A lot of the stories and lessons Tina dives into in What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20 she talks about lectures she gave back in May 2009 and in April 2006 at Standford’s Entrepreneurship Corner.

In What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20, Tina gives some important lesson on creativity, opportunity, and having the right attitude to invite both creativity and opportunity in what you are doing. For example, she speaks of having her students develop failure resumes and to highlight lessons learned from making mistakes. Her reasoning behind failure resume can best be summarized by the following quote from her book.

It’s a quick way to demonstrate that failure is an important part of our learning process, especially when you’re stretching your abilities, doing things the first time, or taking risks. We hire people who have experience not just because of their success but also because of their failures.

Aside from taking risks, and not being afraid of failure, she speak a lot of about having the right attitude to invite the correct atmosphere for success. A persons perspective is important to success, in one because each person defines what they consider a successful venture. Like in the movie The Social Network, where the Sean Parker character says “A million dollars isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? A billion dollars is cool.” For some people success is defined by having 500 million obsessive-compulsive users, and for others it’s about having 1000 paying customers. It is often the case that people let others define their success, but the truly successful are those that define their own success. And defining success has a lot to do with a person’s values and attitudes.

I took a lot of value away from What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20. For example, create a failure resume in Google Docs. I’ve also learning to try to negate the effects of negative thoughts, especially when trying or learning something new.

Here are some choice quotes from What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20:

• Problems are abundant, just waiting for those willing to find inventive solutions.
• Steve Jurvetson, a partner at the venture firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson, describes failures as the secret sauce of Silicon Valley.
• Students are told that it is much better to have a flaming failure than a so-so success.
• On reflection, there appear to be five primary types of risks; physical, social, emotional, financial, and intellectual
• Experts in risk management believe you should make decisions based upon the probability of all outcomes, including the best- and worst-case scenarios, and be willing to take big risks when you are fully prepared for all eventualities.
• Being too set on your path too early will likely lead you in the wrong direction.
• Planning a career should be like traveling in a foreign country. Even if you prepare carefully, have an itinerary and s place to stay at night, the most interesting experiences usually aren’t planned.
• The harder you work, the luckier you get.
• Even when we think we’re paying full attention, there’s usually so much more to see.
• I realized afterward that thinking about how you want to tell the story in the future is a great way to assess your response to dilemmas in general. Craft your story now so you’ll be proud to tell it later.
• A few years ago I took a creative writing class in which the professor asked us to describe the same scene twice, the first time from the perspective of someone who has just fallen in love, the second from the point of view of someone who has just lost child at war.
  You shouldn’t take yourself too seriously nor judge others too harshly.

• Mark Zuckerborg will be summoned by congress for a congressional hearing to clarify privacy settings and violations when some White House intern force checks in the President at a Hooters.
• Digg will buy Reddit from Conde Nast and rebrand the merged organization as Reddigg.
• DVDs and Blu Rays sales will slow as users switch to on demand streaming service such as Netflix and Apple iTunes.
• Groupon will be purchased by Yahoo for $1.5 billion dollars.
• Facebook will have a major privacy and security flaw but non of its users will notice because they all found a pony in their stream.
• Google will allow its developers to only use cheap commodity Linux machines. Google employees will no longer be allowed to program in Macs.
• Google will start to aggressively push and market the Go programming language as an replacement of the Java programming language in the enterprise.
• Google will buy PostreSQL.
• Google will buy the Library of Congress.
• Quora will buy the domain ask.com.
• Ticket Master will buy Eventbrite.
• Rupert Murdoch will sell MySpace for $35 million.
• Mashable will be sold to Rupert Murdoch for an undisclosed $50 million dollars.
• Michael Bay will write, Steven Spielberg will direct, and Johnny Deep will star in Zynga: The Movie.
• Zynga and Rock Star Games will co-develop a crossover game called Grand Theft Auto: Farmville.

In the computer world, Bill Gates will always be remembered for Windows and the blue screen of death. Now that he has moved his attention to education and health care such as vaccines, a blue screen of death in these fields will can really cause someone dying.

If your enemies enemies are your friends, then it is to Microsoft’s interest to see Facebook get into the search space. It makes sense that Microsoft would pay a ridiculous amount of money for the tiniest fraction of Facebook just to see Facebook’s value go through the roof and branch into search, ads, mobile, etc.

I just started noticing people I follow on Twitter start using a new service to take and share their pictures taken from a mobile device. There are already a ton of other services such as Twitpic, Facebook, Flickr, Mobile Me, etc. I consider myself an early adopter, but I think there is a new category of adopter, the “I’ll try everything adopter.” There is a bunch of folks that suffer from the New and Shiny Syndrome where they must try every single new product or service they hear about. They all rave how much better that new product is on Facebook and Twitter for a week and then the herd moves on to the next new and shiny thing.

