools. Do you maintain task schedules? Ask yourself what the real purpose of the schedule. Do you use it to keep everyone busy, all the time, because having idle people is bad? 

Unfortunately, even if a manager realizes that the very process of managing people perpetuates problems, they are probably trapped. Unless the top layer of management understands the same principles of capacity and slack they are unlikely to support substantive changes. But real changes rarely come without pain. 

CoffeeScript is a little language that compiles into JavaScript. Underneath all of those embarrassing braces and semicolons, JavaScript has always had a gorgeous object model at its heart. CoffeeScript is an attempt to expose the good parts of JavaScript in a simple way.

The golden rule of CoffeeScript is: "It's just JavaScript". The code compiles one-to-one into the equivalent JS, and there is no interpretation at runtime. You can use any existing JavaScript library seamlessly (and vice-versa). The compiled output is readable and pretty-printed, passes through JavaScript Lint without warnings, will work in every JavaScript implementation, and tends to run as fast or faster than the equivalent handwritten JavaScript.

Latest Version: 1.1.1

Overview

CoffeeScript on the left, compiled JavaScript output on the right.

# Assignment:
number   = 42
opposite = true

# Conditions:
number = -42 if opposite

# Functions:
square = (x) -> x * x

# Arrays:
list = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

# Objects:
math =
  root:   Math.sqrt
  square: square
  cube:   (x) -> x * square x

# Splats:
race = (winner, runners...) ->
  print winner, runners

# Existence:
alert "I knew it!" if elvis?

# Array comprehensions:
cubes = (math.cube num for num in list)

var cubes, list, math, num, number, opposite, race, square;
var __slice = Array.prototype.slice;
number = 42;
opposite = true;
if (opposite) {
  number = -42;
}
square = function(x) {
  return x * x;
};
list = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5];
math = {
  root: Math.sqrt,
  square: square,
  cube: function(x) {
    return x * square(x);
  }
};
race = function() {
  var runners, winner;
  winner = arguments[0], runners = 2  arguments.length ? __slice.call(arguments, 1) : [];
  return print(winner, runners);
};
if (typeof elvis !== "undefined" && elvis !== null) {
  alert("I knew it!");
}
cubes = (function() {
  var _i, _len, _results;
  _results = [];
  for (_i = 0, _len = list.length; _i  _len; _i  ) {
    num = list[_i];
    _results.push(math.cube(num));
  }
  return _results;
})();

run: cubes

Zynga has been releasing details about its innovative hybrid cloud deployment –called Z Cloud — over the past year, and it has finally revealed the final piece of the puzzle. Namely, that the private cloud component of its infrastructure was built using Cloud.com’s CloudStack software. Anyone interested in replicating Zynga’s cloud success now has the three major building blocks, at least, laid out before them.

Zynga cloud strategy, as detailed here last June, entails staging and launching new games on Amazon EC2 and subsequently moving them onto a private cloud once demand reaches a relatively static level. It mentioned RightScale at the time, but it wasn’t until recently that we learned how, exactly, RightScale fits into the picture. Essentially, RightScale provides the management interface for both Zynga’spublic EC2 resources and private Cloud.com resources, allowing Zynga to easily migrate games from Amazon to Cloud.com using the same configuration templates. It’s as easy (relatively speaking, of course) as launching the same exact application architecture in the private cloud without having to rebuild it from scratch.

It wasn’t until this week, however, that either Zynga or Cloud.com had publicly acknowledged their relationship — and they only did it via a logo on the customer window of Cloud.com’s home page. This is two big simultaneous customer “announcements” for Cloud.com, which I reported yesterday also is the foundation of GoDaddy’s forthcoming cloud computing offering.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (subscription req’d):

• Infrastructure Q1: IaaS Comes Down to Earth; Big Data Takes Flight
• The Structure 50: The Top 50 Cloud Innovators
• Why New IaaS Providers Enter at Their Own Risk

Uppongina sandram la uvvettuna yegisindi

manasunu kadagalanee aasha...

kodigatte deepam la minukuminuku mantondi

manishiga brathakalane aasha...

gundello oopirai kallallo jeevamai

pranam lo pranami..ee...ee...e...

Malli puttani... naalo manishini...

Malli puttani... naalo manishini...

PayPal balance

PayPal account (direct e-book sales): $1,555.18
AppSumo.com 24-hour special: $8,120 (keep $2,436)
AppSumo.com normal sales: $1,425 (keep $712.50)
Lulu.com account: $206.91
Bulk affiliate sale: $700
Total revenue generated, including affiliates:  $12,719.09

Personal gross revenue: $5,610.59
Total investment cost: $2,000 ($1,000 editing, $800 transcription, $200 advertising)
Personal net profit, week 1: $3,610.09

TLDR: I wrote a book, announced it last weekend on Hacker News, got it promoted on AppSumo.com, and in one week, people have paid over $10,000 to read it. I’ll tell you exactly how I did it. I hope someone steals another idea I have using this method (see end of post).

