Paul Graham:

It sucks to run a start-up. Running a start-up is like being punched in the face repeatedly.

We're mass-producing the start-up.

Everything around us is turning into computers. Everything is becoming software.

Justin Kan:

You could be working on the most boring piece of software, and you talk to Paul and you think, Man, I'm excited to go back to work.

Fred Wilson:

I don't mean this in a negative way, but Y Combinator is more like a cult than a venture capital fund. And Paul is the cult leader.

Max Chafkin:

Graham tends to have an air of impatience, as if even a momentary distraction is too much to bear.

Winifred Gallagher:

You can’t be happy all the time, but you can pretty much focus all the time. That’s about as good as it gets.

From the archive:

Marge: I'd really like to give it a try!
Homer: I don't know, Marge, trying is the first step towards failure.

Jeff Bezos:

People over-focus on errors of commission. Companies over-emphasize how expensive failure's going to be. Failure's not that expensive ...

The big costs that most companies incur are much harder to notice, and those are errors of Omission.

Johan de Kleer:

One passionate person is worth a thousand people who are just plodding along ...

Atul Gawande:

Let us look for the positive deviants.

The Start-up Guru

Milton Glaser:

1. You can only work for people that you like.
2. If you have a choice never have a job.
3. Some people are toxic; avoid them.
4. Professionalism is not enough or the good is the enemy of the great.
5. Less is not necessarily more.
6. Style is not to be trusted.
7. How you live changes your brain.
8. Doubt is better than certainty.
9. Learn how to age gracefully.
10. Tell the truth.

Adam Shand:

It's possible to get accustomed to anything. Make bloody sure you are aware of what you've become accustomed to.

Have you seen "Doubt"?

Father Brendan Flynn: You haven't the slightest proof of anything!
Sister Aloysius Beauvier: But I have my certainty!

Martin Schwartz:

Science makes me feel stupid too. It's just that I've gotten used to it.

Ten Things I Have Learned

Christopher Lawton:

Amid tighter budgets, more people are trying to save money by cutting their cable cords.

The cable-cutting trend isn't just being driven by pinched personal budgets.

Paul Kedrosky, from this past March:

There have been a number of articles lately about people cutting costs by canceling/cutting cable TV service.

Memestreams is a leading indicator:

I'm about to cancel cable. I'm sure for lots of people, the subscription model is great, even for music, I'm just not one of them.

More Households Cut the Cord on Cable

It seems inevitable that consumers everywhere will eventually demand ubiquitous on-demand mobile streams, whether from Spotify or someone else, making ownership of music less popular and iTunes therefore less important. And in that respect, Apple’s decade of investment in music and current domination of the online music world may become an Achilles’ heel, as Android’s openness and neutrality give it greater flexibility than Apple’s closed system to offer consumers what they want as alternatives arise.

Decius:

Steve Jobs is dead wrong about subscription based services.

Fortune Magazine:

Rhapsody, not iTunes, in my opinion, is the future of music.

Larry Lessig:

Over time, more and more people will opt to pay for music subscription services.

From last month:

Right before Apple finally implemented variable pricing in iTunes it wasn't hard for many to predict that it would backfire badly on the major record labels as they tried to jack up prices. So, it should come as little surprise to find out those predictions appear to be entirely accurate.

Tim Arango, from February:

Many executives say they believe the future of music buying is over the mobile phone, not from buying individual songs but by paying a monthly subscription fee to hear a vast database of music.

In Music, Apple’s Strength Becomes a Vulnerability

Mary Pilon:

As the financial markets continue their wildest ride in decades, many once-frantic floor traders find themselves all dressed up in mesh-backed jackets with less work to do. Some say they're flat-out bored.

Alan Valdes, a trader with Hilliard Lyons, says he's put on 10 pounds in the past year because "I don't have to run around the floor anymore."

Carolyn Johnson:

We are most human when we feel dull. Lolling around in a state of restlessness is one of life's greatest luxuries.

