My daily interests

Medical miracle

nobody@vox.com(Raman) — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 23:33:57 -0700

This is the story of a pregnant man in India.
Read full story here: http://abcnews.go.com/Primetime/story?id=2346476&page=1

"To my surprise and horror, I could shake hands with somebody inside," he said. "It was a bit shocking for me."...

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Programmers and Startups

nobody@vox.com(Raman) — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 02:49:58 -0700

A very interesting and thought provoking article by Paul Graham.
source: http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html

A few days ago I was sitting in a cafe in Palo Alto and a group of programmers came in on some kind of scavenger hunt. It was obviously one of those corporate "team-building" exercises.

They looked familiar. I spend nearly all my time working with programmers in their twenties and early thirties. But something seemed wrong about these. There was something missing.

And yet the company they worked for is considered a good one, and from what I overheard of their conversation, they seemed smart enough. In fact, they seemed to be from one of the more prestigious groups within the company.

So why did it seem there was something odd about them?

I have a uniquely warped perspective, because nearly all the programmers I know are startup founders. We've now funded 80startups with a total of about 200 founders, nearly all of them programmers. I spend a lot of time with them, and not much with other programmers. So my mental image of a young programmer is a startup founder.

The guys on the scavenger hunt looked like the programmers I wasused to, but they were employees instead of founders. And it was startling how different they seemed.

So what, you may say. So I happen to know a subset of programmers who are especially ambitious. Of course less ambitious people will seem different.. But the difference between the programmers I sawin the cafe and the ones I was used to wasn't just a difference of degree. Something seemed wrong.

I think it's not so much that there's something special about founders as that there's something missing in the lives of employees.I think startup founders, though statistically outliers, are actually living in a way that's more natural for humans.

I was in Africa last year and saw a lot of animals in the wild thatI'd only seen in zoos before. It was remarkable how different theyseemed. Particularly lions. Lions in the wild seem about ten times more alive. They're like different animals. And seeing those guyson their scavenger hunt was like seeing lions in a zoo after spending several years watching them in the wild.

Trees

What's so unnatural about working for a big company? The root ofthe problem is that humans weren't meant to work in such largegroups.

Another thing you notice when you see animals in the wild is thateach species thrives in groups of a certain size. A herd of impalasmight have 100 adults; baboons maybe 20; lions rarely 10. Humansalso seem designed to work in groups, and what I've read abouthunter- gatherers accords with research on organizations and my ownexperience to suggest roughly what the ideal size is: groups of 8work well; by 20 they're getting hard to manage; and a group of 50is really unwieldy.[1]

Whatever the upper limit is, we are clearly not meant to work ingroups of several hundred. And yet—for reasons having moreto do with technology than human nature—a great many peoplework for companies with hundreds or thousands of employees.

Companies know groups that large wouldn't work, so they dividethemselves into units small enough to work together. But tocoordinate these they have to introduce something new: bosses.

These smaller groups are always arranged in a tree structure. Yourboss is the point where your group attaches to the tree. But whenyou use this trick for dividing a large group into smaller ones,something strange happens that I've never heard anyone mentionexplicitly. In the group one level up from yours, your bossrepresents your entire group. A group of 10 managers is not merelya group of 10 people working together in the usual way. It's reallya group of groups. Which means for a group of 10 managers to worktogether as if they were simply a group of 10 individuals, the groupworking for each manager would have to work as if they were a singleperson—the workers and manager would each share only oneperson's worth of freedom between them.

In practice a group of people never manage to act as if they wereone person. But in a large organization divided into groups inthis way, the pressure is always in that direction. Each grouptries its best to work as if it were the small group of individualsthat humans were designed to work in. That was the point of creatingit. And when you propagate that constraint, the result is thateach person gets freedom of action in inverse proportion to thesize of the entire tree.[2]

Anyone who's worked for a large organization has felt this. Youcan feel the difference between working for a company with 100employees and one with 10,000, even if your group has only 10 people.

Corn Syrup

A group of 10 people within a large organization is a kind of faketribe. The number of people you interact with is about right. Butsomething is missing: individual initiative. Tribes of hunter-gatherershav e more freedom. The leaders have a little more power than othermembers of the tribe, but they don't generally tell them what todo and when the way a boss can.

It's not your boss's fault. The real problem is that in the groupabove you in the hierarchy, your entire group is one virtual person.Your boss is just the way that constraint is imparted to you.

So working in a group of 10 people within a large organization feelsboth right and wrong at the same time. On the surface it feelslike the kind of group you're meant to work in, but something majoris missing. A job at a big company is like high fructose cornsyrup: it has some of the qualities of things you're meant to like,but is disastrously lacking in others.

Indeed, food is an excellent metaphor to explain what's wrong withthe usual sort of job.

For example, working for a big company is the default thing to do,at least for programmers. How bad could it be? Well, food showsthat pretty clearly. If you were dropped at a random point inAmerica today, nearly all the food around you would be bad for you.Humans were not designed to eat white flour, refined sugar, highfructose corn syrup, and hydrogenated vegetable oil. And yet ifyou analyzed the contents of the average grocery store you'd probablyfind these four ingredients accounted for most of the calories."Normal" food is terribly bad for you. The only people who eatwhat humans were actually designed to eat are a few Birkenstock- wearingweirdos in Berkeley.

If "normal" food is so bad for us, why is it so common? There aretwo main reasons. One is that it has more immediate appeal. Youmay feel lousy an hour after eating that pizza, but eating the firstcouple bites feels great. The other is economies of scale.Producing junk food scales; producing fresh vegetables doesn't.Which means (a) junk food can be very cheap, and (b) it's worthspending a lot to market it.

If people have to choose between something that's cheap, heavilymarketed, and appealing in the short term, and something that'sexpensive, obscure, and appealing in the long term, which do youthink most will choose?

It's the same with work. The average MIT graduate wants to workat Google or Microsoft, because it's a recognized brand, it's safe,and they'll get paid a good salary right away. It's the jobequivalent of the pizza they had for lunch. The drawbacks willonly become apparent later, and then only in a vague sense ofmalaise.

And founders and early employees of startups, meanwhile, are likethe Birkenstock- wearing weirdos of Berkeley: though a tiny minorityof the population, they're the ones living as humans are meant to.In an artificial world, only extremists live naturally.

Programmers

The restrictiveness of big company jobs is particularly hard onprogrammers, because the essence of programming is to build newthings. Sales people make much the same pitches every day; supportpeople answer much the same questions; but once you've written apiece of code you don't need to write it again. So a programmerworking as programmers are meant to is always making new things.And when you're part of an organization whose structure gives eachperson freedom in inverse proportion to the size of the tree, you'regoing to face resistance when you do something new.

This seems an inevitable consequence of bigness. It's true evenin the smartest companies. I was talking recently to a founder whoconsidered starting a startup right out of college, but went towork for Google instead because he thought he'd learn more there.He didn't learn as much as he expected. Programmers learn by doing,and most of the things he wanted to do, he couldn't—sometimesbecause the company wouldn't let him, but often because the company'scode wouldn't let him. Between the drag of legacy code, the overheadof doing development in such a large organization, and the restrictionsimposed by interfaces owned by other groups, he could only try afraction of the things he would have liked to. He said he haslearned much more in his own startup, despite the fact that he hasto do all the company's errands as well as programming, because atleast when he's programming he can do whatever he wants.

An obstacle downstream propagates upstream. If you're not allowedto implement new ideas, you stop having them. And vice versa: whenyou can do whatever you want, you have more ideas about what to do.So working for yourself makes your brain more powerful in the sameway a low-restriction exhaust system makes an engine more powerful.

Working for yourself doesn't have to mean starting a startup, ofcourse. But a programmer deciding between a regular job at a bigcompany and their own startup is probably going to learn more doingthe startup.

You can adjust the amount of freedom you get by scaling the sizeof company you work for. If you start the company, you'll have themost freedom. If you become one of the first 10 employees you'llhave almost as much freedom as the founders. Even a company with100 people will feel different from one with 1000.