Granted, the only reason I get to write fancy headlines like that is because of AppSumo.com. I didn’t know what to expect when I announced Startups Open Sourced. I thought the reaction would overall be very good because it’s something I would have loved to read for myself, but to my surprise, I noticed that many of the earliest comments coming in were criticizing my use of the term ‘open sourced’ in the book’s title. The sales got off to a slow start too.

Sunday: the roller coaster

Criticism of the book title was the first setback, but I kept staring at the sales for the book and I didn’t see them do anything for a while. I kept clicking the refresh button, but it didn’t budge.

The Hacker News effect on my poor Linode box

I wondered if I would even be lucky enough to get one sale. I went back to the site and I realized it wasn’t even loading. I was freaking out–why does the site not even work! Turns out, Hacker News had crashed my Linode VPS and I had to reboot it twice. The CPU was running at 300%. Each reboot took an excruciating 3 minutes. But even after the site was up, I still wasn’t getting any sales. I knew I had to write a follow up a week later, and I thought this was going to be pretty embarrassing if I had to write that I only had a few sales in that first week. These founders would never talk to me again because I was the only person who would read their interviews.

My first sale came at 1:56 PM, and the second one took nearly 30 minutes, it came at 2:28 PM. Then another at 2:33 PM, then another at 2:37 PM, and the intervals started getting shorter. I finally realized that more than a few people would be buying this book. I was still pretty nervous though. This book won’t be read by anyone if people don’t like the interviews, so I wanted feedback more than anything else.

First day: 40 copies sold. Not bad at all. I anticipate the upcoming ‘trough of sorrow’ and brace myself for slower days ahead.

Monday

I got a random instant message on my GChat from Noah Kagan, who said the content was so good that he wanted to feature it on AppSumo.com for a day. I worked with Noah Kagan to get a PDF and ePub format on AppSumo–at the time of launching, the ePub didn’t exist and I was surprised at how much work the process took just to convert a Word Document to ePub.

Tip: if you’re writing your manuscript in Microsoft Word like I do, convert the Word document to HTML, then use a program like Caliber to convert it to ePub. This may not get you something that will be “certified” to where you can add it to Amazon, but it at least allows your readers to read your material on an e-book reader, such as the Kindle, iPad, or iPad.

That was where a majority of the revenue was made: $8,120. I told Noah I didn’t care about making money at this stage, I just want to get the word out and make people aware of it. I said price the book at any amount you want and pay me 30%. I understand some people may see this as foolish, but when I talked to Noah he seemed concerned about promoting it to his subscribers because he mentioned he loses a portion of his subscribers every time he does that. I personally was in it for the long run, and I didn’t mind helping Noah out either. After all, he was going to get the word out and promote the book faster than I ever could on my own. He would have done a 50/50, but I told him I’d take 30% and I’d be happy with that.

A friend of mine who I consider to be an expert in the e-book space reassured me that book sales take time to accumulate. Doing special deals where you heavily discount the price may help you spread the awareness, but that’s not where your actual revenue is going to come from. You want to rely on steady sales over a longer period of time, and in order for that to happen you’ll need to make sure the product you’re selling is really good to begin with.

Noah is able to do some testing in advance to understand the best price point for goods. I don’t know what exactly is involved here; I hope to write another story about it when I get some more details. Eventually Noah decided that $7 would be the best price, and the expectation was that if we had 1,000+ sales, that’d be really good. The customers of AppSumo.com got a really good deal–I know the book is worth $20, so it probably won’t get priced that low again. I only made an offer to someone to sell a batch of 100 copies for $7 each when they saw AppSumo, but I explained to them that the deal was only running for 24 hours and the price would go back to $15 afterwards, at least for a while. I still haven’t decided how long I want to run the AppSumo.com deal.

Tuesday through Friday

I remember being extremely tired by Wednesday. My sleep debt was catching up to me, and I had a bunch of final projects due during this week with final exams next week. I thought about every comment I received and let it stir in my head.

Specifically, regarding the title complaint: I tried to understand where the other person was coming from–maybe they had a legitimate point to saying that it was ironic I used ‘open sourced’, should I change the title? I was split on it, and my friends were saying not to change it. The takeaway for me, there: I thought people were taking the term too literally. I’m an advocate for open source, and many of my friends are and have contributed to open source projects, and they loved the title. Overall, I still don’t know how to respond to people’s comments on the issue besides trying to describe as clearly as possible how it came to mind and why I thought it was a good idea. If I saw someone tweet that it was ironic, I offered them a free copy.

I spent most of the time responding to e-mails and making fixes for founders on simple stuff. I re-read some of the interviews and found more edits to make. There were some low points and I remember being really excited to hear from some people who had e-mailed me and said they loved what they were reading and it inspired them to work on something new (Prakhar: thank you for your e-mail). That was the single best part of my week, and then I finally thought “this is a good sign–finally I hear something positive.” I was glad to hear anything at all, I hadn’t heard much other than one or two e-mails.

News that Wufoo was acquired surfaced on Wednesday, so I released their interview. Looking to the weekend, I tried to lower my expectations as I did on Monday. The spike can’t sustain; the deals were mostly to generate awareness, and over time, it’ll normalize. At least I don’t have to feel completely embarrassed going into this one-week recap that I promised in my original announcement.

