Cheap Thoughts

You can't listen to one entrepreneur or VC for more than five minutes without them mentioning the importance of building a great team.  It's obviously great advice for a number of reasons but it is also situational.  How to define the characteristics of a great employee for one company might be different for another, furthermore different companies need different types of employees.  You don't need to be a computer scientist from MIT or an astrophysicist from Cal Tech to be considered a great employee.  I'm coming to believe that nothing is more important to look for than sheer willpower. 

A willingness to get shit done, even when they don't know how to complete a task is not something that is taught in school but is equally as rare as a degree for MIT.  You want someone in your office who, when faced with a challenge will break down walls to accomplish the task.  It's the person who won't take no for an answer who is going to make sure your organization moves forward, even if they have to push it themselves.  What's great about that employee is not only that that they will find the answers you need but will have gained an intimate understanding of the initial problem and are now more valuable as an employee.

When you ask a Navy SEAL how they made it through BUD/S they almost all respond with some variation of "I just wanted to be there more than the guy next to me."  They will all admit to not being the fastest, strongest or smartest guy in their class, it was simple willpower.  Hire willpower.

I have recently become completely dissatisfied with the state of radio.  It seems like there are more commercials, less music and little differentiation between radio stations at least in Washington DC.  I can't add satellite radio in my current car, but that is something I will be doing when I buy a new one in a couple years. I've been trying to figure out what to do until then, settled on podcasts and have very impressed.  I started off with a16z, CFR and WSJ and could not be happier with the decision.  

Most of us spend so much time on our cars and for the most part it feels like a complete waste, but with podcasts that's not the case.  I am able to consume the content I wants on my time and with minimal interruption.  Its nice getting out of the car after a 30 minute drive and feeling a little bit more informed.  Even better is the feeling of turning sitting in a car into productive time in my day.

The best parable for the power of exponential growth that I have come across is "The Legend of Paal Paysam."  The short of the story is that a king fancied himself a great chess player.  He challenged anyone he could to a chess match and said he would give the person who beat him any reward the victor could name.  Eventually a pilgrim did beat him and in return he humbly asked the king to put a single grain of rice on the first chess square and double it on every consequent one (1 grain on the first square, 2 on the second, 4 on the third, 8 on the fourth and so on). By the 20th square there would be 1,000,000 grains of rice.  By the time you get 1/2 way across the board you have accumulated nearly 3 billion grains of rice and on the 64th square you would get to 18,000,000,000,000,000,000 grains of rice (larger than Mt. Everest).   Rumor has it that the king had the pilgrim executed for humiliating him but that is neither here nor there.    

Exponential growth is a term that gets tossed around a lot in the technology industry, its what every start-up CEO is looking for.  It's also a principle used to calculate population growth as well as the growth and spread of bacteria and viruses like AIDS.  What's fascinating is in all likelihood  we are only half way through the chess board.  Basically it took us 32 squares to get to 3 billion grains of rice but we will add another 3 billion in only 1 square.  Technological change is going to speed up and humanity as a whole is going to benefit from it.  How quickly are we going to progress when every human on earth has access to the internet?  How many more Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Elon Musks are out there?

One of the major questions we are all going to have to face is; how does the role of government have to change in the coming years if we are in fact just getting to the 2nd half of the chess board?  Government will always be playing catch-up to innovation and progress but what happens when changes are occurring so frequently and have such a large impact on society that government become powerless to adapt?

Every once in a while you come across a statistic is totally humbling.  For a significant portion of my life I did very little reading, I viewed it as a chore or something to get through because a teacher assigned it as homework.  From about the ages of 10-22 you probably never would have seen me reading a book for fun.  For whatever reason that changed right as I was getting ready to graduate college and I have not been able to stop since.  I have pretty much stopped watching TV during the week and you will always find me with 2-3 books that I'm reading at the same time.  

I've set a goal that each year if I can get through 24 books at minimum I would be pretty happy with that progress.  Between work, family, friends and any other commitments I have it seems like a reasonable target.  Then I started thinking about how many books were in existence and how I would never even come close to reading them all.  According to Google there are roughly 130,000,000 books that have ever been published.  At 24 books per year times 60 more years (hopefully) that gets me to 1440 books that I'll read in my lifetime.  Even if a person were to read 50 books a year for 60 years that still only gets them to 3000, or 0.00002% of books in circulation.  

You could debate particulars about what constitutes a book, what about all the news articles and magazines a person reads, etc. but nothing you can do is going to move the needle at all.  With the internet putting all human knowledge at our fingertips it's comforting to know that although we know have access to all of the information we're looking for there will always be more for us to learn.

I love coming across an article that relates to the topic I'm writing about.  Here is an article from the New York Time Magazine, talking about some of the worlds greatest figures in art, business, and more.  It's a really interesting read about what makes someone successful in life and even though we would consider these people the most respected in their fields they feel they are just getting started and still have a lot to learn.

I read an article last week where Finnish Prime Minister, Alexander Stubb, blamed Apple for many of the country's recent economic woes.  The gist of his argument was that Apple had crippled Nokia, the nation's largest private employer and as a result the Finnish economy has been on a steady decline for some time.  He also blamed the economic decline on the Finnish paper industry, which is wholly unsurprising for a number of reasons.   

I was fascinated that a single company could have such a huge economic footprint in a developed country in Western Europe so I decided to do a little digging.  I was absolutely stunned to find that Nokia directly employed 22,000 Fins and indirectly employed another 20,000.  At it's height the company also accounted for 1/5 of the country's total exports, 2/3 of the total value of their stock market value and it's $25 billion in sales was nearly equal to their entire national budget (which probably put a nice dent in Finnish tax revenue when they started declining.  

I'm going to spend a little time researching to see if I can find any other country that is so reliant on a single private company as an engine of economic growth.  

