Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Techie, Tech Blogger, Iran Democracy Activist, New Yorker

"A former student asked me a few days ago how I learned Ruby on Rails. The answer was that I simply read a lot of great tutorials."


Techie, tech blogger, Iran democracy activist, New Yorker.

What do you want to be when you grow up? I just changed my Twitter and Facebook profiles to read the above. It used to be: Iran Democracy Activist, Tech Blogger, New Yorker.

And then there are distractions: The Movie Business.

Fundraising to be able to do full time Iran democracy work has not been easy: Selling 5% Of Nobel For 50K. I mean, if the Iranian American founder of eBay will not come along, who will?

Tweet 1, Tweet 2, Tweet 3, Tweet 4.

Not only do I not seem to have the knack for small dollar political donations, I think political work is meant to be public service, and so I am not going to discontinue my Iran work, I am going to do it on the side, part time. Insa-allah.

I have a LinkedIn email from Anu Shukla that has me psyched.
Location is southbay or virtual - exciting early stage opportunity. Will invest in training and ramp up for non Ruby engineering talent that are interested in learning. Competitive salary and stock.
This means, if I can get in, I get to telecommute from NYC, and I can spend the first few weeks learning Ruby. I am up for it. Besides this looks like might be Anu's new stealth startup. Anu is a serial entrepreneur. She is bigger than Sabeer Hotmail Bhatia because Bhatia basically disappeared after Hotmail, whereas Anu kept chugging all along, and with Anu it is like you ain't seen nothing yet. Her best is yet to come.
Image representing Anu Shukla as depicted in C...Image via CrunchBase
That is the impression I get. Offerpal Media is a bigger promise than the company she sold over a decade ago for was it 200 million dollars?

She is inspiring. I'd be honored to be part of her new stealth startup.

Mike Arrington Is A Sexist Pig: Say PeeeeG!
The Highlight Of My Internet Week
Anu Shukla Has Found The New Frontier In Advertising
I Just Became Friends With Anu Shukla

I might even be open to moving to the other coast. But for now I should stay put. I think I like the idea of staying put in NYC and visiting the Bay Area often enough. That would be a swell arrangement.

Ruby on Rails
Ruby on Rails: Download
Ruby on Rails Guides
Ruby on Rails - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ruby on Rails Documentation
Top 12 Ruby on Rails Tutorials
Ruby on rails: up and running - Google Books Result
Ruby on Rails Tutorials - Tutorialized
Dribbble: Dan Cederholm and Rich Thornett | the Ruby on Rails Podcast
rails's rails at master - GitHub
Ruby on Rails Tutorial
Tutorial
Ruby on Rails Guides: Getting Started with Rails
Ruby on Rails Tutorial: Learn Rails by Example | by Michael Hartl
Ruby on Rails: the Ultimate Beginner's Tutorial
Ruby on Rails programming tutorials2 - Meshplex
Ruby on Rails Tutorial

Languages: English, Hindi, Nepali, Maithili (very good). Bhojpuri, Awadhi, Tharu, Urdu (good). Bengali, Sanskrit (so so).


Paul Graham: What Happens At Y Combinator: a portrait of YC is in some ways the complement of a portrait of the average startup .... an event called Demo Day, at which the startups present to an audience that now includes most of the world's top startup investors. ..... the details people omit in more public talks tend to be the most interesting parts of their stories ...... you hear just how screwed up most of these successful startups were on the way up. ...... Startups modify or even replace their ideas much more than outsiders realize. ..... Usually we advise startups to launch fast and iterate. .... real users, whose often surprising reactions to your product teach you what you should have been building. ..... Since there are a large number of points on the perimeter of most existing technologies at which one could push outward to create a quantum blister, what to build first is one of the most important questions we talk about. ...... The larval product should also have a larval business model. ..... Most things that happen to newly launched startups are bad. But paradoxically, these disasters are precisely the reason to launch fast: they all represent problems you're going to need to solve eventually, and the only way even to find out what they are is to launch. In practice they vary from technological bottlenecks to threats of lawsuits, but the most common problem is that users don't like the product enough. ...... the search space is huge ..... Some startups are immediately attractive, and they'll find it easy to raise money. Others are ugly ducklings, who will grow into swans in time ...... because raising money is like choosing an angle of attack for a plane. If you try to climb too steeply you just stall. ....... Once you start to get hard commitments from investors, more investors want in. ....... We still talk regularly with founders from the first YC batch in the summer of 2005. ....... Occasionally investors will say "I'm in" at Demo Day, but most of the convincing happens in subsequent meetings. ....... Getting a startup set up correctly is a nontrivial problem. ...... mediating disputes between founders. ..... Now, 5 years later, the YC alumni network is probably the most powerful network in the startup world. ..... Starting a startup was a very lonely undertaking when we did it ourselves in Boston in 1995. One of the goals of YC's batch model was to fix that, by giving founders the colleagues one would otherwise lack as companies with just 2 or 3 people. ....... even the most ardent boosters of other cities wouldn't claim they're at parity with the Bay Area. All other things being equal, Silicon Valley is the best place to start a startup. ...... Founders from other places are almost always surprised when they get here by the breadth and depth of support for startups. The Bay Area is for startups what LA is for the film industry. ....... The kind of horror stories you hear about investors dicking over startups rarely happen to those we fund. We almost never see broken termsheets. ....... "One of my goals since my last job was to stop working with mediocrity and find/surround myself with people smarter than I. YC definitely provided the quality of people I needed to be around." ...... The only person who's funded more is Ron Conway, and he may not have had such close interactions with all of them. ...... the intensity of YC.
Enhanced by Zemanta