Sunday: announcement goes full circle

When I announced this post, I very quickly jumped to one of the top spots on Hacker News, and it was last Sunday all over again. The site was #2, but the server had crashed and rebooting wasn’t going to solve anything. I called my friend to get him to remove the story, clearly I’m clueless as to how to deal with traffic spikes. The problem is he didn’t have his phone on him, so I was stuck with fixing this problem on the fly while thousands of HN readers watched a blank page load for over 20 minutes. I ended up writing about how I fixed it on my blog.

Personal e-book sales (disregards all affiliates and paperback sales)

The process: start by writing e-mails

My e-mails followed the same general structure when I sent them out to founders:

• A two sentence introduction: I mentioned that I started a company in 2009, it was acquired by another company, and I’m finishing up school. Compliment them on their startup, tell them how much you admire them.
• Why I’m reaching out to them: I said I was interviewing a bunch of founders and I asked if the founder would be interested in doing an interview. I told them it’d only take an hour over Skype.

And that’s it. You don’t want a long e-mail. Provide just enough information so they know who you are, what you’re trying to do, and pop the question: will you do this interview?

Tip: Do not make your e-mail any longer than it has to be. If you don’t know someone, it can be slightly longer, although try not to get too formal in tone. For people I knew, my e-mail was one line: “Hey man, I’m putting together a book and I wanted to interview you for it. Interested?” Also, do not do things like suggest times, or ask them to do anything. You have one goal: get them to hit reply and type in one word: “yes.” The rest can be figured out as you go. Don’t assume you’ll get a response. If the person responds, then suggest one or two specific times. Respond with ‘Can you do Skype Tuesday at 3 PM PST?’ and leave a phone number in your signature. Avoid offering ranges of times, and convert to their time zone; don’t make them do any extra work. Just get a “yes” and get them to agree to a time.

Don’t get discouraged if people don’t respond. Just make a note to follow up and ask if they received the last e-mail. If you’re feeling really bold, try out Evan Reas’ hack: tell them you want them in your book so badly, you’ll e-mail them every day for the next 30 days with a good reason why they should do it. My reason #1 was always: you’ll hopefully get an intern out of this. I used this on Dennis at foursquare, and he replied after the first e-mail. I let him know in advance I had a reason #2, but I actually don’t think I had one at the time. But I’d figure it out between the time I sent that tweet and my next e-mail, which I set as a reminder on my phone. If you use this tactic, let the person know your goal is not to harass or annoy. Let them know that if they ask you to stop then you’ll stop, but otherwise you’re really excited about talking to them. This is one of those things that can backfire if it’s not done tactfully, and you don’t want to come across as desperate, but rather as persistent (I think there’s a fine line there, avoid looking desperate). The goal is to let them know you really want them to do the interview, and you are going to try and convince them why it’d be worth their time.

Keeping track of who I e-mailed in Google Docs and who was responding.

The call

Actually, even before the call you might have people suggest that they write all of their responses to the interview. Bad idea. Never send your list of questions and say “hey just write up what you want and send it back when you’re ready.” That won’t work, I tried it for 3 people and they never got back to me. They’re probably not that serious about it if they want to do a written response in the first place–the phone call is a much more intimate way of communicating about these things. The call takes much less time overall and places more of the work on the interviewer. One or two hours and the interviewee is done, that’s a cakewalk.

Hopefully you’ve prepared some questions. You can use the same general set of questions with different people, but be familiar with how much press they’ve already gotten. If they’ve been giving the same stories in lots of interviews, you won’t be offering much new information. It may also help to do follow up calls if you run out of time or want to ask more questions to a specific founder. You can have one screen open with Google Docs that contains your list of questions, and then have one screen open on Skype for the call.

I referred to my list of questions during the call

Is video necessary for interviews? You would think it would equate to better quality interviews because people can connect while they see each other, but I found that was not necessarily the case. I started out asking people to use video, and then I realized it didn’t seem to add any additional value. It’s nice to see the people you’re talking to, but I was taking notes the entire time anyway. I’d write down things that they said so I could remember to follow up and ask them more about it. People tend to talk in larger chunks to tell stories, so if you hear something interesting, jot it down and then ask them to explain it when they have finished answering.

Tip: You can use a program called Call Recorder by ecamm to record the Skype calls. This records both video and audio. It helps to have a backup: if a founder is not at their desk, have them call you via Google Voice. Google Voice is especially interesting because it allows you to record phone conversations, but only on incoming calls. You can press 4, and Google will make an announcement that “this call is currently being recorded.” Also, record the entire thing with two different methods. I used my iPhone’s Voice Memo application so I had a backup of the whole interview in case Call Recorder failed for any reason. You could also use Quicktime Pro. Just get backups.

To elaborate on that, I always had two recordings of every call I ever did. Except when I talked to Milo. When I called the founder of Milo, I had called a conference number, which I had never done before on other calls. My iPhone didn’t let me record, and some technical problem with Photo Booth didn’t let me capture the entire thing. I never ended up getting to do that call again. I had to remove that from the book, which was painful. His interview was really good. Never allow a call to go unrecorded.

