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Felix Dennis who comes from humble beginnings:

An art college drop out, Dennis left home before his sixteenth birthday, and lived in a number of bedsits. Dennis started his career in publishing with Oz magazine, the Sixties counterculture magazine, initially as a successful seller, through which editor Richard Neville realized Dennis' potential business acumen. Dennis had earlier contributed to a television discussion on the counterculture, which Oz reprinted; the first magazines Dennis sold had been Neville's only available means of compensating him for using this material.

Oz was prosecuted for obscenity in 1971. All three editors were found guilty of corrupting children, and given jail terms with hard labour, although Dennis himself was given a shorter sentence because the judge, Justice Michael Argyle, considered Dennis "very much less intelligent" — and therefore less responsible — than his co-accused. It was such a cutting remark that it allegedly drove Dennis to create a business empire to prove the judge wrong.

Revenge empire? Interesting, if true.

Some quotes from this article, which somehow manages to be simultaneously annoying, enlightening, and heartening. Probably quite a bit like Dennis himself, if his writing is a window into who he is as a person.

The key, I think, is confidence. Confidence and an unshakeable belief it can be done and that you are the one to do it.

Tunnel vision helps. Being a bit of a shit helps. A thick skin helps. Stamina is crucial, as is a capacity to work so hard that your best friends mock you, your lovers despair and the rest of your acquaintances watch furtively from the sidelines, half in awe and half in contempt.

[...]

If you wish to be rich, however, you must grow a carapace. A mental armour. Not so thick as to blind you to well-constructed criticism and advice, especially from those you trust. Nor so thick as to cut you off from friends and family. But thick enough to shrug off the inevitable sniggering and malicious mockery that will follow your inevitable failures. Not to mention the poorly hidden envy that will accompany your eventual success.

Consider carefully this shortlist:

• If you are unwilling to fail, sometimes publicly, and even catastrophically, you stand little chance of ever getting rich.
• If you care what the neighbours think, you will never get rich.
• If you cannot bear the thought of causing worry to your family, spouse or lover while you plough a lonely, dangerous road rather than taking the safe option of a regular job, you will never get rich.
• If you have artistic inclinations and fear that the search for wealth will coarsen such talents, you will never get rich. (Because your fear, in this instance, is well justified.)
• If you are not prepared to work longer hours than almost anyone you know, despite the jibes of colleagues and friends, you are unlikely to get rich.
• If you cannot convince yourself that you are "good enough" to be rich, you will never get rich.
• If you cannot treat your quest to get rich as a game, you will never be rich.
• If you cannot face up to your fear of failure, you will never be rich.

Ann is the co-founder of Hummer Winblad Venture Partners which opened its doors in 1989. It was the first VC firm to focus exclusively on software. Since that time, 45 of its portfolio companies have been acquired or gone public. She began her career as a systems programmer at the Federal Reserve Bank. In 1976 Ann co-founded Open Systems, Inc., a top selling accounting software company, with a $500 investment. She operated Open Systems profitably for six years and then sold it for over $15 million.

$15 million in 1982 dollars is worth approximately $50 million today using GPD per capita measure, which is the appropriate metric for this kind of thing.

From page 299 of Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days:

When I went there, it was the first real business experience I had — although I had had part time jobs. I'd never been in a corporation, and it felt so glamorous to have a cubicle. Minneapolis is a bright city. There's the Nicollet Mall and you were right downtown in the city. It's like getting a job in San Francisco.

But it just wasn't inspiring. No one was chomping at the bit. I actually can't remember — I knew I was going to quit, but I can't remember the moment where I thought, "I'll quit and start a company." I still felt very empowered, like, "This isn't this hard a job. This is a big job and I've already gotten promoted once in the first 3 months and I know I can earn money. I can always come back to this, so why don't I break out?" So the three guys from the Federal Reserve that started the company with me — one guy did quit his job and the other two took a year sabbatical, just in case this didn't work. They held on to the safety ring.

There were not a bunch of people saying, "Start a company, start a company. Let's do this. Let's build something from scratch." It's so long ago now that I just remember the general feeling that there was very little to risk. I was somehow already fully trained for anything that might confront me. Of course, all that is false; there's a lot of risk and you are never fully equipped to… you just have to be very adaptable. It turned out that I was adaptable. I didn't know that until I did that, but it was just a feeling of fearlessness. "What's the risk? What will I have to lose? I'm sure I can do this." It was not cockiness, just that moment you feel in your youthfulness that you are sort of empowered to achieve.