Working for a small company doesn't ensure freedom. The treestructure of large organizations sets an upper bound on freedom,not a lower bound. The head of a small company may still chooseto be a tyrant. The point is that a large organization is compelledby its structure to be one.

Consequences

That has real consequences for both organizations and individuals. One is that companies will inevitably slow down as they grow larger,no matter how hard they try to keep their startup mojo. It's aconsequence of the tree structure that every large organization isforced to adopt.

Or rather, a large organization could only avoid slowing down ifthey avoided tree structure. And since human nature limits thesize of group that can work together, the only way I can imaginefor larger groups to avoid tree structure would be to have nostructure: to have each group actually be independent, and to worktogether the way components of a market economy do.

That might be worth exploring. I suspect there are already somehighly partitionable businesses that lean this way. But I don'tknow any technology companies that have done it.

There is one thing companies can do short of structuring themselvesas sponges: they can stay small. If I'm right, then it reallypays to keep a company as small as it can be at every stage.Particularly a technology company. Which means it's doubly importantto hire the best people. Mediocre hires hurt you twice: they getless done, but they also make you big, because you need more ofthem to solve a given problem.

For individuals the upshot is the same: aim small. It will alwayssuck to work for large organizations, and the larger the organization, the more it will suck.

In an essay I wrote a couple years ago I advised graduating seniorsto work for a couple years for another company before starting theirown. I'd modify that now. Work for another company if you wantto, but only for a small one, and if you want to start your ownstartup, go ahead.

The reason I suggested college graduates not start startups immediatelywas that I felt most would fail. And they will. But ambitiousprogrammer s are better off doing their own thing and failing thangoing to work a big company. Certainly they'll learn more. Theymight even be better off financially. A lot of people in theirearly twenties get into debt, because their expenses grow evenfaster than the salary that seemed so high when they left school.At least if you start a startup and fail your net worth will bezero rather than negative. [3]

We've now funded so many different types of founders that we haveenough data to see patterns, and there seems to be no benefit fromworking for a big company. The people who've worked for a few yearsdo seem better than the ones straight out of college, but onlybecause they're that much older.

The people who come to us from big companies often seem kind ofconservative. It's hard to say how much is because big companiesmade them that way, and how much is the natural conservatism thatmade them work for the big companies in the first place. Butcertainly a large part of it is learned. I know because I've seenit burn off.

Having seen that happen so many times is one of the things thatconvinces me that working for oneself, or at least for a smallgroup, is the natural way for programmers to live. Founders arrivingat Y Combinator often have the downtrodden air of refugees. Threemonths later they're transformed: they have so much more confidencethat they seem as if they've grown several inches taller. [4]Strange as this sounds, they seem both more worried and happier at the sametime. Which is exactly how I'd describe the way lions seem in thewild.

Watching employees get transformed into founders makes it clearthat the difference between the two is due mostly to environment—andin particular that the environment in big companies is toxic toprogrammers. In the first couple weeks of working on their ownstartup they seem to come to life, because finally they're workingthe way people are meant to.

Notes

[1]When I talk about humans being meant or designed to live acertain way, I mean by evolution.

[2]It's not only the leaves who suffer. The constraint propagatesup as well as down. So managers are constrained too; instead ofjust doing things, they have to act through subordinates.

[3]Do not finance your startup with credit cards. Financing astartup with debt is usually a stupid move, and credit card debtstupidest of all. Credit card debt is a bad idea, period. It isa trap set by evil companies for the desperate and the foolish.

[4]The founders we fund used to be younger (initially we encouragedundergrad s to apply), and the first couple times I saw this I usedto wonder if they were actually getting physically taller.

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Super sunday

nobody@vox.com(Raman) — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 02:22:26 -0700

Yesterday was a super Sunday though it didn't culminate the way i wanted it to. For all race enthusiasts and football fanatics it's a feast. Kimi finished top on the podium. I must say that hamilton is riding on bad luck. they took approximately 20 sec to fill the tank and change tires. this really hampered his chances of podium finish. Force india atleast finished the race.

