9: Jony Ive

Steve Wozniak: The Bomb

The story about the kid arrested for making a clock takes me back to high school in 1967. I built an electronic...

Posted by Woz on Wednesday, September 16, 2015

StartUp Ideas

Image via CrunchBase

Paul Graham does not blog often. But when he does he churns out an instant classic.

How To Get StartUp Ideas

The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas. It's to look for problems, preferably problems you have yourself....... The very best startup ideas tend to have three things in common: they're something the founders themselves want, that they themselves can build, and that few others realize are worth doing. Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, Google, and Facebook all began this way. ...... the most common mistake startups make is to solve problems no one has. ..... you can either build something a large number of people want a small amount, or something a small number of people want a large amount. Choose the latter. ...... Microsoft was a well when they made Altair Basic. There were only a couple thousand Altair owners, but without this software they were programming in machine language. Thirty years later Facebook had the same shape. Their first site was exclusively for Harvard students, of which there are only a few thousand, but those few thousand users wanted it a lot. ....... The founders of Airbnb didn't realize at first how big a market they were tapping. Initially they had a much narrower idea. They were going to let hosts rent out space on their floors during conventions. They didn't foresee the expansion of this idea; it forced itself upon them gradually. All they knew at first is that they were onto something. That's probably as much as Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg knew at first. ....... You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It's easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally. .......... It was not so much because he was a programmer that Facebook seemed a good idea to Mark Zuckerberg as because he used computers so much. If you'd asked most 40 year olds in 2004 whether they'd like to publish their lives semi-publicly on the Internet, they'd have been horrified at the idea. But Mark already lived online; to him it seemed natural. ....... Live in the future, then build what's missing. ....... Drew Houston realizes he's forgotten his USB stick and thinks "I really need to make my files live online." Lots of people heard about the Altair. Lots forgot USB sticks. The reason those stimuli caused those founders to start companies was that their experiences had prepared them to notice the opportunities they represented. ...... anyone reasonably smart can probably get to an edge of programming (e.g. building mobile apps) in a year. Since a successful startup will consume at least 3-5 years of your life, a year's preparation would be a reasonable investment. ..... software is eating the world, and this trend has decades left to run. ..... not absolutely necessary (Jeff Bezos couldn't) .... The Facebook was just a way for undergrads to stalk one another. ..... Live in the future and build what seems interesting. ...... It's no coincidence that Microsoft and Facebook both got started in January. At Harvard that is (or was) Reading Period, when students have no classes to attend because they're supposed to be studying for finals. ...... Worrying that you're late is one of the signs of a good idea. ...... Whether you succeed depends far more on you than on your competitors. ...... The search engines that preceded them shied away from the most radical implications of what they were doing—particularly that the better a job they did, the faster users would leave. ...... Most programmers wish they could start a startup by just writing some brilliant code, pushing it to a server, and having users pay them lots of money. They'd prefer not to deal with tedious problems or get involved in messy ways with the real world. ...... The unsexy filter is similar to the schlep filter, except it keeps you from working on problems you despise rather than ones you fear. ..... Hotmail began as something its founders wrote to talk about their previous startup idea while they were working at their day jobs. ...... The next best thing to an unmet need of your own is an unmet need of someone else. ..... When Rajat Suri of E la Carte decided to write software for restaurants, he got a job as a waiter to learn how restaurants worked. ...... Traditional journalism, for example, is a way for readers to get information and to kill time, a way for writers to make money and to get attention, and a vehicle for several different types of advertising. It could be replaced on any of these axes (it has already started to be on most). ....... after Steve Wozniak built the computer that became the Apple I, he felt obliged to give his then-employer Hewlett-Packard the option to produce it. Fortunately for him, they turned it down, and one of the reasons they did was that it used a TV for a monitor, which seemed intolerably déclassé to a high-end hardware company like HP was at the time .. And the reason it used a TV for a monitor is that Steve Wozniak started out by solving his own problems. He, like most of his peers, couldn't afford a monitor. .... ..... The prices of gene sequencing and 3D printing are both experiencing Moore's Law-like declines. ..... Live in the future and build what seems interesting.

Related articles

• Why most Zimbabwean start-ups AREN'T failing. That is the question.
• Paul Graham: Start With Something A Small Number of People Want A Large Amount
• The World's Leading Cities for Start-Ups - Jobs & Economy - The Atlantic Cities
• DEAR RANDI ZUCKERBERG: Here's The Dream Cast For Your Bravo Reality Show, 'Start-Ups: New York'
• Startups us. Corporate, it's like Apple vs. PC - round 2
• Why most Zimbabwean start-ups fail
• Launch Memphis Launches UpStart Women's Startup Initiative And 48 Hour Launch Dec 7-9
• Technion, India's iCreate to develop start-up incubator
• Be your own user

Rest In Peace, Steve Jobs

Sean Parker: Mystery Man

The New York Times: Apple’s Visionary Redefined Digital Age

worth an estimated $8.3 billion ..... A Twitter user named Matt Galligan wrote: “R.I.P. Steve Jobs. You touched an ugly world of technology and made it beautiful.” ..... the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad ..... transformed not only product categories like music players and cellphones but also entire industries, like music and mobile communications. ..... Starting with “Toy Story” in 1995, Pixar produced a string of hit movies, won several Academy Awards for artistic and technological excellence, and made the full-length computer-animated film a mainstream art form enjoyed by children and adults worldwide. ....... was neither a hardware engineer nor a software programmer, nor did he think of himself as a manager. He considered himself a technology leader, choosing the best people possible, encouraging and prodding them, and making the final call on product design. ....... In his early years at Apple, his meddling in tiny details maddened colleagues, and his criticism could be caustic and even humiliating. But he grew to elicit extraordinary loyalty. ...... “Toy Story,” for example, took four years to make while Pixar struggled, yet Mr. Jobs never let up on his colleagues. “‘You need a lot more than vision — you need a stubbornness, tenacity, belief and patience to stay the course,” said Edwin Catmull, a computer scientist and a co-founder of Pixar. “In Steve’s case, he pushes right to the edge, to try to make the next big step forward.” ........ Mr. Jobs was the ultimate arbiter of Apple products, and his standards were exacting. Over the course of a year he tossed out two iPhone prototypes, for example, before approving the third ....... To his understanding of technology he brought an immersion in popular culture. In his 20s, he dated Joan Baez; Ella Fitzgerald sang at his 30th birthday party. His worldview was shaped by the ’60s counterculture in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he had grown up, the adopted son of a Silicon Valley machinist. When he graduated from high school in Cupertino in 1972, he said, ”the very strong scent of the 1960s was still there.” ...... He told a reporter that taking LSD was one of the two or three most important things he had done in his life. He said there were things about him that people who had not tried psychedelics — even people who knew him well, including his wife — could never understand. ........ Decades later he flew around the world in his own corporate jet, but he maintained emotional ties to the period in which he grew up. He often felt like an outsider in the corporate world, he said. When discussing the Silicon Valley’s lasting contributions to humanity, he mentioned in the same breath the invention of the microchip and “The Whole Earth Catalog,” a 1960s counterculture publication. ........ In an era when engineers and hobbyists tended to describe their machines with model numbers, he chose the name of a fruit, supposedly because of his dietary habits at the time. ....... He was offering not just products but a digital lifestyle. ...... Great products, he said, were a triumph of taste, of “trying to expose yourself to the best things humans have done and then trying to bring those things into what you are doing.” ....... Jobs’s genius lay in his ability to simplify complex, highly engineered products, “to strip away the excess layers of business, design and innovation until only the simple, elegant reality remained.” ....... It’s not the consumers’ job to know what they want.” ....... Mr. Jobs developed an early interest in electronics. He was mentored by a neighbor, an electronics hobbyist, who built Heathkit do-it-yourself electronics projects. He was brash from an early age. As an eighth grader, after discovering that a crucial part was missing from a frequency counter he was assembling, he telephoned William Hewlett, the co-founder of Hewlett-Packard. Mr. Hewlett spoke with the boy for 20 minutes, prepared a bag of parts for him to pick up and offered him a job as a summer intern. ......... a whistle that came in boxes of Cap’n Crunch cereal was tuned to a frequency that made it possible to make free long-distance calls simply by blowing the whistle next to a phone handset. ........ When Mr. Draper arrived, he entered the room saying simply, “It is I!” ...... They raised a total of $6,000 from the effort. ....... decided to leave college because it was consuming all of his parents’ savings ...... “I didn’t have a dorm room,” he said in his Stanford speech, “so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned Coke bottles for the 5-cent deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the seven miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on.” ....... He returned to Silicon Valley in 1974 and took a job there as a technician at Atari, the video game manufacturer. Still searching for his calling, he left after several months and traveled to India with a college friend, Daniel Kottke, who would later become an early Apple employee. Mr. Jobs returned to Atari that fall. In 1975, he and Mr. Wozniak, then working as an engineer at H.P., began attending meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club, a hobbyist group that met at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in Menlo Park, Calif. Personal computing had been pioneered at research laboratories adjacent to Stanford, and it was spreading to the outside world. ............... “What I remember is how intense he looked” ... “He was everywhere, and he seemed to be trying to hear everything people had to say.” ...... Wozniak designed the original Apple I computer simply to show it off to his friends at the Homebrew. It was Mr. Jobs who had the inspiration that it could be a commercial product. ...... In early 1976, he and Mr. Wozniak, using their own money, began Apple with an initial investment of $1,300; they later gained the backing of a former Intel executive, A. C. Markkula, who lent them $250,000. Mr. Wozniak would be the technical half and Mr. Jobs the marketing half of the original Apple I Computer. ........... In April 1977, Mr. Jobs and Mr. Wozniak introduced Apple II at the West Coast Computer Faire in San Francisco. It created a sensation. Faced with a gaggle of small and large competitors in the emerging computer market, Apple, with its Apple II, had figured out a way to straddle the business and consumer markets by building a computer that could be customized for specific applications. ....... Sales skyrocketed, from $2 million in 1977 to $600 million in 1981, the year the company went public. By 1983 Apple was in the Fortune 500. No company had ever joined the list so quickly. ...... The Alto, controlled by a mouse pointing device, was one of the first computers to employ a graphical video display, which presented the user with a view of documents and programs, adopting the metaphor of an office desktop. ...... “I remember within 10 minutes of seeing the graphical user interface stuff, just knowing that every computer would work this way someday. It was so obvious once you saw it. It didn’t require tremendous intellect. It was so clear.” ....... In 1981 he joined a small group of Apple engineers pursuing a separate project, a lower-cost system code-named Macintosh. ...... “I don’t wear the right kind of pants to run this company,” he told a small gathering of Apple employees before he left, according to a member of the original Macintosh development team. He was barefoot as he spoke, and wearing blue jeans. ........ Jobs also established a personal philanthropic foundation after leaving Apple but soon had a change of heart, deciding instead to spend much of his fortune — $10 million — on acquiring Pixar, a struggling graphics supercomputing company owned by the filmmaker George Lucas. ....... In 2006, the Walt Disney Company agreed to purchase Pixar for $7.4 billion. The sale made Mr. Jobs Disney’s largest single shareholder, with about 7 percent of the company’s stock. ...... He had a number of well-publicized romantic relationships, including one with the folk singer Joan Baez, before marrying Laurene Powell. In 1996, his sister Mona Simpson, a novelist, threw a spotlight on her relationship with Mr. Jobs in the novel “A Regular Guy.” The two did not meet until they were adults. ....... his daughters Eve Jobs and Erin Sienna Jobs and a son, Reed ...... Eventually, Mr. Jobs refocused NeXT from the education to the business market and dropped the hardware part of the company, deciding to sell just an operating system. Although NeXT never became a significant computer industry player, it had a huge impact: a young programmer, Tim Berners-Lee, used a NeXT machine to develop the first version of the World Wide Web at the Swiss physics research center CERN in 1990. ...... In 1996, after unsuccessful efforts to develop next-generation operating systems, Apple, with Gilbert Amelio now in command, acquired NeXT for $430 million. The next year, Mr. Jobs returned to Apple as an adviser. He became chief executive again in 2000. ...... Shortly after returning, Mr. Jobs publicly ended Apple’s long feud with its archrival Microsoft, which agreed to continue developing its Office software for the Macintosh and invested $150 million in Apple. ..... The music arm grew rapidly, reaching almost 50 percent of the company’s revenue by June 2008. ........ In 2005, Mr. Jobs announced that he would end Apple’s business relationship with I.B.M. and Motorola and build Macintosh computers based on Intel microprocessors. ...... Afterward, he said he had suffered from a “common bug.” Privately, he said his cancer surgery had created digestive problems but insisted they were not life-threatening. ....... by the end of 2010 the company had sold almost 90 million units. ....... he was found not to have benefited financially from the backdating and no charges were brought. ...... his ability to blend product design and business market innovation by integrating consumer-oriented software, microelectronic components, industrial design and new business strategies in a way that has not been matched. ....... “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.”

Steve Wozniak On Steve Jobs

Source: Engadget

Firing Founders: Mostly A Bad Idea

Image by Annie Bannanie 09 via Flickr

Because-I-can is not a wise use of power.

My first disagreement with Fred Wilson, expressed at some third party blog, about a year ago, was with his assertion that there was too much money in the venture capital business. I find tremendous overlap between his and my thought processes most of the time, and I respect him as a person through our disagreements, and I sure admire his work, but I think I just came across my second major disagreement with Fred.

Fred Wilson: Parting Ways With A Founding Team Member

Fat Can Work, But Lean More Often Does

I am going to paraphrase my summary statement from an earlier debate where I was on Fred's side: firing a founder can sometimes become necessary, but that has to be the exception rather than the norm. Fred seems to think that has to be the norm.

If I look back at our most successful investments over the almost 25 years that I have been in the venture capital business, almost every single one of them has seen a founder or critical founding team member shown the door as the company scaled. It's almost inevitable.

And here Chris Dixon and I seem to stand shoulder to shoulder. I have disagreed with Chris before, fundamentally: Chris Dixon On Twitter: Not Impressive.

(W)ow, Fred, I've never disagreed with one of your posts as much as I do (with) this one. (U)nless a cofounder is deliberately underperforming or engaging in terrible behavior etc you should never fire him/her. (P)ut them in a different role or something if they can't manage/scale.

There are a few things Fred is right about. One, that letting go of an early team member is not easy. And he has put in a lot of sense into how to do it. If you do have to let go a cofounder, do it right. Do it fast, and be generous in the process.

I am in favor of vesting more stock than is contractually obligated to be vested. And severance so the person can take some time and decompress is another way to be generous. Most of all, be generous with the way you talk about the person's contributions. Call them a founder if they are a founder. Recognize their contributions both internally and externally and continue to do so. And help them find another situation where they can work their magic again.

What he has not talked about enough although he has touched upon it is the circumstances in which the cofounder has to let go. He makes it sound like this has to be routine practice, and I find that alarming.

Fred, I guess I see your point to an extent, I can see some instances where a cofounder might need to go. But I'd see your side better if you were to also talk of instances where a founder's departure was a really bad idea. Famous example: Steve Jobs and Apple. A recent example and close to your home: Etsy. Sometimes a charismatic cofounder might be "did in" just because he/she was not adept at the smoke room politics of a big team.

And he has not talked about the alternate which Chris Dixon touches upon. There are alternatives to let go. You could create a new, smaller role for that early team member.

My argument is not that this firing should never happen. I am suggesting this has to be rare, and there has to be a healthy debate as to what the circumstances would be that would warrant such a let go.

Severely diluting angel investors and mercilessly kicking out early team members is not venture capitalism, it is vulture capitalism. All the top tech companies of today have had their founders intact. Sometimes venture capitalists kill or stunt the growth and promise of companies they invest in with their unwise use of power: because-I-can.

Mozart died an early death because he was a creative genius who could not have been adept at the brute force ways of the dumb people around him.

Steve Jobs getting fired by Apple was a terribly bad idea. I have been angry at that Pepsi guy this entire time, and I am someone who has never bought an Apple product. A recent example close at home: why was the Etsy founder brought back? It is a DNA thing. There are people who are good at managing, and good at managing at big scales, and are good at scaling, but they lack the DNA, and that is why they did not start the company they now work for. It is tempting to give all the power to those technocrats, but that can be defeating. You trade muscle for essential DNA.

The Daily Beast: John Sculley On Why He Fired Steve Jobs: “I haven’t spoken to Steve in 20-odd years,” Sculley tells The Daily Beast. “Even though he still doesn’t speak to me, and I expect he never will..."

On that note, I am for a much simpler, transparent formula for the investment climate. That probably is another blog post.

Paul Allen left early for health reasons. Bob Miner was not fired by Larry Ellison, he left on his own. Steve Wozniak, it can be argued, did not scale either. These incidents do not prove Fred Wilson's point, they only disprove another of his pet points, that a company must have a Co-Founder. That is my third major disagreement with Fred. Every historic company has had this one key, indispensable member. That second person was a junior member, an early member, but not a Co-Founder. Companies are not founded by Siamese twins. But, again, that would be another blog post altogether.

