 aron (@aronsolomon)
10/13/13 7:21 AM
In case you missed Nick Bilton's piece on Jack Dorsey, here it is:nyti.ms/15UQ0OD
It wasn’t about reporting; it was about connecting. There could be a real business in that. He would certainly like such a service: his nights alone in his apartment, alone in his office, alone in his car, could feel less alone with a steady stream of conversation percolating online.
One late afternoon, alone in his apartment, he reached over to his cellphone and turned it to silent, which caused it to vibrate. He quickly considered the name “Vibrate,” which he nixed, but it led him to the word “twitch.” He dismissed that too, but he continued through the “Tw” section of the dictionary: twist, twit, twitch, twitcher, twitchy . . . and then, there it was. He read the definition aloud. “The light chirping sound made by certain birds.” This is it, he thought. “Agitation or excitement; flutter.” Twitter.
It’s one of Silicon Valley’s great oddities that start-up founders refer to themselves as “entrepreneurs.” More often than not, the people who come up with company ideas have no understanding of how to run a business or turn a profit. Partly as a result, the relationship between the entrepreneurs, who have the ideas, and the venture capitalists, who finance them, can become tense.
Silicon Valley has seen some of the greatest wealth creation in all of human history. According to the National Venture Capital Association, start-ups can raise more than $20 billion in venture capital in a single year.
To Dorsey’s surprise, Zuckerberg asked if there was a way to prevent the firing, perhaps in order to save the deal. Dorsey assured him that there wasn’t, and Zuckerberg switched his plan from trying to buy Twitter to trying to hire Dorsey. So Dorsey met with Chris Cox, who ran Facebook’s product division, at a Philz Coffee in San Francisco. The discussions soon became more serious. But they didn’t have a specific role in mind. Zuckerberg wanted Dorsey to simply join Facebook in an unspecified capacity, and they would worry about a position later.
In Silicon Valley, there is no currency like access.
But this access often relies on having a narrative — being an entrepreneur with just the right creation story. And Dorsey, once a shy kid with a speech impediment from St. Louis, proved remarkably savvy at selling himself.
Ideas rarely, if ever, come from the mind of a single person, but those who go down in lore as visionaries take credit for them as if they do. Dorsey seemed to understand this intrinsically, too.
 George Haines (@George_Haines)
10/13/13 7:20 AM
The debate in #highered shouldn't be about whether lectures are best delivered in-person or via MOOC.
 Mark Zohar (@markzohar)
10/13/13 6:00 AM
London's great exodus. This is what happens when property becomes a global reserve currency.nytimes.com/2013/10/13/opi… via @trendspottr
 Daniel Tunkelang (@dtunkelang)
10/12/13 9:36 PM
Google CIO Ben Fried bans Dropbox because it holds company data in another company's data center. Irony much? lnkd.in/bZu8mxu
aron (@aronsolomon)
10/13/13 5:19 AM
The era of “either or” was an historical anomaly.medium.com/thoughts-on-cr…
Why was I convinced that the best and brightest needed to actually change things for others? We’re obviously not living in a world where anywhere near the majority of those who have and receive ridiculously amazing gifts give huge chunks of them back.Both talented young people not only have the freedom to choose what they want to pursue, they have the ability to create it, on a really grand scale, for others. Seth and Ben are absolutely architects of a world beyond choice and have the power (which they are choosing to use in profoundly different ways) to become slayers of the either or.
so if we could just change one thing - returning shells to turtles.. so that everyone gets a go.. that'd do it.aron (@aronsolomon)
10/13/13 7:34 AM
Why isn't there a parody yet of the New York Times' "Wealth Matters" section? Can we set it in Silicon Valley? topics.nytimes.com/top/news/busin…
 Cristina Milos (@surreallyno)
10/13/13 7:27 AM
"Those who urge us to 'think different' almost never do so themselves. The literature of creativity - a genre of surpassing banality." 1/2 Lolly Daskal (@LollyDaskal)
10/13/13 7:28 AM
abundance is not something you wait for, its a state of mind#spiritchat
 Jennifer Sertl (@JenniferSertl)
10/13/13 7:29 AM
8) #surrender: In search of enoughnytimes.com/2012/08/19/boo… #a3r
Cristina Milos (@surreallyno)
10/13/13 7:30 AM
TED Talks Are Lying to You tinyurl.com/lthy4uu via @ThomasMarzano Excellent critique of the consumption of "creativity". 2/2Those who urge us to “think different,” in other words, almost never do so themselves. Our writer-to-be was old enough to know that, for all its reverential talk about the rebel and the box breaker, society had no interest in new ideas at all unless they reinforced favorite theories or could be monetized in some obvious way. The method of every triumphant intellectual movement had been to quash dissent and cordon off truly inventive voices. The reason these many optimistic books seemed to have so little to do with the downward-spiraling lives of actual creative workers is that they weren’t really about those people in the first place.