I don’t remember having any problems with Google Chat, except the quality is a little lower than Skype. I probably only did one or two interviews using Google Chat.

About to start the Blippy interview in Google Chat (I think we had problems with Skype)

Watch out though, the quality of Google Voice is sketchy. Sometimes, you can’t hear a person talking for a few seconds, although Google Voice will record the call perfectly fine. I suspect the reason behind this is because the call is actually routed first through Google’s data center, which then gets routed through your carrier’s network. The call has to travel to two places. I also noticed a delay when I asked a question, it took a few seconds to get a response. Overall, avoid Google Voice, Skype is much more reliable.

The interviews varied in length. Dennis Crowley told me he only had 15 minutes, and I knew he’d be particularly busy so I spent even more time in advance crafting custom questions. I knew he’d get rid of me if I was just asking the same questions every other interviewer asked him. I wrote down all of my questions for him, then I looked up his interviews he did for other people, and then I reconstructed my questions again. The average interview length was 1 hour, although some went over and some went under. I had Dennis for 45 minutes.

Hire a transcriber

I quickly realized I couldn’t transcribe all of these calls, so I looked for someone on Elance. The way to negotiate is to make sure you get them to agree to rates in terms of audio time. Instead of asking someone to work at $50 per hour, make sure they will commit to $50 per audio hour. There’s a big difference, although I didn’t realize it at first.

My transcriber is a guy from Africa who had no feedback on Elance, so I knew I was taking a risk. I told him if he was willing to lower his price from $30 per audio hour to $15 per audio hour, I’d be sure he received positive feedback so that he could continue finding work on Elance.

$15 per audio hour may seem low, especially considering that one hour of audio may take up to 4 hours to transcribe. But when you look at the conversion rate, it’s not that bad. $1 USD converts to 83 Kenyan Shillings. I paid around $800 total for the transcribing, which converts to 66,400 Shillings. That’s about a month’s worth of rent in Nairobi, the largest city and capital of Kenya.

The private message board on Elance, where I worked with my transcriber, Philip

Hire an editor

I also realized I could not edit all of these interviews on my own. I needed another pair of eyes. I posted on Facebook and e-mailed a lot of Facebook groups and school e-mail lists (creative writing tutors, English classes, graduate students, etc) and found a lot of people following up. I offered $15/hour, which again isn’t that high but I said I’d pay cash bonuses at certain milestones to help make up for it. I couldn’t afford to pay editors a lot of money up front because all of this was done using my own money.

The trick here is to make people submit samples of their work. Give them a small piece of one of your transcripts, ask them to submit it to you. You find out two things here. The most important: you find out who is self-motivated and who isn’t. Don’t work with anyone who says “they’ll get around to it” and then never sends it to you. You also find out what the quality is like. Do people change the order of the sentences? Do they fix the grammar and spelling mistakes? Do they correct the acronyms? Do they make it easy to read?

I probably received about 15 e-mails or Facebook IMs in total with people interested, and from those I received about 5 or 6 edits. I ended up choosing my sister-in-law because her sample was really good, and she sent it very quickly. I also hired a friend to help because there were so many interviews to edit. We knew we wanted to average 10 interviews per week between all of us, but we couldn’t even sustain that rate.

What the raw transcript looked like after Philip converted the audio. This is what I'd edit before I gave it the editors.

The process: edit, edit, open, close, edit

Throughout this entire thing, you’ll find that things can get hectic quickly. You’ll be asking founders for interviews, you’ll need to track whether they replied, when you should harass them if they don’t respond, what date and time they agreed to, whether the interview is finished, how far along you’ve gone in the editing stage, etc. Here are the programs I used along the process to help me with planning and management:

1. Use Google Docs to create your list of questions
2. Use Google Spreadsheets to list out all the people you want to talk to, check out the screenshot below for some of the columns I used to track. This gets very tiring to manage after a while, so I started using Basecamp to manage milestones and dates.
3. Use Basecamp once you’ve got your founders and need to track when the interview opens and when the interview closes (explained more below).
4. Use Basecamp Writeboards to keep track of things like: your full list of companies, manuscript progress, memorable quotes, tags, testimonials, and final edit progress.

Keeping track of open and closed interviews using Basecamp

The transcripts were bad in some spots, but they accomplished a bulk of the work: attempting to get the audio into a written format. It doesn’t have to be perfect, but at least it’s done and I can spend time on cleaning it up. The founders would throw around technical terms or acronyms that made no sense without some context. “YC” was not something that the transcriber was familiar with, so they might have written “why see” instead. So I ended up replaying each interview and editing the transcript.

