Wilson Miner – When We Build

I encounter this difficulty in cases where I vaguely remember the tweet,
perhaps just a phrase of it, but forget the link that was shared to a
particular blog post or video that caught my attention.

Fortunately, Twitter provides an API. By browsing through the
documentation,
I found this URL to be very useful in such cases:

https://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.json?screen_name=TWITTER_USERNAME_HERE&include_entities=true&count=200&include_rts=true

(This displays the last 200 tweets published by the user
with screen_name TWITTER_USERNAME_HERE.)

A Ctrl+F in the browser helps to find the complete tweet (and its metadata)
by searching for the phrase or words that I had remembered.>

1. It’s easier to find customers. If you make dentist software, you know which conventions to go to and which magazines to advertise in. All you have to do is find dentists. 2. The margins are better. Your users are professionals at work and it makes sense for them to give you money if you can solve their problems.

If you are looking where everyone else is for the next big thing, you are looking in the wrong place.

Mark Cuban

Money is a side effect of specialization. In a specialized society, most of the things you need, you can’t make for yourself. If you want a potato or a pencil or a place to live, you have to get it from someone else.

How do you get the person who grows the potatoes to give you some? By giving him something he wants in return. But you can’t get very far by trading things directly with the people who need them. If you make violins, and none of the local farmers wants one, how will you eat?

The solution societies find, as they get more specialized, is to make the trade into a two-step process. Instead of trading violins directly for potatoes, you trade violins for, say, silver, which you can then trade again for anything else you need. The intermediate stuff— the medium of exchange— can be anything that’s rare and portable. Historically metals have been the most common, but recently we’ve been using a medium of exchange, called the dollar, that doesn’t physically exist. It works as a medium of exchange, however, because its rarity is guaranteed by the U.S. Government.

The advantage of a medium of exchange is that it makes trade work. The disadvantage is that it tends to obscure what trade really means. People think that what a business does is make money. But money is just the intermediate stage— just a shorthand— for whatever people want. What most businesses really do is make wealth. They do something people want.

http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html

Interesting points:

• the importance of MySQL
• the dark launch approach

Link to interview on Wired at  http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2011/12/facebook-timeline-anatomy

Steve Jobs recounts the advice he shared with Larry Page, Google’s co-founder and CEO:

We talked a lot about focus. And choosing people. How to know know who to trust, and how to build a team of lieutenants he can count on. I described the blocking and tackling he would have to do to keep the company from getting flabby or being larded with B players. The main thing I stressed was focus. Figure out what google wants to be when it grows up. It’s now all over the map. What are the five products you want to focus on? Get rid of the rest, because they’re dragging you down. They’re turning you into Microsoft. They’re causing you to turn out products that are adequate but not great. 

Only some months later, in September 2011, Google stated that they will let go of some of their producs: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/09/fall-spring-clean.html

Nothing kills humor like a general and boring truth.

Scott Adams – from Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson