Played 169 times [Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Cypress Hill (Feat. Marc Anthony and Pitbull) - Armada Latina

Cypress Hill’s first single from their upcoming album Rise Up—seems like they’re ready for summer by mixing up Marc Anthony with some Crosby, Stills, Nash.

  via tracks

“What is start-up purgatory, you ask? Start-up purgatory occurs when you don’t go bankrupt, but you fail to build the No. 1 product in the space. You have enough money with your conservative burn rate to last for many years. You may even be cash-flow positive. However, you have zero chance of becoming a high-growth company.”

Ben Horowitz, The Case for the Fat Startup

Ben Horowitz has been on a tear recently and I really enjoyed this article. This echoes some of the themes in Albert Wenger’s Winner Take All and Early Stage Valuations. I like a lot of the lean concept precepts, but the problem with that kool-aid is taking your decision making process away from always making choices that optimize for the chance of success (rather than capital efficiency, etc).

I think the point that’s often lost is the idea of product iteration. There’s often a huge disconnect between the big idea in the big market and what you initially release as your first product. I think one of the reasons that the lean startup ideas are so popular is that they give confidence to people that they may possibly be able to find their way to a good product. It’s probably a false confidence, but the push to innovation is a good one.

I guess I’d be really curious to hear from Ben how he used 100 engineers to R&D what eventually became the Opsware product offering, how that R&D operation was different than a big company, and whether the waste in the size of the team was absolutely necessary given the method of product iteration that they employed (beyond copying competitors features and being the junkyard dog in the marketplace).

I also think the thing that needs to be acknowledged by people like Ben is that first time entrepreneurs often don’t have access to “fat capital” until they have significant traction—which happens with a combination of luck, timing, and iteration. Famous entrepreneurs are not the mean.

I guess what I really want is a panel discussion with Ben Horowitz, Angus Davis (or Dave Weiden), Eric Ries, and Steve Blank. And it would be interesting for Ben and Angus/Dave (the Tellme team) to talk about pivoting a startup of considerable size and with considerable amounts of capital and contrast that to the product / market fit methods advocated by Eric and Steve.

If you’re looking for some interesting business reading, try to find out what you can about the RIfle framework employed by Tellme as it switched from a consumer business to powering the voice trees of major corporations. I guess the devilish follow up question to Angus/Dave/Ben is: how much of the acquisition value of Tellme was due to adopting a customer development strategy and the size of their business and how much of it was due to the size of their data asset (voice phonemes)—and if they had enough capital to capture the same amount of data as a consumer tool, what would have happened?

Crafternoon.

Crafternoon.

Ghosts in Vermont

Played 363 times [Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Bon Iver - Satisfied Mind (Johnny Cash Cover)

  via bijan

Played 77 times [Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Howlin’ Wolf - I Asked for Water (She Gave Me Gasoline)

Changing the Autofocus Button on Canon Digital SLRs

A while ago, I noticed that my friend Jonathan seemed to have a special setup on his Canon 5d—he wasn’t using the shutter button to auto-focus his subjects. He had decoupled the auto-focus from the shutter button and instead used a button on the back of the camera. I tried it; I loved it.

What’s the point of doing this? It allows you to keep shooting regardless of what’s going on with the focus motor. I find that it’s really helpful if you’re shooting with a reasonable depth of field and the subjects are moving around a lot (parties, street photography, people in general). It’s a much faster manual workflow and it takes only a short period of shooting before it feels very natural.

To configure this is easy, but I don’t recommend your camera manual—it’s very obtuse language. Instead, check out: Canon Digital Learning Center - Back-Button Auto Focus Explained. On a 5d Mark II, my FN IV Custom Functions (Operations / Others) have the following settings: #1 is set to 3 and #2 is set to 1.

Happy shooting.

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Etta James - All I Could Do Was Cry

Trying to divine the mysteries of Excel spreadsheets.

Trying to divine the mysteries of Excel spreadsheets.

Played 79 times [Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Sigur Ros vs. Mobb Deep - Shook (Emancipator Mash)

Played 130 times [Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Barbara - Pursuit of Happiness (Kid Cudi)

Is that a sample of the Trapeze Swinger from this trio from LA?