Every year there are a few companies that everybody wants to work for. It has been reported in many news outlet that there is a micro-brain drain at Google as engineers are migrating to Facebook. Zynga has also seen a tremendous growth and has been attracting talented developers, designers, and engineers. Both Facebook and Zynga are already large establish companies. If you are looking for the next breakout company I think you should look into Second Market. Second Market is building a marketplace for employee stock to private companies, Second Market is building a new market and perhaps a new industry. Second Market is has the potential to eventual be at a level to create or move markets.

Microsoft is anywhere between 5-10 years behind current market leaders in social, search, mobile, internet television, digital music, etc. They only consumer technology that they have a leg up on the competition is gaming with its XBox console system. As Microsoft keeps missing each industry boat in the consumer space, Microsoft more and more starts to resemble a company that only sells to large companies. For example, it took Microsoft a long time to get the security in Windows OS right (from XP to Vista to Windows 7) and all along the missed the mobile as a platform.

Twitter and Facebook need to come out with a year-end zeitgist for 2010. Google has been releasing zeitgists for each year since 2001, see the Google Zeitgist Archives. From Twitter I want to know what event was the most tweeted about, what was the hottest trending topic for the year, and a graph of the number of tweets throughout the year. From Facebook I want to know how many likes does it take to reach the center of a Tootsie Roll Pop, who do they sell private personal data to the most, if they fixed the broken fence that let out all those sad malnourished cows.

There are, and have been for a long time, games that thrive because of the virtual economy built into the game. Games such as Second Life and World of Warcraft, which have been released since 2003 and 2004 respectively, depend on virtual currency to a large degree if you want to get far in the game quick. Within these games you can virtually work and earn currency or simply buy in-game money to buy virtual property such as a house or armor or whatever you like. The maker of Second Life have gone as far as to name their currency after themselves, the Linden Dollars. According to Wikipedia, in 2009 the Second Life economy grew to to half a billion dollars!

Outside video games, virtual currency has been used in real life scenarios such as at amusement parks and or places like Chuck E. Cheese’s or Dave & Buster’s. Chuck E. Cheese’s has game chips that you purchase with real legal tender while Dave and Buster’s uses smart cards to debit and credit in-store currency. In both franchises, the in-store currency can be used to play games priced using the in-store virtual currency. Two users can exchange and gift the in-store currency and based on the results of such game you win points that can be used to purchased goods.

All of their claims have been around for years and have been implemented in a variety of systems for years. Another real life example is iTunes. At most retailers, people can purchase iTunes gift cards. The virtual value that can be redeemed from a given iTunes gift card is usually given at a rate of $1 iTunes dollar to $1 real dollar. But some retailers, such as Costco has rates of $1 iTunes dollar to less than $1 dollars. The iTunes gift card will be used to credit a user with some amount of value which can later be used to redeem virtual goods such as songs, movies, and apps through iTunes, the online network application.

Outside of games that force you to tend to virtual crops for virtual money, in other words virtual share cropping, virtual currency has been used to control runaway inflation.

Most Silicon Valley pundits have been predicting that Google next project would be Google Me, a social networking site to compete toe to toe with Facebook. But no one predicted these investments outside of search, ads, and mobile.

Over the past few administrations, federal funding for the National Science Foundation and NASA have been cut while military spending has increased. Maybe Google is the new NASA. They are funding and starting projects usually considered the realm of large federal agencies such as NASA or DARPA. What other areas of scientific research will Google fund or get into next?  Will Google invest in unmanned aerial vehicles, much like the MQ-1 Predator?

I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Google was working on a Googlenet artificial intelligence engine and robots powered with the Android platform.

Software Development

• If your code works not because of your programming intentions but because of bug side effects and your client doesn’t care, it is not done.
• I need a software development bug repellent.
• Design fail if you fix a log message and you break some functionality.
• If a carpenter’s rule of thumb is to “measure twice, cut once” then a programmer’s rule of thumb should be “design twice, code once, refactor a few times, and optimize only if you have to.”
• Saying you know programming is like saying you know how to read, a first grader knows how to read!!
• Requirements gathering is not creative writing.
• I love requirements: The initial instruction should completely initialize the initial value.

Team Leadership

• The only two requirements for a manager is that he is breathing and that he can communicate with his team in their language.
• What happens to you is not other people’s fault, it is your opportunity.
• There is nothing worse than a perfectionist that doesn’t know what he wants.
• The worst thing you can so when you make a mistake is lie about it.
• Every once in a while you have to recalculate, reshuffle, and/or remix your priorities.
• Embrace the edge.

