Andy Brett is a writer, engineer, and athlete living in Silicon Valley

The most striking example I know of schlep blindness is Stripe, or rather Stripe’s idea. For over a decade, every hacker who’d ever had to process payments online knew how painful the experience was. Thousands of people must have known about this problem. And yet when they started startups, they decided to build recipe sites, or aggregators for local events. Why? Why work on problems few care much about and no one will pay for, when you could fix one of the most important components of the world’s infrastructure? Because schlep blindness prevented people from even considering the idea of fixing payments.

Probably no one who applied to Y Combinator to work on a recipe site began by asking “should we fix payments, or build a recipe site?” and chose the recipe site. Though the idea of fixing payments was right there in plain sight, they never saw it, because their unconscious mind shrank from the complications involved.

Posted some thoughts on Quora after a few weeks wearing the UP. Three key flaws:

- I still have to tell the UP what “mode” I’m in (normal, sleeping, or exercising).

- Syncing is awkward and unreliable.

- No API/data export, and no web interface.

I’m pretty excited for the Basis to arrive, as it appears to address all three.

Everyone should watch this. There isn’t a single thing he says that isn’t 100% correct.

My position on marriage is that the government ought to just stay out of it totally and completely and stop arguing about it.

“Sometimes people complain, you know, ‘the lower half don’t pay taxes, what are we going to do about it’, and I say ‘we’re halfway there!’”
“What would our main source of revenue be [if not income tax]?”
“Where it came from before 1913.”
“If the people want us to be the policemen of the world and have welfare from cradle to grave, then no, you can’t get rid of taxation and we’ll continue on until we’re totally bankrupt and our currency fails. But if you want a Constitutional government you really don’t have to have an income tax.”

How much of it should be cut?

All of it […] Foreign aid takes money from poor people in this country and gives it to rich people in other countries.

Side note: Jay Leno’s explanation of our relationship with Israel - “we don’t like to see the little guy get picked on” was unintentionally hilarious.

“He used to be governor of Massachusetts.”
“Right, very good, that’s like a Rick Perry answer.”
“Well maybe that’s what he should stay, is governor of Massachusetts.”

I really hope that this becomes more common, and not the exception that proves the rule. No middlemen, no signing up for something. Just a transaction between a creator and the people that want to enjoy something and will pay money to do so.

I’m also just going to assume that it was my question on Quora that got him to post an update on the (impressive) sales figures to date.

Further, from the AMA on Reddit:

It’s like that thing in the movie “Twister” where they send a bunch of little data collecting balls up into a tornado and just download the lovely results. The whole things has been like that. From the moment it went online and i saw the result of every decision i made. the last question the web guys asked me before we posted was if I wanted the mail list button defaulted to “opt in” or “opt out” and i said start it at opt out. It’s such a tiny thing but I keep hearing about it from people.

Last year, MasterBrand, which has some 7,000 U.S. employees, started tying their insurance-premium contributions to their health-risk factors. Those who score poorly on measures such as cholesterol, blood pressure, body-mass index and tobacco use pay more each week.

The reality is that most programmers working on their own only spend a small fraction of their day actually programming: the interruptions are legion, and dropping in and out of a state of concentrated focus takes most of their day. There is a solution, however: pair program. Two programmers, one computer. No email, no Twitter, no phone calls (at least not unscheduled; you can take breaks at regular intervals to handle these things). If you do this, what you get is a full day of pure programming. And “getting in the zone” with someone else actually takes almost no time at all. It’s a completely different way of working, and I maintain that it is far more efficient than working alone ever can be. And in fact, with the current level of device-driven distraction in the workplace, I’d suggest it is the only way that software teams can operate at peak efficiency.

A pair of Stanford freshmen came in next, with an idea for a mobile-phone application called QuadMob, which would allow you to locate your closest friends on a map in real time… “On Friday night, every single week, I go to a party, and somehow you just lose your friends – people roll out to different parties. And I always have to text people, ‘Where are you, which party are you at?’ and I have to do that for, like, ten friends, and that’s just a huge pain point.”

The QuadMob candidates did not get a Thiel Fellowship.

The way to revolutionize the TV market is to cut out all of the legacy. No cable companies. No broadcast tuners. No channels. No DVRs. All internet delivery. All on-demand. No commercials.