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Evaluating risk and opportunity (as a human)

Our lives are full of decisions that force us to balance risk and opportunity: should you take that new job, buy that house, invest in that company, swallow that pill, jump off that cliff, etc. How do...

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Left brain, Right brain, and the other half of the story

In my head, this post and yesterday's post on risk and opportunity are deeply connected, but logically they needed to be split apart.The theory of the left-brain / right-brain split is that the left...

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Applied Philosophy, a.k.a. "Hacking"

Every system has two sets of rules: The rules as they are intended or commonly perceived, and the actual rules ("reality"). In most complex systems, the gap between these two sets of rules is...

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Open as in water, the fluid necessary for life

"Open" is a great thing. Everyone likes it. Unfortunately, nobody agrees what open is. There are many meanings, but in general, I think "open" must be the opposite of "closed". In the world of abstract...

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So I finally tried Wave...

Last week, TechCrunch published a story about me not yet trying Google Wave ("Gmail Creator Thinks Email Will Last Forever. And Hasn't Tried Google Wave"). The is apparently unacceptable, or as one...

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Tablet thoughts

I don't know anything about Apple's tablet, and I generally don't pay much attention to the speculation about their unannounced products. However, John Gruber has a nice post today which discusses the...

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My poorly remembered and partially imagined predictions from Jan 1, 2000

Reviewing old predictions is fun. Unfortunately, I didn't bother to write any down, so I'm working from memory here, and of course human memory is very unreliable and selective, so this is rather...

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10 predictions for the world of January 1, 2020

After writing my predictions for the past 10 years, I decided it might be fun to write a few predictions for the next 10 years as well. This is a little more dangerous though, since I now lack the...

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Books and stuff: three years of Amazon addiction

I'm a slow reader, but that doesn't stop me from buying a lot of books. Inspired by a Blippy review, I thought it might be fun to publish my Amazon order history.My threshold for buying books is very...

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Censorship flamewar

This post is inflammatory and unfair. It argues an extreme position that I don't agree with, but nevertheless find amusing. When writing angry responses, please direct your hate at the straw-man, not...

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If your product is Great, it doesn't need to be Good.

By now, everyone is tired of hearing about the iPad, but the negative responses are so perfectly misguided that it would be wrong to waste this opportunity. Even better, we can look back at the 2001...

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Today is my wife's birthday...

For her birthday, she wants as many people as possible to donate to her cause, raising $55,555 for the Intensive Care Nursery (ICN) at UCSF Children's Hospital, where our daughter spent the first...

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Serendipity finds you

Here is an interesting comment from Hacker News, on a story about someone turning down an early Google offer: Similar thing happened to me in 1999. I realized Google was way cooler than alta vista and...

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The quest for freedom and safety: Why I donated $100,000 to YesOn19

The common theme uniting most of my efforts is the desire to be free. One of the reasons I'm so interested in startups is that they give people the freedom to create, independent of the institutional...

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The Cloud OS

My recent remark about the future of ChromeOS generated a surprisingly passionate response. Some said that my prediction was obvious and boring, but others disagreed, arguing instead that I am ugly and...

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Four reasons Google is still Awesome

My recent predictions about which Google products will succeed (and which won't) are causing people to think that I'm anti-Google, which makes me sad since Google is probably still the best company of...

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Angel investing, my first three years

I started investing in startups with the assumption that I don't know what I'm doing (which is always true), but that the only way to actually learn anything is through experience. Therefore, my goal...

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The two paths to success

The recent WSJ article on the supposedly Chinese style of parenting has generated a lot of interesting discussion. The most amusing commentary comes from The Last Psychiatrist, who also points out that...

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I am nothing

On a scale of one to ten, how good of a cog are you? How well do you function in your assigned role? How much of a man or woman are you? How do you rate yourself as a son or daughter, father or mother,...

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Eight years today

The car in front of me kept hesitating. The driver couldn't seem to decide where to turn. Up ahead I could see that the light was green, but that I wasn't going to make it through in time because this...

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The Gift

It's often said that you should live every day as though it's your last. That always seemed a little impractical to me. But when my brother died, I felt like I had missed my chance. Life could never be...

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Help me distribute $100,000 to new entrepreneurs in Africa

I love the idea of microlending, small loans of a few hundred dollars made to entrepreneurs in impoverished areas so that they can start or grow businesses of their own, helping them to achieve...

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The Technology

Note: This is the talk I gave at Startup School Europe, which was held last Saturday in London.You've heard a lot of great startup advice today. This is going to be a little different.I often advise...

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Make your site faster and cheaper to operate in one easy step

Is your web server using using gzip encoding? Surprisingly, many are not. I just wrote a little script to fetch the 30 external links off news.yc and check if they are using gzip encoding. Only 18...

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Communicating with code

Some people can sell their ideas with a brilliant speech or a slick powerpoint presentation.I can't.Maybe that's why I'm skeptical of ideas that are sold via brilliant speeches and slick powerpoints....

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