Horoscope du jour

You know how sometimes you check your horoscope and it just seems so dead on it's freaky. I was out at a local coffee shop (my favorite, The Cup) and happened to glance down at today's Boulder Weekly while waiting for my delicious sandwich. It was the horoscope page and being a person of superstition I picked it up. Here's what it said:

This would be a perfect time for you to write your ultimate personal manifesto. I'm talking about composing a sweeping statement of the core ideas that fuel your lust for life. To get you in the mood, take a look at the following lyris from Danny Schmidt's song "Company of Friends."

I believe in restless hunger
I believe in private thunder
I believe in inspiration
I believe in slow creation
I believe in lips on ears
I believe in being wrong
I believe in contradiction
I believe in being smitten
I believe our book is written by our company of friends

This could be the song of my life over the past year. I need to get to work on that manifesto right away.

The Idea

I wanted to start writing a little bit about the role of a CTO in a startup company. There's a wide range of behaviors in that role from the more execution oriented engineering manager to inventing a fair amount of the technology to a visionary steward who directs the company towards the optimum market value. I have played many roles in multiple companies across this continuum and wanted to get a few thoughts down that may be of help to others out there trying to make sense of this elusive function.

A CTO is the Chief Technology Officer in the company. In more well established companies this is a contributing role that would typically report up through the Chief Information Officer (CIO). In a technology startup, the CTO role is critical for the successful launch of the company. It all starts with the idea, and in many cases the CTO is not only the founder but the individual who had the idea and the knowledge to determine whether implementing the idea is likely. For the moment though I would like to set aside the notion of solution probability.

Ideas often start with personal pain. Engineers, or rather inventors are inherently lazy. When confronted with a problem, an inventor will ironically go to great lengths, often expending much more energy than giving in to the brute force approach, to try to find a short cut solution. The brainstorming that follows traverses a series of what if's with numerous cerebral dead ends. The beauty of this stage is in the search for the possible and you may have no f*cking clue how likely a solution is but are making probability guesses based upon incomplete knowledge. For instance, in my last company, Dante Software, I had just finished reading the O'Reilly book on Perl for Bionformatics. I was currently the CTO of a Web 1.5 services company where we built Commerce, Content, and Community sites. I'm going to give myself a smallish bit of credit here for incorporating community directly in the site, although I didn't recognize the importance it was going to play in the future. Anyway, we would continually have issues with system performance and outages that impacted the business. The aha moment came after reading the bioinformatics book and realizing that the web business and it's integration to traditional parts of the business had become specialized and the interactions complicated enough that a similar model in bioinformatics to track protein-protein interactions for disease detection was not all that far off from what I was trying to solve. That is, I wanted to detect problem conditions that could impact the business before they became problems for my customers without having to know what alert thresholds to place on every possible metric in the underlaying IT stack.

Now I have a big hairy problem. There's nothing out there solving it (as far as we know). And there's a solution model in a completely different space that looks like it might be adaptable or at least used as a guide for my problem. Aha, idea born. This could work! The next step is to reverse engineer the problem and map to the proposed solution to come up with a reasonable guess as to how it might work. Then researching whether something already exists that may be close enough or could get there faster than you. And SWAG (silly wild ass guess) how long it would take you to prototype. But these are market and time to market questions. I'll address those later. It's a great feeling just to sit with your idea for a bit and relish the brilliance of it before taking that next scary step of analysis. This will be a long road. Right now you need to build up your confidence to herculean levels :)

I remember once telling a VC at this stage about an idea and they said how about company X, haven't they been working on something similar for the last few months. Knowing the people in the other company and having an inflated sense of confidence in my ability to get this idea off the ground, I looked him straight in the eye and said "We'll crush them". ;)

History of Wikipedia

One of the things we monitor at Collective Intellect is Web 2.0 technology and trends. I came across this video using our tool today. It's a great piece on the history of wikipedia and how Web 2.0 changes our collective future. Web 2.0 is the ultimate democratization of information on the planet and that changes everything. It is indeed an exciting time to be alive!

the moon has no name

My daughter Emma was working on a science project today focusing on the solar system. She was wondering whether the moon had any other name than "moon." As it turns out, no. Here's an excerpt from Wikipedia.

Unlike the moons of other planets, the moon of the Earth has no proper English name other than "the Moon

This struck her as grossly unfair. Being a person of action she decided to campaign for our moon to be named and added the following to the wikipedia discussion page on the moon.

etymology addendum

I propose that the moon be given the name lyftstan (pronounced lift-stan). This would roughly translate into the phrase sky rock in Anglo-Saxon. Since the earth derives its name from Anglo-Saxon and unfairly does not have its own name this seems like a good choice. Any other thoughts?

primaries too close to call - but we did

We just posted a primary prediction on our corporate blog for Texas and Ohio. While it's very close, our man Yordy has put his name on the line and made a prediction.

