startingup

Golden handcuffs and such only go so far, because if a person's mind is not fully engaged, what's the point in him or her showing up?

This has the effect of lowering the price acquirers would want to pay. I have seen this dynamic play out. When one of the companies I am involved with acquired a small company (note that most such deals are never publicly announced), they simply told the founders to stick around 3-6 months, hand over the technology and go. There was not even a plan to ask them to stick around. Of course, the price paid reflected that. This is the flip-side of the "talent acquisition" deals we read about - pure tech acquisitions, valued only for the code and the jump-start it gives someone else.

This is puzzling at first: if private parties thought public markets were undervalued, why won't they directly invest in already public companies?

I believe the answer has to be that private parties believe private companies are relatively undervalued compared to what "they should be" in public markets - in other words, they are not undervalued compared to currently public companies, but they are undervalued compared to some notion of what they ought to be as public companies themselves.

This idea is not surprising - after all every start-up investment, almost by definition, reflects the investor's bet that they found something that is "relatively undervalued compared to its eventual public status."

It has been the age of the financier for a while now. No, this is not capitalism at work; it is Federal Reserve policy. It allowed specially privileged entities to lever up (30x leverage in case of investment banks like Goldman or Morgan Stanley, 10x in case of hedge funds), allow them to speculate with easy money, and have them pay out huge bonuses in case of investment banks or huge carried profit in case of hedgies ... and finally bail them out when their leverage blew up on them, only to have them start speculating all over again.

I suspect if you look at the new inclusions in Forbes 400 list over the past 10 years, that list (of deltas) would be dominated by Finance. This is not a good thing.

Here is my theory: Facebook's traffic, measured in terms of users or page views is about even with Yahoo. Facebook has the added advantage that every single page view is a from a logged in user, who has provided Facebook with a fair amount of personal information, far, far more than what Yahoo has. Facebook has considerable information from the users' profiles as well as their various activity streams that Facebook tracks. This should enable Facebook to target its ads more precisely than Yahoo can, and therefore achieve at least as much revenue as Yahoo. From an advertiser perspective, it would seem like Facebook, with its vastly superior knowledge of user behavior, should be a better bet than old-school Yahoo. Of course, Facebook probably hasn't pushed its sales efforts as hard as mature Yahoo; still, I would expect Facebook to be doing a goodly fraction of Yahoo's revenue, which is running north of $6 billion per year.

If you buy my theory, long term, Facebook should overtake Yahoo in revenue; in fact a lot of Facebook revenue will likely come by stealing advertisers from Yahoo. So the company with the most to fear from Facebook is not Google but Yahoo.

I consciously decided to "improve" myself. Here are things I did:

1. Improved my wardrobe. Believe me, it makes a difference. 2. Consciously taught myself to listen, and ask questions that will lead to more conversation. 3. Consciously taught myself to gauge the level of interest of the other person. Move on if the other person isn't interested - as they say, there is always more fish in the ocean. 4. Push the envelope a little bit ... the man has to push - you have to ask for the phone number! And it is a good way to gauge interest. 5. Don't forget that some level of IQ compatibility is critical. Just as "they" don't want the nerd in you, may be some of the "airhead" types aren't great to be around for you either.

Let me just say that I hit success after consciously doing it. It is like doing a start-up. Know your strengths and know how to compensate for your weaknesses - a superior IQ can help you figure out how to compensate :-)

The time has come for a reevaluation of what constitutes real open source. I believe GPL should be excluded from it, and the MySQL business model is the classic example.

To those who answer "Linux", keep in mind that Torvalds unilaterally declared that applications that run on top of Linux (calling Linux via the standard libraries) are exempt from GPL. This is in effect LGPL, not GPL.

MySQL specifically takes the opposite tack: any application that uses the database using standard libraries comes under GPL, for distribution purposes.

LGPL and GPL are very different animals.

Aggregators tend to build much more value to themselves quickly by riding on other people's content. Yet, aggregators are worth nothing without the underlying content. This irks many content producers, particularly the professional ones whose output accounts of the bulk of the traffic that aggregators end up sending. This trend of professionally produced content accounting for the bulk of the links is evident even in Hacker News.

If these trends continue, giant aggregators could end up controlling much of the content. Yahoo already produces a lot of content, and licenses content for Yahoo News (which is fitting considering Yahoo News has more traffic than any news site in the world). Google News, Digg etc. could follow.

This is the future I suspect Murdoch does not like, because it appears from his perspective to be third parties building value out of his content, without compensating him. Legally, I am not sure he has a claim - if there is a lawsuit on this, it will reach the Supreme Court, that's for sure.

The past 25+ years have been a mass redistribution of wealth towards the financial class, discouraging real capital accumulation in favor of playing games with money. This is not a free market at work, as some of these fraudulent "Wall Street Capitalists" would have you believe. Without an ever-accommodating Fed, , they would have been wiped out a long time ago.

