Archive for October, 2008

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McHypocrisy

Posted in Politics on October 21, 2008 by themaroon

Does it ever seem to you that every argument Sarah Palin makes in favor of herself is actually in favor of Obama, or against McCain? Or that every bad thing she says about Obama is also a knock on her?

I’m certainly a Washington outsider, and I’m proud of that, because I think that that is what we need.

Who is more of a Washington insider, McCain or Obama?

We’ve got to remember what the desire is in this nation at this time. It is for no more politics as usual, and somebody’s big fat résumé, maybe, that shows decades and decades in the Washington establishment . . . Americans are getting sick and tired of that self-dealing, and kind of that closed-door, good-ol’-boy network that has been the Washington élite.

Wait, I’m confused, which Presidential candidate has decades of membership in the establishment? Which one is the goodest ol’ boy in the whole network? I’m getting confused.

I’ve never met him before, but I’ve been hearing about his Senate speeches since I was in like second grade.

You might think that quote was about McCain two days before she got chosen for VP, but it’s actually about Biden.

Voters don’t know the real Barack Obama

There’s the pot calling the kettle African American. Let’s see, whose existence has America known about for only 6 weeks? Whose entire political experience is being the governor of a state with a population roughly the size of Akron, OH, and even then only for a couple years? There’s definitely someone we don’t know here, and it isn’t the guy we’ve seen on TV every day for 20 months.

Why would I vote for someone whose own VP pick seems to keep telling me that I don’t want to? If there’s one thing I’m surprised to see the Republican Party struggling with, it’s having a consistent message. Usually they’re pretty damn good at that.

2 Comments »

Real Americans

Posted in Politics on October 21, 2008 by themaroon

This clip from The Daily Show highlights one of the most effective and, I think, insidious tactics conservatives in America use to stifle discourse, which is the notion that anyone who thinks that America is imperfect hates our country. In their mind, wanting to improve America equals loathing our nation and is unpatriotic.

But I guess that’s what conservativism has been reduced to in this country, the notion that life was better in the past and that change is scary and unnecessary.

1 Comment »

Muxlim, Like Second Life but With Jihad

Posted in Are Religious People Stupid? on October 20, 2008 by themaroon

So there’s now a virtual world for Muslims. Is it me, or do the jokes just write themselves here?

I hope airport security is pretty tight there, or at least that there are no flights to Second Life. If someone dies while killing infidels, do they get 72 virtual virgins? If someone converts to a Christian virtual world, are they stoned to death? Are women treated like second class citizens?

Oh wait, those jokes aren’t funny, they’re sad truths about a religion that the PC police won’t let us speak of.

7 Comments »

Data Is a Loaded Gun

Posted in Uncategorized on October 17, 2008 by themaroon

One thing that never ceases to amaze me is the love we humans have for cherry-picking data to come to conclusions. A fine example is this Malcom Gladwell article in which, in an attempt to prove the hypothesis that SUVs are unsafe due to poor handling, he runs a Chevrolet TrailBlazer and a Porsche Boxster Convertible through the Consumer Reports test track. Unsurprisingly the $50,000 sports car (designed mainly for driving around Consumer Reports’ test track) outperformed the SUV, which costs about half as much and was designed for schlepping kids to and from baseball practice. While you’d have to be borderline retarded to consider a test-track comparison of a Boxster and a TrailBlazer proof or even anecdotal evidence of anything, Gladwell does so with glee.

More recently, you see this sort of stuff cropping up in financial advice. It’s easy to take previous peaks and current valleys and say things like “If you’d invested in the stock market in May 1999, today you’d be down 20%” or “if you bought a home 7 years ago, it would right now be worth what you paid for it then.” (Nobody mentions that between March of 2003 and October 2007 the market went up 80%, or that it nearly quadrupled just during the Clinton administration, or the home valuation increase between sometime last year and any period before that.)

People see that and say “Holy Shit, I need to dump all of my money into CDs and go back to renting”. That’s stupid. Both of the above are proof only that those two markets are subject to variance, and hell, even Wikipedia could have told you that. The fact is that even with current woes, our stock market has returned north of 10% annually since the Great Depression, and real estate has gone up around 1%.

Real estate may sound less impressive, but it’s probably the better investment, at least up to a certain point. It may only gain 1% per year on average, but that’s 1% of the value of the entire property, while thanks to mortgages you’re only putting down 10% to begin with. So it’s really a gain of 10% on the money invested. With your primary residence at least, the tax deduction on the interest makes buying not much more expensive than renting in many areas of the country in the short term. When you factor in the fact that rents increase periodically while a fixed-rate mortgage never does, over a period of, say, 10 years, it’s probably one of the best investments you can make.