I was talking with one of my younger brothers last night and told him I decided to buy some bitcoin.  We had a brief conversation about what bitcoin is and how it works and we got to the subject of mining.  He asked what that meant and I was stumped to come up with a concise answer.  One of my favorite parts about blogging is that is it a perfect place to start to hone your ideas about certain subjects and work on explaining them concisely, so here is my first attempt at describing mining to a layperson. 

1. Most of the currencies we're familiar with (the US dollar) are created by a central government who decides when to print more money.  That's not the case with bitcoin because it operates as a peer to peer network with no one central authority. 
2. The easiest way to describe mining is that any individual "miner" can use special software to solve complex math problems and are issued a certain number of bitcoins in exchange for their work, a reward of sorts.
3. This becomes a smart way to issue the currency and also creates incentive for people to mine.
4. What miners are doings is essentially approving bitcoin transaction, so more miners also means a more secure network.
5. The miners are approving a set of multiple bitcoin transactions occurring on the network and write them into a general ledger. This also ensures that the general ledger can never be tampered with.
6. The mining process is designed to become naturally more complex and resource intensive over time to limit the number of bitcoins that can be created.  Furthermore, as more people start mining it becomes much more difficult to solve the math problems because you're competing against more computers to solve the same problem.  
7. The process of mining is what keeps the bitcoin network stable, safe and secure.

I wrote a post about security a few days ago and I wanted to follow that up with an article I read today from The Washington Post.  It's a quick read but does a good job at humanizing the debate about digital security.  I can definitely appreciate Schmidt's comments about "breaking the internet" and have no problem believing that countries will at some point want to create their own version of the internet (some are already trying to do so).  Iran might eliminate Israel from any of the searches done from within their country, quite literally wiping them off the map or Russia and China might try to whitewash the internet and close it off completely from outsiders.

This obviously becomes difficult to do this as instant global communication services like Twitter continue to grow in users but it's naive to think that government's around the world are not already scheming up ways to create a closed internet.  

Mobile payments has been talked about for a few years now with nothing really coming to fruition, however a lot of people believe that Apple Pay might be the service that gets people on board. I have been reading a little bit about their new service since they announced it a month ago and I'm excited to see how it works.  Interestingly enough though I have also seen a number of other companies pop up claiming to be the "modern credit card."  Plastic Card,  Final, and Coin are three of them and of course you have the mysterious Clinkle that finally launched a product after a ton of bad press.  These companies are all making bets on people wanting to keep a physical credit/debit card on their persons as opposed to Apple who wants to eliminate the need to carry them all together.

The big question remains, are they solving that big of a problem?  I don't think that Coin and the like are really taking too huge of a leap forward, they're simply consolidating something that isn't a tremendous inconvenience anyways (multiple credit cards in one).  That's not to say that mobile payments systems have fared much better in recent years.  Is having to take a credit card out of your wallet really that troublesome?  For the time being I still have to carry a wallet on me to hold my driver license.  Does having to swipe my phone save me enough of a headache to make it exciting?  With each of these services I can see bits and pieces of technology that excites me but nothing that comes off as a game changer.  

Ultimately I think whoever wins will have to do one thing really well, security.  If someone can offer me a new way to make payments that is marginally more convenient and ascetically appealing but is an order of magnitude more secure that's exciting.  

I'm reading Zero To One right now and I guess I would ask if any of these services are taking us from 0 to 1 or are we simply moving from 1 to n?

I have spent a considerable amount of time reading about Bitcoin recently and have finally decided to buy some for myself.  There is nothing as frustrating to me as reading about a great new technology and not actually using it myself.  fortunately the cost has come down considerably in the past few days, presenting a perfect opportunity to get in the game.  

The two uses for the digital currency I have come across the most are speculating and transacting.  I will hold on to a small amount of Bitcoin for speculation purposes but what really excites me is the idea of Bitcoin as a medium of exchange.  As the number of online retailers that accepts Bitcoin continues to increase I'm anxious to understand how the technology works in practice.     

One of the most hotly debated policy topics in tech over the past year has revolved around digital privacy.  The central question, we are trying to answer, is, how much privacy are we as Americans entitled to?  I've always been a firm believer that in most debates the prudent or practical course of action is not usually found in any of the extreme positions people lobby for.  I apply that logic to most policy debates because when taking an extreme stance you are suggesting that your position is absolute and your side of the debate has a monopoly on knowledge.  An example would be the tax pledge Gover Norquist has been pushing for several years.  I dislike taxes just as much as the next guy but a politician cannot with a clear conscience commit to NEVER raising taxes while in office because they have no way of knowing what future events might unfold that require higher government revenue (WWIII).  

I don't believe our government should have access to our personal data without our consent, nor do I believe that with all of the people who want to harm our country and her citizens should we be entitled to absolute privacy. It is a delicate balancing act, but one which is vital to the security and prosperity of our country in the modern world.  I see much more downside risk to completely blocking the government out of our digital lives than there is upside potential in knowing that accessing that data is impossible.  The ongoing debate between the US government and the Apple's and Google's of the world is one of the most important of our generation and both sides have to recognize that Google's desire to keep our data private and the government's desire to protect her citizens are equally valid.

One of the lines in the sand for me would be court orders.  If access to your data is court ordered then companies who are hosting it should be compelled to hand it over.  If the encryption protocols don't allow access at that point then we are not only undermining our judicial system but are endangering the lives of those around us.  Terrorists, pedophiles, drug lords, rapists and kidnappers will all have a wall to hide behind if we as a society aren't willing to come to some sort of understanding on this issue.  I would liken it to the police having a warrant to search a person's car because there is compelling evidence that there is a dead body in the trunk, and the auto-manufacturer creating a trunk that is inaccessible to the appropriate authorities.