Adam Smith's Blog

Visceral Advice

I’m now sure that most advice is wasted.

I’ve ran into several problems recently, after which I thought Gosh, so-and-so’s advice was right! The problem is that I never remember so-and-so’s advice when I’m actually in the situation. There’s a bug somewhere between hearing the advice and recalling it in the situation.

I’ve been trying to fix this bug. I’m going to try to imagine two things whenever I hear advice: the experience that generated it, and myself in a situation that calls for the advice.

I think this exercise will help me generate better questions for the advice giver, too.

A Great Day

Yesterday was a tough day. We were distracted by hiring and long meals and meetings.

Today was great. Gabor and I had lunch and coffee for two hours. We talked about how we can improve our hiring process and how we feel about the way things are generally going. We exchanged lots of ideas. It was fun.

Afterwards we got a large shipment from Dell. That was fun too.

I also played some squash tonight with Greg from Snipshot and two guys from XuQa.com who frequent the Bay Club. I won three out of six games. I’m quite a beginner. It’s so much fun when you get to play with someone at your level!

Other than that, I just hacked away. I worked on some code that’s pretty fundamental to a new direction of our product. After refactoring and refactoring to get the right interfaces, I spent lots of time optimizing memory and run times. It’s hella fast.

I have a few emails to respond to, and then I’ve got to convince myself to go to sleep. I hate ending days like today.

Startup Advice and Lookup Tables

(This post is partially derived from some things I said at Startup School 2007.)

Startup founders really need advice, especially first timers. It’s like you’re put in a big dark room with booby traps, and your only hope of survival is to draw upon the wisdom of those who came before you.

The good news is that you’ll be bombarded with advice. It comes from everywhere – investors, advisors, blogs, books, users, and rap artists. [1] Most startup advice, though, is not relevant to your current situation. You might be thinking about finding a cofounder, but the blog you’re reading is discussing corporate bylaws.

What you’ve got to do is build up a hash table in your head to store the out-of-context advice. The hash table is a map from situations to what you should do in each situation.
The person giving advice has a hash table in their head, mostly built by learning the hard way. The point of advice is to copy their hash table over to your hash table. [2] This copy is very hard to do. How can you internalize all of that knowledge?

I can give you two hacks.

First, use repetition. Download the audio versions of Paul Graham’s essays, burn them on a CD, and listen to them over and over again. Read books once, identify the ones you like, and then read those again and again, every six months.

The second hack is to get the stories. Punch lines are harder to remember than plots like “We faced this problem, chose this action, and it blew up.”

My two favorite startup books are 100% stories. Jessica Livingston’s Founders at Work is filled with interviews of successful founders recalling the Good Ole Days, in full color.

My other favorite startup book is High Stakes No Prisoners by Charles Ferguson. [3] It’s the story of Vermeer, the company that made Frontpage and sold to Microsoft for $140M. The book is only moderately insightful; it is a real win because Charles tells the story in gross detail. He names names, and trash talks everyone for their ugly actions, including himself. It’s remarkably raw.

No Storage
Of course, the real win is if you don’t have to do the hash table copy from books and other data sources. Instead, when you face a challenging situation, just ask your advisors. Essentially, do a lookup in their hash table instead of making a copy.

Having access to these kinds of resources is incredibly valuable. It’s yet another reason that you should be in Silicon Valley to start a startup: experienced advisors are at hand. [4]


Notes
[1] For example, Master P relates some wisdom: “Nigga told me, ‘C, leave that dope, cause rappin is yo thang.’”
[2] This blog post is an example of such a transfer. Most of my thoughts are unoriginal, though, so you’re getting a second hand copy.
[3] Used copies are available on Amazon for seventy nine pennies.
[4] Having great investors also helps. And, okay, maybe Boston qualifies too. : )

Physics at the Symphony

I really enjoy going to the symphony. I’ve been to the San Francisco Symphony twice since moving here last October. My favorite part is watching the violinists stroke their instruments in unison. This would be artful even without the music, but with beautiful music as a side effect – oh the glory!

Xobni is staying lean, though, so I buy the nose bleed seats. If I’m 300 feet from the orchestra pit, the music is delayed about 300 milliseconds behind what I’m seeing. (Sound travels at about one foot per millisecond.)

Humans can typically observe delays over 100ms. I might just be imagining it, but I'm pretty sure I can actually notice the delay between what I see and what I hear!

Why programmers are bad at spin

Programmers survive by paying attention to the ugliness in their code. If you wake me up in the middle of the night and ask what I’m dreaming about, I’ll probably tell you what the three ugliest parts of our code are, and how I’m going to fix each of them. So when someone asks me about the code, my instinct is to describe the bugs. They’re just the first order of business! I think that’s why programmers have a hard time putting a positive spin on things, as compared to salespeople. We have a natural tendency to look for and focus on the things that are not perfect.