On stocks, Warren Buffet says:

Over the long term, the stock market news will be good. In the 20th century, the United States endured two world wars and other traumatic and expensive military conflicts; the Depression; a dozen or so recessions and financial panics; oil shocks; a flu epidemic; and the resignation of a disgraced president. Yet the Dow rose from 66 to 11,497.

The stock market, too, will always remain a better vehicle for long-term savings than CDs. The reason is simple supply and demand. People want lower-risk investments more than higher ones, so they’re willing to accept lower returns for them. If CDs were paying more than the theoretical yield on stocks, money would flow out of the markets and into the banks, and stock market returns would go up while banks lower rates on CDs. If those, treasuries, and other forms of low-risk investments ever pay more than the market over an extended period, it will only be because all of those cell-phone waves flipped some sort of crazy switch in all of our brains.

Of course, the stock market is high-variance (as that cherry-picked data shows) so you shouldn’t stick any money in there that you’re going to need in the next 10 years. Also, as you age, you should shift your newer investments more toward the safer instruments, and at some point when you’re within spitting distance of retirement and the market is doing alright you should move it all that way. But if you’re my age and you’re sticking it all in a money market because the Dow is even over the last 10 years, you’re a victim of cherry-picked data, and a buffoon.

I think the problem is that humans don’t often question other people’s logic. When we argue, we often do so merely by showing different data and trying to draw opposite conclusions from it. McCain says Obama plans to raise taxes (data) and that raising taxes during tough economic times is bad because Herbert Hoover did it (logic) therefore Obama’s tax plan is bad for the economy. Obama doesn’t come back with any arguments that the logic (that raising taxes must be bad for the economy) is flawed or at least not universally applicable, instead he just shows different data, namely that 95% of people will get a tax cut.

Gladwell gives you some data (that a TrailBlazer handles worse than a Boxster), applies some logic (that therefore, SUVs in general must handle worse than non-SUVs) and voila, the conclusion that SUVs are less safe.

It seems that in public discourse, he who makes the first logical assertion based on any data at all has the high ground. Unless the logic is absolutely ludicrous (such as the notion that being able to see Russia from your state gives you foreign policy experience, and even that is accepted by about 40% of the population) your opponent has no chance but to try to find opposing data.

In the real world though, where logic isn’t always as sound as it may appear at first glance, data is a loaded weapon. If you know what you’re doing with it, it can be a lifesaver, but if you don’t there’s a good chance you’ll shoot yourself in the foot.

2 Comments »

But Seriously

Posted in tech on October 15, 2008 by themaroon

Thanks everyone who told me how much you enjoyed the Whiner Jerkins PowerPoint. It was a lot of fun to make. I think everyone needed a laugh for a moment.

Some people seemed to think I was trying to deliberately insult Sequoia or VCs in general. Not so. I think Sequoia’s advice is pretty logical, in fact, it’s largely the stuff you hear at Y Combinator. It’s all stuff my startup is doing anyway, and would be even if I took VC funding.

I have always viewed the "get popular now and worry about making money later" ethic with trepidation. There’s this pervasive belief that any company that gets loads of traffic will be able to become profitable at some point, and I’m just not sure that’s true. Maybe if you make the Alexa Top 100 or something, but that’s so hard to do as to be nearly impossible. There are hundreds or maybe even thousands of startups launched each year, and when you count the big corporations that aren’t going anywhere (Google, Yahoo, MSN, Myspace, Facebook, YouTube, Amazon, eBay, etc.) and the porn sites (with which you cannot compete) you have a lot of dogs fighting for very few scraps. Take a look, you’ll note there are very few recent non-porn startups there. I looked briefly and counted 3

On the other hand, build something like Draftmix or TicketStumbler and you can make a fortune from only 100,000 unique visitors a month which, as far as I can estimate, won’t even put you in the Alexa top 50,000.

It did get me thinking a bit about the typical VC-backed ethic though. If a VC’s advice is normally to be more aggressive in terms of growth in good markets, why is that? Just because money is cheaper doesn’t necessarily mean you should go for a land grab. There are very, very few businesses where that seems necessary. So why would that be their normal M.O.?

The reason is that venture capitalists profit more by investing in higher variance startups (all other things being equal) due to the simple fact that they can only lose the amount they put into your company, but they can make a theoretically unlimited amount. To put that another way, their downside is limited, but their upside is not. It’s the same reason people always warn against shorting stocks or selling calls.