Here’s the order I used for creating the content of the book:

1. You: Edit the transcript. This ensures your editor will keep their sanity, make it the proper format and clean it up. Your editor can then check for basic problems such as grammar, sentence structure, sentence fragments and run-on sentences, and proper ordering.
2. Editor: Edit the edited transcript. Your editor’s job is to make sure the copy reads easily. Don’t over-edit. I explicitly told both editors to leave the copy alone when possible so that the founders’ emotions, tone and stories were still in tact.
3. Open the interview for edits: send the founder the transcript so they can change it. This is done in case the founder says something they later regretted, or perhaps they said something they weren’t allowed to because it should have been off-the-record. A few founders did a lot of edits, but most of them did light editing or no editing at all. Highlight any parts that are ambiguous. I also marked the interview as “open” in Basecamp so that I knew the founder was editing. Create a backup of the interview before they start editing, just in case. Allow 5 days for this, then close it. E-mail the founders the Google Doc link (just make it public, and share the URL), then let them know that you’ll make the doc private in 5 days. If they need more time, that’s fine, just ask them to contact you so you can open it back up. Be friendly about all of this, let them know it’s okay and you understand if they’re on vacation and need some time to do the edit when they get back. Tell them if they can’t do an edit by a particular date, you’ll be sure to get whatever edits they submit into a later version of the book, mention this up front.
4. Close the interview. The founders are not allowed to make any more edits at this point. So make the Google Doc link private. Now you’re going to edit once more, just keeping an eye on simple mistakes and making it easy to read. That’s the #1 focus when you edit: make this entire interview as easy for someone to read as possible. You will usually be removing irrelevant answers, or repetitive answers. The most recurrent changes are run-on sentences. The second most recurrent changes are fillers and certain stop words: “um”, “so”, “yeah”, “like”, etc. Verbal conversations are difficult and painful to read, so that’s where you’ll be doing most of your editing.
5. Finish. Just when you thought you were done editing, you’ve got one final edit to make. You’re going to put all of these interviews together into a book and then do one more edit on the whole thing. You can read a little bit faster and be less analytic at this point. Between you and your editor, you might have some inconsistencies that you need to agree on and fix. This could range from using two spaces vs. one space after a sentence, using a single hyphen or a double elongated hyphen, choosing whether to use quotes or italicize when someone is thinking to themselves, etc. Just agree on all of that and make it look like it was edited by one person instead of two or three. Split the entire book in half: one person edits the first half while the other person edits the second half. This ensures nobody duplicates work. Then switch and edit each other’s.

You’ve got a complete manuscript, now what?

After that, you have yourself a manuscript. You have a few more things to do before you get the word out:

• Get testimonials. Get people to read parts of your book. At first, I only sent out 5 interviews at a time and I asked people to choose those 5 interviews. Bad idea, just send the entire thing and suggest they read a few. They can read others if they want, but don’t make them do any extra work. You should make these e-mails short. The way I got Andrew Warner to agree to read the manuscript was a simple e-mail: “Hey Andrew, I’m a huge fan and just attended your e-seminar last week. Would you be willing to check out a few of these interviews I’ve done with startup founders?” He responded “Yes, send it to me.” I sent it, and I got an e-mail shortly after that said “Holy crap. This is awesome.” Some people said “Sorry, this is way too much, I can’t help you out with this.” Just ask around as much as you can.
• Select interesting quotes. Look at interesting quotes from the people in your book. Copy it down and you can use those to give people an idea of the ethos of your book. Give them something interesting so they’ll want to read the rest of it in full context.
• Take care of the cover and typography. Why did I use Arial–a sans serif font–in the entire book? According to the Journal of Cognitive Psychology, “results showed a small, but significant advantage in response times for words written in a sans serif font. Thus, sans serif fonts should be the preferred choice for text in computer screens as already is the case for guide signs on roads, trains, etc.” The actual debate on serif vs. sans serif is not conclusive enough for you to justify using one over the other, but considering most of my downloads are digital and those will be read on a screen, I wanted to go with sans serif. As for the cover design: I iterated through approximately 15 covers. I ended up settling on what was the most simple design.
• Order a proof. Make sure your margins, sizing, and colors are correct. I used Lulu.com to do on-demand printing, and they’re awesome. I wanted to go with a dark background color initially, but the proof didn’t look very good. Microsoft Word uses mirror margins by default, which adds extra padding to odd-number pages, so that’s good for print. Remove mirror margins for the PDF though, it looks awkward.
• Get a web site setup. I use Thesis to make customizing my WordPress page easy. I host WordPress on my Linode 512 VPS. I registered the domain through GoDaddy and I use Google Apps for e-mail.
• Get a shopping cart setup. I was recommended e-junkie by several people, and it’s awesome. I pay $5/month and that’s it, no limits on how much sales I make, and they don’t take any extra transaction costs. Unfortunately, their coupons are static and must be set in advance. I was trying to do a launch and let people get a bigger discount based on their karma, but that just wasn’t possible. Here’s the Ruby code I wrote to handle that if you’re able to reuse it.
• Setup a Lulu.com account for on-demand printing. I thought I was going to have to buy a lot of books and invest a lot of money up front. Turns out, Lulu.com has solved that problem. They let you upload a PSD, manuscript, and then they allow you to sell your book right away. My book costs about $10 to print, so I net $20 on each paperback purchase. The customer pays shipping and handling.

I wanted to offer a better discount to users with high karma, but that didn't work out with my shopping cart provider.

Get the word out.

