Groupthink: The Brainstorming Myth

The solo students came up with roughly twice as many solutions as the brainstorming groups, and a panel of judges deemed their solutions more “feasible” and “effective.” Brainstorming didn’t unleash the potential of the group, but rather made each individual less creative.

[…]

Osborn thought that imagination is inhibited by the merest hint of criticism, but Nemeth’s work and a number of other studies have demonstrated that it can thrive on conflict … “Maybe debate is going to be less pleasant, but it will always be more productive. True creativity requires some trade-offs.”

A Proposal for Penn Station and Madison Square Garden - NYTimes.com

To pass through Grand Central Terminal, one of New York’s exalted public spaces, is an ennobling experience, a gift. To commute via the bowels of Penn Station, just a few blocks away, is a humiliation.

A Word to the Resourceful
They traversed idea space as gingerly as a very old person traverses the physical world.

This image/analogy is incredibly apt.

“Should we fix payments, or build a recipe site?”
PG brilliantly distills a facet of building companies - “schlep blindness”:

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.

The Social Network That Stole Christmas
“You can also go into someone’s Path—which is a lot like a Facebook timeline, but without all the third-party junk and ads.”
What went wrong with Jawbone’s UP?

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.

Ron Paul on The Tonight Show

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

On marriage:

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

On taxes:

“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.”

On foreign aid:

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.

On Mitt Romney:

“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.”

Louis CK Live at the Beacon Theater

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.

The Future of U.S. Health Care - WSJ.com
This is a really great survey of the current landscape in the health care industry. One quote from a self-insured employer jumps out:

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.
What’s Your Startup’s “Bus Count”?
Rob Mee of Pivotal Labs:

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.
No Death, No Taxes
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.
parislemon • Squared Away
This may sound like hyperbole, but I’m pretty sure that in 5 years I’ll be able to say exactly when/where I first used card case.
“I finally cracked it” - Marco.org
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.
2007 WWDC Keynote - iPhone
Watch starting at 5:00. The audience reaction to the pins dropping onto the map is remarkable - in 2007 it was revolutionary that you could find nearby businesses on a mobile device.
Marc Andreessen on the Dot-Com ‘Bubble’
M.B.A. graduating classes are actually a reliable contrary indicator: if they all want to go into investment banking, there’s going to be a financial crisis. If they want to go into tech, that means a bubble is forming.
The World Is An Internet Startup Now - John Battelle’s Searchblog
The Internet no longer belongs to the young tech genius with a great idea and the means to execute it online. Innovation on the Internet now belongs to the world, and that is perhaps the most exciting thing about this space. It’s attracting not just the “next Mark Zuckerberg,” but also thousands of super smart innovators from every field imaginable, each of whom brings extraordinary insights and drive to play. And that’s another reason I love this industry, because, in the end, it’s not a singular business. It now encapsulates the human narrative, writ very large.
Steve Jobs Presents to the Cupertino City Council (6/7/11)
We’ve seen these office parks….and they get pretty boring pretty fast. We’d like to do something better than that.”


This was more mesmerizing than the keynote the day before. Alexia nailed the short commentary - “Best ‘one more thing’ ever.”
My life in Accenture before startups - swombat.com on startups
“At the same time, something really bothered me about my work. It felt pointless.”
Dogs On Tiny Rocking Chairs: Will A Groupon IPO Injure Them?
Jonathan Swift is alive and well in the form of Paul Carr
A VC: Paperless Financing Docs
“I am going to find out if we can use Docracy on our next venture financing to make things more efficient.”
Docracy at the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon
I really love this idea. Looking forward to seeing Docracy present on Wednesday.
The University Has No Clothes
“When [my daughters are] 18 years old, just hand them $200,000 to go off and have a fun time for four years? Why would I want to do that?”
Y Combinator Is Boot Camp for Startups | Magazine
“In an early sign of the evening’s significance, [PG] is actually wearing long pants.”
Cake Health Wants To Be The ‘Mint For Health Insurance’ (Beta Invites)
Winding down a very long day and a very long week. Could not be more excited about what we’re building - now the real work begins.
Why The New Guy Can’t Code
“There is no excuse for software developers who don’t have a site, app, or service they can point to and say, ‘I did this, all by myself!’”
Google and the Death of Osama Bin Laden
Right now google suggests “osama dead” and “osama bin laden” after typing a single character.
Larry Page email to the Java language user group, 1996
“I have a web robot which is a Java app”
There are two kinds of people in the world
Sweeping generalization? Yes. Bordering on cliche? Maybe. Inspiring? Damn straight.
In the Plex, by Steven Levy
“The Back-Rub team discovered that by retoggling an incorrectly set switch in the basement, it could get full access to the T3 line.”

