Peter Day Interview With Reid Hoffman on The Startup of You

Recently I listened to Peter Day from the BBC's GlobalBiz radio program interview Reid Hoffman (Linkedin), the co-author of "The Startup of You". Here are my notes.

You are the CEO of your own business. There is a tool-kit that CEO's use - (i) knowing how a service works; (ii) how do you build out the next generation of product; (iii) figuring out how to navigate the media world; This tool-kit is equally applicable to the individual. We should remember that we are always a work-in-progress and retain a 'beta' mindset (always in development, always changing, always investigating) - you just get on with something sometimes before it's perfect. Part of living in the modern world is that you have to constantly invest in yourself. Watch out for the threat of early success - keep remembering the need to 'learn again' in order to keep ahead of the field.

Peter Day asked if it is true that 'only the paranoid survive' quoting the book by Andy Grove and Reid Hoffman agreed and said that one has to learn to expect change rather than stability as the metronome and that we need to factor it into our strategy. He advised on the benefits of talking to other smart people and taking small experimental risks. Peter Day went back to Andy Grove's book and said that just when everything in the garden is lovely and everything is just right that is just the time when disaster strikes.

"But does it really apply to me personally as well as an entrepreneur?" asked Day.
Reid: "I think so for several reasons because I think that the intense wins of globalisation and technology disruption massively affect industry and organisations and the question comes down to 'Do organisations adapt?'". If an organisation doesn't adapt then the individual needs to be adapting themselves because if the organisation has layoffs - how do you continue your career? The second thing is the way the organisation adapt really only happens if they have adaptable people working in the organisation. People who are paying attention to these kind of changes and are thinking about it: "How do you learn more? How do you adapt more? How do you take risks? How do you invest in yourself? So I think this mindset is key not just to folks who obviously start companies but anyone who does any job".
To hear the full program - listen to the podcast.

Disparate Views on the internet music model

On the 4th of January Forbes published Steven Bertoni's 5-page article about Spotify’s Daniel Ek giving the impression that, despite the financial downturn, the music biz and the new-media tech companies had finally consummated the marriage.

Shortly after finishing the article I remembered the "Information is Beautiful" graphic that showed/compared various revenues of music indicating that with Spotify the artist would receive $0.00029 per stream. This image is based on an excellent post at The Cynical Musician called The Paradise That Should Have Been about pitiful digital royalties. The conversation about the music business and the models at the bottom of the page on Information is Beautiful is interesting because it has continued since the original post  and participants are both music creators and music appreciators.

I do not know whether it is by design or coincidence but the Forbes article appeared on the 4th Jan and on the 6th January The Cynical Musician published an up to the minute update on Spotify called 'A Realistic Look at Spotfiy and Streaming' in which he revisits the subject and does some more factual in-depth analysis and concludes in a slightly less than his usual cynical way. I found the article informative and well presented and Faza has unusually opened it up to share in order to continue and develop the ongoing conversation.

full marks for ingenuity to the Polish Postman

A friend of mine from England sent me a Christmas card and left out two items of essential information: the addressee and the house number. All the postman from Poczta Polska had to go on was that it was for someone in my street and it came from England. Full credit to him for initiative - he put 2 and 2 together and got cztery (4).

Dynamic Random Access Memory as a possible replacement for Hard Disks

Dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) stores each bit of data in a separate capacitor within an integrated circuit. It is structurally simple (only one transistor and a capacitor are required per bit) allowing DRAM to reach very high densities. The transistors and capacitors used are extremely small; billions can fit on a single memory chip. However, the memory is volatile and data is lost when power is removed.

There is a a research group at Stanford University who say the goal should be to replace hard disks with DRAM. RAMcloud is a general-purpose storage system where all data lives in DRAM at all times and large-scale systems are created by aggregating the main memories of thousands of commodity servers. RAMCloud provides durable and available DRAM-based storage for the same cost as volatile caches, and it offers performance 10-100x faster than existing storage systems. By combining low latency and large scale, RAMCloud will enable a new class of applications that manipulate large datasets more intensively than has ever been possible.

