Naming

Just a quick note about the name of this blog:

The philosopher Eric Zinn, publicly thinking.

Many [ http://blogs.nature.com/vishal/2010/06/14/the-toilet-philosopher ] have realized that good thinking happens in private, particularly when you don't have anything better to be thinking about.  It seems to me that we have only a few such places left:  in the shower, on the toilet, and on a bus or train.

It is interesting to note that driving, while not the most demanding task, still engages too much thought to be a good spot for thinking.  This is why, even if public transit takes longer, I would recommend that you take it over driving yourself to work.

Similarly, don't read on the toilet, or play music while you shower. Leave yourself alone with your thoughts every now and then, and see where they take you.

The Inexhaustibility of Talent

Passion is what makes someone good at something.[1]  Since passion is what makes a great employee, and passion is an unlimited resource, it stands to reason that great employees are also an unlimited resource.

Of course passion isn't exactly enough for most jobs.  You also have to have skill.

While my experience is limited, I was amazed that very few people at Microsoft made me wonder why they were there. That's a company of over 90,000 people. I met no such person at Google. They also turn down a lot of people I think are great.  Both type 1 and type 2 errors are from the difficulty of making good hiring decisions, not from the availability of talent.  

Is this true for areas outside of tech? Perhaps Google attracts the best to the suffering of others? Tech is, however, the _most_ likely space for companies to run out of talent, due to the relative scarcity of good programmers compared to the market size. If huge tech companies are able to hire thousands of competent people, I don't see how a grocery store should have a hard time finding competent clerks.  

The problem, really, is that companies don't understand that _every_ employee matters. They don't care about certain positions enough to bother hiring competent people.  Or, for that matter, treating their current employees well.  We've all suffered from a run-in with an incompetent sales associate or an underpayed security guard.

Creating a great product starts, then, with hiring the best and creating a great place to work: one that encourages and rewards passion.  This a truth in a service-oriented economy that wasn't true when we were a manufacturing economy. How happy Foxconn workers are doesn't matter the same way that the happiness of the Genius Bar staff does, or the passion of Apple's designers for that matter. In many ways, employers are stuck in an old economy where passion didn't matter.

It is interesting to note that I reduced skill to happiness.  There is always more talent out there[2].  Keeping your workers happy attracts the talent, keeps them, and keeps them working well.   Because happiness is clearly inexhaustible, I argue that talent is as well.

[1] - You work hard and constantly improve if you care. Natural talent is only a multiplier, or worse a head start.

[2] - Even if you run into the talent wall, you can make schools that generate more talent. This is what Henry Ford did. More recently, Microsoft donated money to the University of Washington because UW generates good programmers. UW now has twice the number of CSE students, thus increasing the talent pool in the Puget Sound.

The Engineer as Investor

Many talented engineers see the startups that pop up and are successful and think "I could build that." From a technological perspective they are right.  Because they are smart and generally see things as they could be, many talented engineers also have pretty good ideas on what the next big thing may be too.  With the confidence that one can predict what's next and build it many engineers think they should go and start their own startup.

The interesting thing is that a similar question can be asked of investors:  building a great company is about identifying green space and throwing talent and money at it. Great investors already have the connections and money and know-how to build companies like this.  Why don't more investors start their own companies?

The problem with this is that it takes more than that to found a great tech company. At least one founder needs to be focussed on sales, PR, design, etc. Most engineers are bad at this, or at least don't really enjoy it.  It takes a team with great communication and a singular vision to bridge that gap.  Larry and Sergey had Eric.  Wozniak and Jobs had Markkula. They worked great together and their skills complemented well.

If you have that friend and a great idea go for it. In fact you don't even need the idea. Complementing talents, being really talented and having hustle are way more important than having a good idea because your idea can change as you learn.

But what if you don't have that business-savvy friend?  If you're a proper engineer, and the idea of doing sales pitches the rest of your life is truly frightening, the best thing for you to do is to treat your engineering skill the same way a VC treats their money:  you need to be an investor.

Your job as an engineer with lots of places you could invest your talent is the same as a VC: find the company that will be the next Google / Facebook / Microsoft and be the 10th employee there.  Keep an eye on the companies getting funded by top VC's and evaluate their markets and potential the same way.

