Accidental Events, Dreams & Travels in The Life of

Either when it fails or succeeds is the most probable short answer.

Let’s face it, working for a startup or even better founding a startup is in vogue. It’s probably the coolest thing you can do sans not working at all. Just paraphrasing our contemporary culture.

A startup is a high-risk, unproven venture; a business that is being started up. Once it’s proven it’s no longer a startup but a company. Not a terrible advanced philosophical axiom. Yet, I hear folks still referring to their company as a *startup* despite the fact that it has succeeded, i.e. being profitable or being bought.

Startup has become synonymous with small privately funded companies (either revenue or head-counts) or certain industries (technology). Most likely due to our desire to associate ourselves with perceived than real success. It’s mostly corporate peeps that insist on calling anything younger than 10 years and with less then 500 employees a startup. Ri-dic-ul-ous.

I’ve worked on three startups over the past four years: one that never became a startup (stealth), one that failed and is no longer, and one that succeeded and which is no longer a startup but a very successful $50MM company.

The point being that startup is the short period from idea to either proven success or failure. This can be months or years (Plaxo, Rapleaf, Pandora et cetera) pending length of run-way. But for most startups it’s no more than 12 months in today’s world. If you don’t deliver during that time period the likelihood of a continuation is slim.

I’m running behind on my quest to read 101 Books during 2010 due to really sad excuses… but will soon catch up.

The Expectant Father by Armin Brott and Jennifer Ash was a positive surprise in the sea of low-quality and pushy parenting books. New parenting seems to be the area where we gather all our fears of being inadequate and uneducated, taking any advice given at face value. Even if they come from a 20-something mother whom you share *nothing* with. Just the fact they she’s able to conceive makes her an expert. Bollocks.

The book explains the physiology and some psychology behind being pregnant, the process of delivery et cetera which is very educational. But the best part is the last chapter named Fathering Today, addressing the fact that fatherhood is not nearly valued as much as motherhood in today’s world, especially in the US which tends to be much more conservative and religious than other developed nations.

There is clearly a lot to be done both in re-thinking parenting and design lifestyles where both parents can work and play central roles in their kids lives. This book is an interesting early step but far from where we should be in 2010.

Our market economy’s abundant offering and ample choice forces us to create restrictions not to drown in excess. The idea that choice is a democratic right assumes that everyone is well-informed and educated. People are not.

I’ve embraced simplicity in everything I do since a few years back. If forces me to think before I buy, use or throw away. A few weeks ago - inspired by Minimal Mac - I cleaned up my iPhone home-screen. It was a fantastic experience in defining real need, prioritizing and setting restrictions. Not to speak of de-cluttering life.

I’ve done the same on all our desktop and powerbooks. Above is an image of how the desktop on my Air looks like. No visible hard-drive or files, no cluttered menu bar and no overcrowded dock. It’s Desktop Zero.

Here is a list of desktop applications I use on a daily, weekly and monthly basis:

• Chrome - the best browser ever made. I use the Diigo, Freely, GMail, Facebook and Calendar extensions. Google Docs to store, edit and share any file extension.
• Spotify - cause they rock. The interface is making iTunes look silly.
• Hulu desktop - a fantastic user experience via the Apple remote.
• Skype - for outgoing free calls.
• iTunes and iPhoto - cause I must. Stuck in the Apple ecosystem (no need to have in dock though).

By using Google Docs for any file extension I’m also keeping my desktop clean. Docs is self-organizing so I don’t have to think about what I worked on last. Waking up to Desktop Zero (and Inbox Zero) makes work so much more pleasant. I don’t have to spend time working on old problems that might no longer exist, but focus my best creative hours on creating new value.

The Chrome extensions are a great way of being notified on new emails, invites or posts. Great place to start every morning to check mail, RSS feeds and Facebook posts. The same accessibility should obviously be available on the iPhone when traveling.

PS. The iPad has the potential of becoming the best of the desktop and the iPhone. Or the worst. In a few weeks we’ll see.

Forecasting the future is always a fun and entertaining activity, tainted with millions of hidden threats of failure. It’s like a game of strategy, taking everything from technology, human behavior and current institutions to emerging bleeding-edge technologies into account. It’s easy - like forecasting the financial markets - to be biased towards what you would like to happen as to what actually has the highest probability of happening.