Bitch is the New Black

Tina Fey is absolutely brilliant. Tina returned to host SNL this past weekend and took back her position as Weekend Update anchor. (TG the writer's strike has come to an end). Talking directly to the audience in a tight shot, she whipped out the best stump speech for Hillary that I've heard. Unfortunately the video has been pulled from YouTube and I couldn't find it on NBC's site but here's the transcript I found on MyDD:

ROFLOL,

FEY: And finally, the most important Women’s News item there is, we have our first serious female presidential candidate in Hillary Clinton.

And yet, women have come so far as feminists, that they don’t feel obligated to vote for a candidate just because she’s a woman.

Women today feel perfectly free to make whatever choice Oprah tells them to.

Which raises the question, why are people abandoning Hillary for Obama?

Some say that they’re put off by the fact that Hillary can’t control her husband, and that we would end up with co-presidents.

‘Cause that would be terrible, having two intelligent, qualified people working together to solve problems. Ugh.

Why would you let Starsky talk to Hutch? I wanna watch that show, Starsky.

You know, what is it, America? What is it, are you weirded out that they’re married?

‘Cause I can promise you that they are having exactly as much sex with each other as George Bush and Jeb Bush are.

Then there is the physical scrutiny of her physical appearance.

Rush Limbaugh, the Jeff Conaway of right wing radio, said that he doesn’t think America is ready to watch their president quote “turn into an old lady in front of them.” Really?

They didn’t seem to mind when Ronald Reagan did that.

Maybe what bothers me the most is that people say that Hillary is a bitch.

Let me say something about that: Yeah, she is.

And so am I and so is this one. (pointing to Amy Poehler)

POEHLER: Yeah, deal with it.

FEY: Know what? Bitches get stuff done.

(Amy says yeah and starts nodding her head, together they get in a rhythm, with Amy saying in response, more yeahs, uh huhs, with a 'you go girl' style)

Like back in grammar school,

they could have had priests teaching you but, no,

they had those tough old nuns who slept on cots

and who could hit ya and you HATED those bitches

But at the end of the school year

you sure KNEW the capital of Vermont!

So COME ON Texas and Ohio

Get on board, it's not too late!...

BITCH IS THE NEW BLACK!

Academy Award blogularity

Just wrote up a blog entry analyzing what the blog crowd thinks about the movies and individuals nominated for the Academy Awards on Sunday night. We built out topics that covered each movie/individual that also talked about the Awards. We were then able to pull out the ones for each topic that favored the movie/individual versus whether the author thought they would win the award. We also did one case where we weighted the blog influencers more in this voting scheme. There were some pretty interesting results. I've posted the best movie here. To check out the full listing go to Collective Intellect blog.

fuck it, I'll fund that

Was just sent this hilarious post on t-shirts for VC's. The site is for real. Too funny. I especially liked the story at the end about how David Cowan at Bessemer Venture Partners passed on google. I also noticed that they have an homage to my friend Brad Feld with a "treadputer" shirt.

Incredible Mii

I was playing the Wii this weekend with my daughter. It turns out she is fascinated by creating Mii's at least as much as playing the games. There is endless body hacking potential and just like real life we're never quite satisfied with the way we look. There's also a Mii parade so if you're a networked Wii then your Mii's can wander off to other Wii's and join their parades. At one point Emma saw a couple of bubbles appear over two Mii's just milling around. Perhaps they talk to one another when we're away? The Singularity is near and it has a jaunty bounce.

internal dialogue at work

I've been slowly increasing meditation time each week and am now doing morning and night. I can only seem to stay focused on my breath for a few seconds when my mind starts to wander. At this point, quieting my mind against the onslaught of hypertext hyperthought is daunting. My only hope is in the fact that I do recognize that it wanders and can bring it back. I've been counting my breaths to 21 and starting over to try to focus and this seems to help but then I will inevitably start to focus on the counting of the breaths instead of the breath itself.

I'm an information junkie so everything captures my attention and nothing holds it. Since beginning the meditation practice I've noticed this at work and with other tasks as well. I can't just hold myself to the task at hand. My mind is racing along the thousand things I need to do in my personal and work life. How will I get them all done? Oh, I forgot about that task and it needs to be done today. Drop the current task and focus on the new one. Someone calls, someone twitters, or im's or drops by my desk. And the process starts all over again.

The last time I was in meditation class, two weeks ago, the instructor talked about being in the present moment for each thing we do and used driving as an example. We often put ourselves on autopilot while driving and are rarely present unless something out of the ordinary happens. The instruction was to really think about driving while driving. I need to put this into action at work to fully engage a task, driving other thoughts from my mind before moving on.

Another class tonight. I need it :)

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