You are officially halfway there. Now you have the other part, which is just as much work as everything has been so far. Your goal is now to let people know that this book exists and they need to buy it.

I posted on Hacker News, and that was pretty much it for the first day. It hovered around the top 10 for around 5 or 6 hours. AppSumo.com featured me on a Thursday which also caused some Twitter buzz. I’m always thinking of ways to get the word out.

I have a few places I’m advertising:

• reddit.com: $100 for 3 days – I don’t think reddit used all my money on this because I had 75 unique clicks, which would make the CPC ridiculously high. There was an ad running in the compsci subreddit from Thursday through Saturday. I received great feedback from /r/startups on the first iteration. The only comment I got on the actual ad was ‘fake and gay‘, but I explained it to the individual in case they were genuinely confused. Also clarified the purpose of the ad; I think the individual saw me discounting education when the real point of the message was: “hey college students, you don’t have to go get a regular job when you graduate.” 2 people used the coupon code from that ad.
• Hacker Monthly: typically $500 for 3 months, I got a discount – I ran an ad because I knew the readers would be interested in startups and would use many of the sites from the book. No stats here yet.
• Startup Foundry: $100 to be mentioned in 2 videos – I’m still trying to get an ad in there, but I think that audience is exactly who I’m looking for. They want to see interviews with founders and they want to get inspired by it.
• Sponsored some food (55 cookies at $70) for a Hack Night at UIUC. There was probably no return on this, but always happy to help hackers with their blood sugar levels.

Hacker Monthly ad

Tip: 80% of the people who go to StartupsOpenSourced.com only look at that first page and then they leave. That might sound bad, but that’s how people work. Most people will not pull out their credit card to pay for your book or product the first time they see it. They need to see it multiple times in order to seriously consider paying for it.

80% of visitors only look at one page

Maybe a small, small portion of my first-time visitors are early adopters and willing to try out this “Startups Open Sourced” book, despite not knowing who the author is, or whether the book quality is any good. I’m just some schmuck to them, and in their head they’re wondering, “is this thing going to do anything at all for me? Is this just some random person trying to get a buck from me?” All they know is they’ll get a refund if it sucks (nobody has asked so far).

Your early adopters are the people who take risks on you, and if they e-mail you, you better respond and make sure they are taken care of. Treat your early adopters like gold. Do something nice to them–if you have their address, send a hand-written thank you card.

Overall, I’d have to side with David Rusenko’s advice on this: you should be happy even if you only get a few people who pay. I’m happy with one book purchase per day, that’s pretty sweet for me. Anything beyond that and you know you’re probably a little lucky, and you also are receiving real-world validation that you have built something people want. People are going to spread the word over the long-term if you actually did create something people want, and that’s the single most important thing you can be doing. No amount of advertising is going to push a crappy product. It may get you some sales early on, but after a while it won’t sustain itself.

With that, it’s still too soon to tell from week #1. From the feedback on Twitter, it seems that there are a handful of people that really enjoy reading the book so far. That’s a good sign, and so we’ll see how it fares in the long run.

If you haven’t already bought a copy, check out the about page to see who I am, check the founders page to see who’s in the book, and then grab a copy.

Moving forward

From here, I’m hoping that the growth will be more organic than advertising or deal-driven. I am expecting sales to settle down a little bit and hopefully become gradually increasing over time. Things I’d like to get done:

• Redesigning the cover. It doesn’t feel quite there yet.
• Changing parts of the typography and interior design.
• Redesigning the web site. It’s pretty sloppy right now. Way too confusing, too cluttered, no clear call to action or clear organization right now. 80% bounce rate still feels really high to me.
• Interviewing more people and adding them to the book. I’m trying to work the right connections to get an interview with Husky Starcraft, the infamous Starcraft caster and college dropout with nearly 500k subscribers and 170+ million views on YouTube. If you’re an early adopter (let’s say you bought a copy of the book on or before May) I’ll try my best to hook you up with video interviews as well as the full text interviews. You only pay once, and you get unlimited upgrades whenever changes are made to the book. I really want to offer something special to my early adopters. I have no idea what that will be, but if this works out in the long run, I’m doing something really special for them.
• I’d like to allow more premium versions of the book to be created, such as hardback versions or better paper.

Steal my idea

There are lots of fun and informative topics someone could write about, but something I’d personally read and purchase–which was a test I used on myself, just like Noah Kagan suggested in his interview–is to interview angel investors and VCs. There is still some mystery to this entire industry, and it’s probably one of the most frustrating things about doing a startup.

Can we find any patterns by talking to lots of angels or VCs? Can we try to understand how they think about startups? Can we find out how to make the entire process suck less, or move faster? How did the investors get their start in the investment world? Can we figure out which ones specialize in one particular field of interest over another?

These are all interesting questions. The problem is that most investors are probably not going to write openly about this stuff on their own. The net effect from my book is to inspire and motivate people. The net effect from this other book should be to figure out how investors work and how to successfully get any one of them to invest in your startup. Bret Taylor, the CTO of Facebook, is just one example where Dan Gross specifically called out one thing that impressed him the most: rapid iteration. Okay, so now you can go and approach an investor like that, get some feedback, and get the code done in less than 24 hours. That’s an investor hack right there. Can’t we get a full list of these hacks so we know in advance what makes each investor tick? What impresses them?

