I want to tell you a little about Labmeeting.  I work at Labmeeting.  Actually, thinking about it, I have too much to say about Labmeeting.  I cannot tell you everything in one post.  I will tell you a little bit at a time as I think of cool things to talk about.  Let me tell you about our goals.

First, understand that science is broken.  Not in the traditional sense.  Science has not been speeding along the freeway and then suddenly tore a gasket and broke down.  No.  Science is puttering along reliably as it has for decades, centuries.  Exactly as it has been.  No faster.

Yes, scientists do an incredible job of being on the cutting edge of technology while simultaneously pushing that edge further and further.  Nevertheless, it takes between months and years to publish interesting results.  Labmates email cumbersome PDF’s back and forth.  Literature search tools frustrate even the most patient of users.  Conferences help disseminate knowledge quickly, but not when abstracts lose themselves amidst a shuffle of papers and when fellow scientists’ contact information evaporates. Publishers almost seem to try to restrict access to fulltext research articles, so much so that the government must force them to share knowledge.   Graduate students find professors and professors find grad students by pure luck, not by targeted searches.  Professors spend little time at the lab bench due to the skyscraper of paperwork required for modern research grants.

At Labmeeting, we are well on our way to solving all of these problems and many more.  Science operates best when people can develop good ideas securely and communicate good ideas rapidly.  We created a platform to do both like nobody has ever seen before.

Thousands of biomedical scientists, both at top US Universities and smaller ones around the world, already use and love Labmeeting.  We want to help all researchers communicate and work more efficiently so that they can focus on what they do best: science.

YCombinator, a kind of mini-venture capital firm, invests tens of thousands of dollars ($$$) into very early seed stage start-up companies run by smart technology hackers.  They wanted to fund me in Summer 2008.

I applied to YCombinator two times.  The first time, when I applied with my friend Mason for the Summer 2007 round,  I arrogantly presumed that Paul would lavish on us praise and beg us to fly to California to work with him.  I spent no more than an hour on the application.  We had no passion in the idea we presented.  Our projects list hinted at nothing particularly remarkable or unique.  Our analysis of the idea and our competitors delved only into the shallowest parts of a deep lagoon.

The second time, when I applied alone in Summer 2008, in an inspired moment I sat down in Starbucks for a solid few hours to work on the application.  I strived for excellence, not perfection.  A few months prior, I had briefly glimpsed the semi-successful application of Liz Jobson and Danielle Fong.  I recalled their deep detail and thoughtful writing, so I imitated that kind of deep analysis which shows off one’s mastery of logic and breadth of experience.

I wish I had known how to write a good application the first time.  So, taking my cue from Brian Lash’s recent question on Hacker News, I helped him out.  I write here a slightly expanded version to help out anybody else who wants Paul Graham & co. to fund his or her startup.

If I were to advise myself in 2007, I would recommend that I write briefly but write a lot.  This advice seems contradictory, but I mean it in a very specific way.  My first application, I kept brief.  I did not want to swamp YC with a tome of text. I saved many of my accomplishments for the interview.  Do not do this.  Write, write, and write some more.  Write everything interesting and unique about yourself.  If you have doubts about a statement you made about a competitor, qualify it.  Don’t vacillate, but at the same time don’t seem shallow, ignorant, and inexperienced.

Of course, once you’ve written all that, you have a very long application.  Now, take out filler words.  Compress ideas that take up two sentences when you can use just one. If you waste two words in a sentence, delete the whole sentence and write it again from scratch.  If you see a phrase that you think an investment banker might use on his resume, nuke it.  Achieve a high density.  In my experience, the YC crew truly pores over these applications to understand all of the meat of it.  They do not skim your application when it has rich content.  Cut, cut, and cut some more.

Now, step back and look at your application.  If you have very little writing left, real content, then you may not be the best fit for YCombinator this year.  That’s okay.  It’s good you know now.  Take this year off and work on some interesting, hard projects that nobody has done before.  Bounce your idea off of the smartest person you know.  Hell, micro-test the idea.  Then, repeat this process.

Step back, look at your tight list of accomplishments.  If it’s long, that’s great, since reading something long but rich in content everyone loves to do.  The length indicates strength.  In my limited experience, I think this is how I made my application successful.

Here’s some of my application below (I elided some less relevant parts). I was accepted for Summer ‘08 2008 but decided to pass this time for a variety of reasons.

—————————————-

What is your company going to make?

I’m open to anything. Here’s one idea:

————–

Have you ever scanned a document before? How was that experience?

It was terrible for me, too. Everyone I have ever asked has agreed that it is physically painful. But, there is a solution, one based on understanding actual human needs. What is wrong with the scanners of today?:

* slow (takes time to heat up)

* slow (scanning at a high dpi takes a long time)

* complicated (please select the dpi, now select bla, now bal[sic]…)

* cumbersome (files generated at high dpi are huge, slow down system)

* cumbersome (OCR’ing a document is a whole other rigamarole)

What do people really need?  Simply a decent, readable scan of the document. This should be as easy as holding the paper up to face the monitor.