Here are a few of my thoughts - a mix of wishes and possible outcomes - on the world in 2020 :

• Media: Old media is dead and we’ll consume all forms of media via the web, mostly the mobile web. The last residential phone-line has just been disconnected. All the worlds music, movies and books will live in the cloud, accessible to anyone from anywhere. CDs and DVDs will be historical artifacts, collecting dust in the addict. Books will survive through new business models and creative design - old world publishers will be redundant as authors now understands how to use the web to learn about people’s reading preferences and build their own communities of interest. The most popular (TV) shows will be created by small, independent teams. The need for broadcasting and desktop computers are dead. Social networks will replace much of lazy TV watching.
• Traveling: Cheaper and more comfortable alternatives to flying will emerge, like Mag-Lev trains. Certain business travel will be replaced by virtual conferences as people are getting more comfortable with using technology to collaborate. Cutting expenses will also drive this development. We’ll all travel without any luggage as anything will be accessible from anywhere. Gas will be $20 per gallon and force people to leave suburbia or downsize their gas-guzzlers and choose public transportation or start biking / walking. Biking, micro-cars and energy-efficient scooters will dominate the streets.
• Business: Organizations will morph into high performance global networks (anti-hierarchies) driven by individual and team collaboration. The creative and conceptual knowledge worker will rule the workplace. But they workplace will be virtual, driven by the need to cut costs, lower energy consumption and to find a healthy balance between work and family. Many of the bigger 20th century corporation will have dwindled, not being able to shift from the old to the new business models - free being critical. All business will be web-based.
• Living: We’ll live with much lesser stuff but having access to more services. Our home is no longer a suburban storage house with kitchen, living room and three bedrooms. It’s an open space environment with sleeping capsules. We might rent or co-own these in several different locations as we are free to work from anywhere (telecommuting will be an anecdotal term). Our homes will no longer be our castles.
• Work: Knowledge workers have abandoned the 9-5 work lifestyle, suits and titles. Any successful project is being created by smart networks of people, dispersed across the world with regular meet-ups. Work and presentations will be replaced by artist expressions, like creation and gigs. The most successful professionals will be like artists. Work will no longer be measured in hours (i.e. input) but in value (output). Micro-brands and minipreneurs will be the drivers behind innovation.
• Food: Segments of the population will buy their food within a 10-mile proximity and cook their own meals, avoiding corn syrup and processed food. The high gas prices will tilt the power in favor of local, sustainable alternatives. We’ll live healthier and longer.
• Knowledge: New universities will emerge - Singularity, Hyper Island et cetera - that will train kids and adults in critical thinking, languages, technology, art and science. As all knowledge is available on the web the need to find, analyze and create will be more important than the ability to store and remember. Knowledge as in patterns, concepts and new ideas will rule. Education will be lifelong, not just 4-years at an Ivy League school.
• Business models: Free and accessibility will rule. Models will become more integrated where attention will be replaced by time and money. Creating relationships with the right audience will be much more important than building your brand at Super-bowl. Social influencers will get paid to share interesting new products and services with their networks. Marketing as we know it is dead.
• Religion: People have grown tired of organized religion as the guiding light due to all wars, Ponzi schemes and false promises. Spirituality and individual, non-organized faith is on the rise. A few nations are still fighting for religious supremacy.

I realize that many of these ideas are inspired by my aggressive reading program - 101 books in 2010. They are more directional than anything else and many ideas will obviously be completely wrong. But the point is that doing this kind of exercise is very liberating. It enables outside-the-box thinking and the realization that most crap that happens in the world - sans earthquake et cetera - are man-made. What we have screwed up we should also be able to fix, don’t you think.

Suite Arrival is offering hygiene articles for delivery at your destination per Lifehacker. This is a brilliant idea, fewer things to schlepp around on business trips. But it actually works equally great just to get them from your favorite airport lounge or hotel. Life can be so simple.

Having friends over this evening gave me the opportunity to continue my quest for the perfect roasted potatoes. But with a fridge full of goodness I wanted to mix things up a bit so I threw in carrots, onions, apples and rosemary; soaked in olive oil - all stuff from the local Farmer’s Market. About 350 degrees for 45 minutes, apples and onions tossed in after 30 minutes. Flip every 5-10 minutes, salt and pepper.