Yeah. An “incorrectly” set switch.
9 Women Can’t Make a Baby in a Month
Glad to see Mark Suster and I are on the same page: http://goo.gl/OzkOg
In Praise of Quitting Your Job
“States of approval and decisions-by-committee and constant compromises are third-party interruptions of an internal dialog that needs to come to its own conclusions.”
Behold: Image view modes - GitHub
GitHub consistently delivers features that people didn’t know they needed, and subsequently cannot live without
Subject: Airbnb
“He [@fredwilson] is the least suburban-golf-playing VC I know.”
Paul Graham: Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas
From April 2005:

The most common [proposal] was some combination of a blog, a calendar, a dating site, and Friendster. Maybe there is some new killer app to be discovered here, but it seems perverse to go poking around in this fog when there are valuable, unsolved problems lying about in the open for anyone to see.
The Wire: Season Two
“We used to make shit in this country, build shit. Now we just put our hand in the next guy’s pocket.”
Twitter Was Act One | Business | Vanity Fair
“He thinks the city ought to rip out the intrusive, noisy, balky video screens in the backseats of cabs and instead install Apple iPads equipped with a credit-card reader from Square.”
ExxonMobil CEO Really Hurt That College Student Is Talking About Him Right Now | The Onion - America’s Finest News Source
“Throughout the course of the day, Tillerson grew increasingly worried as he agonized over what could happen if the undergraduate ever posted her anti-oil views on Facebook, sources reported.”
Square – Pricing
I go for a quick run and come back to see an entire industry disrupted.
Money Won’t Buy You Health Insurance - NYTimes.com
“Instead, this is a story about how broken the market for health insurance is, even for those who are healthy and who are willing and able to pay for it.”
WITN: Is Justin Bieber Why Lady Gaga Is Pantsless In Paris? [TCTV]
“I think there’s a degree of revisionism there with the history of Bieber.”
Silicon Valley: an apology - Telegraph
I’d like to apologize for Paul Carr’s hat
Inside the DNA of the Facebook Mafia
You had me at “Engineers Are Gods and Education Isn’t What Made Them That Way”
What do we build now? A page from Blueleaf’s Lean Startup Playbook (with examples) - John Prendergast
The idea is to test a feature from concept to implementation beginning with the simplest, lowest effort version that will give us data about user behavior with the feature or concept.
Paul Buchheit: The two paths to success
Paul B’s writing is on par with Paul G.
Mobile Identity by Rebekah Cox - Quora
“Your identity is the product of how you manage your attention and others’ access to that attention.”
Should You Really Be A Startup Entrepreneur?
‘Yeah, I was actively involved on that one. Our advice is what helped them target the right market, hire the right team, build the right products.’ And there are some delusional people who really believe it.
Woke up this morning with a raspy voice and a…
Congrats to @jasonkincaid for an epic AC/DC cover. Your prize: being the guinea pig for me to test my new bookmarklet:
About that slowness on Twitter
Huzzah! I can scroll again
How Facebook Ships Code
Fascinating look at ‘developer-driven culture’, not to mention a complex machine running at full speed and scale.
Fun.
Good tune from a band called “Fun”. via @bensign
Secrets of BackType’s Data Engineers
Very impressive. I’d bet on these guys.
Facebook runs on a very stiff, crude model of what …
“The social equivalent of liver failure”
The 373-Hit Wonder
“Before each show, Gillis swaddles his laptop in Glad plastic wrap and Scotch tape to protect it from the beer and sweat of the fans onstage with him”
RSS: Not Dead Yet
RSS is merely “pining for the fjords”
Google’s decreasingly useful, spam-filled web search
Google is a marked man in the valley right about now.
You can also view my shared items on Google Reader for items prior to Jan 2011.