Imagine that.

I propose that I sell a device which is basically just a decent-resolution CCD chip with a special lens which connects to a computer (wired at first, but v2 wireless). Scanning a document is as simple as holding the camera up to a document and clicking. In my tests, scanning a whole text books takes 5-10 minutes. This is a game-changer. I’ve worked with an ip lawyer to file the provisional patent on this and a few other aspects of the designs.

[BY THE WAY, IF ONE OF YOU WANTS TO HELP ME BUILD THIS, I'M ALL EARS. I'M AN AI HACKER NOT A HARDWARE HACKER. OH, BY THE WAY, I USED A DIFFERENT IDEA IN THE INTERVIEW ROUND, NOT THIS ONE SINCE I'M SKEPTICAL OF THE MARKET FOR THIS PRODUCT AT THIS POINT. NEVERTHELESS, IT'S VERY COOL. I WANT TO BUILD THIS FOR MYSELF!]

For each founder, please list: name, age, YC username, email address, personal url (if any), and current employer and title or school and major. List the main contact first. Separate founders with blank lines. Put an asterisk before the name of anyone not able to move to Boston June through August.

….. [Be sure to put your blog here. Don't have a blog? Make one. Blog about whatever is on your mind. Blog about your hacking.

To be honest, an Ivy League pedigree probably helped.  Also, my computer science degree (as opposed to Economics or Business one) probably encouraged YC's faith in me.]

Please tell us in one or two sentences about something impressive that each founder has built or achieved.

Looking at some things in ~/projects folder: ……..

[Here I mention a few of my projects, with links to open source code, web pages, anything I can publicly show. I didn't spend more than one or two sentences describing any one project, but I listed many of my most interesting projects and why I worked on them. YC likes to see you working on real problems, so I talked about problems I solved for myself and for others directly

They want to see that you think creatively and that you actually finish things.

It goes without saying that you should list projects which uniquely describe you.  Building a toy language in Programming Languages class many people probably do.  Yes, it may have taken you a long time, and you may have learned a lot, but you do not necessarily stand out.  Writing a CAPTCHA solver to hack Digg few people do or can do.]

Please tell us about the time you, ljlolel, most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage.

…… [I talked about my shotgun email to dozens of startups here in Silicon Valley which gave me the opportunity to meet a lot of cool entrepreneurs.  I'll probably blog about this at some point in the future.]

Please tell us about an interesting project, preferably outside of class or work, that two or more of you created together. Include urls if possible.

(see above) [I applied alone, so group projects inapplicable.]

How long have the founders known one another and how did you meet? Have any of the founders not met in person?

n/a [Again, I was a sole founder.]

What’s new about what you’re doing? What are people forced to do now because what you plan to make doesn’t exist yet?

(see above) Basically, nobody ever scans anything because it takes forever, doesn’t really do what you want (you just want a readable, small image and for the document to be searchable),

What do you understand about your business that other companies in it just don’t get?

Scanner manufacturers try to pack in the highest dpi they possibly can. They focus on resolution, when they should be focusing on the user experience. Speed is what they should optimize, but I see no scanner manufacturer doing that.

Who are your competitors, and who might become competitors? Who do you fear most?

HP, Xerox, etc, also ScanR, Qipit, Evernote …… [I go on to be brutally honest about the difficulty and vulnerability of my position as a hardware startup in a crowded field. Remember, you are writing for some very, very smart people. They want to see your analytical thinking skills here. They want to see you be realistic, not delusional.]

……. more questions, answer analytically deeply, answer honestly to the best of your ability ……

If you had any other ideas you considered applying with, feel free to list them. One may be something we’ve been waiting for.

…….. [I always think of new ideas and discuss them with friends. I chose 4 and listed them here. I crisply described each in no more than 2 brief sentences.]

I have already written about my distaste for advertising.

Sometimes, however, these newspapers and blogs manage to make something of value. A particularly hard-hitting expose in a newspaper, or a particularly helpful guide in a blog, offers to people real value. Nobody can create this kind of content every day, or probably even every week or month. A subscription subsidizing the page-filling fodder misallocates wealth. I want to pay for the value more directly, not indirectly through ads.

Or, more commonly, a blog post provides for me a little bit of value. Not $50/month in value, but perhaps 50 cents/month. No payment system can pass around payments like that easily for the user, especially without ridiculously large credit card fees. How can I tell Michael Arrington of TechCrunch that his site I find useful sometimes? Combined with the millions of others who find his site just a little bit useful, he can make some money directly from us.

Fortunately, I think TipJoy solves many of these problems. The site only launched a few months ago, so it has to grow quite a bit before it reaches a tipping point. Nevertheless, TipJoy designed their product beautifully.

Registration

First, for new users, creating an account takes a few seconds. Just click on the TipJoy button, write in your email, quickly create a password, and finish up. No credit cards required. A new user signs up by tipping, integrating the first-use with registration. Ingenious.

They follow a model that bar’s use where you can set up a tab and pay later. Readers get drunk tipping blogs here and there all around, running up a huge tab. Users only pay once the tab gets large enough to justify the credit card fees. Their model differs from the bar, of course: just like the tips themselves, paying the tab is optional. Nevertheless, through this system, TipJoy encourages people to sign up easily, and only over time pay off their tabs.

Tipping

Second, once signed in, tipping takes just one click. No annoying confirmation steps required. No complicated questions about how much you tip. You get one choice: 10 cents. Of course, you can tip more if you want. This encourages readers to tip generously around many sites across the web. The tab builds up invisibly behind the scenes.

When I first read about TipJoy, I knew that it, or a model very similar to it, would take over the web. I think it will take time. However, I will support this service by putting it up on my blog. Maybe, one day, I will write a post that many people find just a little bit useful, and I can finally monetize this blog .

Ads annoy me. Ads annoy everyone.

More importantly, I cannot envision building a serious business which depends on these kinds of banner ads, or even text-link ads. But many websites do: TechCrunch, Project Wedding, Reddit, MightyQuiz, Justin.TV, Scribd, Loopt, and so on.

I use many websites online every week. Many provide a lot of value to me, they help me do my job more quickly or help me live my life more easily. They offer me so much value, I would even pay to use them. Some of these services include Google, Amazon, GitHub, Bank of America, Kayak, Craigslist, and a number of blogs like Slashdot, XKCD, and so on.

Except for Google services and the content creators (the blogs), I pay directly for the value these websites give me, given how little the services cost. The smartest ones all do. Kayak, for example, makes money off of the airline and hotel referral fees, not ads.

Unfortunately, many startups think that Google’s AdWords will be their sole source of revenue for their website.

Weakness

But, advertisements as a business model suffer from a fundamental weakness: advertisements indirectly monetize a website. Sometimes, the indirect monetization means that you make more money. Often, it means you make less.

Imagine you make a technically amazing product on your site. Nothing else exists like it. I sign up, and I notice that you provide an incredible amount of value to me. I would be willing to pay a large monthly fee for that. Instead, though, you monetize the website through advertisements. I never click on the ads. I visit to your site to use your product, not to buy chainsaws. You make no money off of my use. Even if I clicked on a few ads, you still make less money than if I paid a monthly fee.

That doesn’t work. You get none of the pay off from the value you provide me, while simultaneously actively annoying me. Project Wedding offers a good example. I would use Project Wedding to review, for example, photographers and find the perfect photographer for my wedding. The Google Ads at the top for random photographers who happen to pay for the ads do not help me; they only confuse me. A referral fee model makes more sense, or preferably an even more creative never-before-seen model.

The Quintessential Advertising model

Now, for a few kinds of websites, advertising makes sense. When I’m looking for a chainsaw to buy, I google “chainsaw” to find results, but I also see “chainsaw” sponsored ads on the right. That makes perfect sense; it directly provides me value. Google search exemplifies a great use of advertising. As Google’s customer, you watch Google continually provide us a better, more targeted service. It is the Yellow Pages model.

The Common Advertising Model

Advertising does not make sense in most other models. It does not provide value any other way, but it does annoy me. Nevertheless, I would use advertising if I started a company that built one class of product: products that provide little to no value. Examples include most television programs (think “reality” TV) and online games. People spend time watching random television shows to waste time and not think. These provide little (negative?) value. You have absolutely no opportunity to get people to spend money on your silly time-wasting flash game. You can, however, put ads along the side. With this kind of advertising, you transform your customers from the people playing the games into the advertisers. The advertisers pay you to reach out to these game-players, at the expense of the already-void user experience. Advertisers pay more.

Most magazines, newspapers, and blogs also fall into this category. Reddit and Digg as well. Little to no (to negative) real value offered. Newspapers and magazines offer nominal subscription fees, not because they cover the cost of the reporting–it probably does not even cover the cost of the ink– but because advertisers demand that they know real circulation numbers. Advertisers assume that if you pay at least a little, you probably read it and look at the ads. Because content creators cannot extract enough money from you directly into paying for all of the reporting and server overhead, they resort to becoming the servants of advertisers. Digg now displays (or at least recently used to) very annoying flashing ads.

Make something useful

But if I want to create something that depends on this kind of advertising, why do I want to create it in the first place? Why do I want to make something that nobody values, that nobody finds useful? For me, I cannot do that. I want to make something great, not a time-waster.

The Stanford Technology Ventures Program runs a well-developed incubator for tech businesses at Stanford University.

