“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the people to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”
– Antoine De Saint-Exupery
Author: Andrew Montalenti
“We’re killing it”
Good post today, A “Third Way” in Entrepreneurship, that discusses the “always be winning”, annoyingly positive veneer of most startup entrepreneurs. This is a community where many founders you meet always share their latest victory and pretend that failures rarely happen.
… entrepreneurs are pressured to maintain a totally positive face to the outside world about the state of their company. In San Francisco, “we’re killing it” is almost now an inside joke because of the ubiquity of that response when someone asks an entrepreneur how their company is faring. Most of these companies are not “killing it”, and the entrepreneurs probably know that.
There is also a nice comment thread discussing the “we’re killing it” phrase, a discussion to which I contributed an anecdote and interpretation.
The comment I added to the discussion:
A friend once relayed a story to me of a dinner meeting of ~20 early-stage high-tech executives he attended that was sponsored by a startup organization. The moderator asked one question as an ice breaker to kick off the night: “What is the greatest challenge that your startup faces today?”
My friend was the first one picked to share. Being a very level-headed guy (who personally hates the term, “killing it”), he suggested that one of his biggest challenges was maintaining work/life balance & personal relationships, for himself & also for his employees, so that they don’t burn out on the job.
The baton then got passed to the next entrepreneur, and, as my friend tells it, entrepreneur after entrepreneur shared their “greatest challenge”, though they were only “challenges” in the weakest sense of the word. For example: “handling all the new customers we have”, “scaling our servers for our massive user-base”, “hiring enough software engineers to keep up with the business growth”.
He realized then that every entrepreneur was “positioning” the answer to make it appear that the greatest challenge faced was dealing with the company’s illusory massive success.
I think this anecdote describes the “killing it” mentality quite well — even among peers and in a setting where people should be comfortable sharing their fears, this community prefers reality distortion.
Uninterruptability
Paul Graham, in a footnote from his essay on “How to Make Wealth”:
One valuable thing you tend to get only in startups is uninterruptability. Different kinds of work have different time quanta. Someone proofreading a manuscript could probably be interrupted every fifteen minutes with little loss of productivity. But the time quantum for hacking is very long: it might take an hour just to load a problem into your head. So the cost of having someone from personnel call you about a form you forgot to fill out can be huge.
This is why hackers give you such a baleful stare as they turn from their screen to answer your question. Inside their heads a giant house of cards is tottering.
The mere possibility of being interrupted deters hackers from starting hard projects. This is why they tend to work late at night, and why it’s next to impossible to write great software in a cubicle (except late at night).
One great advantage of startups is that they don’t yet have any of the people who interrupt you. There is no personnel department, and thus no form nor anyone to call you about it.
David Foster Wallace on advertorials
In “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” (which also appeared in Harper’s Magazine as the essay, “Shipping Out”), David Foster Wallace discusses an “essay” he came across discussing a cruise, but which was really an advertisement.
In other words, Celebrity Cruises is presenting Conroy’s review of his 7NC Cruise as an essay and not a commercial. This is extremely bad. Here is the argument for why it is bad. Whether it honors them well or not, an essay’s fundamental obligations are supposed to be to the reader. The reader, on however unconscious a level, understands this, and thus tends to approach an essay with a relatively high level of openness and credulity. But a commercial is a very different animal. Advertisements have certain formal, legal obligations to truthfulness, but these are broad enough to allow for a great deal of rhetorical maneuvering in the fulfillment of an advertisements primary obligation, which is to serve the financial interests of its sponsor. Whatever attempts an advertisement makes to interest and appeal to its readers are not, finally, for the reader’s benefit. And the reader of an ad knows all this, too – that an ad’s appeal is by its very nature calculated – and this is part of why our state of receptivity is different, more guarded, when we get ready to read an ad.
The content trading desk
Note: At the time of this post’s publication, I was the co-founder & CTO of Parse.ly, the company behind a a real-time analytics platform used by top publishers such as The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Slate, Fortune, TechCrunch, and over 2,500 others. This post was informed by that work experience.
My first job out of college was as a software engineer for Morgan Stanley. This 50,000 employee firm employed tens of thousands of software engineers. Though the most important employees were the traders, it was clear that software ran the place.