Let’s suppose a VC invests $10 million in your company. Let’s further suppose the VCs mean return to be 3x, so in your case, $30 million. Let’s assume a standard deviation of $25 million as well, to allow for a small but realistic chance of an investment returning 10x ($100m). Here’s the graph of possible VC outcomes.

image

Now let’s assume we double the standard deviation to $50 million. Here’s the same graph:

image

(Sorry about the goofy stretching, but the graphing xls file I found didn’t allow me to alter the axis properly. The curve looks proper though.)

Put those together and we get:

image

Which curve looks better to you? (Of course, I’m not sure results follow a normal distribution, but I can’t guess what else they would look like.)

Founders, on the other hand, have the competing interest of reducing variation. They’d generally be happy to make a $30m mean return with zero variance. In fact, they’d often be happy with a much lower return and a much lower variance. Just something to be aware of when you take money, and it might explain why the typical advice isn’t frugality.

Also, a lot of people pointed out that VCs like Sequoia are now telling you that you’re going to have to take lower valuations going forward. And who is paying those lower valuations? VCs like Sequoia.

That doesn’t make them evil hypocrites, as many have suggested. In fact, they share interests with some of the companies they’ve funded who will be getting funding from elsewhere in the future. It’s just supply and demand. The supply of capital from limited partners is going to drop, and VC firms are going to go through a drought just like founders are in the upcoming year or two, which puts the ones that survive in a better bargaining position. If anything, they’re fairly kind for exposing their hand. That sort of openness is a lot of why they remain at the top.

Angels will go through a drought of their own. Wealthy individuals don’t generally leave many millions sitting in checking accounts. Many of them are diversified, so while the Dow dropping didn’t bankrupt them, in a lot of cases it probably knocked out a sizeable chunk of their net worth.

Also, despite my angel funding slide being meant mainly for humor, very much of the angel investment cash floating around The Valley these days comes from Google. Founders who sold their company to them, employees who got in earlier and have considerable stock vesting over time. A lot of them have lost a lot of money as the stock price has cratered. Hopefully many of them hedged by buying puts back when the share price was north of $600, but for some reason I doubt it.

I feel like if anything, we’re seeing the VC mindset and the founder mindset merge into one due to the rough times forecasted for the near future. That’s probably a good thing. Valuations were a little absurd there for awhile anyway.

As for Seesmic specifically, which some people asked me about, despite what I think of their product, I can’t understand why they had 20ish employees. Not to trivialize what it is they’re building, but Justin TV has built a product in the video market that’s probably more complex and has a lot more traffic, and they’ve done it with a fraction of the employees and what I’m guessing was also probably a fraction of the funding. That’s why I used them as my example.

Loic Le Meur is clearly a one-man PR department, so they’ll probably get through it alright. But it’s clear that, rational or not, things are changing, and a lot of startups won’t, and that’s going to be both good and bad. You’ve got to pull the weeds if you want a beautiful garden.

12 Comments »

Tactile Feedback

Posted in tech on October 14, 2008 by themaroon

One of the main gripes with the iPhone has always been the lack of tactile feedback when typing. In an effort to simulate that, we’re seeing some new phones and the like where the touch screen has some springiness to it. This is coming out both in a new BlackBerry model, and in the touchpad for the new Macbook Pro.

I think both designers are missing the point. The most important tactile feedback of a button is not the spring of depression but rather the shape of the button itself. It allows you to constantly reset your bearings. When you’re typing on a keypad, for example, you feel whether your finger is hitting the button square in the middle, or slightly to the left or right and adjust accordingly. Your brain is able to check its position and modify it on the mental map in your head multiple times per second, like an ICBM homing in on an Iranian nuclear facility.

You can look at the screen and type because of that, in fact, you’re supposed to. Hell, you can probably type whole paragraphs with your eyes shut without erring. It might take a little Zen mastery, since as soon as you think about it consciously you’ll start making mistakes, but when you look at the screen and don’t think about it, you do it nearly flawlessly.

Without the feel of physical buttons, you’ll inevitably drift in one direction or the other. That’s why BlackBerry typing is really so much better than the iPhone. When you have both in broad daylight and are staring at the buttons as you type, the difference isn’t as noticeable, so when defenders say “I can type just as well on my iPhone” they’re telling the truth, or at least close. But on a Berry, you can text one-handed while driving (though I don’t recommend it) while on an iPhone you’d slip up pretty fast. Or, more importantly, you can look at the screen exclusively as you type, as you would on a computer.