I think what does separate some entrepreneurs from other entrepreneurs is we're not handwringers. We don't worry about the unknown. We don't really worry about the risk points ahead. As you get older and you get more experience, you train yourself to think ahead about the risk points versus just to take the next hill. But non-risk-takers and non-entrepreneurs would have really big headaches about this. They would need some level of comfort and safety.

That's something that we look for in entrepreneurs — that they have the courage to do the job. That they'll have the ability to judge the business situation. They'll have the ability to lead people. They'll have the ability to interact with the marketplace and to really build confidence into strategy.

I've been doing a lot of reading lately, and today I was reading "Hiring is obsolete" by Paul Graham. I loved it, and the section on risk really stood out to me, and I'd like to highlight some specific bits.

So what you should invest in depends on how soon you need the money. If you're young, you should take the riskiest investments you can find.

All this talk about investing may seem very theoretical. Most undergrads probably have more debts than assets. They may feel they have nothing to invest. But that's not true: they have their time to invest, and the same rule about risk applies there. Your early twenties are exactly the time to take insane career risks.

The reason risk is always proportionate to reward is that market forces make it so. People will pay extra for stability. So if you choose stability– by buying bonds, or by going to work for a big company– it's going to cost you.

Riskier career moves pay better on average, because there is less demand for them. Extreme choices like starting a startup are so frightening that most people won't even try. So you don't end up having as much competition as you might expect, considering the prizes at stake.

…

But it's not necessarily a mistake to try something that has a 90% chance of failing, if you can afford the risk. Failing at 40, when you have a family to support, could be serious. But if you fail at 22, so what? If you try to start a startup right out of college and it tanks, you'll end up at 23 broke and a lot smarter. Which, if you think about it, is roughly what you hope to get from a graduate program.

Even if your startup does tank, you won't harm your prospects with employers. To make sure I asked some friends who work for big companies. I asked managers at Yahoo, Google, Amazon, Cisco and Microsoft how they'd feel about two candidates, both 24, with equal ability, one who'd tried to start a startup that tanked, and another who'd spent the two years since college working as a developer at a big company. Every one responded that they'd prefer the guy who'd tried to start his own company. Zod Nazem, who's in charge of engineering at Yahoo, said:

I actually put more value on the guy with the failed startup. And you can quote me!

So there you have it. Want to get hired by Yahoo? Start your own company.

The entire essay is absolutely worth reading for anyone interested in starting their own business.

This is Non Sequitur from August 15, 2007:

Sorry, my width isn't quite wide enough. Clicky for standalone GIF.

Mirrored here to prevent future link rot.

Comics, Non Sequitur, relationships

I haven't written anything in a while, mostly because I don't have much to say that others would find interesting. However, I would just like to say that printing to PDF absolutely kicks ass. I discovered this nifty little thing a couple of months ago, and I've been using it religiously ever since.

For those of you non-Mac users, and those who are but haven't noticed, OS X has a built-in print to PDF feature — made much more useful if you click the print page link, or printer-friendly link that most sites have before printing to PDF. (Click for full-size.)

For the last couple of months or so, I've been creating my own little library of research papers of things I'm interested in, or have had occasion to use:

I've actually been accumulating material faster than I can read it thanks to school and work, but I'll have time to catch up in the coming weeks. When I want to find something that I know I read, just Command-Space and I can search the contents of all of the PDFs instantly using Spotlight.

Lots of people complain about Spotlight, but it's better than anything Windows has out-of-the-box.

All of this can be accomplished on Windows, as well, but it's just easier on a Mac. I save CEs, journal articles, whatever I find interesting. It's also interesting that a lot of what you read in medical news and journal articles is 1) uninteresting 2) unremarkable and 3) useless. It seems it's always fun to compare things to placebo when it would be much more interesting (and useful) to conduct head-to-head tests of drugs.

There is no "best-of-breed" drug for a given condition most of the time, thanks to the near-infinitely variable nature of complex higher organisms. There are very few absolutes in medicine, but there are trends that usually emerge. It'd be nice if researchers started going out of their way to look for them. That's somewhat difficult, though, when most of the big studies are funded by large pharmaceutical companies with a vested interest in seeing their drug perform well. You'd be a fool to hundreds of millions of dollars for a big study only to have your drug not perform as well as a competitor's… Sometimes the NIH funds head-to-head studies — the only entity besides Big Pharma with pockets deep enough to do so — but only when there is a significant amount of money to be saved by establishing a "winner".

