February 2012
4 posts
“There’s an education bubble, which is, like the others, psychosocial. There’s a...”
– i don’t always agree with Peter but he’s spot on about education
A Conversation with Peter Thiel - The American Interest Magazine (via pegobry)
“I want to learn something. That’s the real pleasure, when you understand an idea...”
– Francis Ford Coppola on what interests him, happiness, money, and creative purpose. (via curiositycounts)
Font Rendering in Firefox 4
Subtly awful:
:(
Why We're Building Polymath, a New Platform for...
“Your brain is a terrible thing to waste” - Christopher Wallace
One of the things I’m learning as a first-time entrepreneur is how it’s way too easy to put your head down and get caught up in execution mode, doggedly pursuing a grand vision that lives in your head that other people in your life are only vaguely aware of. In an effort to combat that, I wanted to put my...
January 2012
3 posts
“In a world of plentiful options for hardware and software, a product that is...”
– Long quote but this is just a short excerpt from John Borthwick’s excellent letter to Betaworks shareholders. Great read, worth your time.
“Most social networks feed primarily on vanity, in that they allow people to...”
– Important lesson from Mark Hendrickson’s post-mortem of Plancast over at TechCrunch
“The mismatch between Silicon Valley and Congress isn’t just that Silicon Valley...”
– Tim O’Reilly (via bijan)
December 2011
3 posts
“A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and...”
– Came across this quote from Francois Rene Chateaubriand in my friend Kortina’s review of Let My People Go Surfing. Amazing book, awesome quote.
Entrepreneurship and the "Oh Shit!" Moment
That moment when you see a press release from your “what if” competitor - the behemoth internationally known incumbent, with millions of existing users and brand recognition, whom you’ve always been wary of - announcing that they’re entering your market with a competing product. All while you’re toiling in obscurity, fixing bugs and getting ready to ship your...
November 2011
9 posts
“Waters unendingly full of life move along the old aqueducts into the great city...”
– Just reread this passage from Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet— headed to Rome tomorrow; can’t wait.
“One of the reasons I am involved with #OWS, and advocating for an occupy...”
– Interview with a pepper-sprayed UC Davis student (via emptyage)
“These issues go to the core of what democracy means. We have a major economic...”
– Great op-ed from Bob Ostertag, a professor at UC Davis, about civil disobedience and the increasing militarization of police across the nation
“Consumer debt to pay for higher education has cracked the $1 trillion dollar...”
– The Costliest Bubble - Forbes (via rahmin)
“You teach the reader that he’s way smarter than he thought he was. I think one...”
– DFW in ”Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself”.
I think services like Quora and Tumblr are teaching us that people fundamentally want to share their knowledge and creativity with the world (instead of just passively consuming)— the challenge is to enable them to do so...
The Social Graph is Neither →
A solid post from the guys at Pinboard on the problems with our existing model of the “social graph”, and the social networks we’ve built on top of it.
Some good quotes:
This obsession with modeling has led us into a social version of the Uncanny Valley, that weird phenomenon from computer graphics where the more faithfully you try to represent something human, the creepier it...
“The first is a shift in the nature of power and influence. It goes by many names...”
– Is It a Crisis? Maybe So, if You’re a King - NYTimes.com
BRYCE DOT VC: A Little Perspective on Khan Academy... →
brycedotvc:
As a single data point, in its current form the content nor the platform appeal to my kids. Despite multiple attempts in various categories, both self guided and dad enforced, it simply fell flat.
October 2011
14 posts
More from Kurosawa
More salient passages from Kurosawa’s Something Like An Autobiography:
On editing:
I learned a mountain of things about editing from Yama-san, but I think the most vital among them is the fact that when you are editing you must have the intelligence to look at your own work objectively. […]
Yama-San in the editing room was a bona-fide mass murderer. I even thought on occasion if we...
“As I write this, I can’t help thinking how very strange it all was. It was...”
– From Akira Kurosawa’s autobiography, which I’m currently enjoying. The sentiment sounds familiar, no?
“Three years after the financial industry nearly caused a second Great...”
– “Stop the Wall Street Recruitment”, a Stanford Daily op-ed that drew the attention of the Times
(via @kanyimaq)
http://pegobry.tumblr.com/post/11172033415 →
But even lesser ambitions will often be costly. Anything really worth doing will take a lot of your time and energy, probably more than most people are willing to give. Which I why I don’t think commencement addresses ought to come in the “Follow your dream” flavor; or when they do, then the message needs to be “Follow your dream, but don’t be under any illusions about how hard it will be to...
I love Elon Musk
Wired.com: How do you maintain your optimism?
Musk: Do I sound optimistic?
Wired.com: Yeah, you always do.
Musk: Optimism, pessimism, fuck that; we're going to make it happen. As God is my bloody witness, I'm hell-bent on making it work.
“Granted, 9 to 5 is how you survive,
I ain’t tryin to survive,
I’m...”
– Jay-Z, D’Evils. Maybe my favorite HOV line of all-time.
“David was six feet two, and on a good day he weighed two hundred pounds. He had...”
– Who was David Foster Wallace?, people often [1] ask me.
From now on, I might refer them to this profile here in the afterword to David Lipsky’s “Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself”. Really enjoyable read; you get a lot of insight into the author’s early life and...
Even Artichokes Have Doubts →
Found via Hacker News, an article in the Yale Daily News discusses how 25% of Yale graduates go into finance and consulting each year.
The entire piece is well worth a read. This reminds me so much of my time at Penn, where a majority of my peers- many of whom had absolutely no interest in finance or consulting- found it hard to resist the allure of “reputable”, high-paying jobs [1]. I think it...
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September 2011
14 posts
“Entertainment’s chief job is to make you so riveted by it that you...”
– David Foster Wallace, in an interview with writer David Lipsky that eventually became the book “Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself”.
Is it weird that the first thing I thought of when I read this was the new Facebook changes? DFW goes on to say:
The technology’s...
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“Today the wealthy have no such qualms. We have moved from a country of relative...”
– Malcolm Gladwell on the NBA lockout
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Strong Opinions @marksbirch: We Do Not Have a Job... →
marksbirch:
The longer-term problem of talent alignment in our economy however is going to need more substantive and creative solutions. This starts with a complete revolution in our educational system with a commitment that is as bold and audacious as the space program’s mission to the moon. Whatever jobs we think exist today are most likely going to either cease to exist or will be radically...
“Yes, “winning” matters, but it’s winning at hard things -...”
– Tim O’Reilly
Varsity Bookmarking: My Job Pt.1 — I have no idea... →
pieratt:
My situation is blessed and I rarely let a day go by that I don’t say a silent prayer in thanks for the position in which I’ve found myself, but good gracious is this hard.
The most frustrating part is that it is difficult to get into a rhythm in your work when you have no real understanding of the next steps you need to take. There’s no opportunity for flow if both outcome and...
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August 2011
12 posts
4 tags
3 tags
Nathaniel Whittemore: The Beauty of Possibility:... →
nlwinsf:
Ultimately, for entrepreneurs of any stripe - political, social, technology - to do their work, they have to believe that they can make a dent in the universe. And this is why this feels like the end of an era. For as long as young entrepreneurs today have been alive - and especially in the last 15 whirlwind years since Jobs retook the reigns at Apple - we have had a person to look...
