Start Things

You can find studies that either prove or disprove NAFTA’s success depending on how you measure, so I guess it is hard to tell who to believe. I’m not intimately familiar with all the details of NAFTA, so I can’t say if its all good. It certainly is possible that parts of it need to be reworked, but overall, in the fact that it promotes free trade, I think its good for the economy.

The people NAFTA hurts the most are those whose jobs move, people who don’t have the means (in terms of skills) to pursue other opportunities. This seems to be a big issue in the upcoming election. I’m hoping that the candidates will focus more on job training, and enabling these people to pursue other opportunities rather than just trying to keep existing jobs here through protectionism (import tarrifs, restrictions, etc).

I think Democratic economic policies typically sound really good, especially to the lower and lower-middle-class, but these policies often fail to analyze what happens after stage one. For example, Increasing minimum wage works for a while, until the market adjusts and unemployment goes up as a result. So I’m worried that while amending NAFTA or resisting free trade may help the US in the short run it doesn’t really think beyond stage one. (Republican policies are no better for the opposite reason, they usually completely fail to account for the effect such agreements have on the lower to lower-middles)

An appropriate analogy is the US music industry. It has failed to respond to the economics of new technology which has created a whole new distribution model it initially tried to ignore. It has attempted to fix this problem through litigation, but as it is beginning to see, legal manuvering can only work for so long. The forces of the market dictate change, and ultimately ignoring those forces will lead to the deaths of those companies who fail to evolve with changing technology and a changing market economy. Same can be said for the US economy as a whole in the context of globalization. We can ignore the forces of change or try to limit them with tarrifs and other protectionist measures. We can “save American jobs”, but in the end I think we’ll be worse for it.

I really think we should focus on helping those who are displaced by free trade move up and take advantage of the opportunities that are created by the more efficient economy that these policies provide. Whether the best way to do this is job training programs or something else I don’t know, but that is what we, as a country, should be trying to figure out.

I’m in the midst of getting a new startup off the ground, and since “most valuable things are pretty hard” (although “everything really hard is not necessarily valuable” - Max Levchin) I’m pretty busy. If you’re interested in what’s going on I suggest you check out my new tumblelog, thats where I’m posting random clips from around the web and other observations that I don’t have the time to analyze to create a sufficiently engaging blog post around. I’ll have some interesting observations on this whole journey here once we launch. Stay tuned.

Here is a short list of things I ask myself daily. I have found this immensely helpful, it helps me stay focused and on track. I keep the list in my wallet (in bold).

Today Did You …
- Sleep less than 8 hours
I’ve found oversleeping is one of the biggest killers of productivity
- Read 1 hour
I like to devote some time everyday to learning about stuff not directly related to work
- Learn of & from others
Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Every man I meet is my master in some point, and in that I learn of him” I find that taking this perspective helps me not dismiss others opinions and helps me consider what they say in the context of which they are saying it, whether that be either their life/or immediate circumstance.
- Avoid hypocrisy
To be one in word and action, to not say or insinuate then not follow up. This reminds me that if I set goals I need to achieve them
- Practice audacity
To try to approach everything I do in a fearless, determined, bold way

What are the questions you ask yourself daily?

The feeling of starting a company full time is difficult to define, your feelings from day to day, hour to hour run the gamut from excitement to despair, certainty to anxiety, gloom to happiness. I think that there is no better advice than if you are thinking about starting something, you should just do it. Rarely do people regret things they did in life more than things they wished they had done. Find a way to quit, you don’t really want to be working that job or slaving away at a degree that seems pointless anyway do you?

There is nothing more real than a startup, it is your ideas in action, it is taking success into your own hands and making it based on your merits, and it is more fun than you will ever have. You will always have excuses, always have reasons to say you can’t do it, but to make things happen you have to put those in the back of your head and just make it happen. Willpower is a motive force. It seems to me that a lot of people become successful simply by pointing themselves in the right direction and not stopping until they get where they are going, no excuses, just do it.

I have heard a lot of discussion lately among the young entrepreneur/techie crowd (Mostly on news.ycombinator.com) about the difficulty of finding a co-founder, but is finding skilled and like-minded people really that hard to do? I would argue that it comes down to how good you are at networking. Networking is all about relationships and good relationships involve communication and take time to develop. At Startup School last year there was a quote I thought was right on, “Q: Where do you find cofounders? A: That is akin to where can I find a wife that I can have a kid with right away?” In order to find the people you will start your company with. Finding co-founders is a relationship building process.

When was the last time you took someone out for coffee and talked to them about what they were working on? Do you follow up with the people you meet and maintain relationships. Do you know how to network? For anyone out there struggling to find meaningful relationships in business I highly recommend reading Keith Ferrazzi’s book Never Eat Alone, maybe building meaningful relationships in business isn’t as hard as you think, you may just need a new strategy.

*NOTE: If your company is looking for Facebook Apps my web development consultancy specializes in creation of social apps on Facebook Platform, get in touch with us at www.lightboxit.com if you are interested.

