Ergodic Entrepreneurship

Last November I spent a full week in the basement of a masonic temple in Manhattan, an oddly appropriate venue for a workshop about risk. The Real World Risk Institute was founded as a hedge against a very specific real life risk — the possibility that author and risk expert Nassim…

An Open Source Stack for Physical Science Startups

It is hard enough running a ‘hard tech’ startup. Hardware is one thing, but companies bringing physical science innovations to the world have it toughest of all. Mother nature can be a very cruel compiler.

Money Can’t Buy Knives

Most technology startups involve some amount of engineering risk. Can we build it at scale? Can we build it for $X by our launch date? Can we refine the product to be attractive before we run out of money? There is a ton of material from the lean/agile world on how to approach these…

How to find your founding values

One of the most fun (and philosophical) parts of starting your own organization is finding your founding values. Today, entrepreneurship is easier than ever, cooler than ever, more valued than ever. As a result, I think that many people are jumping in without any real…

Please Share Your Failures

It is our natural tendency to want to share our successes and hide our failures. In many ways, this is a confirmation bias towards conformity. As a society we celebrate success, there is a clear advantage to portraying oneself in the most successful light. The only problem with…

Permission to Fail: RIP Karen’s Hub

An experiment needs permission to fail. The reason why has nothing to do with the methods and…

Everything is a draft

In undergrad, you brainstorm, outline, draft, critique and revise in the convenient container of one semester. Then you turn it in, get a grade and forget all about it.

In grad school, you spend 3+ years figuring out what the hell you are doing, then a few more…

READ/WRITE ERROR: Death by Notification

Have you ever unplugged an external hard drive without ejecting it first? Do you remember the angry message saying, “Don’t Do That!”. Why is it bad? Mostly because you don’t want to interrupt it while it is writing information to the disk. You might corrupt…

You have a dream…

You have a dream. I know you do.