HN user
One of the better pieces of financial advice I ever got from a mentor was: if you have a business or are self employed, get disability insurance.
I ended up enrolling in California's Disability Insurance Elective Coverage (DIEC) - http://www.edd.ca.gov/disability/self-employed.htm. I wonder if anyone else has gone this route?
Ah, so you're a waffle man...
SEEKING FREELANCER: We're hiring a part time (up to 20hr/wk), remote web application developer to support a BPM project for one of our clients, a high technology manufacturing firm in Sunnyvale, CA. The platform is Intalio BPMS (http://intalio.com) and skillsets required include building AJAX user interfaces (we are using Tibco GI), web service implementation and testing (XSLT, Xpath, SoapUI), MySQL, Tomcat. Small team, good rate, interesting technology. Contact: info@innovelocity.com
We're hiring a part time (up to 20hr/wk), remote web application developer to support a BPM project for one of our clients, a high technology manufacturing firm in Sunnyvale, CA. The platform is Intalio BPMS (http://intalio.com) and skillsets required include building AJAX user interfaces (we are using Tibco GI), web service implementation and testing (XSLT, Xpath, SoapUI), MySQL, Tomcat. Small team, good rate, interesting technology. Contact: info@innovelocity.com
We're hiring a part time (up to 20hr/wk), remote web application developer to support a BPM project for one of our clients, a high technology manufacturing firm in Sunnyvale, CA. The platform is Intalio BPMS (http://intalio.com) and skillsets required include building AJAX user interfaces (we are using Tibco GI), web service implementation and testing (XSLT, Xpath, SoapUI), MySQL, Tomcat. Small team, good rate, interesting technology. Contact: info@innovelocity.com
One of the hardest things to do when hiring a consultant is to figure out what they're like to work with ... will they have a good attitude, work well with people, understand and listen to requirements etc. Surprisingly to some, many companies value this kind of thing very highly.
Does anyone else see this as a thinly veiled partisan rant along the lines of, "Democrats are Ivory Tower elitists who hate Joe the Plumber and will destroy free enterprise in the USA"?
In what sense does this article have any practical value for entrepreneurs, or even the Obama administration? Seems like Schmidt, Page and Brin have been offering plenty of informal advice along with lots of other successful entrepreneurs.
Ripped directly from Wikipedia: The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act (sometimes known as the Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act)[1] was an act signed into law on June 17, 1930, that raised U.S. tariffs on over 20,000 imported goods to record levels. In the United States 1,028 economists signed a petition against this legislation, and after it was passed, many countries retaliated with their own increased tariffs on U.S. goods, and American exports and imports plunged by more than half. In the opinion of most economists, the Smoot-Hawley act was partially responsible for the severity of the Great Depression.[2][3]
I don't know why this was modded down ... it's a fascinating subject. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Depression
Every entrepreneur knows that those who choose to ignore history are doomed to repeat it.
For people seeking an informed and academic perspective, you may find this PDF on Liquidation Cycles during the Great Depression to be of interest: http://econ161.berkeley.edu/pdf_files/Liquidation_Cycles.pdf
You have to take into consideration the author is a sales guy and not an operations guy. The problem for a sales guy is, "how do I get my prospective customer to take a risk and shake things up by buying my product?"
An operations guy would read it a lot differently, because it seems to be implying that you have to choose between predictability and innovation.
As any operations guy knows, the reason Toyota etc. are consistent and innovative is because they have gradual continuous improvement throughout the company, led from the bottom-up by the employees themselves.
As you can see, Seth has heard of the term "Six Sigma", but I'm not entirely sure he knows what it means. Not his fault, I wouldn't ask Deming for sales advice either.
At the end of the day what I took from it is the old message: "what made you successful in the past is not guaranteed to make you successful in the future", and a lot of people and companies have trouble letting go and trying something new.
To prevent this from degenerating into partisan political BS, let me say that if anyone is interested in the macro environment and the economy, check out the Economist.
This paper was established to advance free market and free trade principles, and it isn't beholden to any US party (it's a British publication).
http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9...
I'm all for positive thinking, but it's a little early for partisan hacks to start crowing about how excellently the economy is functioning right now. Show me the data in 6 months time.
I nearly fell off my chair on the part where they claimed lenders were forced against their will to make the bad loans for "Affirmative Action" reasons... Wow. Just wow.
I know I'm going to get downmodded for this but I have to agree with Captain-M.
The attitude that "we're doing better than our competitors so we don't need to improve" is toxic, and usually fatal for a company in the long run (... the others aren't going to be content with sitting in second place forever).
My earlier-gen MBP, iPhone, iPods etc are all rock solid (I'm delighted with them all), but I could easily see a situation where quality could go south on new products in the rush to cut costs and get to market faster.
I hope that's not the case. It would be little comfort to me as a new buyer if my machine bricked for no reason, and some smug fanboy pointed out that other people who bought Macs in the past had no problems (making me the problem?)
A lot of the biz types would be surprised at how truly unoriginal their "ideas" are. It takes deep technical insight to come up with something truly groundbreaking.
I would rather talk about the opposite case: i.e. A hacker has a brilliant technology idea and needs to find a business person with the connections, sales skills, finance skills, channel knowledge (and at least some technical understanding) to make it commercially viable. That seems like a harder problem... your fresh out of college MBA guy might not be the right fit.
In the context of starting a company, this is pretty wise advice.
Do you hire people who are brilliant but ethically questionable (and might stab you in the back one day for an advantage), or do you hire people who are merely great ... but will stay and struggle with you when the inevitable hard times come?
"What IBM did was to create a piece of hardware which everyone bought into. And built it out of generic enough parts that it could be cloned. I'm not sure who the equivalent player this time around."
-- I don't think there is an equivalent to IBM in the handset market.
IBM had a powerful steamroller when it came to branding, sales and cash - most people hopped on the PC Compatible standard (including DOS) because it was the "sure thing". Not because DOS was inherently more open than, say, CP/M.
Google has a similar steamroller (at least in the respect that to a lot of people, Google = Internet) but unless most people are demanding a "Google Phone" then handset makers aren't going to fall over themselves to hand over their lunch to google.
Google and the developer community will have to build something pretty incredible and build a lot of mind-share with the general public, I think.
Effort is important, but knowing where to make an effort makes all the difference.
Tapping with a hammer ....... $ 2.00 Knowing where to tap ........ $ 9998.00
http://fridayreflections.typepad.com/weblog/2007/08/knowing-...