A FOOLISH CONSISTENCY

"There’s an education bubble, which is, like the others, psychosocial. There’s a wide public buy-in..."

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 16:04:33 -0500

“There’s an education bubble, which is, like the others, psychosocial. There’s a wide public buy-in that leads to a product being overvalued because it’s linked to future expectations that are unrealistic. Education is similar to the tech bubble of the late 1990s, which assumed crazy growth in businesses that didn’t pan out. The education bubble is predicated on the idea that the education provided is incredibly valuable. In many cases that’s just not true. Here and elsewhere people have avoided facing the fact of stagnation by telling themselves stories about familiar things leading to progress. One fake vector of progress is credentialing—first the undergraduate degree, then more advanced degrees. Like the others, it’s an avoidance mechanism.”

- 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 or you answer a..."

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 21:32:18 -0500

“I want to learn something. That’s the real pleasure, when you understand an idea or you answer a question. When I was a little boy I used to think you could get all the answers to all the questions. I thought that you could learn who God is and will he answer why he made me. You think you are going to get those answers but you don’t. (Laughs)”

- Francis Ford Coppola on what interests him, happiness, money, and creative purpose. (via curiositycounts)

Font Rendering in Firefox 4

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 10:00:05 -0500

Subtly awful:

Why We're Building Polymath, a New Platform for Learning

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 06:20:00 -0500

“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 thoughts down and share what I’ve been working on with my co-founder Dan over the past couple months.

—

Let’s start with a little story.

I graduated from Penn with a degree in Systems Engineering (and a cool $100K in student loan debt) a couple of years ago. I think my college experience was pretty typical in that most of what I learned that still sticks with me, I learned outside of the classroom. Instead of joining most of my classmates on the path to Wall Street doing consulting and banking, I decided to work full-time at a startup called Venmo, where I’d been working on marketing and customer development as I finished up school. My first day of work was a surprise — despite never really coding much before, I was told that I’d be building our new iPhone app. Gulp. I bought a couple books and got to work, in what was a tough and lonely process learning an entirely new skillset.

Fast-forward a few months. I decided that coding full-time wasn’t ideal for me — I wanted to be involved in all parts of the product development process, and I left to find a product manager role. Despite having some product background, I didn’t have great technical knowledge of design fundamentals, and needed to learn a lot more about marketing and messaging. I did what anyone would do and asked the smartest people I knew to help me out — recommend great resources for me to learn from, answer questions I had, and keep me motivated by keeping tabs on my progress. With their help, I learned a lot and, armed with my new knowledge, finding a cool position was not a problem. Awesome!

—

The point of that story wasn’t to ramble about my life. It’s to highlight a process that happens so often to people in this new generation of work (Fast Company does a good job talking about this climate in a couple of pieces— Generation Flux and The Four-Year Career). You leave college with only some tangible work skills (and maybe some debt) and a bunch of on-the-job training to be done. You switch jobs or careers a few times in your quest to find something that you’re good at and is fulfilling to you. Along the way, you constantly reposition yourself by learning new skills that will better prepare you for the work you want to do and keep you up-to-date with the latest technology.

I think more people are realizing that rather than being the exception, this is the new normal. Writer Ben Casnocha does a great job here talking about how the career “escalator” of old that we expected has now disappeared:

For the last sixty or so years, the job market for educated workers worked like an escalator. After graduating from college, you landed an entry-level job at the bottom of the escalator at an IBM or a GE or a Goldman Sachs. There you were groomed and mentored, receiving training and professional development from your employer. As you gained experience, you were whisked up the organizational hierarchy, clearing room for the ambitious young graduates who followed to fill the same entry-level positions. So long as you played nice, you moved steadily up the escalator, and each step brought with it more power, income, and job security. Eventually, around age sixty-five, you stepped off the escalator, allowing those middle-ranked employees to fill the same senior positions you just vacated. You, meanwhile, coasted into a comfortable retirement financed by a company pension and government-funded Social Security.
People didn’t assume all of this necessarily happened automatically. But there was a sense that if you were basically competent, put forth a good effort, and weren’t unlucky, the strong winds at your back would eventually shoot you to the top. For the most part this was a justified expectation.

