Thoughts from an iPad

Big problems are problems for a reason – they are problems that are hard to solve. If there was an easy solution, one of the thousands of ambitious, smart engineers out there would have solved them by now. So instead of solving big problems, the smartest, most creative brains in Silicon Valley are building apps to help us organize group lunches, share funny photos, or aggregate daily deals. I’m sorry, but these aren’t the big problems. In fact, most of these new startups are creating more problems than they solve.

Maybe the problem is that they can’t tolerate big problems, they can’t bother working on them. They want to be ignorant of the existence and play with cute scripts that create new problems. But don’t worry, I’m just sure someone else will solve them.

One of the examples brought up is dealing with medical records and how every time you go see a doctor you spend 30 minutes filling out the same paperwork. Luckily some startups are working on these “big problems”. I think they’re on the right track, too.

Keep it simple, Get it right, Don’t hide power, Use procedure arguments to provide flexibility in an interface, Leave it to the client, Continuity Plan to throw one away, Keep secrets of the implementation, Use a good idea again instead of generalizing it

Handle normal and worst cases separately as a rule

Split resources in a fixed way if in doubt, Use static analysis if you can, Dynamic translation from a convenient representation to one that can be quickly interpreted, Cache answers to expensive computations, When in doubt use brute force, Compute in background when possible, Use Batch Processing if possible, Shed load to control demand

Just the most important things, of course.

Marc Randolph, Netflix Co-Founder:

I’m happy to go on record as saying that the ability to create a reality distortion field is right up there alongside optimism as an entrepreneur’s most valuable weapon.

I’m sure this article hits home, at least for a few of you.

 As many of you know, today I leave my post as executive editor of VentureBeat for a new opportunity. I’ve joined the Daily Dot, a media startup, as its founding editor.

Doesn’t this almost sound familiar?

John Paczkowski from All Things Digital reports that Apple’s VP of global marketing and communications, Allison Johnson, is leaving “To co-found a new marketing and communications firm”. I think we’re beginning to see this more and more. People joining these small startups (adventures really), and leaving jobs which would appear stable and secure. I think this goes hand in hand with what Evan Williams has to say:

 Founders, in general, get an out-sized share of the credit for any successful company. There are hundreds of people at Twitter now, some of whom have been there for years and played critical roles.

Mark Cuban from Business Insider:

At some point, and that point should come quickly, you have to move on. If you have a good product/service/idea, there will be someone who will understand the value and that will want the product. If you keep on pushing with someone who obviously does not want the product, for whatever reason, you are making multiple mistakes.

 At the end of the drive, he agreed to fund the company, as long as they didn’t compete with any of his other investments. They got the clear, and are working out of the 500 Startups incubator space in Mountain View today.

With startups like this, location matters. This proves that being in the right place at the right time can make all the difference.