Someone should create this. I won’t have time to do it myself with my next startup that I’ll be doing full-time next month, but I’ll be the first person to buy a copy. I’ll be your early adopter. Let me know if I can help.

 

Yahoo has finally found a buyer for long suffering Delicious. YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen have acquired the company, says Yahoo, via a “new Internet company, AVOS.” We’re still gathering details, but here’s the official stuff:

Yahoo’s statement:

“Today YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen announced they have acquired the Delicious technology from Yahoo!. They plan to continue the service that users have come to know and love and make the site even easier and more fun to save, share and discover the web’s “tastiest” content.

Providing a smooth transition for users is important to both companies. There will be a transition period where users can elect to sign up for a new account. Users’ public and private bookmarks will be maintained through the transition period and transferred as they are today when it is complete.

As we have said, part of our product strategy involves shifting our investment with off-strategy products to put better focus on our core strengths and fund new innovation. We believe this is the right move for the service, our users and our shareholders and look forward to watching the Delicious technology develop. ”

 

Delicious blog:

“YouTube Founders Acquire Delicious

Today, we’re pleased to announce that Delicious has been acquired by the founders of YouTube, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. As creators of the largest online video platform, they have firsthand experience enabling millions of users to share their experiences with the world. They are committed to running and improving Delicious going forward.

Providing a seamless transition for users is incredibly important for both companies. Yahoo! will continue to operate Delicious until approximately July 2011. When the transition period is complete, your information will be moved over to Delicious’ new owner.

Starting today, we will ask you to login to Delicious again and agree to let Yahoo! transfer your bookmarks to the new owner. That way, you’ll enjoy uninterrupted use of the service and will keep your account and all of your bookmarks when we make the transition. For more information on the Delicious transition, please refer to this FAQ.
Thank you for your patience in this time of transition and thank you for using Delicious! ”

Press Release:

YOUTUBE FOUNDERS ACQUIRE DELICIOUS FROM YAHOO!

Promise Users the Same Great Service And Even Easier & More Fun Ways To Save, Share, and Discover the Web’s “Tastiest” Content.

San Francisco, CA., – April 26, 2011 – Delicious.com, the leading social bookmarking service, has been acquired by the founders of YouTube, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. As creators of the largest online video platform, they have firsthand experience enabling millions of users to share their experiences with the world. Their vision for Delicious is to continue to provide the same great service users love and to make the site even easier and more fun to save, share, and discover the web’s “tastiest” content. Delicious will become part of AVOS, a new Internet company.

“We’re excited to work with this fantastic community and take Delicious to the next level,” said Chad Hurley, CEO of AVOS. “We see a tremendous opportunity to simplify the way users save and share content they discover anywhere on the web.”

“We spoke with numerous parties interested in acquiring the site, and chose Chad and Steve based on their passion and unique vision for Delicious,” said John Matheny, SVP of Communications and Communities at Yahoo!.

The YouTube founders plan to work closely with the community over the next few months to develop innovative features to help solve the problem of information overload. “We see this problem not just in the world of video, but also cutting across every information-intensive media type,” said Chen.

Going back to their roots, Hurley and Chen located Delicious in downtown San Mateo, California, blocks away from where they started YouTube. They’re aggressively hiring to build a world-class team to take on the challenge of building the best information discovery service on the web.

 

MUMBAI, India — Free speech advocates and Internet users are protesting new Indian regulations restricting Web content that, among other things, can be considered “disparaging,” “harassing,” “blasphemous” or “hateful.”

The new rules, quietly issued by the country’s Department of Information Technology earlier this month and only now attracting attention, allow officials and private citizens to demand that Internet sites and service providers remove content they consider objectionable on the basis of a long list of criteria.

Critics of the new rules say the restrictions could severely curtail debate and discussion on the Internet, whose use has been growing fast in India.

The list of objectionable content is sweeping and includes anything that “threatens the unity, integrity, defense, security or sovereignty of India, friendly relations with foreign states or public order.”

The rules highlight the ambivalence with which Indian officials have long treated freedom of expression. The country’s constitution allows “reasonable restrictions” on free speech but lawmakers have periodically stretched that definition to ban books, movies and other material about sensitive subjects like sex, politics and religion.

An Indian state, for example, recently banned an American author’s new biography of the Indian freedom fighter Mohandas Gandhi that critics have argued disparages Mr. Gandhi by talking about his relationship with another man.

Although fewer than 10 percent of Indians have access to the Internet, that number has been growing fast — especially on mobile devices. There are more than 700 million cellphone accounts in India.

The country has also established a thriving technology industry that writes software and creates Web services primarily for Western clients.

Even before the new rules — known as the Information Technology (Intermediaries guidelines) Rules, 2011 — India has periodically tried to restrict speech on the Internet. In 2009, the government banned a popular and graphic online comic strip, Savita Bhabhi, about a housewife with an active sex life. Indian officials have also required social networking sites like Orkut to take down posts deemed offensive to ethnic and religious groups.