Ben Horowitz: Why We Prefer Founding CEOs: The conventional wisdom says a startup CEO should make way for a professional CEO once the company has achieved product-market fit. .... The macro reason: that’s the way most of the great technology companies have been built ..... founding CEOs consistently beat the professional CEOs on a broad range of metrics ranging from capital efficiency (amount of funding raised), time to exit, exit valuations, and return on investment. ..... why are great technology companies so often run by their founders? And why do professional CEOs sometimes succeed? ...... Professional CEOs are effective at maximizing, but not finding, product cycles. Conversely, founding CEOs are excellent at finding, but not maximizing, product cycles. Our experience shows—and the data supports—that teaching a founding CEO how to maximize the product cycle is easier than teaching the professional CEO how to find the new product cycle....... innovation is the most difficult core competency to build in any business. Innovation is almost insane by definition: most people view any truly innovative idea as stupid, because if it was a good idea, somebody would have already done it. So, the innovator is guaranteed to have more natural initial detractors than followers. ........ the founder’s courage to innovate despite the doubters. ....... Comprehensive knowledge .. Moral authority .. Total commitment to the long-term ..... Great founding CEOs tend to have all three and professional CEOs often lack them. ...... This knowledge is nearly impossible to replicate. Without it, thoughtful people lack the courage to bet the company on entirely new directions......eems totally natural that Larry Ellison transformed Software Development Labs from a consulting business into a software company called Oracle ....... An excellent example of existing, invalid assumptions paralyzing a whole set of companies recently played out in the music industry. ...... Despite this dynamic history, modern record company executives badly missed the most sweeping technical innovation—the Internet. How was that possible? By the time the Internet arrived, all of the original founders of the record companies had been bought out, retired, or died. The new, professional CEOs were unwilling to let go of the most basic assumptions driving the cost structure of their businesses........They were proficient at running the current business, but lacked both the courage and the moral authority to jeopardize the old business model by embracing the new technology. ...... Hastings wasn’t married to the old distribution model precisely because he invented it. ...... Any serious innovation requires a heavy investment. Beyond the up-front cash, costs may include lower growth, bad publicity, and internal grumbling as existing features atrophy. Recently, we’ve seen Facebook’s founding CEO Mark Zuckerberg make a series long-term bets........

Related articles by Zemanta

• Meeting Fred Wilson In Person (technbiz.blogspot.com)
• Fred Wilson, our second panelist (scripting.com)
• Flying over the radar (of Fred Wilson) (zemanta.com)
• Venture Capital 2.1 = Venture Capital 1.0 Redux, with a Twitter Account (freddestin.com)
• Who Is Andrew Parker? (technbiz.blogspot.com)
• MBA Mondays Offers Free Advice for Startups and Small Businesses [Startups] (lifehacker.com)
• Blind Men and an Elephant- Nature Versus Nurture and Entrepreneurship (steveblank.com)
• Jack Dorsey, Twitter and venture capital - some musings (theequitykicker.com)
• Notes from last night's meetup (scripting.com)
• Fred Wilson: A DJ (technbiz.blogspot.com)
• Money Managers Should Pay The Same Tax Rates As Everyone Else (businessinsider.com)
• My personal "Panel Pile Up" Etiquette (softtechvc.com)
• Fred Wilson: A DJ (technbiz.blogspot.com)
• Face It: NYC Is Not The Best Place For A Startup (businessinsider.com)
• The New Reality of the Twitter Ecosystem (gigaom.com)
• NYC vs Silicon Valley (metamorphblog.com)
• The Panel Pile Up Is Not An Ideal Pitching Opportunity (businessinsider.com)
• John Sculley on Steve Jobs: "I have tremendous admiration for him" (macstories.net)
• How Steve Jobs beats presentation panic (macworld.com)
• The Other Apple Founder (patspapers.com)
• For Apple co-founder, misstep was a costly one (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• Now Even Scully Doesn't Think Scully Should Have Been Apple CEO (wired.com)
• Why I Fired Steve Jobs (Thomas E. Weber/The Daily Beast) (techmeme.com)
• John Sculley: Maybe I Shouldn't Have Been CEO Of Apple (AAPL) (businessinsider.com)
• Remains of the Day: Sculley looks back, Portal pushed back (macworld.com)
• Silicon Alley Insider: Steve Jobs Single-Handedly Restructured The Mobile Industry (AAPL) (businessinsider.com)
• Seed Deals Account for 26% of Early-stage Web Investments (gigaom.com)
• Inside Versus Outside Financings: The Nightclub Effect (businessinsider.com)
• Escape from New York: Is the Valley Necessary? (readwriteweb.com)
• Why Apple had to fire Steve Jobs then.... (broadstuff.com)

Vint Cerf, Craig Mundie, Steve Wozniak