With increaed throughput (1m ops/sec/server) and low latency access the implication is that we will see a new class of applications that operate large scale using very large datasets. Possible applications are: 

• crowd level collaboration;
• large scale graph algorithms;
• real-time information intensive applications
• applications using open linked data 

There are a number of issues that are being addressed by the research group including durability and availability, the right data model, concurrency and consistency and keeping up to date on the progress will be extremely prudent.

A useful introductory lecture by John Ousterhout is Professor (Research) of Computer Science at Stanford University can be watched here.

open source cloud and note about company naming

An interesting article by John Greathouse about Marten Mickos, CEO of Eucalyptus Systems discusses the open source approach to cloud computing. Mickos used to be CEO of MySQL and he has a pragmatic approach to open source cloud and being in the business of providing a software platform for private cloud explains how the employment of a hybrid clouds can cater for unpredictable and variable workloads. In the video interview Mickos explains Eucalyptus Systems value proposition. They enable companies to run within their own firewall a cloud that is exactly like the public cloud, so it can be used for 'in-house' and hybrid situations.

The article goes in depth over two pages including a video interview and when I reached the end, I realised that there was some guidance from Mickos about company naming which neatly adds a contemporary twist to my previous blog about product naming. He offers some grounded advice for emerging entrepreneurs interested in starting a venture within the cloud ecosystem. Like most rapidly growing tech sectors, cloud computing has experienced its share of hype and hyperbole. Marten cautions entrepreneurs to avoid being lost in the current cloud mania, “If you are going to build a really successful company in the cloud (space), you should not give it a name with cloud in the name or some Latin name of clouds. Over time…there are too many companies that have similar names and it gets confusing. To name your company after the industry you are in…can turn into a banality and it doesn’t give the right impression. Find some other name than cloud something." The full article can be read on this page.

revealing truth about testing techniques

Anyone involved in getting projects live whether via Agile or Waterfall will be acutely aware of the importance of the testing phases. Kevin Burke wrote a very interesting article looking at testing techniques called "Why code review beats testing: evidence from decades of programming research" and concludes: If you want to ship high quality code, you should invest in more than one of formal code review, design inspection, testing, and quality assurance. Testing catches fewer bugs per hour than human inspection of code, but it might be catching different types of bugs. You should definitely try to measure where you are finding bugs in your code and the percentage of bugs you are catching before release – 85% is poor, and 99% is exceptional. If you are involved in this type of project work then I recommend it as essential reading. #software #testing #bug #coding

Collective Learning #Change11

The examples of collective learning by Allison Littlejohn from Caledonian Academy in her blog 'collective learning examples' which is week 4 of the Change11 MOOC draw primarily from industry. The first example is that of large companies like Amazon, Boeing, IBM, P&G and Merck which have been crowdsourcing ideas to foster innovation.

Some ideas come through proprietary channels and networks such as licensing, outsourcing, and joint ventures, but a large part come through open and amorphous social networks. The results have been very positive and produced breakthrough innovations for industry, health and the environment.

Having been a participant in a similar information jam (although it had more of a survey feel) I wanted to also express a frustration that can grow as a result of taking part. If ones idea is not one which is replicated by a fair number of other people then it is dismissed or not used. One may express oneself a number of times via an infojam or survey and if the ideas or submissions repeatedly come to nothing then the participant reaches a point where they feel there is no point in contributing. The same opinion I quite often hear about voting: 'there is no point to vote for a minority party because they will never get into power'. It maybe that part of the process involves reassuring those who take part that their contribution has value. This can be seen more clearly in he opening anecdote of The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki which relates Francis Galton's surprise that the crowd at a county fair accurately guessed the weight of an ox when their individual guesses were averaged (the average was closer to the ox's true butchered weight than the estimates of most crowd members, and also closer than any of the separate estimates made by cattle experts). The data was of a numerical value and in this case every guess had a value because it had an influence on the final average. The case is not the same for opinions and ideas.