STVP offers some very cool resources free to the world. For example, I have been listening to their Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders audio podcast. The program brings in some of the greatest entrepreneurial forces in Silicon Valley today. Some of the speakers include

• Ron Conway (angel investor extraordinaire: Google, Facebook, etc)
• Mike Maples (angel: Digg, etc)
• Carly Fiorina (ceo: HP)
• Larry Page and Eric Schmidt (founders: Google)
• John Doerr (venture capitalist: Kleiner Perkins)

and so on.

While I was listening to Mike Maples and Ron Conway give their talks about angel investing, I had trouble following along and knowing who was saying what. I had subscribed to the talks through iTunes. When I visited the site, I noticed that they published videos as well, but in a Flash format, and not available as a podcast. I followed the videos much more easily.

So, in accordance with their fair use license, I decided to scrape the video metadata, download the video files, transcode them into an iPod-acceptable format, and republish them in a simple video podcast format. I now have scores of these talks in my iPhone and on my Mac Mini to view at my leisure.

Now, you can download them to your iPod, too. Just subscribe through iTunes or any other podcatcher.

P.S. I’ve open-sourced the code (AGPLv3), in case you ever want to make a podcast yourself.

When someone searches for your name on Google, you don’t know what they might find. They might find an article or two in which you were featured, or they might find a random post you made to an open source project. Or, they might find someone else and not know he is not you. The scattered information evaporates and confounds your online persona. You have a blog, but it might not point to your LinkedIn account, or your home-made balancing robot video.

What I need to be able to do is manage my online identity easily. Moreover, I don’t want my data to be hostage to a single company. But, that’s exactly the opposite goal of a company like Facebook or Microsoft. Ideally, companies want to trap your data entirely on their platforms so that you must use their services, even as they become inferior due to lack of competition.

Now, a knowledgeable guy like me could set up, for example, his own identity server and RDF Friend-Of-A-Friend (FOAF) page. However, most people cannot, of course. Moreover, such an technical, intellectual exercise would seem to serve no purpose. FOAF has not the following of Facebook.

I propose a service which I would value today, even if I were the only person using it. It may even improve as more people use it. Am I proposing another social network? No.     Please, no. Facebook wouldn’t want you to link to your MySpace or LinkedIn accounts. No, Mark Zuckerberg want to be MySpace and LinkedIn. He even wants to be Windows.

I propose an elegant identity aggregator. You constantly create yourself and reveal yourself online. You want to make sure that people can see all that you created and all that you are. Additionally, you want to authoratatively say which sites are about you, so the imposters can stay hidden. You want this to be easy. You want this to be elegant. You want it to be open. You don’t want to sign up for another social network.

I envision a beautiful, simple way to aggregate all of your online personas onto a single page which summarizes and links to all of the others. Onto a single page, a single tile. Your tile shows small thumbnails and links to your Flickr photos, knows who you are on Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn, points out and highlights the best articles about your accomplishments.

It happens simply, you go to OneTile, tell it about your blog. Then, it intelligently searches for more about you. It guesses that you might be this user on Digg, and that user on Yahoo Answers. Eventually, it picks up enough information to create a personalized, flashy tile for you. The best content about you stands out, but it’s all reachable. Now, when someone searches your name, your tile comes up. It’s impressive, concise, and accurate. Plus, all the data you have collated is easily downloaded through RDF, not locked into OneTile.

As more and more people start using the service, it gains notoriety. I imagine a sea of tiles for everyone online. This is what I imagine the OneTile homepage could be:

It highlights the most fascinating tiles with the most interesting content. You can zoom in to have a closer look:

Slick animation zooms through the sea of tiles as you browse through people’s public online lives. Finally, you can choose one tile to examine closely.

When choosing a specific tile, one person’s tile, you can see their name and all the tiles that are theirs: their flickr pictures, their photo albums, their rss reader on the right, maybe some friends, links to social networks on the left, some research tiles in the middle.

Some people link to blogs when they mention their friends. I think OneTile would be more complete.

My friend Dan O’Shea sparked the idea for me. He described to me a similar vision, and I had this one. We might start building this soon. As I said, if I can make this nice, it would be useful for me myself. If I can help others, that’s just extra pasta.

I bought and held QID for a few weeks until the NASDAQ dropped. QID is a twice leveraged short of the NASDAQ. The NASDAQ was overpriced, I made an easy eleven percent.

But I want to ensure that I’m actually doing well, and that ostensible success is not due just to availability bias. I want to calculate my annualized rate of return. This is not trivial, though, because I added money to my Scottrade account three different times. I didn’t find anything which can help me solve my problem immediately, so I put together an Excel spreadsheet.