That’s what makes some keyboards and keypads so much better than others. The buttons are designed in such a way as to let you know exactly where you are upon contact. Don’t get me wrong, the resistance when pushing a button is useful too, as it allows you to adjust along the third axis. The other two are simply more important though.

I’m not sure if it’s very relevant in the case of the Macbook Pro, since it’s a one mouse button we’re talking about. It might be fine, especially since you can presumably feel the bottom edge of the pad, and the whole thing isn’t large enough for even one finger to get very lost on. But on the BlackBerry, I think it will not make typing much better than on the iPhone, if at all.

I remember once reading about such a pad that sends tiny electric shocks as you pass over the virtual buttons that simulate the feel. That would go much further toward matching the BlackBerry experience on a perfectly flat touchpad than a spring.

1 Comment »

Bizzarro Grocery Universes

Posted in Adventures I Got My Dumb Ass Into on October 14, 2008 by themaroon

As I’ve moved around the country a bit, one thing that’s always struck me is just how weird going to a new grocery store is. Every area has two major grocery chains, and you fall into the habit of going to a particular one, usually the closest to you, but every now and then you have a reason to go to the other.

When you go to the other one, it’s like every single little detail is different, but they all add up to the same exact thing. It’s a lot like visiting a foreign country. They have all of the same stuff, but it all looks different, or is in a different place, or is just a little off in some tiny imperceptible manner, but it’s so close that you know that you could get used to it, and if you did, you know your former place would seem just as alien. You spend your week walking around the strange new world until it doesn’t seem that strange anymore, and then you go back home and do it all over again.

It’s amazing how every single thing changes from one store to another. One has metal carts, the other plastic. One has the Advantage Card, the other has the Ultimate Card. The entry is always by the produce department, but sometimes the rest of the store is to the left, and sometimes it’s to the right. One has Food Club generic brands, the other has Topco. One has red order separators with the name of the local newspaper written on them, the other has blue with USA Today.

I always feel like I’m in some sort of bizarro universe, where everything is the opposite. I’m waiting for the cashier to say “goodbye” when she first sees me, and “hello, and screw you for shopping here douchebag” when she’s done. The bagger will then throw my groceries haphazardly into the cart and say “please don’t ever come again.” And I won’t, because I like my grocery store, and this place gives me the creeps.

1 Comment »

Whiner Jerkins All Hands Meeting Powerpoint Revealed

Posted in tech on October 13, 2008 by themaroon

Recently the VCs at Whiner Jerkins held a meeting for all of us startup CEOs in their portfolio. I thought I’d share the PowerPoint presentation with you.

Whiner Jerkins All Hands 10/13/08

You’ll probably want to full screen it.

18 Comments »

Techcrunchywag

Posted in tech on October 11, 2008 by themaroon

So I’ve been following this “story” about the “Team Cyprus Video” (if I have to keep using quotes this much, people are going to start thinking I’ve got Ron Conway ghostwriting for me) with umm, what’s the opposite of earnest? Is there a word for that? If so, that’s what I’ve been following it with. Apathy maybe? Yeah, that sounds right. I’ve been following it with apathy.

Anyway, for those lucky enough to have never heard of this yet, here’s the basic gist of it. 20 or so younger Silicon Valley types went to Cyprus and rented a house together. Employees of Google, Facebook, some startups nobody outside of California has ever heard of, etc. Sounds like fun actually, and I’m a little pissed I wasn’t invited. Only a little because I’m pretty sure I’ve never met any of them. Still, total strangers email me every day about buying Viagara, expatriating money from the estate of dead Somalian royalty, or watching them fornicate with various equine mammals (including, but not limited to, a zebra) so you’d think I could at least get a heads-up on a Turkish vacation.

Anyway, they had the audacity to go on a holiday they almost certainly planned months ago even though the economy was tanking. And, on top of it all, they had fun! What’s wrong with these people? Don’t they know that any time anything bad happens, you’re supposed to sit home and feel bad for everyone? Or at least, if you must spend a week chugging raki, have the decency to act like it sucked when you get back?

Then, as if having fun on vacation wasn’t rude enough, they topped it off by making a video that nobody who wasn’t in it could possibly ever give a shit about of everyone lip syncing to a Don’t Stop Believing.

Arrington says:

Team Cyprus: Alcohol + Bad Judgement + Really Poor Timing

Well, I’ll give him the alcohol. And hell, it was a Journey song, so I’ll give him bad judgment too. But poor timing? What were they supposed to do, go all McCain Campaign and wait a week? How’d that work out for old Johnny Boy?

