OverMatter

A job is the default...

"This leads us to the last and probably most powerful reason people get regular jobs: it's the default thing to do. Defaults are enormously powerful, precisely because they operate without any conscious choice.

To almost everyone except criminals, it seems an axiom that if you need money, you should get a job. Actually this tradition is not much more than a hundred years old. Before that, the default way to make a living was by farming. It's a bad plan to treat something only a hundred years old as an axiom. By historical standards, that's something that's changing pretty rapidly.

We may be seeing another such change right now. I've read a lot of economic history, and I understand the startup world pretty well, and it now seems to me fairly likely that we're seeing the beginning of a change like the one from farming to manufacturing.

And you know what? If you'd been around when that change began (around 1000 in Europe) it would have seemed to nearly everyone that running off to the city to make your fortune was a crazy thing to do. Though serfs were in principle forbidden to leave their manors, it can't have been that hard to run away to a city. There were no guards patrolling the perimeter of the village. What prevented most serfs from leaving was that it seemed insanely risky. Leave one's plot of land? Leave the people you'd spent your whole life with, to live in a giant city of three or four thousand complete strangers? How would you live? How would you get food, if you didn't grow it?

Frightening as it seemed to them, it's now the default with us to live by our wits. So if it seems risky to you to start a startup, think how risky it once seemed to your ancestors to live as we do now. Oddly enough, the people who know this best are the very ones trying to get you to stick to the old model. How can Larry and Sergey say you should come work as their employee, when they didn't get jobs themselves?

Now we look back on medieval peasants and wonder how they stood it. How grim it must have been to till the same fields your whole life with no hope of anything better, under the thumb of lords and priests you had to give all your surplus to and acknowledge as your masters. I wouldn't be surprised if one day people look back on what we consider a normal job in the same way. How grim it would be to commute every day to a cubicle in some soulless office complex, and be told what to do by someone you had to acknowledge as a boss—someone who could call you into their office and say "take a seat," and you'd sit! Imagine having to ask permission to release software to users. Imagine being sad on Sunday afternoons because the weekend was almost over, and tomorrow you'd have to get up and go to work. How did they stand it?"

(paulgraham.com - Why to Not Not Start a Startup)

Post-Cluetrain Reality

gapingvoid: edelman talk

Venture Capital 101

Seth's Blog: The realistic entrepreneur's guide to venture capital

Chimerica

"Think of the United States and the People's Republic not as two countries, but as one: Chimerica. It's quite a place: just 13 per cent of the world's land surface, but a quarter of its population and fully a third of its economic output. What's more, Chimerica has accounted for around 60 per cent of global growth in the past five years.

Their relationship isn't necessarily unbalanced; more like symbiotic. East Chimericans are savers; West Chimericans are spenders. East Chimericans do manufactures; West Chimericans do services. East Chimericans export; West Chimericans import. East Chimericans pile up reserves; West Chimericans obligingly run deficits, producing the dollar-denominated bonds that the East Chimericans crave. As in all good marriages, the differences between the two halves of Chimerica are complementary."

(Not two countries, but one: Chimerica | Telegraph)

Note From Boss To Employees

1. I am sometimes under enormous pressure from upper management; pressure that you seldom see. Anything that you can do to make my job easier will be greatly appreciated.

2. Your interests are important, but please remember that I also have to juggle the concerns and feelings of a bunch of other people, including individuals outside of the department.

3. I may not have been given a huge amount of training before being named to a supervisory position. As a result, I’ve had to learn through trial and error. That's not always bad. Many of my responsibilities can only be learned through practice.

4. If you are a former co-worker of mine, please recognize that supervising former peers is one of the toughest jobs any supervisor faces. The support that you give me is crucial.

5. I will make mistakes. Please give me the same understanding that you’d like me to give you when you blunder.

6. If I do something dumb or am on the verge of doing so, please tell me. Don’t hint. Tell me.

7. I don’t like unpleasant surprises. Let me in on bad news as soon as possible. (Things that you believe are obvious may not be that clear to me. On the other hand, you'd be surprised at how quickly the latest gossip reaches my ears.)

8. I expect you to take initiative. If you keep bouncing things to me, I’m going to wonder why I have you around.

9. You should ask questions if you don’t know what to do. On the other hand, you should not have to be taught the same thing over and over again.

10. Let’s respect each other’s time. We each have a job to do and the more we can reduce unnecessary interruptions, the happier we'll each be.

11. Don't let all of my talk about meeting goals and producing results lead you into unethical behavior. You always have my permission to be ethical.

12. If either of us has a problem with the other's performance, let's talk about it.

(Execupundit.com)

Switching to Macintosh

Valleywag finally had a genuinely helpful post! Apple: 42 Reasons Normal People Can Switch to Macs

Apple Unveils New Product-Unveiling Product

"Get ready for the future of product introduction," said Jobs, looking resplendent in a black turtleneck and faded jeans. "The iLaunch will be able to make announcements from this, or any other stage, making human participation in generating consumer awareness almost entirely unnecessary..."

Shortly after Jobs' address, Microsoft announced that they are working on a similar product, the Launch-O, due to debut in 2009."

(The Onion - America's Finest News Source)