No, says Ben— now, “Entrepreneurial career strategy involves learning while going, executing while planning, finishing while starting, aiming while firing.”

We live in a time when we’re told to follow our passions. Do things we love. The world is our oyster. And for the most part, that’s abundantly true — the most fulfilled people I know are the ones pursuing their dreams, the ones who figure out what they really want and reinvent themselves along the way to their goals. The Columbia econ graduate figuring out the music business and launching her singing career. The Penn Bioengineering masters opening a tea house. The former risk consultant learning UX design and photography and starting a new career.

That’s all great, right? But the problem with this is something I’ve faced firsthand — there is incredible inertia in finding and learning these new skills and getting started, enough so that there are tons of people doing things they don’t love or that are otherwise suboptimal (lower pay than what they could be earning with an updated skillset, for example). Despite there being ample (free!) resources online about anything we could possibly want to learn about, it’s incredibly hard to filter it all and find the most relevant information and content. It’s hard to know what you need to know. It’s hard to learn something new on your own without getting peer help. It’s hard to prove what you know once you’ve learned it! And so this combination of issues often keeps people from even getting started on their path to new knowledge and more rewarding work. These are the problems we’re setting out to solve with Polymath.

We all know the flaws of traditional higher education institutions— extremely high cost, overly rigid structures, laughably outdated course content that struggles to keep up with industry changes… the list goes on. But the model obviously works in a number of ways— you get unparalleled access to a community of like-minded learners, high-quality content, and expert-led instruction. We’re trying to combine the benefits of traditional schooling with the unique power and reach of the web to enable and empower the next generation of people to learn & do what they love, and we couldn’t be more excited about what we’re working on. Stay tuned!

Thanks for reading! If you liked this post, get involved by signing up for the Polymath beta.

"In a world of plentiful options for hardware and software, a product that is “just good..."

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 05:21:59 -0500

“

In a world of plentiful options for hardware and software, a product that is “just good enough” will not suffice. Technical barriers to entry are so low, and the number of providers are so high, that users expect more than just functionality — they are drawn to demand excellent product design. In this multi-platform era, users are the ultimate arbiter of quality. As users try and adopt new services, their expectations of design and overall quality are elevated, both in professional and personal use.

I don’t restrict my definition of design to the visible user interface; I include the end-to-end design of products from the interface, to the database, to the API, and even how that product connects with other products. The social design decisions about how to enable graphs (e.g., the degree of anonymity, game mechanics, default settings around privacy, the symmetry/asymmetry divide, etc.) are fundamental decisions that can determine whether or not a product works. Design drives the optimization of experiences for specific devices/mediums/interactions. Different types of media (web, app, SMS, email, PC, tablet, phone) demand targeted design experiences, not generic reprints. End-to-end, human centered, design is a discipline, a process, and a function that this new world demands.

”

- 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 share and tailor online..."

Sun, 22 Jan 2012 17:19:10 -0500

“Most social networks feed primarily on vanity, in that they allow people to share and tailor online content that makes them look good. They can help people communicate to others that they’ve attended impressive schools, built amazing careers, attended cool parties, dated attractive people, thought deep thoughts, or reared cute kids. The top-level goal for most people is to convince others they are the individuals they want to be, whether that includes being happy, attractive, smart, fun or anything else.”

- 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 isn’t engaged enough..."

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 05:19:20 -0500

“The mismatch between Silicon Valley and Congress isn’t just that Silicon Valley isn’t engaged enough with lobbying Congress, but that Silicon Valley has this outmoded idea that your ideas succeed when they are right, as proven in the marketplace, rather than because you were better at making a backdoor deal than the next guy.”

- Tim O’Reilly (via bijan)

"A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor..."

Fri, 30 Dec 2011 20:41:02 -0500

“A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.”

- 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

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 03:31:01 -0500

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 v0.1.

