I wrote before that I am quite bullish on certain professional and niche personal applications of Google Glass but find the adoption strategy puzzling. Having just tried Glass for the first time I feel quite comfortable with both of these assessments which I had made prior to a first hand experience. Glass is easy to wear and operate and the one I tried projected in way that did not force me to look up. I could completely see myself skiing or sailing with Google Glass (wondering if any of the...

I wrote before that I am quite bullish on certain professional and niche personal applications of Google Glass but find the adoption strategy puzzling. Having just tried Glass for the first time I feel quite comfortable with both of these assessments which I had made prior to a first hand experience. Glass is easy to wear and operate and the one I tried projected in way that did not force me to look up. I could completely see myself skiing or sailing with Google Glass (wondering if any of the...

When we moved back to the city at the beginning of 2012 we experimented for 6 months with homeschooling our kids. They then spent last year at Avenues, a new school in Manhattan. Avenues is a startup (and of course I love startups). The Avenues team did an impressive job coming out of the gate and are building a great school. But as it turns out our kids all concluded that homeschooling was better yet and so we are going back to it. I will be blogging extensively about the experience most lik...

When we moved back to the city at the beginning of 2012 we experimented for 6 months with homeschooling our kids. They then spent last year at Avenues, a new school in Manhattan. Avenues is a startup (and of course I love startups). The Avenues team did an impressive job coming out of the gate and are building a great school. But as it turns out our kids all concluded that homeschooling was better yet and so we are going back to it. I will be blogging extensively about the experience most lik...

For startups, backup is a lot like security, something you need to have but not something that’s really visible to endusers or that endusers even care about unless of course things go terribly wrong! So in today’s Tech Tuesday I want to talk a bit about backup and will follow up with a broader disaster recovery post. It used to be not uncommon to encounter super early stage companies that quite literally have no backup strategy whatsoever. It simply didn’t make the cut with everything else th...

For startups, backup is a lot like security, something you need to have but not something that’s really visible to endusers or that endusers even care about unless of course things go terribly wrong! So in today’s Tech Tuesday I want to talk a bit about backup and will follow up with a broader disaster recovery post. It used to be not uncommon to encounter super early stage companies that quite literally have no backup strategy whatsoever. It simply didn’t make the cut with everything else th...

In the future we can’t have privacy for the same reason that the record labels and Hollywood can’t have DRM and that’s ultimately a good thing. DRM has proven a fool’s errand because it is not compatible with general purpose computing. At some point a song or movie has to be decrypted in order to be played back and short of tamper proof and “trusted” hardware at that moment it can be digitally copied (and even if we had all of that it could be re-recorded or re-filmed during playback). That i...

In the future we can’t have privacy for the same reason that the record labels and Hollywood can’t have DRM and that’s ultimately a good thing. DRM has proven a fool’s errand because it is not compatible with general purpose computing. At some point a song or movie has to be decrypted in order to be played back and short of tamper proof and “trusted” hardware at that moment it can be digitally copied (and even if we had all of that it could be re-recorded or re-filmed during playback). That i...

Last Tech Tuesday, I wrote about a heuristic for prioritization. If you took that approach to its extreme you would always work on only the lowest hanging fruit (at the time). That would of course be an over simplification for several reasons. First, for any but the most trivial projects there will be a list of known bugs of varying severity that have to be fixed. Second, as I mentioned in an earlier post on technical debt, you will have to allocate some time to getting rid of it. Third, cert...

Last Tech Tuesday, I wrote about a heuristic for prioritization. If you took that approach to its extreme you would always work on only the lowest hanging fruit (at the time). That would of course be an over simplification for several reasons. First, for any but the most trivial projects there will be a list of known bugs of varying severity that have to be fixed. Second, as I mentioned in an earlier post on technical debt, you will have to allocate some time to getting rid of it. Third, cert...

Last night I had a delicious dinner at Momofuku Má Pêche with a friend who was in town from Germany. When we were paying my American Express card was declined. That is certainly not the end of the world but is annoying and in different circumstances potentially embarrassing. So this morning I called American Express to find out what was going on and was told that I had an overdue balance on a *different* card. Now (1) that card hasn’t been in use for years and (2) the balance is *trivial* com...

Last night I had a delicious dinner at Momofuku Má Pêche with a friend who was in town from Germany. When we were paying my American Express card was declined. That is certainly not the end of the world but is annoying and in different circumstances potentially embarrassing. So this morning I called American Express to find out what was going on and was told that I had an overdue balance on a *different* card. Now (1) that card hasn’t been in use for years and (2) the balance is *trivial* com...

Startups are heavily resource constrained and so prioritization of what to work on becomes paramount. In today’s Tech Tuesday I want to share an important heuristic that many companies can benefit from. The point of departure for this the well known 80:20 rule, which for our purposes loosely states that 20% of the work will get you 80% to the goal. After that you have rapidly diminishing returns. For instance, you get a huge amount of benefit from just putting your code under version control ...

Startups are heavily resource constrained and so prioritization of what to work on becomes paramount. In today’s Tech Tuesday I want to share an important heuristic that many companies can benefit from. The point of departure for this the well known 80:20 rule, which for our purposes loosely states that 20% of the work will get you 80% to the goal. After that you have rapidly diminishing returns. For instance, you get a huge amount of benefit from just putting your code under version control ...

We are excited about going back to homeschooling for our three children after the summer vacation. The goal is for each of them to explore one or more interests and use those to motivate learning and skill building. In order to get ready, we are looking for three awesome individuals we are calling guides, who will each have primary responsibility for the growth of one of our children. As a guide, your job will be to help the child 1. Explore one or more areas of their interest (this includes ...

We are excited about going back to homeschooling for our three children after the summer vacation. The goal is for each of them to explore one or more interests and use those to motivate learning and skill building. In order to get ready, we are looking for three awesome individuals we are calling guides, who will each have primary responsibility for the growth of one of our children. As a guide, your job will be to help the child 1. Explore one or more areas of their interest (this includes ...

My blog post on Monday about privacy and DRM was read by some as suggesting that we abandon any and all notions of privacy over night. That was not the point I was trying to make so let me try again, this time with an analogy. We secure our homes by closing and (generally) locking the front door. That serves as a demarcation and keeps out a completely opportunistic thief. It does not, however, prevent anybody even remotely determined from entering. For that we rely on some combination of soci...

My blog post on Monday about privacy and DRM was read by some as suggesting that we abandon any and all notions of privacy over night. That was not the point I was trying to make so let me try again, this time with an analogy. We secure our homes by closing and (generally) locking the front door. That serves as a demarcation and keeps out a completely opportunistic thief. It does not, however, prevent anybody even remotely determined from entering. For that we rely on some combination of soci...

Contracts are necessary to doing business but surprisingly many people miss a central point about them: they define the starting point for future negotiations. Where you actually wind up as an outcome depends on both the contract and external factors that determine your bargaining power. Let me illustrate what I mean by that by looking at a rental contract (lease) for an office. Suppose you have signed a three year office lease and two years into it you have to leave. The lease says that you ...

Contracts are necessary to doing business but surprisingly many people miss a central point about them: they define the starting point for future negotiations. Where you actually wind up as an outcome depends on both the contract and external factors that determine your bargaining power. Let me illustrate what I mean by that by looking at a rental contract (lease) for an office. Suppose you have signed a three year office lease and two years into it you have to leave. The lease says that you ...