The way I see it, your typical VC-backed startup needs 3 different teams from birth, to growth, to exit:
1. startup team: visionary founders, mad hackers getting little sleep to push the envelope on the product, great bizdev, amazing product people that understand their market.
2. growth team: operations people (ceo/mgmt team), larger engineering team to stabilize product and continue pushing features, more of everything.
3. exit team: people with relationships in key positions that can then make the connection for acquisition/exit.
(This is all anecdotal and I'd love to be corrected)
Several points in no particular order why I think this may be a "good" article (i.e., it's good storytelling), but I'm still critical of this article.
While writing this reply, I skimmed a couple of food startup companies on Wikipedia. It looks like these guys tried to do a SoBe (started 1996 bought by Pepsi in 2000; they year they started their company) and failed. I'd be very interested in an account of the SoBE story.
1. No reasoning in the article about why they thought this drink would sell.
2. First expenses are to buy two Land Rovers? AFAIK, these are not the cheapest SUVs. And this is literally like in a recent bad movie I watched ("Role Models").
3. On the same lines, they got an RV and two salespeople to drive around nationwide in an RV handing out samples? Was this drink even available nationwide? I've never seen it. Why were they spreading themselves so thin?
4. No mention in the article about how they got things done on the cheap. Which is a staple of all startup stories. Looks like they splurged on everything.
5. I had to read the BevNet link somebody posted to this article to find out that this drink costs much more than sodas because it uses real juice. It costs $1 to make and sells for $1.29. Is there a tiny probability that this could have contributed to the failure of the drink?
6. I mean this thing costs in the range of Red Bull and Starbucks but they market it as a competitior to Pepsi and Coke?
7. As I kept reading the article, I noticed how everything was being blamed on everybody else other than Bill. Bill did no wrong, and others let him down. I did not see enough evidence to convince me that this was the case.
8. Though billed as wife's story, this article is equally about Bill. So I have a problem that Bill is written up from the point of view of an adoring wife.
9. The BevNet thread shows that there are some people who are very angry with Bill. Btw "Wayne" (he doesn't get the courtesy of his real name being using, I think he's Mike Gilbert from the bevnet thread) has a book out to put his side of the story. This article sounds like an attempt to rehabilitate Bill's reputation.
10. Notice how they heavily criticize LKCM for "attempting" to bankrupt the company. But I'm supposed to find nothing suspicious about Bill proposing a deal with a new investor which would give the new guys 51% of the company (meaning management control with ability to replace Bill etc).
11. In short, at the end of the article, I was completely unsurprised at the total failure of the company. There is only one lesson to learned from this story for me: if hire a Bill, you'll fail. But I already knew that.
Are you as well doubting Amnesty International findings simply because they are anti-torture? What is wrong with people having convictions and spending money to find facts that support these convictions?
I find the trend towards quick character assassination (rather than looking at the facts) quite annoying. We see it in climate debate, for example, way too often.
What I see is a rather artistic photo. It surely contains nudity, but it's nonetheless a work of art. If nudity is porn, then Picasso was a pornographer:
This is a very encouraging report. In Portugal there was a significant drop in drug usage, hospitalization, and deaths after decriminalization. The savings in enforcement paid for improved treatment. Selling drugs was not decriminalized.
The situation here in CA is insane. Medical use of marijuana is legal, but the feds raid the shops. We spend billions turning minor drug dealers and users into prisoners and billions more building new prisons. The prison guards union is one of the most powerful lobbying groups in the state. I remember reading around the turn of the century that nationally 40% of black males, teens to early 20's, were on parole, in jail, or awaiting trial. Insane.
It seems that decriminalization reduces the attractiveness of drugs. I speculate that it reduces peer pressure, hard sell drug dealers, and the profitability of drug sales.
Rack is probably the most important project for the Ruby world since Rails. Allowing any ruby web framework to work seamlessly with each other should help propel the newly competing web framework as first class citizens, to be used easily alongside Rails .
Soon we'll see Routing, Authentication, and Debugging all using Rack middleware instead of framework specific plugins.
Well, you said you already had some ideas, but maybe these help as well.
Things that work for me:
- Tasks you really don't like doing are harder to start with. But, are the tasks you have to do really important? What happens if you don't do them? Eliminate as much as possible.
- Break it up in small steps. Working on a task "Build the next google" is not going to get you started. Split it up in smaller steps, and associate little milestones or 'victories' to completing a small step.
- Another reason for procrastination is feeling overwhelmed (decision paralysis, action paralysis). If you have so much to do that no matter what you finish, it still feels like you have a lot left, it's impossible to start. Again, try to eliminate or make a feasible schedule for yourself, such that you are able to finish your list for the day.
- Stop feeling bad about procrastination. Actually, plan in some procrastination time. Forcing yourself to work all the time and feel bad about not doing it will cause you to procrastinate more. Plan in some time for 'slacking', or even better: exercise, do some sports and get back to work afterwards.
- If you would give yourself 1 hour/day for procrastination; what would you rather do? Read digg about lolcats or sit outside in the sun, and talk with some friends? If you go at it like this, you'll notice how valuable your limited time actually is, and you'll stop reading those websites.
- Again, more sports! Clear mind == more productive.
- If you allow yourself the time to 'procrastinate' (i.e. reading websites, RSS, email, etc.), it will also make it easier to read news/mail in batches. Limit it to max. 3 times per day or so.
- If you want help to get into some new (productivity) habits, start a "Seinfeld calendar" (Google it if you haven't heard of it before)
- Do NOT, _EVER_, start your day with reading news/mail/etc (or keep it to offline news -- yes, news papers ;).
- Unplug. Information overload == bad.