The benefits to this over founding your own company are huge.  You're already funded by top investors and growing rapidly.  If it works out you still get quite wealthy, but you don't have the bagage that founders do.  Founders have to stay with their baby forever. At the very least they can't go do something else apart from retire. Early employees have no such limitations. They are free to go start their own company or join another and can still retire early if they want.

If you're trying to get in on the tech boom to get rich, you must be confident the company you're joining can be the next many thousand employee, multi-billion dollar company.  Tech companies follow a power law distribution[1] and thus most of the growth is concentrated in a couple big wins.  The vast majority of companies (particularly those chasing tiny markets) will experience respectable growth, but will never "blow up" the way a couple do. Every year you get another Google, Facebook, Zynga, etc but their explosive growth happens once and never again.  To win you need to jump on board before that explosive growth.

Non-engineers

The interesting next question is: what if you're not an engineer. What if you're more in product or finance and really want to work in tech?  Does the equation change?

My intuition is that yes, it does but not as you might think.   Fewer of the next Apple's first employees will be sales / econ people. By the time a tech company gets big enough to hire teams of these people the company is probably too big already for your career to grow with the company.

Because of this it is probably better for non-engineers who want to get in on tech to find a talented engineer or two and found their own company.  If it doesn't grow to be the next Google, hopefully you can at least sell to Google and get to work there as a PM or strategist, which would never happen if you applied directly.

TL;DR

Startups need money and VC's are the investors that give it to them.
Startups also need talent, and employees are the investors that give them it.
Employees should evaluate companies the way investors do before joining.

[1] - http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/post/21869934240/peter-thiels-cs183-startup-class-7-notes-essay

Continue to Fly the Plane

Most people in life are pretty aimless. We find some things that we enjoy doing that people encourage us to do and we do those things.  Very few people do only one thing.  We see the many things that we could do and we like to kind of do them all instead of doing one of them well.

As any self-help guru will tell you: the key to a happy life is complete focus.  If we can just find that one thing that makes us happy we should throw everything else away and do just that one thing, because after all that's the thing that makes us happy right?  All the rest is distraction.

To be happy you need to be good at doing the thing that makes you happy and to be the best that you can be at something you need to focus your entire life around it, at the cost of everything else.   If you choose to be a photographer, you need to spend every minute learning about photography and perfecting your craft.

When you decide that you are doing something, you should do it with your whole being, and you should actually be there doing it.  Do not think about the cereal you had for breakfast or that itch on your head or that airplane flying overhead:  think only about taking the perfect shot.

Life is so much more fulfilling when you are actually present in the moment, feeling the agonies of failure and the high of success, and putting your all into something that you enjoy.

--

In his book "Checklist Manifesto" Atul Gawande tells the story of how checklists for airplane failures are designed.  When something goes wrong on a plane (any plane) there is a binder with checklists that tell the pilot exactly what steps should be taken in order to address the issue at hand.

These checklists are designed by the engineers that build the plane and are tested in simulations to remove all unnecessary or confusing steps.  They repeat this testing process until they're confident that the checklists they produce are intelligible and complete but not cumbersome.  These checklists are some of the biggest successes of this kind of design methodology and have resulted in an extraordinary safety record for modern flying.

There was, however, a problem with a particular checklist.  Many recreational fliers were crashing to their death when their planes' engines gave out (not an uncommon thing for small planes).  The engineers looked back at the checklist and the steps definitely got most engines running and guided the pilot through a safe landing if that failed.

It wasn't until they decided to take pilots up, kill the engine, and actually observe some pilots that they learned what was happening.  When an engine goes out, the pilot is very concerned about this (understandably!) and tries to get their engine back up and running.  They turn to the check list and start going through the steps to get the engine running again, just as they were told to in training.

In their complete focus on the task at hand, however, most inexperienced pilots will forget about the most basic task they should be doing: flying the plane.  They take their hands off the controls and start reading the checklist. While they are trying to restart their engine the plane nose-dives into the ground: killing them instantly.

Based on this experience, the engine restart checklist, in bold letters at the top of the list, now says "Step 1: Continue to fly the plane"

Take a second to appreciate that.   Telling a pilot to fly a plane.