You hit the nail on the head. I know 4 very talented engineers who have been in silicon valley for 12+ years each. I have tried to recruit all of them at various times, but they have always been swimming in great offers, in good times and bad, so they are good. Between them, they have worked in at least 10 start-ups. While none of them are starving, no one got rich either. They have lived frugally, so they have a decent pile saved up, but that was done the old fashioned way, not through hitting the lottery.

There exist great start-ups, great big companies, lousy start-ups and lousy big companies. And within great companies, big or small, there exist lousy situations. Your immediate boss and your colleagues have more to do with your happiness than almost anything else.

My broader point is really about the problems of GPL in the real world, not open source in general. I am a huge fan of BSD/MIT/Apache, and thankfully a lot of contributors these days seem to like those licenses.

I have always viewed open source contributions as a form of charity. GPL is a highly encumbered form of charity (it is still charity, but think of charities tied closely to particular religious points of view). BSD/MIT/Apache is much more freely and liberally given and embody a generosity of spirit ("My charity recipients do not need to follow my religion"). My philosophical preference is the latter.

GPL is way too dogmatic, and given the fact that most free software actually is written by people with a paycheck from those hated proprietary software companies (at any rate, companies that definitely do not buy into FSF dogma), there always has been an underlying tension between their philosophy and the vast majority of contributors to open source. Basically Stallman wants them to feel dirty getting that paycheck.

As a result, we are moving to a different phase in the open source world - focus on code, not on the politics.

I want to add an illustration of the perverse effects GPL produced in practice. MySQL - now in the hands of Larry Ellison ... there must be some irony there - perfectly shows how to use GPL in a very "interesting" way. I have dealt with MySQL salesmen on several occasions, so I know how they "use" GPL. Basically they would assert with full confidence that your use-case (whatever it may be) would violate GPL, so you have to pony up unless you want all your code to be GPL. They knew how to exploit "GPL fear" in companies, but would back down in most cases once you bring a lawyer.

That is the practical real world effect of dogma. My prediction: MySQL will be orphaned intentionally by Oracle. No one else is going to touch it because forking the MySQL code will not let anyone escape the famous Oracle salesmen.

Some wise guy decided to have a little joke, and posted a comment instructing people to copy and paste a snippet of Javascript on their URL location bar. A lot of people (presumably "web programmers") did as instructed. That little snippet posts a comment on that same thread, instructing the next person to do the same. That entire reddit thread is overrun with those script generated comments.

Social lesson: we are fked as far as security is concerned, if that reddit thread is any indication: even programmers would sheep-like do as they are instructed. I suppose that was the "lesson" the wise guy had in mind.

Some good samaritan posted another Javascript snippet to clean up the reddit thread - automatically downvote the spam comments or hide them.

It used to be, Keynes says, that wealthy men just thought investing was the manly thing to do. They weren’t going to sit around and calculate what kind of bonds yielded the greatest expected return. Bonds are for wusses. They were real men. They were going to take their money and build a railroad.

But they don’t make rich people like that anymore. Nowadays, they put their money in the stock market. Instead of boldly picking one great enterprise to invest in, they shift their money around from week to week (or hire someone else to do it for them). So these days, it’s the stock market that stimulates most new investment.

Even accepting this explanation, it is worth asking why they don't make rich people who invest in building real stuff rather than chasing paper anymore. What happened to the innate human drive, curiosity and so on? Why is it that downturns in 19th century corrected themselves, but now we need more and more government intervention, progressively more every cycle?

In Economics cause and effect are often difficult to separate, but one reasonable hypothesis is that the widespread adoption of Keynesian policies themselves caused rich people to chase paper, leaving it to government/Federal Reserve to manipulate the stock market to try to stimulate investment indirectly. In other words, Keynesian policies beget more Keynesian policies, in the process generating a whole bunch of Keynesian economists who can "correctly" claim "We told you"; we reach the point where the government runs most of the economy, robbing people of initiative ("we don't make real men anymore").

If you travel to socialist countries, you will observe this in effect. The population displays a curious passivity ("that is the government's problem"). No one thinks about taking the initiative because the incentives systems are all wrong.

At some level, all taxonomies break down, but startup vs small business taxonomy isn't very strong to begin with.

Surprisingly (or perhaps not so surprisingly) there are excellent non-GPL open source alternatives today. And my subjective impression is that recent open source projects that use GPL are less popular than BSD/MIT/Apache based alternatives. That may be confirmation bias, of course.

So in that sense, I agree that GPL is declining ... frankly, I am happy with that development, because I don't consider GPL to be a license so much as a political philosophy, a philosophy I strongly disagree with. Which is why we choose not to use GPL software to the maximum extent possible (much as Stallman would choose not to use the software we create, which is perfectly fine with me!).