And what was the true object of this superstitious stuff? A final clue came from “Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention” (1996), in which Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi acknowledges that, far from being an act of individual inspiration, what we call creativity is simply an expression of professional consensus. Using Vincent van Gogh as an example, the author declares that the artist’s “creativity came into being when a sufficient number of art experts felt that his paintings had something important to contribute to the domain of art.” Innovation, that is, exists only when the correctly credentialed hivemind agrees that it does. And “without such a response,” the author continues, “van Gogh would have remained what he was, a disturbed man who painted strange canvases.” What determines “creativity,” in other words, is the very faction it’s supposedly rebelling against: established expertise.
Consider, then, the narrative daisy chain that makes up the literature of creativity. It is the story of brilliant people, often in the arts or humanities, who are studied by other brilliant people, often in the sciences, finance, or marketing. The readership is made up of us — members of the professional-managerial class — each of whom harbors a powerful suspicion that he or she is pretty brilliant as well. What your correspondent realized, relaxing there in his tub one day, was that the real subject of this literature was the professional-managerial audience itself, whose members hear clear, sweet reason when they listen to NPR and think they’re in the presence of something profound when they watch some billionaire give a TED talk. And what this complacent literature purrs into their ears is that creativity is their property, their competitive advantage, their class virtue. Creativity is what they bring to the national economic effort, these books reassure them — and it’s also the benevolent doctrine under which they rightly rule the world.
Unfortunately, Influentials are a myth. Studies have shown that they are neithernecessary nor sufficient to create viral chains or social epidemics. Great change happens when ordinary people act in unison—in effect, everybody is an influencer. Ascribing magical qualities to certain individuals after the fact obscures more than it reveals.
or perhaps.. fortunately
Great change happens when ordinary people act in unison—in effect, everybody is an influencer. Ascribing magical qualities to certain individuals after the fact obscures more than it reveals
Great change happens when ordinary people act in unison—in effect, everybody is an influencer.
Yet we don’t need any fancy research to tell us something is wrong with the Influential idea, common sense will do. Where, after all, were the Influentials during the Arab Spring? Anybody who had influence beforehand was powerless to stem the tide of protests. The protesters, for their part, played little role in what came after.
And what about corporate titans like Blockbuster Video and Kodak? What would a theory of Influentials have done for them? Would higher Klout scores have prevented their demise? Of course not! If a theory cannot predict nor prescribe, what good is it?
ginormous..
and yet we spend years.. and gobs and gobs of money..
and we play with people's minds.. ie: making them believe in research... as god. .
Take the concept a little further and it becomes obvious that influence is a function of groups rather than individuals. That, in essence, is what the threshold model of collective behavior predicts. An idea usually takes hold among people who are most receptive to it and, as they increase in numbers, more people join in. It builds on itself.
not sure where he's going with this..
true grit/sustainability - as daily self talk
In the early 1960’s Everett Rogers noticed that successful innovations follow a peculiar pattern. They don’t catch on all at once, even if there is a clear benefit. Rather, a small group of enthusiasts try it first and then it spreads to those who are more reluctant. This became famous as diffusion of innovations model:
Notice how there is no reason to assume that the innovators and early adopters possess any special qualities, they just need to be interested. We are all early adopters in one area or another. Some of us like gadgets, others like fashion, while still others are thoroughly ensconced in music and art.
indeed - grit - talk to self..
However—and this is a crucial point—we’re much more likely to adopt an idea if people around us do. So if we live in Silicon Valley, we’re going to be more likely to try a new gadget, if we live in Manhattan a funky new hairstyle won’t seem particularly off base.
indeed - how to hasten the finding of your people.. reduce time between intention & action - page
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