Shipping is a Feature: Some Guiding Principles for People That Build Things
BY STEVEN SINOFSKY
I love questions about advice because they really force one to think carefully about what to say. My former colleague, Jackie Bavaro now at Asana, who recently co-authored a thoughtful book on the ins and outs of securing a role in product management, asked the following question on Quora:
In thinking about the question and some of the recent design-oriented discussions, here are five takeaways that have always guided me. They didn’t originate with me, except in the sense that I discovered their value while making some mistake. MORE
By Opposing Small Cap Market Reform, Wall Street’s Largest Retail Brokers are Putting Their Economics Ahead of Customers’ Best Interests
By Scott Kupor
The Legend of The Blind MC
Photo: Vision Network
People say I’m crippled, but that’s a lie
They’re just mad ‘cause I’m so fly
Being handicapped is a state of mind
I’m not disabled I’m just blind
—The Blind MC, “Blind and Def”
BY BEN HOROWITZ
People often ask me why I feature Hip Hop so much in my blog posts. In the past, I have given short and incomplete answers, but here is the full story. It probably belongs in The Hard Thing About Hard Things, but I did not know how to tell it without Rap Genius.
In 1986, I was 20 years old and attending Columbia University in the City of New York. I received a phone call from my mother on the shared dorm room phone … MORE
How to Engineer a Best Picture Oscar
Photo: Thomas Hawk
BY MICHAEL V. COPELAND
Fast & Furious 6 is not in the race for Best Picture in the upcoming Oscars. All five of the preceding movies were similarly snubbed. If you are a fan of muscle cars or Vin Diesel (sometimes hard to distinguish between the two), this ongoing insult may seem unfair. But according to analysis of past Best Picture nominees by data jockey Benn Stancil, it’s not the mumbled lines or wooden acting that is preventing the Fast & Furious crew from getting a shot at mumbling through an acceptance speech – it’s that it has virtually none of the elements required for a shot at a Best Picture win. The participation of the actor Daniel Day-Lewis for starters. Or that it not be a sequel, which, as the sixth in a series it certainly is.
In an attempt to engineer the perfect Best Picture, at least by Academy of Motion Picture standards, Stancil, who is the chief data analyst at San Francisco-based startup Mode Analytics, sifted through mountains of data collected from entertainment information outfit Rovi and the Academy Awards database. The result, Stancil says with a laugh, “is the ultimate Frankensteinian Oscar-bait.” And like Frankenstein, it could be a triumph or an abomination. MORE
Why I Will Give 100% of My Book Earnings to Women in the Struggle
BY BEN HOROWITZ
There is a woman in Somalia
Scraping for pearls on the roadside
There’s a force stronger than nature
Keeps her will alive
This is how she’s dying
She’s dying to survive
Don’t know what she’s made of
I would like to be that brave.
—Sade, “Pearls”Never believe that a few caring people can’t change the world. For, indeed, that’s all who ever have.
—Margaret Mead
I will donate all of my proceeds from The Hard Thing About Hard Things to American Jewish World Service to support their efforts to help women fight for their basic rights throughout the world. Since there are many important causes, I thought that it would be worth explaining why I am supporting this one. MORE
Why There Will Never Be Another Red Hat: The Economics of Open Source
Peter Levine
Photo: R.E. Barber
Open source software powers the world’s technology. In the past decade, there has been an inexorable adoption of open source in most aspects of computing. Without open source, Facebook, Google, Amazon, and nearly every other modern technology company would not exist. Thanks to an amazing community of innovative, top-notch programmers, open source has become the foundation of cloud computing, software-as-a-service, next generation databases, mobile devices, the consumer internet, and even Bitcoin.
Yet, with all that momentum, there’s a vocal segment of software insiders that preach the looming failure of open source software against competition from proprietary software vendors. The future for open source, they argue, is as also-ran software, relegated to niche projects. It’s proprietary software vendors that will handle the really critical stuff.
So which is it? The success of technology companies using open source, and the apparent failure of open source is a head scratcher. Yet both are true, but not for the reasons some would have you believe. The success or failure of open source is not the software itself – it’s definitely up to the tasks required of it – but in the underlying business model. MORE
Why I Did Not Go To Jail
Photo: Thomas Hawk
BY BEN HOROWITZ
A lot of people have been asking me what my upcoming book, The Hard Thing About Hard Things, will be like. Here’s a piece that I wrote for the book that did not make the cut. I still think it’s a pretty good story and gives you a flavor.
I just tell the truth so I’m cool in every hood spot
21 years and I ain’t ever met a good cop
—Drake, “I’m Goin In”
After we transitioned the business from Loudcloud to Opsware, we needed a head of finance. Therefore, when the CFO from one of the best-run enterprise software companies became available, I jumped at the chance to hire her.
Michelle (note: her name has been changed) comprehensively understood software accounting, business models, and best practices, and she was beloved by Wall Street in no small part due to her honest and straightforward reporting of her previous company’s business. In my reference checking, at least a dozen investors told me that they made far more money when the numbers disappointed than when the company outperformed, because they trusted Michelle when she said that things were not worse than they appeared and bought on the dips. MORE
Dooming Wild Dogs and Digital Downloads
African wild dogs. Photo: Arno Meintjes Wildlife
On our last platform safari, we explored how incentives designed to prevent lion hunting in Kenya are surprisingly akin to policies designed to encourage free shipping on eBay. From the king of the jungle and the flow of packages, we turn to the dog of the savanna – the African wild dog – the unfortunate victim of the tradeoffs involved in ecosystem management.
Using Software and a Crowd to Push the Frontiers of Human Understanding
Image: Opensourceway
As much as we depend on our gadgets and their accompanying software to do more of our daily tasks—from reminding us to go to meetings to crunching stats for our favorite sports players—human intelligence is far from obsolete. On the contrary, MIT computer science professor Rob Miller believes there will always be a margin between what humans understand and what computers can do.
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