I need to take a break from doing class work regularly these days. Sometimes I get home from work and I’m worn out, and I need to turn off my brain for a couple hours before starting on class work for the evening. Sometimes I just want to distract myself for a bit before heading […]
Category: thoughts
Being anti-stealth
Charlie O’Donnell has been taking an anti-stealth approach to his new startup Path101, where he’s blogging everything that’s going on with the company, from meeting agendas to funding strategies. His strategy sparked a great thread on the nextNY mailing list about the advantages of being anti-stealth versus being secret. I contributed to the thread, and […]
Common Sense
Bill Simmons, the Sports Guy columnist at ESPN.com, has used the recurring trope of the Vice President of Common Sense which he describes in this column where he derides the choice of Mario Williams over Reggie Bush in the NFL draft: I’m becoming more and more convinced that every professional sports team needs to hire […]
Six Sigma and the Perils of Process
We had to read about Six Sigma process management last week for class. Six Sigma is a set of practices that allow companies to improve their processes towards satisfying customer needs, which is a laudable goal. The basic idea is that you have to first Define your goals, find ways to Measure your performance relative […]
Intracorporate communication
Why do organizational hierarchies exist? I was discussing this question with a friend a few weeks ago – I actually read The Origin of Wealth because she said that it had a good discussion of this question. The answer in the book, which I sort of agree with, is that hierarchies are actually an efficient […]
Change of view
When I first went to work for Applied Strategies, I didn’t really understand what they did. Applied Strategies (at that time) specialized in doing demand forecasting using decision analysis, which meant that we constructed mathematical models to estimate the size of a market for a drug or a vaccine. Our analysts used complicated decision trees, […]
Is an elite university worth it?
Paul Graham makes the provocative claim that “It may not matter all that much where you go to college.” He’s been evaluating startup founders as part of his Y Combinator program for a few years now, and “what we’ve found is that the variation between schools is so much smaller than the variation between individuals […]
Shared experience and community
I spent last weekend up in Boston hanging out with TEPs, most of whom were younger folks that had joined TEP years after I had left Boston. And yet I felt reasonably at home with them. I continue to be fascinated by these questions of what makes a community and how community is linked to […]
Checking in
Gosh, it’s been ten days since I last posted. I’ve had lots of scattered ideas, but haven’t quite had the focus to pull any of them together into a full post. Things have been busy at work as we prepare for the release of FogBugz 6, the newest version of our main product, so that’s […]
Community media usage
As usual, good comments on my last post that you should read. Anca picked up on my last point that one might be able to design the direction a community takes by designing the media interaction spaces for that community. But before trying to design something, I think it’s useful to observe my current and […]