I learned a number of interesting things. First, my returns are very good. 24.7% annualized returns (including commissions and trading costs but sans taxes). I trade Apple, Google, Amazon, and some market ETF’s: QID, SPY, IWO. Here is a graph of my returns since I started investing in January 2006:

The bump there isn’t due to market swings or anything like that. My return stream is uncorrelated with the market. (Most of the time I am out of the market, and I have been short the market about as much as I have been long it.) I did so well at first, I got very cocky and started investing in Ford and AT&T, companies about which I know very little. Subtract out those two months of overzealousness, and my trades become both much higher and all positive (0 bad trades).

The Barclay Hedge Fund Index, http://barclayhedge.com/, notes that hedge funds have gained, year to date, 12.1% while I have gained, year to date, 29.2%.

I earned 50.4% since I started investing in January 2006. As a comparison, your bank probably gave you 1%. A money market could have tossed you 10%. A mutual fund might have left you 16%. The normal benchmark, the S&P 500, earned just 15%. In the same period, the NASDAQ earned just 17%. XLK, a tech sector index fund, earned only 25%. I note the tech sector because I’m more likely to invest in tech stocks since I know more about them. A blanket strategy of buying and holding technology stocks would not have created the returns that I have. My excess returns are alpha.

Not only are my excess returns alpha, I’m pretty sure that most or all of my returns (and moreso if you include making up for stupidity in buying Ford) are alpha. Each data point on the graph above is a trade. I’ve made fewer than a couple dozen trades in 22 months. Less than one a month. I held each one for a maximum of a couple of weeks, usually for a period of just 3 business days (enough time for my funds to settle.) That means that I am almost never exposed to the market, so I can’t have any beta. To factor out much of the beta I scooped up as I dip into trades, I have also been short the market, twice leveraged, for a few weeks. For the most part, these returns are pure alpha.

Now, I could have gotten much better returns by, for example, buying and holding Google, Amazon, and Apple. Google doubled, Amazon doubled, and Apple tripled in value. But, first, I am not that patient, and, second, holding the stocks would have left me open to lots of market beta (like the recent tech correction), and also the up and down swings of everyday rumblings. I prefer more consistent, less negative jumps. I don’t know when the next bubble is, or when the next bubble burst is, I just know when a stock will jump by 10% tomorrow.

Half of my trades have been fantastic moves (7%+). Almost the rest of the other half didn’t do much (+/- 2%). The only two non-trivial bad trades were during my cocky period and were disastrous. See a scatter plot of my trade returns below, the trades are plotted over time from left to right.

As you can see, there are clearly three clusters. The clusters are unbelievably well-defined and well-separated. It gives me the impression that I might be able to figure out, before I trade, if the trade will turn out to be a fantastic 7%+ trade, or a ho-hum +/- 2% trade. I continue to maintain that the bottom group is a fluke and that they will never happen again. What’s nice to see here is that I have consistently achieved fantastic trades at all times throughout the past two years. There is no lucky streak. Moreover, the only very bad trades are clustered around a time period when I specifically know I started investing unwisely. I’m surprised by the very, very low noise.

Another interesting note about the graph directly above is that I seem to be trending toward riskier investments, although this might just be my mind searching for patterns in random noise. If you look at the profitable cluster, it is trending up over time. I make higher returns for my good trades. This would be a good thing, except that my ho-hum cluster seems to trend down over time. This divergence implies I might be moving towards riskier trades and not just increasing skill at choosing better trades. Right now, when I am wrong about a trade, it usually just does nothing around 0, but I wouldn’t want to take a slight negative penalty every time. I’ll have to watch out for that and study my trades more.

I would calculate a Sharpe ratio or information ratio for my returns, but that would be inappropriate. To do so would be a rape of statistics. My returns are definitely not normally distributed. The distribution of returns for my trades are two-humped and highly left-skewed. You can clearly tell from the histogram below:

Frankly, it would make no sense to measure my returns over risk, since my risk is nearly entirely on the upside. Moreover, return over risk when risk is all upside would penalize me for having even more positive returns.

Now that I see how my trades stack up, I’m convinced that my returns are real and due to skill. The results are so clear that I don’t even have to run any statistical tests. I can improve, however. Warren Buffet thinks he can earn 50% annually if he had less than a million dollars. I think that’s right. I was sliding 50% annually for the first 10 months until I screwed up. I violated Warren Buffet’s first rule: don’t lose money. I also violated his second rule: don’t lose money. There are a few ways for me to make more money:

First, I can see how to identify the better trades in the ways I described above by analyzing the best ones. Second, I can open a margin account to double my returns or just so that I don’t have to wait until funds settle so I can take my money in and out faster. Finally, I will open a Roth-IRA to take care of those pesky taxes.

I am reading Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 again. It’s hilarious. As I read through Yossarian’s attention-deficit narrative, I can hear his dry, serious voice, “They’re trying to kill me.” I can see the insane soldiers scurrying through abrupt transitions. I can imagine hilarious shorts made from each chapter of the book.

Traditional media companies like CBS are confounded by online video. They don’t know how to make money with it, or at least they didn’t a year ago. They seem to be on the right track now, posting their television shows online. But that is just a start.