Product Placement

• In Google We Trust.
• Google claims their motto is to ‘do no evil’, put I suggest they change it to ‘do no customer support.’
• If you use Google search to find Google Mail customer support and still can’t find it, is that a fail in their customer support or search?
• There should be Freedom of Information Act for corporations. I want to know everything that Google knows about me and how that info is used
• Can’t believe the AT&T website is not iPhone/mobile friendly.
• Apple should develop a dual screen iPhone, iPhone GS3 DS.
• I imagine a time when Zynga will have in-game ads for Monsanto genetic modified seeds on FarmVille or Foster Farm turkeys for Cafe World.
• Facebook saves everything you create/post/save/click/delete, it can reverse engineer what you where thinking.
• Doing four square drive-by check-ins.
• Does Craigslist have an iPhone app?
• Do you have multiple twitter personality disorder?

Quote

• If we let things terrify us, life will not be worth living. – Seneca
• If I could make the same amount of money but wake up until when I can’t hold in my pee any longer, I will be a success. – Phil Kaplan
• The answer to the question “where do good ideas come from” is always the same, the come from bad ideas. – Seth Godin
• Only the mediocre are always at their best. – Jean Giraudoux
• From pitch perspective, the more you wear your idea, the more it fits you… – Brad Feld
• Nothing fails like success. – Arnold Toynbee
• I totally question the conventional wisdom of the American dream. – Anil Dash
• If we wait for the moment when everything, absolutely everything, is ready, we shall never begin. – Iva Turgenev

Software Development

• Are we that good that some features work because of an unintentional side effect of a bug?
• I’ve heard of cloud computing, even ground computing, but I can’t wait until I can do intergalactic-interdimensional computing.
• Maintenance is a real full time job and it should be planned, scheduled, and budgeted accordingly.
• Maintainability is a feature.
• Team meetings should not feel like AA meetings.
• The debugger don’t lie, but the test might.
• Old legacy systems don’t die, they just complicate your architecture.
• Mashup data with dreams, feeds, and feelings…

Team Leadership

• Guilt is not the optimal way to inspire people to do what is right.
• Knowledge is like an fractal iceberg, and what you know is the tip of a snowflake in the tip of an iceberg in an ice planet.
• Usually there is only one way to win at a given time, but many ways to lose most of the time.
• When people don’t listen to the truth they are lying to themselves.
• Not all great ideas make for a good business.
• Thinking Asymmetrically!

Product Placement

• Should I get a Droid or wait for the new Google phone?
• Does Zuckerborg eat his own dog food when it comes to privacy, his real profile is not public, just his fan page in which he doesn’t post much.
• The only way Zuckerborg would appreciate privacy is if TMZ deployed their paparazzi on him.
• @zynga I would love to give points/credits as a gift in non-spammy and non-recurring way without signing up to services I don’t need.
• @zynga can I buy Cafe World gift card?
• I just got a subscription of Mobile Me. I like how I can track, lock down, and erase the data of my iPhone from the web.
• Got crack? There’s an app for that!
• Twitter should increase to 256 characters…
• Money don’t grow on trees, but with these prices for xmas trees you would think it does.

Quote

• What came first, chicken nuggets or the egg mcmuffin? – Little Jackie
• If I ask no questions I hear no lies. – Little Jackie.
• The Three Es of Good Work: Excellent, Engaging, and Ethical. – Howard Gardner
• The United States has been dominated by the three Ms: Money, Markets, and Me. – Howard Gardner
• If you can’t cover it up, turn it up. – Adam Curry/NA-152 #noagenda
• We have privatized our foreign policy – Philip Brenner
• The more complex an economy is, the more fragile it is, and the more cataclysmic its disintegration can be. – Bryan Ward-Perkins
]]> http://juixe.com/techknow/index.php/2010/02/06/retweet-december-2009/feed/ 0 http://juixe.com/techknow/index.php/2009/12/19/juixe-techknow-predictions-2010/ http://juixe.com/techknow/index.php/2009/12/19/juixe-techknow-predictions-2010/#comments Sat, 19 Dec 2009 08:23:56 +0000 TechKnow http://juixe.com/techknow/?p=923 Just like opinions, at the end of the year everyone has their own predictions for the new year. I came to these predictions by reading the back of caps of green tea bottles. If you like to see my accuracy with past predictions see the predictions of 2009.
• In the future everybody will have their 15 minutes of fame and their own iPhone app on the App Store.
• The App Store app review process will be even more stringent, opaque, and occult. the App Store will require a vial of blood from each iPhone developer.
• Steve Jobs has himself cloned and a disk image of his memories will be implanted in the clone.
• The Apple Tablet shall come with Steve Jobs’ iCommandments.
• The Google Android platform will explode with hundreds of Android phones on the market, and no app review process for apps. Also the first Android trojan horse virus will affect Android users.
• Google will release a Google Phone and become a true telephony company with Google Voice.
• The Google Twins will have a falling out over an argument as to who does less evil.
• Marissa Mayer, VP of Search Product and User Experience at Google, will leave Google for her own startup where she will develop the next killer web app which consists of a single search field and no buttons or text.
• Twitter will be hacked, Fail Whale, and Jump the Shark all in the same day.
• Facebook will buy Foursquare only to let it bit rot like Google did with Dodgeball.
• Facebook will allow advertisers to impersonate you and post in your friends wall.
• Zynga will but Facebook and rename it to FarmBook.
• News Corp will buy Digg for $500 Million only to have all the users migrate over to Reddit.
• Paul Graham will be deified by entrepreneurs around the world and will be given a mandatory 3% for $10 of all new startups.
• The US government will award $10 million contract for an installation of WordPress for a government site.
]]> http://juixe.com/techknow/index.php/2009/12/19/juixe-techknow-predictions-2010/feed/ 0 http://juixe.com/techknow/index.php/2009/12/13/retweet-november-2009/ http://juixe.com/techknow/index.php/2009/12/13/retweet-november-2009/#comments Mon, 14 Dec 2009 04:06:07 +0000 TechKnow http://juixe.com/techknow/?p=949 From time to time I just blast tweets about software development, project planning, team dynamics, or whatever else comes to mind. Here is a synopsis of recent tweets and rants. If you want to follow the conversation follow me at techknow and/or juixe and I’ll be sure to follow back.

