Richard Tibbetts has called me out for conflating Web 2.0 startups with all startups in my recent blog posting, “Google has a problem retaining great engineers? Bullcrap”. His complaint was that I was over generalizing from Web 2.0 startups to all startups.

He’s right, of course. The traditional “technology startup” by definition does have a large amount technology work that needs to be done, in addition to the business development work. However, things have changed a lot even for technology startups. Consider a company like Sequent Computer Systems, which started in 1983. At the time the founders had a key idea, which was to use multiple commodity intel CPU’s to create first SMP, and then later, NUMA minicomputers. But in order to do that, they had to design, build and manufacture a huge mount of hardware, as well as develop a whole new Unix-derived operating system, just to bring that core idea to market.

Once again, there’s been another story about how Google is having trouble retaining talent.   Despite all Eric Schmidt’s attempts to tell folks that Google’s regretted attrition rate has not changed in seven years, this story just doesn’t want to seem to die.   (And those stories about Google paying $3.5 million and $7 million to keep an engineer from defecting to Facebook?   As far as I know, total bull.  I bet it’s something made up by some Facebook recruiter who needed to explain how she let a live prospect get away.  🙂

At least for me, the complete opposite is true.   There are very few companies where I can do the work that I want to do, and Google is one of them.   A startup is totally the wrong place for me.   Why?  Because if you talk to any venture capitalist, a startup has one and only one reason to exist: to prove that it has a scalable, viable business model.   Take diapers.com for example.   As Business Week described, while they were proving that they had a business model that worked, they purchased their diapers at the local BJ’s and shipped them via Fedex.   Another startup, Chegg, proved its business model by using Amazon.com to drop ship text books to their first customers.  (The venture capitalist Mark Maples talked about this in a brilliant talk at the Founders Showcase; the Chegg example starts around 20:50 minutes in, but I’d recommend listening to the whole thing, since it’s such a great talk.)   You don’t negotiate volume discounts with textbook publishers, or build huge warehouses to hold all of the diapers that you’re going to buy until you prove that you have a business model that works.

When I have a moment, I’ll try to tally up the responses that I got to “An ethical question involving ebooks”and see if there are any interesting patterns based on self-identified generational markers. Obviously, this is not a properly controlled survey, so the results aren’t going to mean much, but it is interesting that some fairly passionately written comments came from folks who self-identified as coming from generations that broke with the common stereotypes of their respective demographic groups.

I recently purchased a short story from Fictionwise, which was not DRM’ed, so I could easily get it into a form where I could read it on my Sony eReader. Thanks to that short story, I was introduced to an author, and a character, which I found very engaging. When I decided to find out more about the character, I found that the author had written two additional short stories, and three additional novels many years ago, but has since stopped writing any more books involving that character.

“Lord, enlighten thou our enemies. Sharpen their wits, give acuteness to their perceptions, and consecutiveness and clearness to their reasoning powers. We are in danger from their folly, not from their wisdom: their weakness is what fills us with apprehension, not their strength.” I found the following quote from an article eulogizing Milton Friedman to be really thought-provoking. Originally written by John Stuart Mill, a 19th century philosopher and economist, it was used in the Salon article to point out how even left-of-center economists owed Milton Friedman a debt of gratitude.

Yes! It is occasionally satisfying to be able to make a difference. I don’t know what Diane Duane would have decided to do if I hadn’t made my offer (I was the “mystery mailer”), but it is definitely a nice feeling to know that I had a hand in making it possible for a piece of art to enter the world. It would be really cool if this posting helps to encourage more people to help sponsor (or subscribe) to this book, and to become sponsors and patrons of the art and artists that they love in general.

I finally got around to replacing my battery in my 1990 Toyota Corolla. Sometime a month or two ago, I had noticed that the battery had died, but since that I had recently gotten a new young vixen in my life (a 2004 Lexus ES 330), I had been neglecting my faithful companion for the past 14 years. Anyway, $39.95 and a battery from Cosco later, my Corolla is working again, and for the first time in about five months, I took my poor neglected Corolla out for a spin.

What does it mean to be a friend? In LiveJournal, it has a very specific meaning; it means that you’re interested in reading someone’s journal, and that in general, you’re willing to let that person read your “friends-only” postings — at least, unless you start using friend groups to control who can see which posting. In Orkut, however, saying someone is a friend has little or no meaning, since in orkut you don’t really do anything other than define your social circle.

I recently came across Clay Shirky’s essay, A Group is Its Own Worst Enemy, which talks about social dynamics, and challenges faced by on-line groups created by various technologies (Usenet, weblogs, etc.) It’s definitely worth a read; there’s a lot to think about.

It’s 20 minutes into the hour, which means if I start watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer now on my TiVO, I won’t run out of show when I fast forward past all of the commercials. (TV networks of the world, shudder in fear; the Tivo changes everything.) My initial observation from watching the intro “teaser”…. if you’re going to try to have the “potential slayer” from Hong Kong try to speak Cantonese, either don’t bother, or dub her over with someone who can actually speak the language properly….