DividesByZero

I would suggest it's not just a matter of willpower. You should be in a material position to execute effectively - having to start worrying about how you'll feed your family, or pay your rent is a massive distraction.

Build up a buffer so you won't have to worry about it, at least in the beginning.

If you want to really do a start-up, quit your job. If you can't or won't quit your job, it is not yet time for you to do a start-up.

I quit my job with six months in savings to start my company. It took us almost 8 months to get somewhere - we filled the gap with just a little web design work on the side. I have never regretted leaving my job.

If you only have 20 people to reach out to, you don't need much structure in how you go about doing it. Your goal should be to make those meetings happen at all.

Ask them for advice around the thing you are working on. Your goal at this stage should be to find 10 users who love your product.

Exactly. But those services are typically provided to entire families by BigCo - padded margins sound like this is a space where a cost-focused company could stand to make quite a bit of money.

From my own recent experience, there is definitely demand from the side of founders for an AirBnB style deal specifically aimed at a place to live-and-work, especially for start-ups who need to relocate.

Take a look at listings like these:

https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/1337007

https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/133974

https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/264052

AirBnB doesn't accommodate them effectively because this is not their target market - AirBnB is mostly about holidays and residential space. Similarly, 42Floors doesn't do this at all because they are about Co-working and Commercial space.

I would suggest, forget the equity part of this completely. Start-ups are already bad customers without having to wait to recognise any revenue, and also have to go through regulatory implications. Let me rent a place with a sleeping area, a bathroom, a kitchen area and an office area for my whole team for a reasonable price.

It cost me a $4,000 deposit, $2,500/mo in rent and about $1,500 in IKEA/WalMart, and $3000 in temporary AirBnB accommodation to get my team situated in the bay area. Give me a better deal than that, especially one that saves me time.

Ship me groceries weekly, get me a rental car as part of this deal, and have it all ready as soon as I arrive and I wouldn't use any other service ever.

Additional features I would want:

- Connect me to the local hacker community - Tell me where I can get exercise and where I should shop

I don't think this makes economic sense. Equity in startups who don't have enough cash on hand to pay rent is likely to be more risky than equity in those who do.

Giving away equity for rent at an early stage doesn't make sense for founders either - making a mess of your cap table for office space is a poor decision when you could work from many other places for free, or remotely from home.

This sounds like a bad deal for both parties in the marketplace.

Buckminster Fuller had it right back in the 70's -

"We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living."

The accusations of 'revisionism' show an underlying bias - in the former soviet union and much of Europe, this is has been the accepted historical perspective for some time.

Bad news for the educational game accelerator they just launched.

I don't recall LJ having anything like a 'search by mood'. I guess my memory might be hazy though.

When I saw this I was confused about why Facebook wanted to be more like LiveJournal. Is that a reflection on the userbase?

The best advice I ever got about how to hire people and fill gaps in your team is to do the job yourself first - this applies to everything, not just tech.

The advantages of this approach are enormous - it helps you understand what you're looking for, helps you evaluate candidates and helps you understand the needs of your own company better than anything else ever could. And you're no longer desperate - you can afford to wait until you've found the best person to work with. It means that when you do start talking to people, they will respect you more because you took the time and effort to work out exactly what it is they do and how valuable they are.

It might even turn out that you don't even need that person, that the company is doing just fine because you worked out you can do it yourself more cost effectively than bringing on someone else.

Develop your skills so you can be the tech co-founder until you can get someone better than you.

It's in the interests of the smugglers that tight immigration controls remain in place, just as it's in the interests of Silk Road that regulations on restricted substances remain in place.

They need not lobby directly for these restrictions, they have other organisations that will do that for them.

I'm not sure we disagree here - rent seeking indirectly by the mechanism you describe between police and drug trafficking is still rent seeking behaviour!

You don't need a formal agreement or specific legislation to establish a rent-seeking economy, nor is economic patronage necessary. A black market is not somehow separate to rent-seeking business.

The owners of such roads are operating rent-seeking businesses. Not in any way a contradiction.

Consider that it's very much in Silk Road's interest that the regulations that currently create the transactional frictions on which it makes a profit remain as they are, or perhaps become even more restrictive. It's rent seeking in the same way that smuggling illegal immigrants is rent seeking. This does not require a broadened definition of rent seeking at all.

Roads are a public good, not a business (despite what libertarian rhetoric would have you believe). All business seek to enforce their position, by the way.

You're correct, every business that profits from easing transactional friction is to a greater or lesser extent, rent seeking.

For someone who paints themselves as some sort of Randian superman, he sure uses the words of collective action and altruism a lot.

"It’s paradoxical, but the less you focus on your own happiness and focus on others’, the happier you’ll be."

John Galt indeed.

Please elaborate on this? Good work in what sense?

Ignoring the dubious ethics of running a black market, SilkRoad is ultimately a rent-seeking enterprise making money from transactional frictions. It creates no value - hardly the sort of shining beacon of enterprise the founder(s) make it out to be.

I don't think any of the things you mention are equivalently intrusive. But it's a point that scares me a little.

It's not exactly an uncommon phrase...

A point very well made - in fact there's a startup here working on that precise problem, that is how to disengage from the endless barrage of notifications from a billion services all vying for attention.

That facebook home ad with the distracted employee creeps me out for this exact reason

I think the sort of future where I need to buy and use a device from a corporation to modulate my experience and participate in society is a pretty shitty future, and we should be doing some thinking about that.

Too often real innovation is lost behind froth and grandstanding like this - too many excitable nerds and shiny toys, not enough introspection on the effects of technology on society. Not enough emphasis on problems that need solving, too much on how to raise more ad revenue or VC money.

I saw this talk live at NEXTBerlin, and while in the audience all I could think was 'wow, I don't care at all if you win - your life sounds like it must suck if you're competing for ridiculous minutiae - and what has this got to do with privacy anyway?'. Questions of privacy - an important pillar of digital policy in Germany and other EU states - were brushed aside at the prospect of faster airline tickets and 'competition for experience', whatever that means.

Really? Can Scoble not imagine a world where experience isn't a zero sum game? Is this the perception of the world we're being locked into by technology?

Google Glass has a lot of potential in some spaces - in teaching, in medicine, in law enforcement - but I am terrified that its evangelists and early adopters are brushing aside the concerns of a digital layer in front of real experiences so readily, as if more technology is automatically a good thing.

This isn't really about control or enforcement, it has to be about fundamental ideas in how society deals with this kind of technology.

Assuming society can actually find time without being distracted. No doubt we'll adapt, but at what cost?

This ad was actually pretty scary - Facebook seems to be actively encouraging a culture of active and constant distraction. I don't think that society has really learned to handle being bomabrded with always-on distractions yet and this seems to push the idea aggressively.

Very fair. I guess more maths isn't always better after all.

That's true, but I'm sure it would have helped while the author was trying to balance the game out to better understand the sources of particular imbalances, rather than having to guess-and-iterate on them.