Shanti’s Dispatches

Your best guesstimates of the local optima turn out to be true (as of now), and can be agreed upon.

… Only optimizations over a given set of variables.

Paul Graham on How to Start a Startup:

You need three things to create a successful startup: to start with good people, to make something customers actually want, and to spend as little money as possible. Most startups that fail do it because they fail at one of these. A startup that does all three will probably succeed.

Full article here.

This article already made the rounds last week, but I also just noticed the link to his Summer Founder’s program.

Want $6,000 to start a startup and live in Cambridge for the summer? Then check out the application form here.

I’d go through the trouble if it was more like $10k for the summer. But it is the perfect amount for a recent grad or undergrad who’s just getting started in the world.

Programming a web application in PHP feels a lot like reinventing the wheel, after having learned Ruby on Rails.

For this particular project, we’ve been planning on using PHP for a while now. We’re also using the Services_Ebay class in PHP. There is no comparible module for Ruby.

We’re also going to be using some off-the-shelf PHP/JavaScript components for image manipulation, such as this one. Again, nothing like this exists for Ruby/Rails (as far as I know).

As for getting the rest of the MVC framework and data access layers up and working, I suspect that we’ll spend a good 2-3 weeks just getting to the point where we’re ready to begin coding. Which is where you can be in Rails, within 5 minutes.

That’s a darn shame. Welcome to the world of a Rails developer who has drunk the Kool-Aid but has gone back to the world of PHP. You’re used to things just working so easily and intuitively, like magic almost, yet they don’t anymore… It’s like you’re programming back in Assembly after learning a high-level language like Java or something.

Oh well, good times!

JPMorgan Chaise is thinking about building an Internet-based payment system similar to PayPal.

This is an early April Fool’s joke, right?

I think eBay has realized that there’s no use in going head-to-head with Craigslist. (Not to mention they own something like 25% of CL.)

Instead, looks like they’re trying to make an end-run around it in non-CL dominated markets.

They’ve stealthy launched Kijiji,which means “village” in Swahili:

Hopefully Kijiji helps bring back a bit more of the “village” feeling in our own communities. The internet has done wonders to help bring ideas and people together from all over the world - but what about helping to create a deeper sense of community right in your own neighborhood?

EBay has some great roots… but there’s just something that feels not quite right about a global mega-corporation trying to create a grassroots community site, a la Craigslist.

Ebay worked when Omidyar started it from his garage for all the opposite reasons that they have going for them today. He built eBay in such a away out of necessity, due to limited resources.

If I were eBay, I’d hire 25 tech entrepreneurs from the “global village” - pay each one a Ramen Noodle Salary (enough to live off), and give them a cut in the equity of the respective Kijiji-like creations. Give them system resources like server space, etc. Then watch them duke it out in the marketplace, each in their own respective markets. I believe they used to call this “skunkworks” - though this is an extreme example, where the parent corporation would basically relent all control over what the independent entrepreneur would create.

One thing about community, is that you can’t try too hard to create it. Community is something that just happens. It springs up out of people’s desire to connect, not to create wealth.

That’s partly why we’ve gone into stealth-mode over at the labs. Right now we’re just a community of 4-5 guys. Maybe we’ll create a great service one of these days and grow beyond that, maybe not. It’s just fun to kick back and have a few IMs with fellow entreprehackers, all working towards the same common goals.

Since these are, after all, my “dispatches from the garage” - I thought this was an interesting find over at Chris Russell’s blog.

HP’s Rules of the Garage

• Believe you can change the world.
• Work quickly, keep the tools unlocked, work whenever.
• Know when to work alone and when to work together.
• Share — tools, ideas. Trust your colleagues.
• No politics. No bureaucracy. (These are ridiculous in a garage.)
• The customer defines a job well done.
• Radical ideas are not bad ideas.
• Invent different ways of working.
• Make a contribution every day. If it doesn’t contribute, it doesn’t leave the garage.
• Believe that together we can do anything.
• Invent.

Steve Yen posts an interesting spreadsheet over at NumSum.com detailing the effects of Moore’s Law in the Datacenter.

Effects of Moore’s Law in the Datacenter:

Ed Adkins points out a website to me called Zopa - what they’re calling “The first lending and borrowing exchange:

What we do is very simple: we put people who want to lend in touch with creditworthy people who want to borrow. And because there?s no middleman ? the borrower just pays a 1% exchange fee to Zopa up front ? both benefit.

It would be cool if this worked…. That’s all I’m going to say, since I don’t want to be negative =) I guess people did think Omidyar was crazy for thinking eBay would work…

That’s what Milton Glaser says in his speech
10 Things I have Learned.

Sorry about the caps -

Number 1
YOU CAN ONLY WORK FOR PEOPLE THAT YOU LIKE.

Number 2
IF YOU HAVE A CHOICE NEVER HAVE A JOB.

Number 3
SOME PEOPLE ARE TOXIC AVOID THEM.

Read the rest here.