Everyone knows that you're supposed to be doing that!  But when faced with engine failure, you're most likely to forget to fly the plane without someone reminding you.

--

Complete focus is in many ways something to strive for.  Many worthwhile things can only be done with focus.

Life is not one of those things.

Life requires you to be doing many things at once (even if that is just "eat" and "breath") and many of these things are contradictory or overlapping.  We cannot avoid multi-tasking even if we wanted. We must balance many priorities and try to find ways of doing things that accomplish our many disperate goals: to maintain friendships, help people in need, maintain a comfortable life, etc.

While we idealize the artist that can produce beautiful work from years of solitude, their story simultaneously fills us with a sadness.  For when the focused life is actually lived, it looks less like happiness and more like madness.

If you spend your life developing one skill or one way of thinking, you are lost when things change.   Change in the world or in your life is inevitable and if you're not open to that you will miss out on most of what life has to offer.

So despite what you may sometimes hear or feel: here's to the aimless life!
And being able to continue to fly the plane :)

Chicago Ideas Week Day 4 (TEDxMidwest)

Sorry about the formatting and style of this post. Kind of odd, but here goes:

Day 4 was spent almost entirely at TEDx Midwest.  But first...

Groupon Panel


Focus on doing one thing (the core of your product) really well.  Use short iterations to improve rapidly. You never know what people will do with it until you put it in their hands.


Moderated by Matt Moog (Founder of Viewpoints and BuiltInChicago)

Tech will not be in the same place in four years. What you're learning now is irrelevant. Can you learn? Can you hustle? That's what's important.

 Featuring:

Brittany Laughlin Founder of G Trot

Don't hide your product behind its features.

Lon Chow Partner at Apex Ventures

I take the same approach [with the companies I invest in] that I do with my kids: if you want help: I'm here but mostly my job is to make sure you don't hurt yourself then get out of your way.

Entrepreneurship is lonely. Absolutely go in with a team [of friends].

 Josh Hernandez Founder of Tap.Me

Get it out fast. Throw it together. Make it shitty, but most importantly put it in front of people.

  TEDx Midwest


At the Oriental Theater in Chicago, IL




Pablos Holman of Intellectual Ventures 


What he does:  Get together a group of scientists to brainstorm technological solutions to the world's biggest problems.


Interesting ideas: 
*Use all the energy in nuclear waste to power a non-critical reactor. 
  -  There is enough energy in spent nuclear fuel to power humanity for the next thousand years.
  -  Spent nuclear fuel is non-critical, so it can never "meltdown"
  -  Not any more dangerous than storing nuclear waste.
  -  Requires extremely minimal new nuclear material to be enriched (allows for nuclear power at the same time as nuclear disarmament)


*Put dust into the upper atmosphere to reflect sunlight and reverse global warming. 
  -  Simple
  -  Cheap
  -  Geologists know this works (volcanic events)


*Kill malaria carrying mosquitos with lasers.
  -  Stop the spread of the disease at the source.
  -  Automated: requires little continuous human effort


Bottom Line: 
We know so much about different areas, that innovation today is more likely to come from combining people with different expertises.








Edie Wiener  Futurist
see previous blog post






The (Violence) Interrupters Do-gooders


What they do: Go into violent areas of Chicago, and preach nonviolence.
Idea: Violence can be stemmed from spreading the same way infectious diseases can.
Bottom Line:  Watch their movie to learn more (Official Website)






Alexis Ohanian  Founder of Reddit


Closing the feedback loop in charity, and allowing people to see the effects that their donations have can go a long way toward encouraging people to spend more of their disposable income on charity.  Make charitable giving exciting, competitive and rewarding in ways that it usually isn't, because otherwise you will fail.  The "biggest enemy [of a charity website] is the back button"







Dean Kamen  Founder of FIRST


Make engineering as competitive, fun and valued in grade-school as sports by making a competition out of engineering.  A bit of a misquote, but the idea was:  "Most high school athletes won't be able to make it big, but every single one of our players can go pro.  There are jobs waiting for every single one of them.  What is wrong with a country that values hitting balls with sticks over building things that can save lives?"