- Start the day with an easy task. It's not hard to start with and it will get you in the "getting-s*-done mood". Once you start ticking of tasks - no matter how little it was - it feels like getting done more!
It is inefficient for everybody to learn to about science.
I agree it's inefficient for everybody to learn advanced science; but basic science? Gravity for Newton's sake? Don't people spend around 10 years going through basic education? What are they learning in those 10 years if they can't even understand a tiny bit of how the world that we live in functions?
Also, if you have read the article it's not just a failure to understand gravity, there was a severe lack of ability to apply logic (even by the TA that was teaching logic!).
Well that says something about the education system.
I would argue that everyone should learn at least the basics of science, and appreciate the fact that this marvelous civilization that we are living in is shaped by the very science that they don't fully comprehend.
I'm homeschooling four children, and describe myself as an eclectic homeschooler with strong unschooling tendencies. My youngest is now six years old, and she spends a lot of each day drawing, building Lego constructions, doing kitchen chores with her mom, playing with her brothers, talking walks outdoors (with various members of the family keeping her company), or occasionally watching videos, some educational, and some not. She is close to being an independent reader. I give her a reading lesson each school weekday, and a math lesson. (My favored materials are Bloomfield and Barnhart's Let's Read: A Linguistic Approach
So I guide my children's activities, but they have a lot of free time and a lot of control over how they spend their time. I like promoting QUIET activities like drawing and reading, because much of my work is done at home.
It's not a question of being prudes. The definition of pornography is "sexually explicit pictures, writing or other material whose primary purpose is to cause sexual arousal". I think we can all agree that Playboy fits that definition. Hence, the full Lena picture is porn by definition. Secondly, labeling it as porn can only be considered prude behaviour if you're offended by porn. Personally, I do not find porn offensive. Do you? Lastly, something can be pornography and still be artistic. I think the real prudes are those who think that there can be no overlap between art and porn.
They would be profiting by curing the suffering of others.
The only way they make money is if they make people better. And if they make people better, they deserve money. In fact, money is a damn good incentive to make sure we have anti-virals like this ready.
in some topic I think is generally applicable to their lives.
No offense, but you have absolutely no business deciding what's applicable to someone else's life. Just because it's interesting to you doesn't mean it has to be for others. And if it isn't, it's still perfectly acceptable.
I sigh when people judge others for not caring about things that they themselves care about.
Neither of your claims check out. The black plague killed a higher proportion of the world's population, and the 1918 Spanish Flu was airborne, like other flus.
I'll just mention that in Romania I pay $15 for unlimited bandwidth at 5 Mbps (it even gets speeds of 10Mbps and up for connections from inside the country) and they give you free install and fast costumer support also.
Romania was smart/lucky because people started their own micro-ISPs (Block/Neighborhood Networks) with 50 to 3000 customers each. Buying from bigger ISPs very powerful connections and selling it to more users that shared that connection. Thanks to competition, it brought the prices down a lot and even the big ISP had to adjust.
Edit: There is a side effect like having this http://www.roconsulboston.com/Media/Artists/DDBuchJly08/Wire... on almost all streets in Bucharest, but I find the benefits much higher. Also Wireless Internet is free in pubs/bistros/coffee houses that provide this service here.
Best beginner text after K&R is Kelly and Pohl's "A Book on C"; very newbie friendly and at the same time uses traditional C examples (i.e. memory management, serializing and reading-back record-oriented data stored in structs, file and directory manipulation, string manipulation, etc.)
Most other C books will just treat it as a stepping stone for C++ which is a different beast, and a few awful offenders will stretch it to Java!
To see a few Algorithm implementations in C, there is no better friend than Robert Sedgwich's polyglot tome; it's the applied Knuth volumes that everyone keeps on their desk (quickly swapped for the actual Knuth volumes when expecting hacker guests.)
Along with C materials you will also need Unix materials. The two are inseparable and fuel each other. You already have a decent Unix in your Mac, and your FreeBSD is the best of the Unix breed bearing the original blood. For that there are no better companions than the books by Richard Stevens, both for system and network programming.
For larger scale software engineering you will need a few small to mid projects of your own. You will deal with header file and Make dependency problems, a few unix and processor portability problems and a few other stuff. The solution to those problems along with a fat library of useful routines are found in "C Interfaces and Implementations" by Hanson. It's a literate programming text where source code is interwoven with prose documentation and it's very self evident.
Along with productive C programming you might need to look into the darker side of C and Unix and follow the papers of the hacking underground (yes, HACKING, dispute the terminology all you want, but I think some blackhats deserve the noble noun more than javascript and CSS jockeys.) Unix and C have plenty of Not-TODOs to motivate plenty of caution. Hoglun and McGraw's Exploiting Software is the canonical C-Do-Not text books.
If you want to read library source code, your FreeBSD source code should give you plenty to keep you busy. Start with the sources for the games; I spent an enjoyable summer porting Minix games to DOS and taught me allot. There is also "The Standard Function Library", or SFL, google it, it has the cleanest C sources you ever seen. Highly recommended.
And should you ever want to write a C compiler, like I attempted, here is some advice: implement Oberon instead. Everything you could possibly learn at 1/100th of the headache.
Just the 2 cents of a guy who will only write C code again if there was a gun to his head ;-)
1. startup team: visionary founders, mad hackers getting little sleep to push the envelope on the product, great bizdev, amazing product people that understand their market.
2. growth team: operations people (ceo/mgmt team), larger engineering team to stabilize product and continue pushing features, more of everything.
3. exit team: people with relationships in key positions that can then make the connection for acquisition/exit.
(This is all anecdotal and I'd love to be corrected)