As television loses its prominence, IPTV, internet television, all on demand, will be the prominent medium. With every new format comes a new art. Movies require people to go out to the theatre (or wait on a DVD from Netflix) and sit down in front of a large screen for a couple of hours. The kinds of stories you can tell in a movie are different. The Godfather would not have played out the same on television. The Simpson’s doesn’t necessarily lend itself to being a good movie. Movies compact their character development into key scenes building up to a single climax. Television shows extend character development over months and years, with regular climaxes in each episode.

Internet video is very different. People online want information fast. YouTube videos are often just a few minutes in length. The only videos longer which are seen at all are clips which were shown on television: South Park, Colbert Report, presidential debates. I think the videos can be longer on television because of social effects. I can watch House knowing that I can relate to many others who watch House on FOX. If I watch a random video on YouTube, I don’t want to invest half an hour into something not entertaining that nobody else will watch. I might be willing to spend a couple of minutes for a quick entertainment snack.

Which gets me back to my idea. Movie producers constantly try to make quick money by adapting books to the silver screen (see Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, The Chronicles of Narnia, and so on). But creating a screenplay usually demands that the screenwriter emasculate the book of much of its meaning. The movie format is far too compact. That’s why many recent book adaptions often exceed 120 even 150 minutes in length filled with action and dialogue, while pure movies are often just 90 minutes long.

I think books can easily be adapted not for the silver screen but for the computer screen. They would play out well. Each chapter can be an episode, just 5-10 minutes long. Or shorter. The Internet does not have the limitation of television in forcing the writers to extend or contract episode plots to a specific 23 minute time slot. Each chapter can naturally fill its vessel. Moreover, book chapters are inherently self-contained stories. Many books often end chapters with cliff-hangers. Cliff-hangers like those in The Giver would make me want to wait eagerly for next week’s show. Most TV shows don’t do that for me. IPTV book adaptation can be straightforward, cheap, simple, and much more faithful to the original than movies.

Catch-22 and Harry Potter each have about 40 chapters. A producer can release one chapter-episode each week for nearly a year. At 10 minutes each, that’s 400 minutes of content for the book. One year of a half-hour television show might yield a little more than that if you subtract out advertising. Typical movies are between 90-120 minutes, longer ones might be 150 minutes. An IPTV book show would be able to delve much deeper into the book than the movie with all that extra time. Why not put books on TV? It’s far too difficult to adapt the book to make an interesting show precisely every 30 or 60 minutes. Books aren’t so periodic: there are short chapters and there are long chapters. Only on-demand Internet episodes can handle this new format requirement.

I would love to watch Catch-22. Many other books, like all of Michael Crichton books, similarly would require little editing of the source material to make an entertaining show. The artform is new, and needs to be perfected, but I think it can be done. Robert Rodriguez faithfully kept to the source material for Sin City, and made a good movie. That fit well into a movie because comic books have less depth. Books need a different video adaptation medium.

I would love to make this video version of Catch-22. I would need some people to help me. I would love to learn how to direct and edit video. I imagine it’s incredibly difficult to turn ideas into good-quality video. I have no misconceptions that it would be easy. I do think it would be fun.

From a NextJump survey:
“”"
12. Visualize a rosy scenario where the company you are working for goes through a wildly profitable public offering, and you personally make enough money from your equity share to enjoy lifetime financial independence. Freed from the need to hold down a job just to meet the financial obligations of your chosen lifestyle, what would you do with your time and money?
“”"

That’s kind of a frightening question. For a lot of people I know, their sole goal is to become fantastically wealthy. That dream is so far away, they don’t even think of considering what they would do with the money once they have it. They don’t even realize that they desire money as merely a means to an end.

I like Tim Ferriss’s example. He asked his friend, what will you do after years of toil at your investment bank, after making millions as a vice president working eighty-hour weeks? His friend answered, I’ll finally get to take a long vacation riding a motorcycle through Thailand. Tim just chuckled, telling him, he can do that right now and for a lot less than a million dollars.

I’ve always wanted to get money to achieve my ends. Now, I’m just looking for my ends. As I do what I like, as I do good work, I’ll just get paid enough (or much more than enough) for it. I know that money, more money than I’ll ever need, will simply follow.

Never go for the 1% or 2% or even 10% improvements. Although these improvements require time and effort to achieve and maintain, these small gains are tiny, often imperceptible, to a person.

No, I say waste no effort even considering any kind of cost-benefit exchange. Ignore these small fruit within your grasp. You will be picking berries all your life because it is easy, because you can see the nearby goal. Instead, spend a little more effort looking for and finding the watermelons. The larger goal might take more creativity to achieve and the end may not easily be in sight, but in the end you spend orders of magnitude less time and effort. Much more importantly, you employ your natural human faculties to create. You enjoy imagining and innovating much more than the tedious and repetitive.

