Amazons, not Amazon (although there were certainly people from Amazon there). Warrior women, in legions, with the young huddled around the old seeking advice and peers talking about battle scars. There was even two victorious festivals, complete with drinking and dancing and wild shouting. I don’t think there was any mead, but it wouldn’t have […]
In psychology, we talk often about the survivorship bias: the tendency of people to focus on winners, rather than losers, as a way of trying to insure future wins. The prototypical example is airplanes in war (one used in a great recent post on the topic): if you want to figure out how to keep […]
There has been a recent spate of folks hating on Hackathons lately that seems, to me, a bit like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It is part of a larger movement (that I’m mainly in agreement with) to point out the ways in which tech folks these days are desperately trying to “change the […]
Recently, I lucked into a VIP invite to the NASCAR All-Star race in Charlotte (the same week I did the Star Trek red carpet, incidentally; surreal does not even begin to describe my life at the moment) and, despite my lack of experience and against strong stereotypes, I’m not only a fan but a believer that […]
Last week, I got to do something that is every geek’s dream: attend the red carpet premier of a Star Trek movie. With the bonus of cracking jokes with Leonard Nimoy (who was very gracious about my geekiness) and producing some slides that went up before the movie and too many other small things to […]
When I talk to college students, I always give them two pieces of advice: go to class and get a job even if you don’t need the money. The reason for the first advice is hopefully obvious (although it is surprising how many college students pay a fortune for an education they believe they can […]
When people ask me what I think the role of startup advisor is, I often liken it to the on played by some of the great professors I had in college and grad school. While I count many of them among my friends now, at the time they did two important things for me: removed […]
I tweaked my back moving boxes yesterday, so I decided to take a hot bath to see if I could loosen it up. And since I’ve been watching Star Trek: Enterprise on Netflix on my new HTC 8X all weekend, naturally I’m deeply engrossed and there is no way that wasn’t going to continue into […]
Clearly, I have no time to actually be running a hackathon these days. But I do have a dream for the topic I want to see: broken/old smartphones. There are three major types of hackathon-eligible phones: Screen is completing broken, cannot be used for input or display. Screen is cracked, can be used for input and […]
Finding the right team for a startup is hard. You are often facing a tradeoff between limited resources (cash and equity, which themselves can have different values to different people) while looking for people who not only meet your current needs but your future plans. And for many key roles, once you find those people, […]