You can panic, start thinking about your backup options, decide to give up… or you can realize that you have absolutely nothing to lose, and get right back to trying to craft an amazing product that will delight people and solve problems.

That “oh shit” moment and how you deal with it, to me, is what entrepreneurship is all about. Gotta love it.

In case you were wondering how Italians felt about recent...

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 16:04:14 -0500

In case you were wondering how Italians felt about recent economic measures.

"Waters unendingly full of life move along the old aqueducts into the great city and dance in the..."

Wed, 23 Nov 2011 06:45:24 -0500

“Waters unendingly full of life move along the old aqueducts into the great city and dance in the many squares over white stone basins by day and lift up their murmuring to the night that is large and starry here and soft with winds. And gardens are here, unforgettable avenues and flights of stairs, stairs devised by Michelangelo, stairs that are built after the pattern of downward-gliding waters— broadly bringing forth step out of step in their descent like wave out of wave. Through such impressions one collects oneself, wins oneself back again out of the pretentious multiplicity that talks and chatters there (and how talkative it is!), and one learns slowly to recognize the very few things in which the eternal endures that one can love and something solitary in which one can quietly take part.”

- 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 movement on the UC campus,..."

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 14:30:30 -0500

“One of the reasons I am involved with #OWS, and advocating for an occupy movement on the UC campus, is to fight privatization and austerity in the UC system, and fight rising tuition costs. I think that citizens have the right to get an education regardless of economic condition.”

- 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 crisis in this country..."

Sun, 20 Nov 2011 01:02:48 -0500

“

These issues go to the core of what democracy means. We have a major economic crisis in this country that was brought on by the greedy and irresponsible behavior of big banks. No banker has been arrested, and certainly none have been pepper sprayed. Arrests and chemical assault is for those trying to defend their homes, their jobs, and their schools.

These are not trivial matters. This is a moment to stand up and be counted. I am proud to teach at a university where students have done so.

”

- 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 mark, making the total..."

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 20:44:56 -0500

“Consumer debt to pay for higher education has cracked the $1 trillion dollar mark, making the total larger than all outstanding credit card balances. We have seen over the last few weeks that a lot of the personal angst that enrages Occupy protesters is driven by college loans that are too large for them to pay off and which can’t, by law, be discharged like other debt in bankruptcy.”

- The Costliest Bubble - Forbes (via rahmin)

"You teach the reader that he’s way smarter than he thought he was. I think one of the insidious..."

Wed, 09 Nov 2011 15:18:12 -0500

“You teach the reader that he’s way smarter than he thought he was. I think one of the insidious lessons about TV is the meta-lesson that you’re dumb. This is all you can do. This is easy, and you’re the sort of person who really just wants to sit in a chair and have it easy. When in fact there are parts of us, in a way, that are a lot more ambitious than that. And what we need, I think-and I’m not saying I’m the person to do it. But I think what we need is seriously engaged art, that can teach again that we’re smart. And that there’s stuff that TV and movies- although they’re great at certain things- cannot give us. But that have to create the motivations for us to want to do the extra work, you know, to get these other kinds of art.”

- 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 as easily as possible. I’m trying to keep this in mind when building Polymath.

The Social Graph is Neither

Wed, 09 Nov 2011 15:05:00 -0500

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 becomes. As the model becomes more expressive, we really start to notice the places where it fails.

(As anyone who’s organized a G+ circle will tell you)

Social networks exist to sell you crap. The icky feeling you get when your friend starts to talk to you about Amway, or when you spot someone passing out business cards at a birthday party, is the entire driving force behind a site like Facebook.

Because their collection methods are kind of primitive, these sites have to coax you into doing as much of your social interaction as possible while logged in, so they can see it. It’s as if an ad agency built a nationwide chain of pubs and night clubs in the hopes that people would spend all their time there, rigging the place with microphones and cameras to keep abreast of the latest trends (and staffing it, of course, with that Mormon bartender).

We’re used to talking about how disturbing this in the context of privacy, but it’s worth pointing out how weirdly unsocial it is, too. How are you supposed to feel at home when you know a place is full of one-way mirrors?

