Wander, Think, Repeat

Recently, the valley has seen a trend towards mini-conferences. One or two day events centered around a hot technology topic. The idea seems to be: move very fast, get all the top names around a topic with a lot of buzz, and get it all done within 60 days (120 days at the top).

There’s definitely value in this. It’s a little disconcerting because most of the really hot topics don’t yet have 2 days worth of solid knowledge around them, at least not that’s ready in presentation form. But getting the coverage in one place, and talking to people with similar interests, and overhearing the hallway conversations, is probably worth the price of admission (for example: Dave McClure’s Graphing Social Patterns).

So here’s the mini-conference I’d love to see: cloud computing. A 2 day event covering how to build a datacenter in the cloud, complete with case studies and talks by people who’ve done it.  I really do want to know this, and it seems hard to learn via web browsing.

20 years ago, Allan Bloom convinced me I knew very little. His book, The Closing of the American Mind, is a bona-fide masterpiece. It’s brilliant, it’s compelling, and, in its own way, it’s as Gonzo as anything Hunter S Thompson ever wrote.

So it shocked me to learn that it’s been 20 years. Because the book doesn’t feel 20 years ago. The passion, the ideas, and the outcome are still fresh in my mind today.  I will admit, though, that  some of the retrospective articles, in particular Stanley Kurtz’s piece on NRO, are interesting.

It also shocked me to realize that it’s ONLY been 20 years. I mean, wow. Since Bloom wrote the book, the way we experience culture, and the way we interact with each other, has changed entirely. I’ve recently been thinking that Facebook and Twitter represent a whole new model of society.

And now I’m wondering what Allan Bloom would make of the word we’re creating. It’s an interesting question.

Now that the storm around the iPhone has subsided, it’s time to admit the obvious: it doesn’t matter.

What it is, in the end, is a gorgeous phone with a few too many limitations. It runs Mac OSX, but that’s been crippled (you can’t install software). It makes calls, but they’re only over AT&T. It’s probably as reliable as an iPod, and it’s just about the most expensive thing out there.

More interesting things, that are actually “game changers” (as opposed to “profit centers”):

• TMobile selling phones that use wi-fi to place calls when a hotspot is nearby.
• OpenMoko is about to ship.

I won’t be buying another phone for at least a month, but … even in the wake of the iPhone, it’s high odds that my next cell phone will be a blackberry running on T-Mobile (and I’m not a T-Mobile customer now. The wi-fi, should they support blackberry, and the “free calls to 5 numbers” make this an easy decision).

Chris Yeh has now posted his second defense of economic inequality. In many ways, his defenses of economic inequality remind me of the Randians out there, most of whom reason well on a micro-level and all of whom are incapable of rethinking their basic assumptions.

(update: this wasn’t fair to Chris. I wasn’t meaning to call him a Randian, just to say that this particular post, with its combination of well-argued logic and completely false base assumption, reminded me of Randians).

To be fair, Chris does actually state the basic hole in his thinking when he claims:

The problem here is that the key impact that wealth has on startups is the motivation that potential wealth provides, not the capability that actual wealth provides.

That’s completely unconvincing to me. And, I suspect, to Chris.

Why Chris Shouldn’t Believe His Argument:

Later in the same article, Chris writes:

If startups didn’t offer the prospect of incredible wealth, as a responsible family man, I’d have to take a job as a consultant (and make $500K+ per year) or on Wall Street (and make $1MM+ per year). It would be economic suicide to be an entrepreneur. As it is, it’s still a pretty shaky decision, but one I’m willing to live with!

To which I respond with: Symphoniq? Incredible wealth? Chris has been there 5 years now. Does Chris really think that when (which is really if) Symphoniq finally cashes out, he’s going to recoup the $5 million he could have made on Wall Street?

Of course, there’s a hole in my observation. Chris probably no longer believes he will recoup the opportunity cost of working at Symphoniq. But that’s hindsight. Silicon Valley is an enormous roulette wheel and, when Chris started at Symphoniq, he probably believed that the expected value of his years at Symphoniq was significantly higher than the expected value of going to Wall Street (significantly higher because, after all, Chris is an MBA and therefore will want his rate of return to be adjusted for his risk as well).

But here’s the thing: Chris is still in the valley. He’s been here long enough, and he’s more than smart enough to realize that success in the valley is 1% talent, 2% hard work, 3% who you know, 4% persistence beyond all definitions of rationality, and 90% sheer luck.

