paul graham says “the best startup ideas initially look like bad ideas”

Pretty amazing when a “Startup Home Run King” says something like that!

Here are some good blog reads for the upcoming weekend

• Black Swan Farming « Paul Graham Paul Graham talks about how counterintuitive startup investing is. I quickly nodded in agreement with his first point that there are very few big winners, but his second point is “super interesting – “that the best ideas initially look like bad ideas”. Here it is verbatim. the full post is very interesting.
  

  The two most important things to understand about startup investing, as a business, are (1) that effectively all the returns are concentrated in a few big winners, and (2) that the best ideas look initially like bad ideas.

• Takeaways From The 100 Largest Public Companies « Elad Blog This is just so cool.
• stable and volatiles « rands in repose OMG. This is how engineering really works. Reminds me of an old Eric Ries post “engineering managers lament“
• How to Be a Grouch: A Vintage Sesame Street Guide to Grumpiness « Brain Pickings I loved this as a kid and … I still love it. The full book online.

UBC Customer Development Alumni — in Gangnam Style

The Sunberry Fitness Gangnam Style Fitness Classes in Richmond article made my day.

It also reminded that I should mention other projects that have continued after classes ended. Here are projects that past BAEN 502 / e@UBC students and supporters are working on.

Swiip released their Swiip ToDo app “for twenty-somethings” to the AppStore this week.

Namkis has been “Smiling and Scowling” all summer.

and supporter Contractually keeps working hard.

More Startup & Entrepreneurship Reading Lists

Here is a new “HowTo Startup” reading list that Tom Eisenmann has developed for his “Launching Tech Ventures” class at Harvard. The good news is that it is very comprehensive, the bad news is that it is very comprehensive. It is huge.

The headings are as follows:

• Lean Startup Concepts
  
• Business Model Analysis

• Product Management
• Customer Conversion Funnel Analysis/Optimization
• B2B Selling
• Public Relations
• Business Development
• Recruiting/Organizational Issues
  

More Lists

• Steve Blank’s Blog has an enormous list Books For Startups
• My very short list – I’ve tried to keep mine to must reads.

Gratitude

Thanks to @alanchiu for the pointer.

Must Read, Walter Isaacson Follows Up With Management Lessons of Steve Jobs @HBR

Walter Isaacson has a great summary of the management lessons he believes Steve Jobs has provided us “The Real Leadership Lessons of Steve Jobs” Here are all the main headings. Enjoy.

• Focus
• Simplify
• Take Responsibility End to End
• When Behind, Leapfrog
• Put Products Before Profits
• Don’t Be a Slave To Focus Groups
• Bend Reality
• Impute — I still don’t really know what this awkward word means
• Push for Perfection
• Tolerate Only “A” Players
• Engage Face-to-Face
• Know Both the Big Picture and the Details
• Combine the Humanities with the Sciences
• Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish

Compliments and More

A big “Thank You” to @aschmitt for pointing me to this great article. And at some point I need to post my review of Adam Lashinsky’s “Inside Apple”

Internet Traffic Growth down to ~45%/yr vs ~55%/yr » MINTS

Minnesota Internet Traffic Studies (MINTS) Nov 17, 2009 update says wireline Internet traffic growth is about 40-50% per year, down from its previous pace of 50-60% per year.

There is some info on wireless data traffic growing 100% per year. This is based on comments from Verizon, Cisco, and Chetan Sharma

Steve Jobs Photos » Fortune

Dave W sent me this link to a gallery of Steve Jobs photo’s over at Fortune mag. It brings back a lot of memories for me as a Mac User. My first experience with Jobs and Mac was back in high-school where I learned to program in basic on the Apple II.

Internet Traffic – Goog 6% & P2P Down to 18% – NYTimes.com

Very cool article at NY Times today on Internet Traffic titled Google Accounts for 6% of All Internet Traffic – NYTimes.com. Amazing how much Google accounts for. Also interesting is that P2P share dropped from a peak of 40%, a few years back, down to 18% today. It’s not that P2P declined in actual terms, it is that streaming video is the new and growing bandwidth hog.

Tip to Adam at Lifehacker for finding this.

How to Start!

Seth’s recent post

Nothing The only thing worse than starting something and failing… is not starting something.

is so simple and yet I just shook my head at the number of times I’ve needed that to be said to me.

I find that Carol Dweck’s Mindset ideas and strategies are a great way to ensure that we start projects and learn from them instead of starting projects and failing. Or worse “doing nothing”. Give her a read. It will make a difference.

Link | BRK 2008 Annual Letter » Fred Wilson

Fred assembles 11 bullet points from the BRK annual letter in this post The Berkshire Hathaway 2008 Annual Letter » A VC. I like number 7 – “Quants – “Beware of geeks bearing formulas.” It’s that γ (gamma) from this month’s wired again

I’m still trying to synthesize the Snowball. The biggest thing for me are the many descriptions of how Buffet works thru disasters like the Buffalo newspaper, Salomon, etc. It is amazing how many ugly situations are described. A big reminder that Buffet earned the wins. Investing and managing in “value-land” is very difficult.

Link | Netbooks » Wired

The March Wired article on netbooks is very interesting, too. I’ve always been a fan of having a small laptop.

I was a portege guy for a long time. I’ve been wondering about the usefulness of these small unix laptops for a few years. A couple summers ago I loaded xUbuntu on a 1999 vintage portege laptop to see how it would “feel”.

The end result was that it was just fine for all the stuff mentioned in this netbook article – email (thunderbird), websurfing (firefox), and writing text(vi & Abiword), etc. The only issue is that it takes forever to boot and it was pretty bad with for presentations of large pdf files. A 2009 netbook is much more powerful than a ’99 portege, so I’m strongly thinking that my next laptop is gonna be a netbook running Ubuntu