Venture Geek

“A cynic is a passionate person who doesn’t want to be disappointed again.”

- Benjamin Zander

A man is a fool not to put everything he has, at any given moment, into what he is creating. You’re there now doing the thing on paper. You’re not killing the goose, you’re just producing an egg. So I don’t worry about inspiration, or anything like that. It’s a matter of just sitting down and working.

- Frank Herbert

Many organizations have adopted the unfortunate philosophy that repeatable processes lead to success, yet in reality what you really want is repeatable results (that is, the delivery of a high-quality system). The quest for repeatability often leads to templates, and because each system has its own unique set of issues, these templates have a tendency to grow over time into all inclusive monstrosities that do little more than justify bureaucracy.

– Scott Ambler in a Dr. Dobbs article about Agile documentation strategies.

In Silicon Valley, if you’re still working when you’re in your late-40s or 50s (and you’re not a VC), it means you’re not among the smart ones. The smart ones have made something worthwhile or joined the right startup when it was small and made enough to retire by the time they’re “old.” The older execs are basically the ones who were the lower-50% when they were young, and are the ones left working now that their smarter peers have long since retired….

From a comment by “Davion” on Valleywag’s coverage of Mark Zuckerberg’s comments that people under 30 are smarter, better employees.

I don’t know how reliable the ratings are anymore. I’m among those who cast a skeptical eye at the Nielsen Co. and the demographics and ratings they deliver. The fragmentation of the audience is so profound I don’t know how the samples can even tell me how many people are watching my show anymore. It seems like such a crap shoot. It’s like where the music industry used to be a few years ago, before they got — what’s that thing called? — SoundScan. Before they got that it was like Nielsen; they called up store owners and asked them what was selling and what wasn’t. When they shifted to a legitimate way of tracking each and every sale, it upended the charts. Suddenly, country music was huge, much bigger than anyone had thought. I think TV is in the same ballpark. We’re relying on a really old system based on this sample of people, and it’s not really accurate anymore. God knows how many Nielsen families are sci-fi fans.

– Ron Moore, creator of Battlestar Galactica, quoted at Salon.com.

I am actually amazed at how little money there is in politics. Do you realize that an entire Presidential campaign from start to finish costs well under a billion dollars? I know lots of people with more money than that.

— An early Google employee, now semi-retired in his early 40s.

Being “wired” does not mean becoming “computer literate” any more than driving an automobile requires becoming “combustion literate.”

- Nicholas Negroponte

(hat tip to Andrew McAfee)

“We are living with classical structures in a jazz age.”

- Rishad Tobaccowala, CEO of Denuo, talking about the nature of advertising planning at most big companies, as heard on On the Media.

Program standards must be established corresponding to technical standards. . . . Technical standards are only a means to an end, whereas programs are an end in themselves. . . . Leave this matter to broadcasters and you will have more and more entertainment of a lower order, the kind of entertainment that appeals to the masses counted in millions; and you will have less and less entertainment of the kind that appeals to the intelligent, who are comparatively few; more and more of the blare of advertising and no educational programs worth mentioning.

George Henry Payne. Speech before the Second National Conference on Educational Broadcasting, Chicago, IL, December 1, 1937

Douglas Rushkoff: “…most of what we see in America passing for a generation gap is really just target marketing.” (from the comments to this post)