May 2012
31 posts
jericsinger:
Things that lead to froth:
Celebrity angel investors
Pseudo-celebrity institutional investors
“Sure thing” incubators
A compelling narrative for why this time is different
Ready tales of overnight success
Things that lead to bubbles:
Hidden correlations
Rapid deregulation
A large, opaque, and poorly understood asset class
Human nature
$$$
“I can see that lack of resolution now as a young writer’s move. You find that...”
– Franzen
“A page was enough, by then. If you read the biographies of people who have...”
– Franzen
“So right around the beginning of the nineties I suddenly had three male writer...”
– Franzen
“I just suddenly saw it. I suddenly made the connection between my needs as a...”
– Franzen
“INTERVIEWER
You’ve said you were writing eight hours a day.
FRANZEN
I could...”
– Franzen
“And people, creative, industrious people, will be able to get their products to...”
– Larry Ellison
“If you can improve the wealth in China, if you can increase the wealth in...”
– Larry Ellison in 1995
“INTERVIEWER
Did you devise another kind of program for yourselves? Did you go...”
– Franzen
“I understand better how much of writing a novel is about self-examination,...”
– Jonathan Franzen
“INTERVIEWER
Do you ever find critics useful?
GORDIMER
Yes, but you must...”
– Nadine Gordimer in the Paris Review
“The most vital lesson [Reid has] learned from 22 years working at record...”
– L.A. Reid
Sina Weibo updates its "Community Conventions" →
dbreunig:
Of special note is article 13:
Article 13: Users have the right to publish information, but may not publish any information that:
Opposes the basic principles established by the constitution
Harms the unity, sovereignty, or territorial integrity of the nation
Reveals national secrets, endangers national security, or threatens the the honor or interests of the nation
...
“Now it’s true that by structuring the company as a kind of personal...”
– aws meets corporate governance
“DA: You mentioned your vision of where the PC will be on every desk and in every...”
– Bill Gates, 1993, talking about the future.
“Now electronic mail has been a huge phenomena for us. And it keeps a little bit...”
– Bill Gates, circa 1993
“The problem that we have in this country is that the customers went away. The...”
– i don’t agree with most of this statement about public schools in the united states.
“SJ: The computer industry is at a very critical juncture where those people are...”
– Steve Jobs in 1995. how times have changed.
“And remember that Facebook was developed at the tail-end of the PC era. As the...”
– The FT’s Lex takes a look at Facebook
“But we made a mistake which was to try to follow the same formula we did at...”
– Steve Jobs on NeXT, which was founded in 1986 (!)
“We’re not satisfied based on the accomplishment of the last thirty years....”
– Steve Jobs. (take that, founder’s fund/stagnationists/present-exceptionalism-ers!)
“I certainly think that having some dimension, when you’re young, that you...”
– Bill Gates on education
“.. the new concept we’re really trying to apply here—and a lot of...”
– Marc Andreessen
“Think of each website as an application, and every single click, every single...”
– Read the 1995 Smithsonian Oral History interview with Marc Andreessen and then the recent Wired interview back-to-back. This quote is from only one interview, but it feels equally true for both.
April 2012
47 posts
“You’d actually build this thing yourself. I would say that this gave one...”
– Steve Jobs in the Smithsonian Oral and Video Histories series
“There’s an education bubble, which is, like the others, psychosocial. There’s a...”
– i don’t always agree with Peter but he’s spot on about education
A Conversation with Peter Thiel - The American Interest Magazine (via pegobry)
Design studio marketing
MARKETING
Most clients, when they hire a design studio, take the attitude that the studio is lucky to work with them, that they selected them from a plentiful pool of design companies bidding on their business. To many clients, design studios are, in a sense, interchangeable. So if you don’t want to do something the client’s way, if you don’t want to let them integrate their staff on your team or...
“Companies die from not being eaten by their competitors, but from self-inflicted...”
– Drew Houston, Dropbox (via sequoiacapital)
hm .. shiny objects.
Wililam Gibson on visions of the future
INTERVIEWER Why did you set the novel in the aftermath of a war? GIBSON In 1981, it was pretty much every intelligent person’s assumption that on any given day the world could end horribly and pretty well permanently. There was this vast, all-consuming, taken-for-granted, even boring end-of-the-world anxiety that had been around since I was a little kid. So one of the things I wanted to do with Neuromancer was to write a novel in which the world didn’t end in a nuclear war.
“But the simplest and most radical thing that Ridley Scott did in Blade Runner...”
– William Gibson in his Paris Review interview
“And your own perception of yourself is always going to be very different....”
– Seamus Heaney