I served it with grilled chicken on top of the roasted veggie goodness with strokes of mixed olive oil and hunan sauce on the edges of the plate. I would have shared a photo but wasn’t fast enough as my guest gobbled up the dish in seconds… ;)

PS. For starter we served applewood bacon wrapped asparagus and dessert crepe suzette with fresh raspberries and raspberry sorbet. Verdignan and Campo Viejo wines.

The Art of Strategy by Avinash K. Dixit and Barry J. Nalebuff made my gaming brain salivate as soon as I glanced over the cover. The subtitle said it all: A Game Theorist’s Guide to Success in Business and Life. Yum!

This is the most interesting book on strategy I’ve ever read and I’ve been trough most of the classics in business school. Strategy is a way of thinking about everything in the context of others that are trying to achieve the same thing. It’s backward reasoning and game theory. It’s beautiful plans and well executed roadmaps. It’s a moveable feast.

The books starts out easy to train you in how to create game trees, think about probability and then extends to Nash’s equilibrium, different classic dilemma’s and signaling. They even use a reality show - Survivor - which they were consultants for as an example of how to create games that forces strategical thinking:

“Twenty-one flags were planted in the field of play between the tribes, who took turns in removing the flags. Each tribe at its turn could choose to remove 1, 2 or 3 flags. The team to take the last flag won the game.”

What would your strategy be?

A Theory of Everything by Ken Wilber was the right choice to follow up my exploration of mythology. The book is taking on the quest of explaining everything through the M theory. The most fascinating part is the Human Consciousness Project which is mapping all structures, memes and stages of human consciousness.

There are eight waves of of existence: six first-tier thinking and two second-tier thinking. Think Maslow but for existence, not needs. The interesting things are happening in the shift from first to second tier thinking as you might have guessed.

The latter two tiers represents a quantum leap into a human consciousness where we can the both think horizontally and vertically, in hierarchies and heterachies. It’s the Big, Big Picture. Reaching that level is the equivalent contemporary quest of a mansion and a rolls-royce.

This is a fascinating read as we are in the end of an era - often called post-modernism - and seemly stuck as a society. This book will is a wonderful journey in on to how become unstuck!

PS. I also ran into Ken Wilber as a recommended read via Open Space Technology.

The Great Recession is forcing us to rethink and in many ways scale back. Restrictions drive innovation which creates value. It’s all good!

The really exciting consumer trend is Stuff as a Service (SaaS); having access to stuff w/o the cost of ownership. Beg, Borrow and Steal, Zipcar and Netflix are just a few examples of services that replaces ownership. More to come.

Anything with infrequent use, non-perishable and durability lends itself well to being shared. It’s cost-effective, good for the environment and makes life simpler.

The behavioral adoption will take some time as stuff has been the physical trophy of the industrial age. The rusty adage still rings true: “Whoever has the most toys when he dies wins!”

I’m critical by nature. When I first saw the iPad I was no better than Bill Gates (“this thing will bomb”). But as I’m pushing my iMac, Air and iPhone to their limits I realize that there is a nice little need for something in-between. It’s more vision than routine which makes it hard to get your head around this new thang.

One of my buddies - ex-technical Yahoo! - painted a sweet picture today during lunch. It’s not the e-reader I’m excited about, it’s the doc reader, he said. Which is so true. It’s Byline for PDF’s with Diigo. Cached during flights to digest, highlight, annotate and share. Accelerated thinking and collaboration.

It’s both business and digital living room. It’s realtime on the cheap ($15 for 250MB). It’s cloud + apps + entrepreneurialism. It’s not just what it can do but what you’ll use it for.

I wouldn’t have realized this if I hadn’t kicked the shit out of my old iPhone with Travels with iPhone. And it’s ironic that it’s called an iPhone as the phone is what I never use. And I wouldn’t have realized it if I wasn’t working independently, defining how and when I work.

Sure, you can use these new gadgets in the old context and they will deliver incremental value or you could let it free and see where it takes you. New hardware and software is not just about what it can do for you but what you can do that you couldn’t before in your quest for world domination.

I’m more and more certain that the driver behind this technology evolution is our desire for friends, freedom and thought (a little Seneca there for ya). It’s meritocratic marxism. It’s lifestyle design.