Using a freedom of information law, the Center for Internet and Society, a Bangalore-based research and advocacy group, recently obtained and published a list of 11 Web sites banned by the Department of Information Technology. Other government agencies have probably blocked more sites, the group said.

The new Internet rules go further than existing Indian laws and restrictions, said Sunil Abraham, the executive director for the Center for Internet and Society. The rules require Internet “intermediaries” — an all-encompassing group that includes sites like YouTube and Facebook and companies that host Web sites or provide Internet connections — to respond to any demand to take down offensive content within 36 hours. The rules do not provide a way for content producers to defend their work or appeal a decision to take content down.

“These rules overly favor those who want to clamp down on freedom of expression,” Mr. Abraham said. “Whenever there are limits of freedom of expression, in order for those limits to be considered constitutionally valid, those limits have to be clear and not be very vague. Many of these rules that seek to place limits are very, very vague.”

An official for the People’s Union for Civil Liberties, an advocacy group based in New Delhi, said on Wednesday that it was considering a legal challenge to the constitutionality of the new rules.

“What are we, Saudi Arabia?” said Pushkar Raj, the group’s general secretary. “We don’t expect this from India. This is something very serious.”

An official at the Department of Information Technology, Gulshan Rai, did not return calls and messages.

The rules are based on a 2008 information technology law that India’s Parliament passed shortly after a three-day siege on Mumbai by Pakistan-based terrorists that killed more than 163 people. That law, among other things, granted authorities more expansive powers to monitor electronic communications for reasons of national security. It also granted privacy protections to consumers.

While advocates for free speech and civil liberties have complained that the 2008 law goes too far in violating the rights of Indians, Internet firms have expressed support for it. The law removed liability from Internet intermediaries as long as they were not active participants in creating content that was later deemed to be offensive.

Subho Ray, the president of the Internet and Mobile Association of India, which represents companies like Google and eBay, said the liability waiver was a big improvement over a previous law that had been used to hold intermediaries liable for hosting content created by others. In 2004, for instance, the police arrested eBay’s top India executive because a user of the company’s Indian auction site had offered to sell a video clip of a teenage couple having sex.

“The new I.T. Act (2008) is, in fact, a large improvement on the old one,” Mr. Ray said in an e-mail response to questions.

Mr. Ray said his association had not taken a stand on the new regulations. An India-based spokeswoman for Google declined to comment on the new rules, saying the company needed more time to respond.

Along with the new content regulations, the government also issued rules governing data security, Internet cafes and the electronic provision of government services.

So no one told you life was going to be this way.
Your job's a joke, you're broke, you're love life's DOA.
It's like you're always stuck in second gear,
Well, it hasn't been your day, your week, your month, or even your year.

But, I'll be there for you, when the rain starts to pour.
I'll be there for you, like I've been there before.
I'll be there for you, cause you're there for me too.

You're still in bed at ten, the work began at eight.
You've burned your breakfast, so far, things are going great.
Your mother warned you there'd be days like these,
But she didn't tell you when the world has brought you down to your knees.

That, I'll be there for you, when the rain starts to pour.
I'll be there for you, like I've been there before.
I'll be there for you, cause you're there for me too.

No one could ever know me, no one could ever see me.
Seems like you're the only one who knows what it's like to be me.
Someone to face the day with, make it through all the rest with,
Someone I'll always laugh with, even at my worst, I'm best with you.

It's like you're always stuck in second gear,
Well, it hasn't been your day, your week, your month, or even your year.

But, I'll be there for you, when the rain starts to pour.
I'll be there for you, like I've been there before.
I'll be there for you, cause you're there for me too.

« The Kitchen Test | Main | Assorted links »

World Income Inequality

Here, courtesy of Catherine Rampell of Economix, is a remarkable chart from Branko Milanovic's book The Haves and Have Nots. Along the horizontal axis are within-country income percentiles running from the bottom 5% (1st ventile) to the top 5% (20th ventile). Along the vertical axis are world income percentiles.

The graph shows that the bottom 5% of Brazilians are among the poorest people in the world but the top 5% are among the richest. Thus the vertical range of the curve tells us about within-country inequality.

Comparing between countries we see that the poorest 5% of Americans are among the richest people in the world (richer than nearly 70% of other people in the world). The poorest 5% of Americans, for example, are richer than the richest 5% of Indians.

Posted by Alex Tabarrok on January 31, 2011 at 12:21 PM in Data Source, Economics | Permalink

via marginalrevolution.com

This Is the State of the Web Right Now

Now and then, comic artist Matthew "The Oatmeal" Inman truly manages to capture something that we're all thinking about but unable to convey. Today that something is the truth about the state of the Internet as it is right now.

 

Republished with permission from Matthew Inman aka "The Oatmeal," a former web designer turned comic artist. You can see more of his work on The Oatmeal. Matthew is a one man operation, so be sure to check out posters and prints from his shop or pre-order a copy of his book.

The author of this post can be contacted at tips@gizmodo.comv>

This is the video and text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down – that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

My third story is about death.

Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960’s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

Source

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