A big part of why I’m uncomfortable using Facebook.

My hope is that whatever replaces Facebook and Google+ will look equally inevitable, and that our kids will think we were complete rubes for ever having thrown a sheep or clicked a +1 button. It’s just a matter of waiting things out, and leaving ourselves enough freedom to find some interesting, organic, and human ways to bring our social lives online.

They’re making a few different points here:

Our social connections are too varied, ambiguous, and evolving for one “graph” to accurately capture all that nuanced activity, at least with current methods;

A lot of the activity on “social” networks isn’t inherently social from the user’s perspective (asking people to explicitly define relationships, for example);

Social networks these days are designed around getting you to broadcast as much information as possible in order to mine that data (and store it forever to use as they like)— that’s troubling.

—

tl;dr: The social graph (modeling our offline relationships online) obviously has value. With current implementations though, it’s tough to model a completely “accurate” pervasive single social graph, and even tougher to build something meaningful on top of that graph. Here’s to figuring it out.

"The first is a shift in the nature of power and influence. It goes by many names and takes many..."

Mon, 07 Nov 2011 07:19:32 -0500

“The first is a shift in the nature of power and influence. It goes by many names and takes many forms. It is open-source software and encyclopedias written by crowds and revolutions seeded on Internet portals. It is the idea of the United States “leading from behind” in Libya rather than fiercely commanding. It is newspapers linking to other newspapers on their Web sites rather than walling everything in. It is Kickstarter, Meetup and Ushahidi and any number of other platforms that allow disparate, diffuse strangers to marshal the kind of influence that once only centralized institutions could.”

- Is It a Crisis? Maybe So, if You’re a King - NYTimes.com

abaldwin360: In a nutshell.

Sun, 06 Nov 2011 01:53:47 -0400

abaldwin360:

In a nutshell.

BRYCE DOT VC: A Little Perspective on Khan Academy Numbers

Sun, 06 Nov 2011 01:49:59 -0400

BRYCE DOT VC: A Little Perspective on Khan Academy Numbers:

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.

More from Kurosawa

Wed, 26 Oct 2011 11:10:00 -0400

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 were going to cut so much, why did we have to shoot it all in the first place? I, too, had labored painfully to shoot the film, so it was hard for me to scrap my own work.

But, no matter how much work the director, the assistant director, the cameraman or the lighting technicians put into a film, the audience never knows. What is necessary is to show them something that is complete and has no excess. When you are shooting, of course, you film only what you believe is necessary. But very often you realize only after having shot it that you didn’t need it after all. You don’t need what you don’t need. Yet human nature wants to place value on things in direct proportion to the amount of labor that went into making them. In film editing, this natural inclination is the most dangerous of all attitudes.

I’m fascinated by how this language echoes that of great product creators like Steve Jobs, Jack Dorsey, etc., which I suppose reinforces the idea that making an excellent, evocative product that someone can repeatedly use is akin to creating a great work of art.

On work ethic:

In the middle of the night I woke up. When I turned over, I saw light coming through the cracks around the door of Yama-san’s room. I got up and very softly walked over and peeked in. I saw Yama-san seated on top of his bed with his back to the door. He was reading.

He was poring over the manuscript of my Sugata Sanshiro screenplay. He was going through it very carefully page by page, sometimes turning back the pages and rereading. In that concentrated silhouette there should have been some sign of the exhaustion of the day’s shooting and the evening’s drinking. Not a trace. The barracks occupants had all gone to sleep; there wasn’t a sound anywhere, except for the pages turning. I wanted to say, “You have to get up early in the morning— it’s all right, you don’t have to do this for me, please go to sleep.” But for some reason I couldn’t bring myself to speak. His seriousness was intimidating. I sat down and waited with my back erect for him to finish reading. I will never forget that view of Yama-san’s back and the sound of those pages turning.

I was thirty-two years old. At last I had climbed to the base of the peak I had to scale, and I stood gazing up at my mountain.

Simple, clean, refreshing: reading Kurosawa write about his life is like drinking a cool bottle of Oi Ocha on a warm day.