Unfortunately, the world focuses on picking berries. Although we naturally love to reason and think and be creative, for some reason, we also love to accumulate the small improvements. I think the quick satisfaction and low chance of failure cause us to avoid a much more fruitful but less clear end. Established companies depend on squeezing out small improvements in efficiency, at the cost of quality and employee morale. These big companies grew large due to a several order of magnitude innovation, but, now large, the executives do not want to risk innovation. They prefer to squeeze out whatever profit they can from their established product until the company smothers itself under its own morass of details.

Even in your day to day tasks, you focus on small details which seem significant. They, however, pale in comparison to real efforts you can contribute to create orders of magnitudes of improvement. Environmentalism is a great example. Some people go through great pains to recycle what is left after consuming something. But what if they don’t consume it in the first place? Would their life be materially more unhappy? Not at all by any scientific survey. Not at all by any experiment I have done. In fact, if you really sit down to think about it, the next thing you buy you almost definitely do not need and you probably don’t actually want. It just takes effort to go out and buy, to store, to maintain, to consume, and to dispose of. Sometimes it makes you feel guilty (e.g. many snack foods). What actually affects you most is who you are with and how you think about life, others, and yourself. Changing your thinking brings orders of magnitude of change. Buying more baubles does nothing.

People often hate their jobs because they pick berries. At a career fair the other day, I overheard many students asking the recruiters what kind of work they would be doing, will I be “creating new models” or something else? No matter what job you have, in whatever industry, in a large company you will be making small improvements to the existing process. Thats why they hire you and others. The guys at the top found the berries, and they are hiring you to pick them. It doesn’t matter if you are in the research department or if you are the manager of trading. If you are lucky, your job is minimally creative.

But that does not have to be the case. I think it’s possible to move away from this model. The company just needs to make a solid commitment to not make small improvements. All changes, all work, should not only be quantifiable, but easily qualitatively perceptible in value to the outside world. Demand that no efficiency improve things by less than an order of magnitude. Let’s define an order of magnitude as doubling, twice the original. So, ten times better would be a little more than 3 orders magnitude (2^3). A thousand-fold improvement is 10 OM’s. There are few 10 OM in reach but many 3 OM changes.

So, don’t figure out how to improve department communication by 10%. Figure out how to eliminate the 90% of the communications, documentation, and emails which are not only useless but also suffocating. A strong 10 OM improvement.

Usually, these major improvements are so large and fundamentally revolutionary, the improvements are barely measurable:

Don’t increase staff by 50% so you can have more people indexing the Internet by hand. Instead, build an automated search engine that intelligently uses links already online to figure out which web pages are the best. Immeasurable improvement that actually scales.

Don’t stick a slightly faster computer chip and more RAM into your video game system. Instead, design a completely different game controller which couples motion and your whole body tightly with the game. Qualitatively improve the way people experience and invest themselves in your games.

The orders of magnitude improvements are always there. You can always find them, as long as you do not occupy any of your time with the small ones.

I want to do some work for someone else. Even if I work on just one project in a month, just a few hours, I would love to make just a little bit of money to pay for my food.

While I would be able to do any job very well, I think I can uniquely offer my programming skills. I want to think about, implement, and perfect complicated solutions for people.

PHP web programmers are a dime a dozen, especially outside the US. They can crank out generic, dumb solutions. I want to create programs that others cannot make with traditional programming techniques. I want to leverage my knowledge of Artificial Intelligence algorithms to save people tens of thousands of dollars, to do things that would take far too long and be far too expensive to hire people to do.

I made a website, Ivycall, to describe what I want to do, and how I will do it. Now, I need to talk to people with whom I have worked in the past. I can help them. They can help me. I just need to work up the courage to actually call people. I should have called on Monday. I will make talking to people my only task for tomorrow. I hope that I can muster the strength to do it. Of what am I afraid?

I should stop writing I as much as I have.

I think Investment Banks do some good things for the world. I disagree with how they sometimes view the world and interact with people. They can become dishonest and empty.

I received the e-mail below from JP Morgan today. It’s a standard invitation to apply to one of their leadership programs. I’m probably on some big list of theirs. This is all fine, except that this recruitment manager claimed she “wanted to personally tell” me about the program. This is a lie to feign sincerity. There is nothing personal about this message.

There are several telling clues. First and very obviously, I’m not in the To: line. In fact, there is no To: line. That’s because this manager probably BCC’ed a huge list of students. The point of BCC is to not let the recipients know to whom else the message was sent. She wants to hide the massive number of people she personally invited. In a personal e-mail, you would never BCC the recipient.

Second, it doesn’t say Hi Joseph, Hi Mr. Perla, Hi Joseph, or any variant thereof. It’s the generic “Hi” you use when addressing a large group. Adding my name would have been pretty easy, but it seems she didn’t even take the trouble of this modicum of effort.