On the other hand, ManU vs Liverpool was a very good match except for the poor decisions by referee. Off side is given as a corner which turned to be ManU's first goal. Later couple of yellow cards and 10 players on the field for Liverpool shattered their hopes. Arsenal vs Chelsea turned out to be a disaster for arsenal. Despite scoring first, they failed to capitalize on that. Now ManU is on the top of the table with 73 points.

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You can't pay by touch anymore

nobody@vox.com(Raman) — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 04:55:44 -0700

Pay by touch is built on innovative biometric technology. It allows users to pay the bills using their finger print. Basically it makes credit cards obsolete. But to attract customers for is a daunting task. I was wrong here. Pay by Touch succeeded to attract a whopping 3.6 million customers. This is something that we see in sci-fi movies. Totally futuristic. But now it failed because of the erratic CEO. Closed its operations yesterday.

For more info: Read here

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Financial crisis

nobody@vox.com(Raman) — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 22:32:37 -0700

Yesterday, i was talking about global crisis and today i found a well written blog by an mba applicant on the present scenario in US.

"So, the financial system is in a deep mess. I am not saying I understand it all, but if someone asked me to summarize the gist of the problem I'd say it's this - please correct me if I am completely wrong:

We, or rather US creditors in the first place, gave loans to people (American consumers) for everything from houses to cars to other consumer goods, no matter what their creditworthiness. Consumers happily spent away, America basically paid for the worldwide economic upturn over the last few years. But they paid for it with money they didnt have. Eventually, the first people were unable to pay back their loans, interest rates climbed and even more people had trouble making their payments. That's how foreclosures started. House prices began to sink, thus making it harder for people to finance their other debt and the downward credit spiral began. That's why now people default on their consumer credits as well. And the rest of the world is financially also in trouble because all those debts can be purchased by other parties using a complicated system of derivatives that apparently not even those that should know understood.

To make a long story a little shorter: Things suck at the moment. Jobs, especially in finance, will become scarcer. Which will lead to more competition in other job areas, such as consulting."
Source: http://mbahighwaypart-two.blogspot.com/2008/03/financial-crisis-mba-job-lookout-200910.html

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How true

nobody@vox.com(Raman) — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 02:13:05 -0700

You spend so much time checking off what you’ll do that you never do anything.
Source:http://perpetualmotion.wordpress.com/

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Current global crisis

nobody@vox.com(Raman) — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 00:03:42 -0700

Dollar rates are falling and the dollar value is at an all time low. US is facing crisis or recession and it is going to have a huge impact on the indian economy. The worst hit might be the IT sector.
Interesting article: Crisis or mere recesssion
Oil prices at record high
When a barrel of oil cost $50, everyone complained that is very high. Now it crossed $100 and currently barrel of oil costs $111 approximately. Now the real trouble starts.

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It started with a red paperclip

nobody@vox.com(Raman) — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 23:56:12 -0700

This guy called kyle MacDonald who bartered his way from a small red paperclip to a house through a series of trades. this is very interesting. Who would have thought that he will end up with a big house. If someone would explain me this idea before its success, i would have definitely write that off.
He is also guinness world record holder for most successful Internet trade. Check his blog: http://oneredpaperclip.blogspot.com/

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Permission marketing by godin

nobody@vox.com(Raman) — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 03:10:26 -0700

With my limited knowledge, i can say that godin is the god of market. Here is something that i learned from his blog. Its called permission marketing. We all know what permission marketing is. But i never put a name for that and called it so. Also, i never analyzed the merits and demerits of it.
If a company does marketing to only those people who are interested by seeking their permission then it is called permission marketing. I see this as a very positive move. Companies advertise their products to you only after getting your approval. How cool is that? You won't get unsolicited calls from banks asking you to apply for their credit cards.

The source is here.

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Attention - seeking,earning,demanding

nobody@vox.com(Raman) — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 22:44:36 -0800

Seth Godin's views are so amazing that i started to like the way he look at things. Here is some thing he wrote on attention.
Can i have your attention or can i have your ATTENTION. Of course not, you cannot have my attention. You can either earn my attention and you can beg/seek my attention. If none of these works, then you may demand my attention. But how in the world can you have my attention. But "Can i have your attention" is the accepted vernacular in English.
Pretty weird..and a tad interesting.

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