I think we all really need to step back and ask ourselves “what’s news about this?” The only thing I can see that might pass as noteworthy is that there appears to have been a couple cute chicks hanging out with a bunch of geeks. Hard to say for sure, because it looks like cell-phone camera quality, but there’s a chance and I’ve been to enough Web 2.0 parties to know that’s headline material.

As I said yesterday, fair or not the video video will always be associated with the end of Web 2.0.

Umm, no it won’t. That “video video” (as opposed to an audio video I suppose) will always be associated with some Googlers having awful taste in music. It will always be associated with TechCrunch finally completing a long descent into Valleywagville, and their RSS subscriber count dropping by 10 as all remaining readers with a three digit IQ blow their brains out in disgust.

But Web 2.0 can’t end because it never really started. It was stillborn. It’s a concept that nobody outside of a 50 mile radius around Palo Alto has ever given a single thought to. It translates loosely into “take your site and add Geocities to it.”

And that video is nothing but some people having fun on their vacation to a really, really awful soundtrack. People are calling it “fiddling while Rome burned” which would make sense if any of them were the Emperor and could do anything at all about the stock market crashing. If they were George Bush, it would be pretty bad (and it would be called “Hurricane Katrina”). Really though, it’s just a few peasants who had a little too much ouzo and a really cheap video camera.

Also, what’s with all the girls wearing the same outfit? It’s like Satan dug up Robert Palmer, reanimated him, and said “You know what? The world hasn’t gone entirely to hell yet, which means you must not have unleashed enough shitty music videos during your first lifetime. I thought for sure when you came out with Addicted to Love, chaos would reign and I’d be able to release the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. But it didn’t happen. So I’m gonna bring you back for one more. Make me proud.”

And he did.

27 Comments »

Conservative Social News

Posted in Politics on October 11, 2008 by themaroon

From a comment on my last post that I felt interesting enough to warrant an entry:

"I thought you were making a claim about some inherent feature of social news which makes it right wing hostile rather than an empirical observation.

Do you think it would be possible to create a right leaning social news site?"

I think there is an inherent feature which makes social news websites lean left, which is that they are on the Internet. Internet traffic disproportionately represents people who are into technology, and those people are very left-leaning. Just look at the top Technorati blogs which are listed by an objective measure called Authority. In the top 10 you have one left-leaning political blog (Huffington Post) and then TechCrunch, Gizmodo, Engadget, Boing Boing, Life Hacker, Ars Technica, Daily Kos, Google Blog, and Smashing Magazine.

So you have a lefty politics blog, followed by 6 blogs aimed at techies, then another 1 lefty blog and 2 more techies. Right-leaning blogs, while sometimes large, are outweighed vastly in terms of traffic by the left. The first one I could find on Technorati was Michelle Malkin, which was number 45. There were at least 5 lefty blogs above it. And here’s the Compete.com traffic graph for the top progressive and the top conservative blogs:

huffingtonpost.com michellemalkin.com_uv

(Neat coincidence that Compete.com colors them blue and red by default.) Note that while there are more registered Democrats in the U.S. than Republicans, it’s by a ratio of less than 1.5:1. I don’t have the time to add them all up, but there’s clearly over a 10:1 ratio  (and maybe over 20:1) in terms of blog traffic though, which shows disproportionate representation online.

I suspect it is primarily due to us techies flooding the Internet. We tend to be online all day. Many of us have jobs that have us in front of computers all day at work, and then we go home and screw around on the computer. You can see it in the inordinate amount of traffic to blogs about tech, a subject that only some small percentage of the population cares about.

This isn’t surprising really. Democrats have embraced science, technology, and intellectualism while Republicans have embraced religion and anti-intellectualism. And in politics, people tend to favor the politicians that favor them.

You can pretty much see the difference between the right and the left’s Internet usage in this post about Obama and McCain’s websites.

I’m almost positive you could create a successful right-leaning social news site. I don’t know enough about either political agenda to know where you’d find your initial audience, but I imagine through forums, existing popular blogs. There’s no shortage of conservatives on the web, as Michelle Malkin’s traffic (which is undoubtedly nothing to sneeze at) shows. They’re certainly there. There are less of them, by a big margin, but still a pretty high number.

You might have some problems though, especially if you got big. For one, expect shenanigans from left-leaning hackers and such. I don’t know that they’d have any more desire to DDoS your site than conservative Internet denizens, but they’d have 100x the ability to do it. Or they could simply flood it with Daily Kos stories and vote them up, either manually or with bots. If the front page of Digg is any indication, they’ll do it too.

But, I think you could do it. You might have to spend a good amount of time moderating, but it could still be done.

3 Comments »

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