Lunch


Ate lunch with a billionaire CEO and a national geographic photographer (among others). They were notable because they planned a trip to the arctic together over lunch.


Also talked at length with an education policy advocate who I actually agree with a lot. His insight is to give kids real problems and real responsibility in school. Learning comes faster, easier and more effectively. Students behave better and focus more and you give them a real sense of accomplishment when they can make something they're proud of. Lastly, when you get students used to thinking for themselves and reward them for taking responsibility and being social actors, you raise a generation of thinkers and designers, and not just knowers and doers.


The other important aspect of education in this sense, and also in society as a whole, is forgiveness OR the freedom to fail. The startup culture is so awesome because failure is expected. What is valued is guts, drive, and vision.  Labels are so important in society because they _generate_ behavior. This, along with negativity bias, causes so many people to fall into a negative spiral.  You get bad grades one year in school because of family troubles, and suddenly you're labeled a problem student.  You get graded continuously on all your assignments in the US, which means you have to do well from the very beginning. How does that allow _learning_ to happen?!  In society as a whole, too, we need to be more forgiving of people with criminal backgrounds. As the Interruptors prove, even murders can have an extraordinary positive impact on society. We need to get over the notion that people are either good or bad, and realize (as Zimbardo says later) that people are (mostly) just people and only become good or bad as the situation dictates.






Wes Craven  Horror Film Maker


Fear is cathartic when shared. There are deep fears that we have buried in us, and horror films bring that out into the open so we can deal with it.  Fears that "there is no God, just predator and prey" or that the human body is, for all we do, actually incredibly fragile. Horrible stories reassure us that we aren't the only ones feeling this fear and also helps us to dig it out, and externalize that fear.


To me, the most incredible part of his talk was a throw-away comment that he expects someone to make a retelling of the Cronus myth. In case you aren't familiar, the story goes that a fortune teller tells the Titan Cronus that one of his sons will overthrow him. So, in order to hold on to his kingdom, whenever he had a son Cronus would be sure to devour them. This terrible story of a father eating his own children to hold on to his fragile kingdom reminds at least Wes Craven of what is happening in society today. Horror stories also have the power to show us the horrors of our own actions, and be a force for social change.




Phil Zimbardo  Stanford Psychology Professor who proved that people are evil


People are (typically) neither inherently good nor evil, but they are guided by circumstance to do good or evil things.  We know, from his own research, what makes people turn evil, but what is the formula for making people do good?  There are factors like lack of stress, feeling of acceptance, and freedom.  Amazingly, when free to do things people are generally good. Having a system of harsh repercussions for misdeeds adds stress and constrains choice and actually makes people less likely to do good deeds.  This is an ongoing area of research that is surprisingly hard to find funding for.






Rob Warden  Head of Northwestern Law's Center on Wrongful Convictions


The biggest cause of wrongful convictions (including death sentence cases) is the false confession.  Police use immoral and often illegal interrogation techniques to get confessions from people just trying to save themselves.  The problem could be easily solved if police interrogations were required to be video taped and released to defense attorneys: a no brainer legally that is for some reason still not law.




Deborah Fallows  Author of Dreaming in Chinese


You are never too old to learn a foreign language.  


Your brain is amazing at adapting and can learn new languages surprisingly easily, you just need to learn it at a higher conceptual level than children do.  Don't learn by the Rosetta Stone method, learn by conceptual frameworks, pneumonics _and_ immersion together. Realize that in Chinese, they think of the past as being above them and the future as below (a fact you could guess from their writing direction) and then the word 上 shàng becomes obvious as meaning both above and in the past. This is one example of ways in which it is actually easier to learn Chinese as an adult than as a kid.




Hellen Fisher  chemistry.com


There are 4 basic personality types (explorer, builder, director, diplomat) governed by 4 different hormones. Learn to identify that kind of thinking in others and realize they may not think like you.
Love is a 3 stage process: first our "gut" tells us to have sex with them, then our brain has to agree and lastly we get attached. One third of long term relationships started out as casual sex.
Quote of the day: "Anything that's loose rolls into California"




Daniel Hernandez  Saved Congresswoman Gifford's life
"Every past experience you've had is useful to what you're doing now and has helped make you who you are."