Troy McClure:

Don't let the name throw you Jimmy. It's not really a floor, it's more of a steel grating that allows material to sluice through so it can be collected and exported.

From the archive:

The looming demise of the "time lady," as she's come to be known, marks the end of a more genteel era, when we all had time to share.

The Big Bored: NYSE Traders Look for Diversions as Life Slows on Floor

Johnny Cash:

"It hurts so bad."

Sam Jones:

In physics, Markov chain processes underlie our most basic understanding of the world around us, from the way liquid turns to gas to the way a drop of vivid ink might slowly diffuse through a glass of water. If you treated people like atoms, the actuaries reasoned, you could apply the same maths.

By the time David Li got to New York, in 1998, the quants had taken over the asylum.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb:

"Anything that relies on correlation is charlatanism."

David Li, from Felix Salmon's article:

"The most dangerous part is when people believe everything coming out of it."

Of Couples and Copulas

Robert Solow on Richard Posner's new book:

No one can possibly know how long the current recession will last or how deep it will go. Whenever the US economy returns to some sort of normality, or preferably before then, it will be necessary to improve and extend the oversight and regulation of the financial system. The main goal should be to make another such episode much less likely, and to limit the damage if one occurs.

As Posner sees it, talk about greed and foolhardiness is comforting but not useful. Greed and foolhardiness were not invented just recently. The problem is rather that Panglossian ideas about "free markets" encouraged, on one hand, lax regulation, or no regulation, of a potentially unstable financial apparatus and, on the other, the elaboration of compensation mechanisms that positively encouraged risk-taking and short-term opportunism. When the environment was right, as it eventually would be, the disaster hit.

An audio commentary accompanies this article.

From earlier threads on the book:

Richard Posner presents a concise and non-technical examination of this mother of all financial disasters and of the, as yet, stumbling efforts to cope with it.

How to Understand the Disaster

Nicholas Carr:

Three truths:

1. Google is a middleman made of software. It's a very, very large middleman made of software. Think of what Goliath or the Cyclops or Godzilla would look like if they were made of software. That's Google.

2. The middleman acts in the middleman's interest.

3. The broader the span of the middleman's control over the exchanges that take place in a market, the greater the middleman's power and the lesser the power of the suppliers.

For much of the first decade of the Web's existence, we were told that the Web, by efficiently connecting buyer and seller, or provider and user, would destroy middlemen. Middlemen were friction, and the Web was a friction-removing machine.

We were misinformed.

Joshua Porter:

The game is attention. And the attention game is becoming dominated by two players: Twitter and Facebook. That two-pronged sword will eventually be Google’s undoing.

Scott Karp:

The greatest irony of the web content economy is that Google by itself doesn’t have a clue what content is good or bad.

Google In The Middle

James Surowiecki:

It’s true that the uncertainty of recessions creates an opportunity for serious profits, and the historical record is full of companies that made successful gambles in hard times.

Then again, the record is also full of forgotten companies that gambled and failed.

Malcolm Gladwell:

Mysteries require judgments and the assessment of uncertainty, and the hard part is not that we have too little information but that we have too much.

Marc C. Taylor:

The alternative to blind belief is not simply unbelief but a different kind of belief -- one that embraces uncertainty and enables us to respect others whom we do not understand. In a complex world, wisdom is knowing what we don't know so that we can keep the future open.

Robert McNamara:

Rationality will not save us.

Hanging Tough

Tim Harford:

I do not regard my own confusion as an indictment of modern macroeconomics, but I am struck by the soul-searching that has gripped the profession in the face of the economic crisis. The worry is not so much that macroeconomists did not forecast the problem – bad forecasts are more a sign of a complex world than intellectual bankruptcy – but that macroeconomics seems unable to provide answers. Sometimes it cannot even ask the right questions.

Your daily dose of Simpsons:

Smithers: That's quite a nice model, sir.

Burns: Model?

Malcolm Gladwell:

Mysteries require judgments and the assessment of uncertainty, and the hard part is not that we have too little information but that we have too much.

Do Sweat The Big Stuff