Software Development

• If bad artists copy and great artists steal then bad programmers copy and great programmers cut and paste.
• You have to think outside our current requirements and think about solutions that fit the platform and which we can build product features.
• Can programmer mood/happiness be deciphered based on rate of check-ins, changelist, source code diff size, amount of refactoring?
• Software is alchemy. The magic of software is that it can turn complexity to simplicity.
• One man’s feature is another’s complexity.

Team Leadership

• A 10:00 PM design leads to 1:00 AM release leads to 8:00 AM FAIL.
• There are sore losers and sour winners!
• You may know your competitors, but do you know your complementor? Complementors are businesses and services that complement yours.
• Know thy competitor, and get to know thy complementor.
• The biggest risk is not taking risks.
• Don’t be afraid of someone stealing your idea, be afraid that someone is actually going to follow through with it
• Taking startup advice is like taking dating advice.

Product Placement

• Google Wave does not feel like a wave, it is more like a creek and I am without a paddle.
• I’m riding the Google Wave, but not drinking the Google Kool-Aid.
• It’s great that Apple invest in design and multi-touch tech, but they need to invest in water proof tech too. I’ve lost two ipods to water.
• I want to tether an iPod Touch with an iPhone.
• The iPhone is the PC.
• I have a growing collection of ebooks on my Kindle, in fact I have not bought a hard cover book since I got my Kindle over a year ago.
• Recharging my Kindle. It used to be that a book recharged my creativity and imagination now I have to recharge my ebook.
• FaceBook should just rename itself to FarmBook! All I see on FaceBook when I sign in are updates from FarmVille, Cafe World, etc…
• Will Microsoft port Google Go to the .NET platform? Why will they call it? G++? Iron Google Go? Google Go 2010 Business Edition?
• What will people abbreviate Google Go down to? GooGo? GoGo? Goo? Goog++? Golang? Pogo?
• ‘Python 300′ + ‘C++’ + Googleplex + $$$ + WTF = Google Go

Self Development

• Creditability is worth more than money in the bank.
• It is better to work on your own ideas than on someone else’s assumptions.
• To think outside the box it helps to first master the box.
• Don’t do what stops you from doing what you want to do unless that is what you want to do.
• You are damned if you do, damned if you don’t, and damned if you hesitate.
• If you don’t have the key to success, call on a locksmith.

Quotes

• The biggest motivation is not the money but the impact. – Matt Mullenweg/#TWiST 26
• You can’t build everything and there is no more a killer feature. Everyone has a different killer feature. – Matt Mullenweg/#TWiST 26
• I am the unhappiest WordPress user in the world, I think it sucks. – Matt Mullenweg/#TWiST 26
• Having a virtual assistant is one of the greatest training for managers. – Matt Coffin/#TWiST 27
• I only believe rumors that I start – Mike Elgan
• Wait a second, … you’ll waiting for me to take a risk, and then you’ll take a risk, that is not risk at all – @jason/#TWiST
• We spend more time worrying and planning for the downside than we do spend worrying and planning for the upside. – Mark Pincus/Zynga
• A lot of what you have to do as CEO is convince the employees that you are not a normal company. – Mark Pincus/Zynga
• If you don’t have control of your company, you are an employee. – Mark Pincus
• The hardest arithmetic to master is that which enables us to count our blessings. – Eric Hoffer
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