John Hodgeman Millionaire
"Two lonely people can't be un-lonely together"


John Ondrasik  Songwriter for "Five for Fighting"
Just create something, because you never know what will resonate with people.

The Future of the Global Economy

The following is an essay of my own composition around some of the ideas Edie Wiener presented in her fantastic keynote at TEDx Midwest. Sorry about the length. She brought up some really amazing points in a very condensed time period that made me think of a lot of other things.


("TL;DR Summary")

• Technology makes us more powerful and smart than ever before
• Innovation happens faster than ever before
• Unemployment will raise as machines continue to replace people
• We need to change our institutions so they can react quickly to innovation
• We should use our excess labor to change the world

("The Speed of Change")


We tend to think that things are changing faster now than they used to. The past hundred years seems to have exploded with technological change. If you think back to the end of the last century, however, they would say the same thing: that the past hundred years have brought extraordinary growth, unknown in previous ages.


The wise, thus, say that change happens constantly, at the same rate.  The only thing that changes is that our perspective moves forward and thus those changes that happened most recently seem biggest.


The idea that "change is more rapid now is a fallacy" is actually a fallacy.  


Life on earth was single-celled for 7 billion years. It took just 600 million years from the moment multicelled creatures started appearing for all complex life on earth to evolve, and it took just 2 million years for man to come from early apes.


Similarly, civilization has evolved higher level economies based on the efficient solution to human needs at an ever-quickening rate.  We had an agricultural economy for over 2000 years. Just 200 years ago, we started to have an industrial economy. The information revolution started just 40 years ago. Edie Wiener argues that we are already in a new revolution, the emotile economy that started just 10 years ago: an economy of connecting you with people and things that make you feel a certain way.


("Why Faster?")


There are strong parallels with Maslow's hierarchy of needs.  The progression of these economies represents nothing but the mechanization and efficient "solving" of progressively higher human needs. The agricultural revolution "solved" the food supply problem for civilization. The industrial revolution "solved" our need for physical things and our power for physical change in the world.  The information revolution is currently solving our need for knowledge and the emotile revolution has just begun to change, at a fundamental level, how we feel.


Now, obviously, these revolutions don't happen strictly after each other. They feed into each other and innovations in each effect the others. As fewer workers are needed to make food, more people can make tools. The more tools that are made, the less people there are needed to make food. The more information technology we have, the smarter we become and the faster that innovative combinations of ideas can happen.


This not only explains how change accelerates, but also why it always feels fastest in the last hundred years or so.  The rate of change in the next hundred years will be about the same as the last few hundred combined.


("Social Change") 


Revolutions in economy typically necessitate social revolutions as well to remold the social institutions to better reflect the (for lack of a more inclusive word) economic reality.  The industrial revolution saw social revolutions across the world which did away with the institutions that were better suited for an agrarian society.


Unfortunately we still have institutions that are built for an industrial society. 


We raise kids with more stimulation and curiosity and energy and independence than ever before.  We then stick them in the same schools our great-grandparents went to and drug them when they can't sit still and focus on a stale curriculum taught on a black board.  


We have banks and economists that think that wealth should be concentrated and controlled by as few people as possible. We have a government that mediates the voice of the people through several layers of opaque representation and is afraid of asking its citizens to do things.  We have a tax structure that punishes work and encourages harmful behavior. We have old courts, old jails, old regulatory systems, and old intellectual property laws.  


We are only just starting to feel the tremblings of the social revolution in the West and Middle East that the information revolution must eventually cause.


Unfortunately for us, social institutions cannot change very quickly by their very nature of needing to be resilient to whim.  Now that economic revolutions are happening on the order of decades instead of hundreds of years, it is not clear that social revolutions can keep up with the rate of change.


The careful reader may argue that the free flow of information that the information revolution has facilitated should actually speed up the rate and effectiveness of revolutions and allow more small, nonviolent revolutions to happen now than in the industrial revolution. The industrial revolution, after all, was so tough and bloody because the state had mechanized weapons.


