Greek Complexity

Great article! Why to Not Not Start a Startup, writes Paul Graham. Great read for anyone that earns a living, not just for entrepreneurs. Couple quotes:

If you're too inexperienced to start a startup, what you should do is start one.

and

To almost everyone except criminals, it seems an axiom that if you need money, you should get a job. Actually this tradition is not much more than a hundred years old. Before that, the default way to make a living was by farming. It's a bad plan to treat something only a hundred years old as an axiom.

Expressed unexpectedly like that, it does set one thinking.

Golden Eras

A friend posted an interesting thought on his Facebook page a few days ago that I thought I'd share:

People talk about Golden era of this and that being 50+ years ago and wish they were there. I wonder what are we in the golden era of now?

Someone responded:

We are in the golden era of tech n biotech innovation!

To which my friend pointed out:

I don't know - its not like we sit in awe of the next technological or biotech innovation - much like years ago when flying was a super exciting event or when everyone gathered to watch the space launch. These days people couldn't even care less about the space shuttle launches!

Someone else then added:

The only thing which gets people as excited as you say nowadays is soccer in Europe and S.America, Superbowl for N. America, Cricket for Indians and Chinese New Year for the Chinese, the movie Titanic in 1997 and iPhone, iPods, X-Box, playstations and Harry Porter in general..... Some Hollywood and some bollywood movies also tend to make people queue overnight for tickets.....
So you can say we are in the Golden age of culture and sports....
May be we live in the Golden age of metro-sexuality, bi-sexuality, transsexuality......

You have a very valid question... but the answer to it is that we live in the Golden age of "something" that only the future generation may refer to as "Golden" and for us is just plain everyday "bull-s**t" :-)

And then I piped in with:

I think there are no more golden eras left. Things move too fast for that and like [the guy above] points out, there isn't one thing that rivets the world... very little homogeneity. It's like a comment I read once made by a film critic or gossip columnist or something. Went something like- in the Golden Age of Hollywood, we had Stars, but today we only have celebrities.

Maybe if someone looked back a thousand years from now at the scale of a few hundred years, they'd find a Golden Age of something. Innovation? Creativity? The spread of the rule of law? The emergence of intelligence at the level of our entire species (as opposed to individuals or groups of individuals) enabled by boring stuff like better education but also by better tech? Overt religiousness? The rise of Big Oil? Ok, just kidding about that last one!

What do you think?

Pragmatic vegetarianism

Interesting article. JG is Jeff Goldberg, a journalist with The Atlantic. JF is Jonathan Safran Foer, a writer who recently published the book Eating Animals. 

Would normally have just stuck this on my radar feed but I thought I'd bung in a quote:

JG: When I was a vegetarian, the first thing I would cut out was mammals, because I figured that mammals are the closest species to me. Birds are more distant and fish are still more distant, but you argue very strongly that beef is actually the most humane thing to eat. Do you differentiate at all, on a moral scale, between eating mammals and eating birds and eating fish?

JF: Another way to think about this is how different does an animal have to be for us to simply regard it as a living thing. And I think this kind of dichotomous way of framing this - it does a real disservice to the conversation. Even the word 'vegetarian.' You were talking about cutting things out of your diet, instead of cutting down. There are an awful lot of people who care about this stuff and for reasons good or bad, just can't envision becoming vegetarian. So what do we do with that? Do we throw our hands up in air and say that since I'm not going to be perfect about this I'm completely off the hook. They will say, `I was a vegetarian for six years and I found myself at an airport and I was shaking from hunger so I ate some McNuggets and that was the end of my vegetarianism. It's just such a bizarre way of thinking about it.

I care about the environment, I try to buy good appliances, I certainly turn the lights off when I leave rooms, and so on and so forth, and yet I also fly. So should my getting off the plane say 'Okay, I know that was bad, so I'm now bad, I'm going to leave lights on, I'm going to let my car idle.' It's nuts. I wish people would talk about food in a way that was more similar to how we talk about the environment. The question of 'Are you an environmentalist or not?' is nonsense. It just doesn't make any sense.

JG: Something is better than nothing.

[...]

JF: Maybe one day the world will change, that we'll be in a luxurious position of being able to debate whether or not it's inherently wrong to eat animals, but the question doesn't matter right now. 

Twitter Rant

The FT has an interesting article on Tencent, the Chinese Internet company that has grown leaps and bounds over the past few years to now become one of China's largest and most valuable Internet players. Quite well written, I thought, covering all the major aspects of Tencent's business and the reasons for its success so far.

What irritates me about the article though, as with so much press out there, is the headline: "Why Tencent could teach Twitter a few tricks". Why does this irritate me?

For starters, Twitter is mentioned all of once in the article body. The article is about Tencent, not Twitter. Why insert Twitter in the headline, Mr Sub-Editor, when the journalist herself has focused on Tencent?

But more importantly, where is the sense of proportion? Tencent is expected to have revenues of $1.5B-2B for 2009, it has 500M active accounts for its QQ messaging platform alone, its market capitalisation is $39B, it had a net margin of 39% as of 2008, and the list of achievements goes on.

And Twitter has... hype. The company itself doesn't seem to release user stats but estimates I've seen are piffly. Take this post for example which estimates that US users will number 18 million as of the end of 2009. Globally, the service may have anywhere from 35 million to 45 million users. Monthly unique visitors number in the 6 million to 10 million range. But, and here's the rub,

• "Users” are defined as people who access Twitter at least once per month. Once per month?!
• How many of these "users" are robots? No one knows.
• Twitter also has a high abandonment rate, estimated at 60% in the first month alone as of April 2009, meaning that 60% of users abandon the service within the first month of signing up! Who knows how many more follow the crowds to the exits thereafter.
• And most importantly, Twitter doesn't make money!

The only thing Twitter has done well is market itself to the media (not users). Ok, they've had a bit of a role in helping to disseminate news during occasional events such as the Nov 2008 Bombay terrorist attacks but this doesn't in any way make the company a broad-based success.

So can the media please stop with the Twitter hype? There are many many more deserving companies out there, especially outside the US.