Finally (fixing this would be really putting forth extra care), the body of the message says nothing specific to me. Nothing about my major, nothing about my interests. I’m glad she looks forward to seeing me on campus, but I’ve never met her. In fact, she wrongly assumes that I could be having a good semester (I’m taking the year off).

Now, maybe I-Bankers have a different definition of “personally”. Maybe, I-Bankers define personally inviting someone as mass-mailing an indefinitely large group a short generic message plus an attachment from their own Outlook. “I used Outlook myself on my computer. I didn’t have my secretary do it: it’s personalized.”

Personally, I have a problem with that definition.

———————————————————
from: [employee]@jpmorgan.com”
date: Sep 24, 2007 11:06 AM
subject: JPMorgan Launching Leaders Scholarship. Apply by November 15th

Hi,
I wanted to personally tell you about JPMorgan’s Launching Leaders scholarship. The details are in the flyer attached below. Please feel free to share this with your friends. For more information and to apply go to jpmorgan.com/launchingleaders. Hope you are having a good semester. Looking forward to seeing you on campus soon.

Best,
[employee]
———————————————————

I disagree that if you try to perfect your product, you will necessarily succeed. In fact, I contend that you will necessarily fail.

Perfection is impossible. You will never achieve it. Your startup can get 90% of the way there with just a little effort. To get that last 10%, to be close enough to caress perfection, would take orders of magnitude more work. You never launch.

Take the example of designing your homepage. It is incredibly complex and dynamic, with dozens if not hundreds of individual components. Of course, it is also the most important page of your entire site. Now, consider just one tiny aspect of designing this page: where to align the text. You end up spending hours deciding how many pixels from the left side of the screen your text should start. Yes, there is a perfect distance. You can make focus groups and do scientifically-rigorous experiments, then ask a consultant to run all the data you collected through a quadratic optimizer. Or, you can ask the guy next to you if it’s ugly or not. Saves you money, save you time, and you can actually get the valuable part to the end-user.

Better yet, at regular intervals, just run through a quick usability test with someone, anybody. Sit next to them, and ask them to find some information. If she hesitates, then you found an important problem. If she finds it quickly, then congratulations! Your site is ten times better than nine out of ten sites online. If she says that the orange on your hompage should be just a little more red, then you need a different tester. Color, spacing, width, etc are not important. They are means to an end. Don’t spend time measuring and testing and perfecting the means. Spend your time excelling at the ends.

Ferrari is a great brand. But it also doesn’t make the kind of money that Google makes. They only make any amount of money because they are an old company, and because they advertise to people that they spend a lot of time “perfecting” their engines. I’d still bet Toyota engines last longer. Sure, Ferraris can accelerate faster and have a higher top speed, but a lot Ferrari owners don’t race and instead just buy the cars for their cachet.

So, I can probably create a car company overnight which would have as much or more cachet, but without the wasted effort in trying to “perfect” design. All I have to do is take a Toyota, put a slightly different frame on it (Lotus?), and perhaps stud it with diamonds and layer solid gold on everything. Instantaneous excellence. On top of everything, I’d probably also make more money than Ferrari.

When Apple started to sell the iPod a few years ago, they faced a large uphill battle. Apple’s device held less music than other mp3 players, had fewer features, was large and bulky (cf. current iPods), priced itself too high, and came late to the game. Other companies had already established themselves in the industry. Creative was a leader in mp3 players and Sony still had brand strength from the Walkman.

I think a key feature in the initial branding, growth, and success of the iPod was its distinctive white headphones. Before Apple, most music headphones were black, presumably to blend in. Ask any magician, she will tell you that black is invisible to the human eye. Therein lies the iPod’s brilliance.

Usually, a music enthusiast hides his small music player in his pockets while walking around. The only visible signs that he is listening to an mp3 player or other device are the headphones. By making iPod headphones distinctively white, Apple made sure that everyone around the music enthusiast knew that he had spent big bucks on a premium device from Apple. The white head phones immediately stand out, unlike the black headphones which people overlook. Even if an onlooker were to notice the black headphones, the headphones could have been plugged in to any mp3 player, cd player, or even Sony Walkman tape player.

The white headphones stood as symbols of buying a premium device. They also served to indicate the growing popularity of the device. At first, one would only notice a few headphones and one may ask about the iPod in passing. Later, as one saw that an ever growing number of people peacocked white headphones, one wanted to buy this apparently very popular device even more. Now, Apple owns the color.

We could all learn a lesson from this brilliance, whether Apple did this purposefully or accidentally. Try to make something distinctive. You don’t have to ask your customers to shout your company’s name and product at all of their friends. You don’t have to ask them to put your company’s logo in loud letters on their shirts and pants. You can brand with just a simple, barely perceptible icon and a unique association.

Eventually.

I will be posting informative articles about how to start a business over the next few weeks. They will be tagged “Entrepreneurship”.