How quickly, though, can a revolution happen in today's emotive economy?  What are tanks in Tiananmen Square compared to think tanks on cable TV? How much harder it is to overcome a state that has emotional weapons of comfort and distraction!


This is why companies will continue to overshadow governments in power and influence in society. Our governments (as currently imagined) are not flexible enough institutions to change at the pace necessary in todays world. All that governments can hope to do is set the rules by which companies play together.


("The Future of the Economy")


Edie's description of the future economy is that it will be a "meta-space" economy. The important spaces in this economy are physical space (place for all the people in our crowded world), storage space (where to put all our trash and where to get new resources), temporal space (quantifying time as a commodity), cyberspace (creating ways and spaces to live online), outer space (going off our planet), innerspace (biotech and nanotech) and green space (valuing natural spaces and ecologies). These areas are going to be immensely important as the world gets even hotter, flatter and more crowded.


As the world gets flatter, people in progressively poorer areas move closer to the developed world.  This is great news for them, because businesses can move in and provide (for a price) the development that should have happened there already.  Businesses like WaterCredit.org which finance projects to bring basic necessities to populations that don't have these things can be profitable because it costs so little to purify water and people are willing to pay incredibly well for these basic necessities.  Charity becomes easier, as does "exploitation" which here I put in quotes because it is hard to not see providing clean water as a good thing. The future economy may just be the process of bringing the advances of the developed world to the world's poorest areas.


The problem is that the poorest areas on the planet are by definition poor and can't spend money on much more than basic goods. And the incredibly sad, frustrating news is that they never will.


The problem is this: the rich areas of the world don't need the labor of most of the worlds poor and uneducated anymore. The tragic, terrible paradox of the future economy is that because our tools are so good, we don't need everyone on the planet to be working to solve the rich people's problems anymore, and this means that in a greed-based economy such as we have and always have had wealth cannot flow down to the entire population.


It used to take an entire section of countryside to feed a royal family well in the dark ages. As the population grew and farming / tradesmen improved, more man-power could go into providing the rich with art and enlightenment: and we had the Renaissance.


In the modern world however, a few million dollars can build you a home that Louis XIV would have been proud of, and a mere $50 / month can buy you enough internet to keep you entertained (and happy?) for life. There isn't much higher left to climb on Maslow's pyramid! When solving the problems of the rich becomes too easy, unemployment becomes the norm and not the exception.


("The Way Out")


We need another war.  It is what galvanized the nation after the Great Depression and it is necessary now.  I don't mean a war with another nation.  The planet needs to rally together and focus on solving big problems as a whole.  We have the technology and the human resources to educate the entire planet, to solve global warming, to abolish hunger, to make sure that all water is drinkable, to build a spaceship to go to mars, and more.


The amazing thing is that for as much as this would "cost" governments to do, as a society it would actually cost nothing because there is so much unemployment: unemployment that is not caused by inflation or deflation or stagflation but rather by the fact that solving the problems of the rich is no longer a reasonable way to keep the entire world employed.


In a war, when humanity's very survival is at stake, we rally behind one cause and all contribute to making it possible. This employes not just enough of our population to get by, but enlists the help of everyone.  When everyone is contributing, everyone gets back because suddenly every other human being becomes (economically) valuable.


What mankind needs, at both the private level and at the largest, is a cause of existential importance: working toward a goal not just because you believe in it, but because you will perish if you do not succeed.


The good news is global warming may provide us with exactly what we need.


~Alex Madjar

Chicago Ideas Week Day 3 (Think Chicago)

The day started off with
a panel moderated by Mayor Rahm Emanuel at Google's Chicago office.

The event was super small, just for the 50 of us undergrads and a couple of the Google employees and consisted half of their pitch for doing startups in Chicago and half of answering questions about how to go about doing it.

The Panel:
1. "Find something that frustrates you in the world and just decide one day to fix it." 
      ~ Desiree Vargas Wrigley, Founder of GiveForward

2. "You have to quit your job, cause until then your idea is a hobby and not a passion" 

      ~ Matt Maloney, Founder of GrubHub

3. "It isn't just the idea: it's really in the execution. [...] having a talented team is critical."