If I get bored someday soon, I'll post some of the names of the huge studies to which I refer in this mini tangent…

Apple, OS X, Spotlight, Tiger, Mac, PDF, library, digital library

There's a metafilter thread that asks what book everyone should read. There are some good suggestions, but they are all temporal recommendations. There's nothing timeless about any of them, really. And they miss one thing that is essential to being a human being.

All humans are social. We're born that way, we cooperate to live. Every aspect of life is built upon cooporation. Economics, the study of the interconnectedness of every aspect of life in particular. Because we are all inherently social, and will always be social — until there is no more human race — it stands to reason that we should read something that will all further our understand of the relationships we form with one another.

To that end, I offer up the book How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. It's message is timeless, and once you've got the foundation down, you can build off of it in any direction you like: science, business, healthcare… anything, really.

I mean honestly… some of the suggestions are just out there:

QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter by Richard Feynman, for a gentle math-free introduction to the theory that appears to most accurately describe what really happens when charged particles interact.

I mean really. WTF? That's not useful to me at all. I frankly couldn't care less about what happens when charged particles interact. I don't think a starving person in Africa would care either. (A book like Carnegie's is actually useful to anyone on any level of Maslow's heirarchy of needs because it can help one move up on the ladder.)

The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins.

The theory of evolution is incredibly beautiful in its ability to give a simple explanation for the complexity of the biological world, yet few people understand it well. In his books, Dawkins shows how evolution can produce altruism, and various other complex organs and behaviors, but most of all, he explains its basic principles and shows why evolution is the only possible explanation - even in theory - for complex living organisms.

These are not timeless suggestions. While they may be great books, our understanding of physics will change, our understanding of the origins will evolve (har har). However you take a book like How to Win Friends and Influence People and its advice is timeless. The fundamentals outlined therein will be relevant from now until the demise of humanity.

(And yes, I completely ignored the fiction genre because fictional books wouldn't be especially relevant to someone trying only to survive.)

I came across this yesterday, and I thought it was great. It was really freaking long, though, and I wanted to print it out to read offline, so I made a PDF. I figured others might want to do the same, so here it is.

Penny Arcade vs. MIT PDF

If you wish to link to it, please link to my post instead of the PDF directly. Gracias!

Penny Arcade, MIT, Penny Arcade vs. MIT

A few weeks ago, my shiny new laser printer arrived. I bought it because I wanted to print things to read offline — I have a hard time reading large amounts of text on a screen (though I have no problem writing), and I wanted a way to read many of the things that I thought would be interesting. Normally, I'd leave them in a tab in a browser for a few days, lose interest, and then close the tab. I can't even begin to guess how many things I wanted to read, but never did. In the hundreds, anyway. I've been doing it for years.

I discovered that many websites have a convenient little "Printer friendly" option. The BBC, Yahoo news, etc. And many of the things actually worth reading are formatted so simply that you don't need a printer friendly option because that's the way it's going to be formatted anyway. Basic webpages look like shit on the screen, but they're lovely on paper.

Here's a rundown of just some of the stuff I've read in the last week or so. These are just the full-length articles, not the short news blurbs that I print out as well.

• Inside the KLAT2 supercomputer
• Quantum search algorithm implemented using off-the-shelf optics?
• The Ars Technica Motherboard Guide: Part I — motherboard fundamentals*
• Breakthrough of the Year: Evolution in Action
• Road test: Four databases tested*
• Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School District*
• The end of the period*
• LISPing at JPL

* Denotes an especially excellent article

It's a safe bet that I wouldn't have read any of these articles if I hadn't printed them.

(And yes I'm recycling the paper. :p)

I've spent the last half an hour reading the Xooglers blog, and I've got to say that it's absolutely brilliant. I'm not a fan of blogs so much, but this is certainly an interesting look at the culture that pervades Google. It was posted on Slashdot this morning, and it's certainly quite amazing.

This particular entry made me laugh out loud several times.

Reading the Xooglers blog shows (rather than tells) how companies in the "knowledge" business should be run. The blog is well worth the read — start at the beginning and work your way forward. You won't regret it.

* Rian prods David