For anyone who has worked on Wall Street in the last couple of decades, this is no surprise. It may be surprising to people from outside the industry, who perhaps still associate Wall Street with traders wearing funny jackets calling out orders across a busy NYSE trading floor. That still goes on (though, probably not for long). Most of the trading activity on Wall Street is heavily computerized. Orders are placed and fulfilled mostly by machines.
Once the markets went digital, data analysis became a much more rigorous discipline on Wall Street. Whereas before, a trader’s primary edge was being personally connected to the most important players (think Gordon Gecko), today’s traders seek edge in systematic prediction models. In other words, other machines analyze the orders being placed and fulfilled on the market, and yet others try to detect patterns or make predictions based on all of this data.
Continue reading The content trading desk
Python double-under, double-wonder
Python has a number of protocols that classes can opt into by implementing one or more “dunder methods”, aka double-underscore methods. Examples include __call__ (make an object behave like a function) or __iter__ (make an object iterable).
The choice of wrapping these functions with double-underscores on either side was really just a way of keeping the language simple. The Python creators didn’t want to steal perfectly good method names from you (such as “call” or “iter”), but they also did not want to introduce some new syntax just to declare certain methods “special”. The dunders achieve the dual goal of calling attention to these methods while also making them just the same as other plain methods in every aspect except naming convention.
PyCon 2013: The Debrief
PyCon US 2013 is over! It was a lot of fun — and super informative.
The People
For me, it was great to finally meet in person such friends and collaborators as
@__get__, @nvie, @jessejiryudavis, and @japerk.
It was of course a pleasure to see again such Python super-stars as
@adrianholivaty, @wesmckinn, @dabeaz, @raymondh, @brandon_rhodes, @alex_gaynor, and @fperez_org.
(Want to follow them all? I made a Twitter list.)
I also met a whole lot of other Python developers from across the US and even the world, and the entire conference had a great energy. The discussions over beers ranged from how to use Tornado effectively to how to hack a Python shell into your vim editor to how to scale a Python-based software team to how to grow the community around an open source project.
In stark contrast to the events I’ve been typically going to in the last year (namely: ‘trade conferences’ and ‘startup events’), PyCon is unbelievably pure in its purpose and feel. This is where a community of bright, talented developers who share a common framework and language can push their collective skills to new heights.
And push them, we did.
Rapid Web Prototyping with Lightweight Tools
Today, I am teaching a tutorial at PyCon called “Rapid Web Prototyping with Lightweight Tools.” I’ll update this post with how it went, but here are the materials people are using for the course.
- Video Recording
- Slides (web)
- Slides in Note Form (Github)
- Slides (SpeakerDeck)
- Code (git)
- Code (zip)
- pip requirements
Continue reading Rapid Web Prototyping with Lightweight Tools
Uruguayan President: a radical farmer as president?
He was a former guerrilla militant who violently rebelled against the government. He lived in solitary confinement in prison for a decade. He was elected as president of Uruguay, one of South America’s most liberal nations. He has pushed for abortion rights, marijuana legalization, and sustainable energy.
His net worth on taking office was $1,800 — the value of his 1987 Volkswagen Beetle. He donates 90% of his presidential salary to the poor. He lives in a small house on $800/month with his wife, even as president. He has sold off presidential vacation homes and believes public officials should be “taken down a notch”. He believes serving consecutive terms is “monarchic.” He hopes to return to farming after serving his presidential term.
Solidify your Python web skills in two days at PyCon US 2013
PyCon US 2013 is coming up in March. It is in beautiful Santa Clara, right outside of Palo Alto / San Francisco.
The main conference is sold out, but there are still a few spots open for the tutorial sessions.
(Here’s a secret: the tutorials are where I’ve always learned the most at PyCon.)
Most of PyCon’s attendees are Python experts and practitioners. However, Python is one of the world’s greatest programming languages because it is one of its most teachable and learnable. Attending PyCon is a great way to rapidly move yourself from the “novice” to “expert” column in Python programming skills.
This year, there is an excellent slate of tutorial sessions available before the conference starts. These cost $150 each, which is a tremendous value for a 3-hour, in-depth session on a Python topic. I know of a lot of people who are getting into Python as a way to build web applications. There is actually a great “novice web developer” track in this year’s tutorials, which I’ll outline in this page.
Continue reading Solidify your Python web skills in two days at PyCon US 2013