Day 1

Of the first day of my life.

I am starting anew, in a sense. Everyone wants their chance. This is my chance.

The first step is to follow the ways of Bruce Lee. Read his story, copy his steps, perfect everything.

A person can do anything.

And you can do anything a person can.
Ergo: You can do anything.

6-Pack abs

One man's routine:For six-pack, on YouTube
Some Takeaways:

• Decline-bench situps
• Leg lifts
• Overhead cable crunch
• 7-7-7s
• Medicine Crunches
• Plank, to finish it off

Keep it at around 15 reps generally. The biggest factor though is a good diet, which will help you burn off fats.

Don't forget in silicon valley...

Fate changes rapidly (your company's profits, for example) but people change organically (you, for example).

Converse, Inverse, Contrapositive

Okay, I'm going to need a mnemonic because I always mix these up.

• statement: if p then q


• converse: if q then p


• inverse: if not p then not q


• contrapositive: if not q then not p

Check the source out for more information.

Python with SQL

To be used at PPC when I get the chance. I want to make my current reporting system more robust.

http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0249/

Value Systems

"The first thing to realize is that it’s easy to swear by a value system, and a different thing to follow it. To see someone’s true colors, you have to observe them when they are forced to compromise. Even the most morally bankrupt individual will adhere to “you shall not steal” if he’s alone on an island. Without a forbidden fruit there will never be a test of will, and you will never know what the person’s made of."
...

"On the inverse, companies that lack or have inconsistent value systems often have an incredibly difficult time executing well, no matter what engineering, sales or marketing skills they have. Because they disagree on what is good and bad, and right and wrong."

Source

Towards Good Programming Style in C
Major takeaways on variable:

• Use good variable names, with camelCasing or under_scores


• Describe variables at declaration

Major takeaways on documentation:

• Document every subroutine with a block comment


• For longer programs describe the entire program, including purpose, requirements, missing (required) features, known bugs, etc.

Lastly, the golden rule of style:

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Style Principle
Structure and document your program the way you wish other programmers would.

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Be true to yourself

Truth -> Independent thinking -> Conflict -> Innovation.

First and foremost, you have to be true to yourself, and be confident in your reasoning.

Second, because what is true to you is not always transparent, you must focus on communicating this truth.

Independence

“Don’t be trapped by dogma—which is living with the results of other people’s thinking.”

-Steve Jobs, Stanford Commencement 2005

Do the right thing

“When you want to do pension reform for the prison guards,” he says, “and all of a sudden the Republicans are all lined up against you. It was really incredible, and it happened over and over: people would say to me, ‘Yes, this is the best idea! I would love to vote for it! But if I vote for it some interest group is going to be angry with me, so I won’t do it.’ I couldn’t believe people could actually say that. You have soldiers dying in Iraq and Afghanistan, and they didn’t want to risk their political lives by doing the right thing.”

-Arnold Schwarzenegger, interview by Michael Lewis

Source: Vanity Fair

Article source Reproduced below.

tl;dr

Find a mentor and track metrics
Don't over fundraise
Find a partner to complement you (techie or non-techie)
Care about your impact
Everyone overestimates their market


The start up genome Report -interesting findings
After interviewing 650 early Internet startups a group of incredibly smart people based on empirical information summarize what makes a successful internet startup

1.Founders that learn are more successful-Startups that have helpful mentors, track metrics effectively, and learn from startup thought leaders raise7x more money and have 3.5x better user growth.

2. Startups that pivot once or twice times raise 2.5x more money have 3.6xbetter user growth, and are 52% less likely to scale prematurely than startups that pivot more than 2 times or not at all.

3. Many investors invest 2-3x more capital than necessary in startups that haven’t reached problem solution fit yet. They also over-invest in solo founder sand founding teams without technical cofounders despite indicators that show that these teams have a much lower probability of success.

4. Investors who provide hands-on help have little or no effect on the company's operational performance.But the right mentors significantly influence a company’s performance and ability to raise money. (However, this does not mean that investors don’t have a significant effect on valuations and M&A)

5. Solo founders take 3.6x longer to reach scale stage compared to a founding team of 2 and they are 2.3x less likely to pivot.

6. Business-heavy founding teams are 6.2x more likely to successfully scale with sales driven startups than with product centric startups.

7. Technical-heavy founding teams are 3.3x more likely to successfully scale with product-centric startups with no network effects than with product-centric startups that have network effects.

8. Balanced teams with one technical founder and one business founder raise 30% more money , have 2.9x more user growth and are 19% less likely to scale prematurely than technical or business-heavy founding teams.

9. Most successful founders are driven by impact rather than experience or money.

10. Founders overestimate the value of IP before product market fit by 255%.

11. Startups need 2-3 times longer to validate their market than most founders expect. This underestimation creates the pressure to scale prematurely
.
12. Startups that haven’t raised money over-estimate their market size by 100x and often misinterpret their market as new.

13. Premature scaling is the most common reason for startups to perform worse. They tend to lose the battle early on by getting ahead of themselves.

14.B2C vs. B2B is not a meaningful segmentation of Internet startups anymore because the Internet has changed the rules of business


Noam Zur

Sales Mentor - Customer development for startups
4 months ago

Truth

Steve Jobs passed away today. It's funny how one person can impact so many lives.

Today is 8302 of my life, I believe. Soon, I will be a 10,000 day old person.

For most of life you need partnerships. But to find your own truth and following your heart, as Steve Jobs put it, you must look within. He was a hustler. He made things the way they are. Because he believed enough in his heart.

Racial humor

Telling racial jokes is kind of like drinking for the first time.

It's hard to know when to stop.

Day 8299

Enjoying my time with David. Stayed up the last 36 hours, most of which was spent on a Lab for my networking class. I liked it, although I'll crash soon..

Going to do Algo Homework and sleep. Today I hung out with Jim for a bit, then Simon for dinner, and David for post dinner beer and chill. Listening to Starry Starry Night by Don McLean...

Want to put down this link so I don't forget it, just some intermediate python work.

http://www.rexx.com/~dkuhlman/python_201/python_201.html

David's wisdom to me yesterday... "The red herring is purpose"

It's catching...

Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs

On my to read list.

Yeah but...

I've noticed that I need a second opinion to make a lot of decisions lately. So, that really puts me at the whims of whatever suggestion floats by. Always, when someone offers a suggestion, you have to do your own optimization. Tell yourself "That's interesting, but..." And try to think of things objectively.

Happy planning =D