I Blame Beer

Ha! Ryan beat me to it.

Yep, sitting at 21A, sipping on my pint of North Star Red (a bit too sour, coulda been better, coulda been hoppier). There’s wifi, there’s power and (of course) there’s beer. Who needs coffee shops?

Some notes from a talk by Thane Plambeck at USF on April 4th, 2006.

* Don’t look for good ideas. Look for good people and good problems instead.
* Start the company with a partner.
* One person will be the technical wizard, the other is the master salesman.

Create a California S Corporation
Split stock 50/50
Make sure both partners are fully commited.

Plan for 18-24 moths with no income.
An office can make the company and its progress seem real (are people visiting us? do we have more people working? etc.)

How to find a problem?
Based on your area of expertise and contacts. Must be interesting to you.
* Inside knowledge
* High pain levels caused by lack of appropriate tools.
* Paradoxical situations (sell to X what X is selling to others)

Bad problems:
* Vague.
* No one will pay
* Can’t say who will pay
* Technobabble
* Problems that everyone is trying to solve

Bootstrapping
* Be a sociable prospector. Get to know people, ask questions, listen, try to understand.
* Bootstrap via IP (consulting while you own the IP or at least rights to resell, keep right to use customer’s name)
* How to know you’re on the right track?
* You have a customer, a contract and a dealine to deliver a solution.
–> You’re making money
* Focus - You can say exactly what you are doing.
* The tech wizard is busy coding, the sales person is busy selling that.

What’s the market?
* Don’t five stuff away for free - you don’t know who your customers are.
* Sell high-cost software
* A market of one is enough to succeed in the long term (where there is one, there are more)

* Get used to people saying you’re wrong.

The end
* Dont hope to sell your company until you have a profitable, growing company.
* Dont bring up selling the company yourself but be open to discussions.
* Dont sell yourself short.

OMG^3 or OMG3 is a perfect candidate for I Blame Beer. It’s a crazy project that’s only ever been discussed over beers (or other alcoholic beverages). I should write about it sometime but for now, the main idea is a automatic drama tracker. Tracking the levels and the specifics of drama and drama inducing events in the lives of those around you.

tblee has some interesting articles about philosohpy and design posted on the w3c site. Definitely makes for some good reading.

• Principles of design - You’re probably already aware of most of these but the Test of Independent Invention definitely deserves some thought.
• The World Wide Web and the “Web of Life” - About the parallels between the philosophies behind Web design and the Unitarian Universalist church.
• Evolvability - How to design for evolvability and interoperability.

I just wanna know where does Nicholas Carr find the nerve to call someone else, really anyone, antagonistic.

hAtom has a much wider scope than most microformats. I’ve seen many cases when the answer to someone’s question about issues completely unrelated to syndication was “put it in an hAtom container” or “use attribute so and so from hAtom.” It is a generic microformat and in terms of scope is far from micro.

One possible example (which I need to find some time to create) is wrapping in hAtom all dynamic elements in a blog. So that every list of elements (xfn links, categories, etc.) can be consumed using the same semantics; The very least of which is ‘give me all contacts that have updated since a specific date.’

In other cases, I think it should be possible to use hAtom to define the scope of other microformats (especially rel-tag but also rel-directory and others).

So project nirvana is coming along pretty well. It’s actually quite amazing to see conversations from several blogs aggregated in one location and even threaded properly. I should write something about how blogs are changing. Been thinking about that lately as I’m repurposing blogs into more general entities and also there’s been some others writing about it.

Possible idea: Segement a blog’s feed by cagtegories/tags and republish each feed in the appropriate place.

Sprenzy is a brand new blog set to chronicle the start of a Web 2.0 business. So it’s quite natural that the author was somewhat upset when flickr’s Caterina Fake proclaimed that It’s a bad time to start a company. It started out quite sensible but then sprenzy brought out the big guns:

More importantly, what’s the opportunity cost of not taking the risk of starting your own business? There’s a line in the movie Braveheart that has always resonated with me. William Wallace cries:

Aye, fight and you may die, run, and you’ll live… at least for a while. And dying in your beds, many years from now, would you be willin’ to trade ALL the days, from this day to that, for one chance, just one chance, to come back here and tell our enemies that they may take our lives, but they’ll never take… OUR FREEDOM!

William Wallace’s struggle for freedom was much nobler than my fight for freedom from the ”man”.

Mixing William Wallace and Web 2.0? There has to be a supr.c.ilio.us post somewhere in there. Ooh maybe if Braveheart embraces Pinko Marketing

I got a new domain! What other reason do I need to start yet another blog? This one should catalog all the silly ideas that settle into my mind as the beer settles into my stomach. Stuff that will not make it into Hellonline because it’s too silly and yet is not quite silly (or well-formed) enough to make it into Supr.c.ilio.us: The blog.