Karm City

May 8th

Maurice Sendak on life, dying, and the intelligence of children

May 7th

The real point of a business plan

Lots of startups hit the scene with the impression that creating a business plan is a waste of time; just an exercise to appease potential investors, like filing provisional patents and signing NDAs. “Come up with the idea and strategy first, then make the business plan” right?

What isn’t shared often enough is the true value of a business plan: the process of creating it. If you’re going to come up with an idea and define the strategy, you owe it to the idea to go through the process of developing a business plan. It forces every potential issue to be confronted head-on, leading to a much more well-rounded strategy.

No business plan has ever been 100% accurate, nor should it. That’s not the point. The creation process helps you digest exactly what your requirements, dependencies and risks are before you waste time barking up the wrong tree. If you’ve done your job, every move your company makes will be intuitively linked to a bigger picture.

A good business plan isn’t something that should be made once and forgotten, either. Redoing a business plan from scratch every year is a great way to process what you’ve learned and use it to move forward productively. You may even realize what you thought you were making turned out to be something completely different.

The best framework for figuring out how your idea is going to work, and how you’re going to grow a business, is sitting right in front of you.

Instead, the startup scene is going in the opposite direction. Y Combinator recently announced their weird “No Idea” initiative: funding entrepreneurs who don’t yet have an idea. In their words, “if the only thing holding you back from starting a startup is not having an idea for one, now nothing is holding you back.”

The logic: if they fund a person, that person will then come up with an idea, then create an all-star team to execute on the idea, which then generates tons of profit, which then exits. 

I get it. Investing in the team, not the idea. The problem is, it’s taking something that is already risky and making it even riskier. I guess Y Combinator isn’t disappointed enough in their sub-average 8% company exits.

Plus, correct me if I’m wrong, but don’t you need to have an idea to be an entrepreneur?

May 4th

The only reason you should be an entrepreneur is because that’s the only way the idea will come into the world

April 18th

After a race, the hot water that pours over my head and down my back eases the aches from the day. I look as if I am wearing my cycling clothing in the shower, so thoroughly am I marked by grime on the skin that had been exposed on my legs, arms, neck, and face. With a washcloth, I scrub the thick, black gunk from my body, starting with my face. When I reach my legs, I once again feel the effort of the race. The muscles, empty, stripped of glycogen and of water, cry out. The veins pulsate against the washcloth. My legs are destroyed.

But redemption comes. Even reduced to rubble like this, as the dirt comes off, my legs in their smooth state show each ripple, every indentation carved by the lack of the fat, every bulging muscle that pushes the skin taut, every scar. They are sculptures, monuments to my love of cycling, and it is right that they should not be covered.

April 17th

Business book translator

There are a lot of business books out there. I’ve read a lot of great ones, but I’ve barely scratched the surface. The Library of Congress has indexed over a million business-related books. Invariably, almost all of them start out with the author qualifying themselves. In short, they want to explain why you should take their advice.

A good warning indicator that the book you’re about to read should be taken with a grain of salt is if the introduction has been obviously combed over by a marketer to embellish limited experience until it sounds like the person single-handedly invented quantitative analysis.

Here are a few examples:

“I was fortunate enough to participate in the Carl H. Lindner Honors-PLUS program, which is essentially an MBA at the undergraduate level.”

Translation: “I had a terrible GMAT score.”

“I landed a management position at a Fortune 50 company — Procter & Gamble — during my second year of college.”

Translation: “I got an internship that had the word ‘manager’ in it at Procter & Gamble.”

“Andy doesn’t have an MBA — he studied electrical engineering in college. He’s now one of the company’s top global IT managers, responsible for leading many of P&G’s largest projects.”

Translation: “You may think middle-management is for the birds, but I’m here to convince you to lower your aspirations!”

“During my first three years with the company, I participated in decisions across every part of the business process.”

Translation: “I attended meetings.”

This last one is my favorite. “I participated in decisions…” You didn’t make decisions, you participated in them. So if I had an idea and you were like, “that’s a good idea,” does that mean you participated?

April 13th

Get out of the way

Horace Dediu, interviewing anyone:

So I ask you… well before I ask, I need to clarify the point that A is really more like C but to explain C, we first need to get to the root of why B even exists so the real question is, and before I ask it, I’d like to explore the notion of the alphabet and letters, do you agree, because I’d like to see this problem from the viewpoint of the listener because we know the alphabet exists and has several different versions, like in the English language, we know the alphabet to have 26 letters, but to understand why this number came to be, we need to first understand…

I appreciate Horace’s excellent business savvy and analytical commentary, but if you’re going to do a radio interview, interview.

March 25th

Best video game ever made?

The objective of the game is to drive a bus from Tucson, Arizona to Las Vegas, Nevada in real time at a maximum speed of 45mph. The feat requires 8 hours of continuous play to complete, since the game cannot be paused.

The bus contains no passengers, contains little scenery (an occasional rock or stop sign will appear at the side of the road), and there is no traffic. The road between Tucson and Las Vegas is without exception completely straight. The bus veers to the right slightly; as a result, it is impossible to tape down a button to go do something else and have the game end properly.

If the bus veers off the road it will stall and be towed back to Tucson, also in real time. If the player makes it to Las Vegas, he will score exactly one point. The player then gets the option to make the return trip to Tucson—for another point (a decision he must make in a few seconds or the game ends).

Penn and Teller’s Smoke and Mirrors.

March 23rd

Facebook wants to protect its users from employers demanding access to their accounts. The company is looking to draft new laws as well as take legal action against employers.

March 22nd

Silent ghoti

Using the same method and reinforcing the original point, ghoti (fish) can be a silent word, where:

• gh as in though;
• o as in people;
• t as in ballet;
• i as in business

Amazing.

March 16th

In April 1986, following an attack on American soldiers in a Berlin disco, President Reagan ordered the bombing of Muammar Qaddafi’s terrorist camps in Libya. My duty was to fly over Libya and take photos recording the damage our F-111’s had inflicted. Qaddafi had established a ‘line of death,’ a territorial marking across the Gulf of Sidra , swearing to shoot down any intruder that crossed the boundary. On the morning of April 15, I rocketed past the line at 2,125 mph.