But he’s staying here anyway. He’s part of our infrastructure, he’s part of our ecosystem, and he’s put down roots. Even though, now, he realizes that he’s mostly making bad bets and that if he were economically rational, he would flee the valley for more fertile pastures.

Saying This More Bluntly:

Entrepreneurs start companies dreaming of building the next Google and becoming a billionaire. They don’t create breakthrough companies because of a desire for a comfortable salary.

is pure moonshine (the second sentence is true. But the first is false, and the conjunction of the two is amazingly false).

What’s more, Chris knows this. Think about his examples:

Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak didn’t need a lot of money to start Apple. Sergey Brin and Larry Page were poor grad students when they started Google. Ditto for Jerry Yang and Dave Filo of Yahoo.

Is Chris’s claim really that Brin and Page started working on what would become Google with the intent of making a billion dollars? That Wozniak (who by the way had a job at HP when he started tinkering around with what become Apple) is motivated by money?

Why Chris Stays Here:

He did this. It’s a wicked cool deal, an interesting idea, a small bit of out of the box thinking. And it might dramatically alter the outcome for Symphoniq (though, not, I repeat, not enough to recoup Chris’s opportunity cost).

Chris isn’t here because of his greed. He’s here because he wants to do interesting things.

I’m speculating, of course. I don’t have a deep pipeline into Chris’s subconscious after all. But, like Chris, I could make a lot more money elsewhere, or at non-startups in the valley. And, like Chris, when I’m pressed at cocktail parties I’ll talk about the potential value of my options and their life-altering nature.

And, I suspect, like Chris I stay because I find the work interesting.

How This Applies to The Inequality Argument:

Suppose someone came up to you and offered you a deal.

• Deal 1. “I’ll guarantee your income. As long as you work at startups and are building interesting things, I’ll make sure you’re in the top 1% of income earners nationwide. But, in exchange, I get all your stock options.”
• Deal 2. Same as deal 1, but for half of your stock options?
• Deal 3. “Go do something deeply interesting. I’ll handle the daycare for your kid and make sure that, if your new company fails, I’ll make sure you still have three square meals a day and good dental coverage.”

Would you take any of these deals?

This isn’t purely hypothetical. I know people who’ve done variants on deal 2 (There’s already a crude market in employee stock options here in the Valley).

The question Chris and his anonymous friend are arguing over is whether a lot of talented people (people who could found landscape altering companies) would find any of these deals interesting.

I think the answer is absolutely.

But then again, I’m an engineer. What do I know about people?

For those who weren’t paying attention, or those who were just paying attention to this blog, the story goes something like:

• Last March, I left Echopass.
• For the next six months, I stayed at home, playing with my newly born son Andrew (well, I also did some consulting; I’m fond of being cash-flow positive).
• In late October, I took the VP of Engineering position at Engage.

It’s a great company, in a great market place. And it’s incredibly different from anyplace I’ve ever been before.

Echopass was all about call centers. Hipbone, where I cut my management teeth, was also about call centers. Before that was Stanford (research) and before that was PDH (consulting group).

Engage is an internet consumer site.

In the words of the man from Cabaret (loosely paraphrased): The design focus is different. The operational focus is different. Even the scalability requirements are different.

(If you don’t know the Cabaret reference, or hate Joel Grey, ignore the italics)

I’m learning a lot, having a great time, and building a scalable and reliable service that helps people out.

The only fly in the ointment? It’s hard to recruit good people. I’ve hired some great developers. But, for some reason, great QA and DHTML people are scarce. As in very few and even farther between.

So if you, or someone you know, meets the criteria, send them my way. It’s that rare “win, win, win” opportunity:

• It’s good for the people we hire (great company in good space).
• It’s good for Engage (we get good people to help us build out our service).
• It’s good for you (we pay referral fees).

Guess what Andrew and I spent a good part of today waiting in line for ….

From an e-mail I just got around to reading:

I am a PhD student from the University of Surrey focusing on software defect prediction using statistical models. In order to validate my model I need to conduct experiments on relatively error free java code. The banking example in your Java RMI book has been pointed out as suitable.

All I can say is: Wow The code I wrote in a book to explain RMI and distributed systems to Java programmers (which, as far as I can tell, mostly wound up being a university textbook anyway), is now being used as an example of relatively error free code for research in software defect prediction.

One of the great things about having children is that you suddenly realize just how hard everyday actions really are.

Andrew knows that the food should go inside his mouth. And it starts out there. But, somehow, it keeps squirting out.

This weekend, I’ll be at No Fluff Just Stuff.  For my money, still the best value in software conferences.

I used to speak for them, now I just attend. The price of becoming management, I guess.