msg:
Burning Man 2011 X Dr Seuss = BEAUTIFUL
You’re off to great places, today is your day. Your mountain is waiting, so get on your way!
“Bagels and Brooklyn go hand in hand. Used to be bagels, Brooklyn and the Dodgers. But we still have Brooklyn and the bagels.”
I hope you are ready to watch the greatest video on the Internet.
[via windsorterrace]
Amazon Letter to Shareholders, 1997 (IPO year). Too many gems to quote any one.
-via Business Insider
Dance Number of the Day: Alex Yde introduces the world to “yoga breakdancing” while AWOLNATION sails away in the background.
[thd.]
Schultz is back with Big Idea No. 2. It is every bit as idealistic as his first big idea, but far more practical. Starbucks is going to create a mechanism that will allow us citizens to do what the government and the banks won’t: lend money to small businesses. This mechanism is scheduled to be rolled out on Nov. 1. This time, Schultz is not tilting at windmills.
We Can All Become Job Creators - NYTimes.com
A CEO of a public company thinking innovatively and doing good things. More, please.
(via shripriya)
“If you study the root causes of business disasters, over and over you’ll find this predisposition toward endeavors that offer immediate gratification. If you look at personal lives through that lens, you’ll see the same stunning and sobering pattern: people allocating fewer and fewer resources to the things they would have once said mattered most.”
The folks at Cornell’s Creative Machines lab wondered what would happen when they let two chatbots talk to each other. Their findings: Amazingness happens.
Putting this on my business card: “I am not a robot. I am a unicorn.” (via)
I always tell people if you try to connect the dots of your career, if you mess it up you’re going to wind up on a very limited path. If I decided what I was going to do in college—when there was no Internet, no Google, no Facebook … I don’t want to make that mistake. The reason I don’t have a plan is because if I have a plan I’m limited to today’s options.
Consider the two fundamental laws of networks: both Metcalfe’s Law and Reed’s Law assume that as a network of people grows, the value of the network increases substantially. (In Metcalfe’s Law, the value of the network is proportional to the square of the number of people in the network, whereas Reed’s Law demonstrates that the value for any individual within a network grows exponentially with every new member.) But with individuals, the opposite is true: The value of a contributor decreases disproportionately with each additional person contributing to a single project, idea, or innovation.
This is true across all areas but only so far as there are discrete pieces of work to be done. To be sure, there is clear value in having a marketing person work with a programmer on a project or a biologist working with a chemist on a problem. Proper team building is a powerful thing. But when an activity can be performed sufficiently by one person with adequate skills, doing the activity as a group should be avoided.
Source: HBR
Social networks do best when they tap into one of the seven deadly sins. Facebook is ego. Zynga is sloth [laughter]. LinkedIn is greed. With Facebook, it’s vanity, and how people choose to present themselves to their friends. It’s the feeling of being connected. I like to emphasize the importance of the deep universal, psychological structure in people’s minds. Zynga is about fun. Fun is important. Fun is good. And to have the ability to do something fun for 10 or 15 minutes that’s right at your fingertips and involves your friends, well, that’s better than television in terms of social connectivity. With LinkedIn it’s taking control of your economic destiny and improving how you operate as a professional and how you can develop a competitive advantage. These are fundamentals for having a fulfilling quality of life.
Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.
- Thomas Edison
Hardly Working: Startup Guys (via College Humor)
I have a feeling these guys would actually raise money today.