This is the beginnings of a plugin I may put together to help others integrate Facebook into their Rails apps. Much of the code is borrowed from Luke Shepherd’s examples and slightly modified and repackaged. It is cleaner (and more Ruby-like) than having all those Facebook specific methods scattered around your application controller. You can check out the latest code with fixes (including fixes for the extended RFacebook Ruby API Client) at http://svn.jamiequint.com/rubyface (NOTE: There likely still bugs with this code, I’m collaborating with Paul McKellar on this and will update here as things progress) You will want to put this code in the lib directory of your Rails application and use it like this…

require "facebook_web_session"

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
include Facebook
session :session_key => ‘_myapp_session_id’
before_filter :initfb
before_filter :require_login, :except => [:view, :index, :list]
end

I’ve also found the most helpful resource yet to be the Facebook Platform Wiki so if you are looking for further help I suggest checking that out.

UPDATE: Matt Pizzimenti just released an updated version of RFacebook that works so as of now you probably should be using that.

I’m focusing on graduating right now (May 6th), I have a lot of work to wrap up in this last week and a half. It’s been a while since I’ve posted and it will likely be another two weeks before I do again, but I have some good stuff I am working up, so stay tuned everyone.

There is an idea that has been popping up a lot lately (Mostly in conjunction with Chris Anderson’s book The Long Tail) called the “economy of abundance.” Its the idea that in a digital age when the cost of production nears zero that scarcity (upon which classical economics is based) disappears. This creates some very interesting problems, because when you plug zero in to economics equations involving scarcity they tend to blow up. There are many issues still yet to be hashed out with the economics of abundance, but taking the theory into account in certain situations is nevertheless very interesting. One particular application I am interested in is understanding this idea in conjunction with artificial scarcity. That is, the intentionally limited production of goods with a marginal cost near or at zero.

One of the best examples I could think of for this was the recently introduced Facebook gifts. It’s the first example I can think of where the gift-economy and infinite supply collide. (I actually think Hot or Not has something similar to this too) Facebook is allowing people to give value in gift-economy terms (e.g. karma, honor, loyalty, enjoyment, etc.) for an economic return ($1). The difference between a traditional gift economy and this is that Facebook has created this value at negligible cost, basically making economic value out of nothing. In this case, I have a feeling that even in the case of unlimited supply that the gifts would still sell.

Other interesting applications for this theory include studies as to why DRM-free music (In this case DRM, technically limits the supply, or at least the proliferation of it) does not have to spell the end of the music industry (Quite the contrary as Steve Jobs argues in his controversial letter, “Thoughts on Music“). However, even this is not exactly the same comparison. The cost of an album or DVD can me more directly related to variable costs associated with the creation of that product and there is an upper bound at which the consumer is unwilling to pay for the privilege enjoying that media. Also, people are usually willing to buy music (its not directly related to the gift economy), but not something like a Facebook gift, for themselves.

Its really interesting that even in a post-scarcity economy it seems that there is a lower bound on the demand curve (price is maintained in light of infinite supply). Apparently in this case price is not necessarily set where the supply and demand curves meet.

It would be very interesting to see some data points about the effect artificial scarcity has on this lower bound. These are just some ideas and this is something I’m very interested in exploring at more depth, let me know what you think.

Related Links:

Wikipedia - Artificial Scarcity

Wikipedia - Post Scarcity Economy

Wikipedia - Gift Economy

Techdirt - The Economics of Abundance

Harvard Business School - What Happens When the Economics of Scarcity Meets the Economics of Abundance?

I finally signed up for Twitter yesterday, its addictive, and it made me think a lot about why it has become popular so quickly, I think there are three big things.

1. Its mindless. “What are you doing?” Twitter doesn’t make its users think hard to interact.

2. Its ubiquitous. Easily available everywhere: IM, Mobile, Web

3. Barrier to interaction is almost zero. Easy as popping open an IM window, it takes a couple seconds.

I’m sure the fact that people are naturally voyeuristic doesn’t hurt either

LinkedIn claims to let you “stay in touch with your network”, but what does that mean? If keeping lists of names and numbers is staying in touch with your network I’d say most people do an excellent job, but lists of names and numbers are meaningless. Valuable personal networks are built on meaningful relationships. You can have the contact info for 1000 people and no matter how powerful those people might be you have a worthless network if you don’t keep in touch with them in some way.

What tools do people use to track their networks currently? Besides LinkedIn and Address Book (Outlook, Plaxo, etc.) there is only one that effectively tracks interactions, its called email, and in the volume that most people send and receive its the signal to noise ratio is entirely too high to support this. These solutions are inefficient and ineffective.

Since November I’ve been working on an app that will help you maximize the value of your personal network. Its smarter contact management for networkers. I’m aiming to launch by April 1st. Stay tuned to peepflow.com for updates.

UPDATE (07/24/07): I am now working on this idea full time with a small team, stay tuned to peepflow.com for updates.