      ~ Phil Nevels, Founder of Power2Switch

The Tools:
http://www.builtinchicago.org/ <- "networking"  (which means having good, deep conversations with smart people you respect and trust, not just handing out business cards)
Incubators (traditional like http://www.techstars.com/ but particularly http://www.exceleratelabs.com/  and also specific ones like http://www.healthboxaccelerator.com/)
MBA programs at entrepreneurially focused schools like Booth.

Why Chicago:
Chicago has a newer, smaller tech startup scene than the Valley and is more forgiving than in New York. Other entrepreneurs and investors in Chicago want you to succede: there is less of a inter-competitive spirit between companies and more of a mentorship culture in Chicago than in Silicon Valley. Talent in the Valley jumps from company to company every 9 months: in Chicago you can really keep a team together for a few years without making it big: important because most companies take this long to mature and become successful. Talent is cheaper here than in SV/SF and NYC (good for entrepreneurs, if bad for  talented people!).

Chicago is the city that makes no small plans. It raised Obama as a community organizer and generally believes in the power of individuals causing social change through organization and leadership, including through private, entrepreneurial ventures. People in Chicago, from the mayor on down, want you to succeed because they believe in what you're doing. It is a city that thinks of entrepreneurs as agents of social change and not as high-margin, high-risk investment opportunities.

Oddball Point:
The most important policy choice that a mayor can make to encourage a tech scene in his or her city is to make generous, protected bike lanes.



Next we split into groups for company visits.

GrubHub


It was great to talk to Matt Maloney more privately. He's a seriously impressive individual that exudes puissance, knowledge, authority and calm: seeing him with the mayor he was a bit nervous, but back at GrubHub he was the master in his workshop. Below are some of the most interesting things I learned from talking to him.

A startup is a way of making society more efficient. You make society more efficient, this adds value to society and that's where profit comes from. The internet is making efficiencies in areas across society not only possible but obvious.  This is why it is exciting and important to go into technology now and why this is actually adding value to society and not just moving wealth around.

You should make your on-boarding process for new-hires slow and hire even more slowly. Make sure that you can instill your vision of your company and of the future of the industry into people as they come in, so that the company's vision stays focused. As a founder, once you start hiring people to do all the actual work for you, the only real control you can retain on your company is to make sure your hires understand the goals and the vision and then trust their actions.

The best way to find great people to do design, marketing, business, etc is to find people whose work in these areas you respect, and then ask them who _they_ respect.  You aren't the best judge of who is good in fields you don't know much about, but people you know in these fields do.

It is important to grow your product and idea as a hobby at first, so you can get a product going, get momentum, and learn about your users and their needs, etc before it becomes a matter of the life or death of your company. It is, however, equally important that at the right time you drop that first job and start to pursue it full time.

Entrepreneurship is about finding the better way of doing something. Be flexible and open to change within your company as you are outside it. Constantly ask yourself "is there a better way to do this" and never be satisfied that you've found the best solution.

Always focus on the value that you add to society right now, on the product as it is right now, and on the current users needs.  Don't get too caught up in the high level plan for social change because the way people will actually use your product is inevitably not going to be how you intended it.

Coudal Partners


Next we headed over to a small design company called Coudal Partners.  A fascinating company, Coudal found itself in the recession of the early 2000's in a crisis of identity: it was an advertising and branding company that was doing a lot of work they weren't proud of.  They started trying to make their own videos and, frustrated at the lack of quality packaging for their pilot dvd's, decided to make their own.  The brand they created is Jewel Cases.  Coming off this surprising success, Coudal has continued to make brands and products in whatever area is interesting to them and frustrates them.  They design products that they are proud of and happy using and typically this results in brands and products that other's like as well.  Their biggest brand at the moment is Field Notes: a brand of very high quality, American, adventurous and nostalgic notebooks and pencils that can be found in a variety of high-end male fashion stores.  Their products remind me a great deal of the best of Japanese design, in minimalism, functionality and style but with a rustic, American touch.

Also check out their layer tennis videos, and "field tested books" (such as Stumbling Unhappiness)

The amazing thing about Coudal is that they just said screw you to doing things they don't enjoy. They make products they're proud of and interested in for themselves, and if other people find those things useful and want to buy them: all the better.  Really an inspiring message.