Friday, September 24, 2010

Scoble Chimes In On Angelgate

Scoble, Longhorn EvangelistImage via Wikipedia
Robert Scoble: The secret hell of tech industry angel investors: when the story broke, I thought it was just Mike being bombastic and trying to make something out of a dinner that he wasn’t invited to..... Mike stumbled into a story that has a ton of undercurrents. ..... The angel investor world is getting HYPER competitive .... Entrepreneurs are seeing access to lots of capital. ..... 10 people just are not going to have enough market power to do anything really naughty although it’s good to nip this problem in the bud, which is why I now support Arrington’s stance.
The early stage investment world is seeing major churn, but I would like a much larger geographical spread, not just on the continent, but globally. It will happen.
Enhanced by Zemanta

Angelgate Rolls On

Ron ConwayImage via Wikipedia
TechCrunch: Ron Conway Drops A Nuclear Bomb On The Super Angels [Email]:The world of startups would be a better place if you spent less time complaining about deal structures, terms, vc’s, and valuations etc and the cars you drive, and just helped entrepenuers build their companies..... These startups are binary …they succeed or fail so why waste time on deal structures, terms, vc’s, and valuations etc and just help entrepenuers build their companies..... I am tired of seeing you and engaging in idle chit chat and not sharing my true feelings. ..... .where no one was there to speak up for the interests of the entrepenuers.

Mike Arrington's mischievous post on super angels apparently has been gathering momentum. The first few VCs to speak up said Arrington was merely selling newspapers. Ron Conway, on the other hand, is blowing wind Arrington's way. Stop colluding, he says. This might just be a warm-fuzz thrown Arrington's way since the dude has been profuse in his past praises of Conway, deserved for the most part. Or perhaps the conversation is not over. More people will chime in over the next few days.

My take home word from Conway's email: binary.

Super Angels, The Churning VC Game, And Catch Up Tech

In The News

Bloomberg: ARM Rises as Oracle’s Ellison Says Company May Buy a Chipmaker:Ellison, 66, said at Oracle’s annual meeting in San Francisco yesterday that “you’re going to see us buying chip companies” to add to its resources in computer hardware.

TechCrunch: “WiFi On Steroids” Is A Go. Now Google (Or Someone) Just Has To Build It. Please Do. Fast.:the FCC’s 700Mhz spectrum auction .... “white space” ..... White space is the name given to the vacant airwaves between television channels, airwaves which are increasingly open as people move to cable and other methods of getting television. These airwaves have the potential to carry wireless data at speeds and distances that would make today’s WiFi seem antiquated. That’s why the white space has earned the nickname “WiFi 2.0″ or “WiFi on steroids”. ...... gives technology companies a way to innovate outside of the realm of wireless carriers or broadband providers ..... white space WiFi blankets cities and people can use WiFi phones instead of the the ones tied to carriers.

Google Public Policy Blog: FCC vote on white spaces lays promising foundation for “Wi-Fi on steroids”: y sets the stage for the next generation of wireless technologies to emerge .... will put better and faster wireless broadband connections in the hands of the public. ...... the beginning, and not the end, of crafting forward-looking spectrum policy
Nature: Relativity comes down to Earth: time speeds up if you climb just one rung up a ladder, and slows down if you travel at just 36 kilometres per hour

Time: Feeling Alone Together: How Loneliness Spreads: For some people, feelings of isolation are sharpest during times that are in fact defined by togetherness — celebrations or the holidays .... or perhaps especially in a crowd — it's possible to feel unbearably alone...... happiness, obesity and quitting smoking — can propagate like a wave throughout a network of people..... The effect was strongest among those in close relationships ..... one lonely person could influence whether his friend's friend's friend felt lonely. ..... it really is a fundamental human motivational state very much like hunger, thirst or pain." ..... loneliness is more like an indicator of the social health of our species on the whole — a temperature reading, if you will, of how well- or not so well-integrated we are as a population....... we are, by nature, a social species; we feed off our interactions with one another and thrive when we are inspired, challenged and supported by one another ....... passed on through feelings of mistrust and negativity..... lonely individuals think negatively about other people People may be spreading their negative feelings simply by frowning or making other unpleasant facial expressions, making hurtful remarks or even adopting uninviting body postures. . ... Over time, lonely people find themselves banished to the periphery of their social networks ...... It's not necessarily the number of connections people have that matters but the quality of them. Communities that encourage regular interaction among its members

Enhanced by Zemanta