Leave it to Psmith - 10/10
Anna Karenina - 8/10
The Code of the Woosters 8/10
Fooled by Randomness 7/10
Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life 8/10
How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia 9/10
Reluctant Fundamentalist 9/10
The Sense of an Ending - Julian Barnes 8/10
The Last Question - Asimov - 9/10
The Magic of Thinking Big - 6/10
The catcher in the Rye 8/10
Models 7/10
High Fidelity - Nick Hornby 8/10
The Ocean at the End of the Lane - Neil Gaiman 7/10
The Surrender Experiment - 10/10
Untethered Soul - 9/10
The Autobiography of a Yogi - 7/10
Raja Yoga - Swami Vikekandanda - 7/10
Something Fresh, something new - 7/10
Karma Yoga - Swami Vikekandanda - 8/10
Thinking, Fast and Slow - 9/10
Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates 10/10
The Pearl by John Steinbeck 7/10
The unnatural way Homejoy raised their seed rounds, with Cheung basically calling up Levchin and PG [1] was instrumental in setting up a failed business. This gave the startup undeserving social proof and let to the huge funding it should have never received.
Without specific reference to any company, "Convincing an investor to invest in a company which is not, at the present moment in time, either profitable or cashflow positive" is not in any way exceptional or unnatural. That's the nature of the game in early stage investing.
They're all high-risk companies which, if you simply linearly project out where they are today, will "default to dying" (to use PG's phrasing). Sophisticated investors bet that they can perceive some X factor about the business, the market, or the founders which will cause the business to actually not achieve the default outcome. Usually they lose these bets. Occasionally they bet that two Stanford gradudate students who know nothing about business will nonetheless figure out a terribly difficult CS problem allowing them to unlock money from an oversaturated low-margin business that every smart analyst correctly believes has no future. If you invest in nine $STARUP_WHICH_FAILED_INGLORIOUSLY and one Google you do very well for yourself.
I agree. But such access to Silicon Valley luminaries is rare and a seed round from PG and Levchin is going to distort and inflate investment in subsequent rounds.
The initial seed round gave Homejoy more rocket fuel than was natural. I watched the speech live, and at the time I felt that Homejoy was a Mini with a jet engine. It was imbalanced and was likely to blow up.
tl;dr; summary of video -- "The theme that most people want me to talk about and which I will oblige today is ... how not to die in the context of a startup. ... Our goals (1) make people happy, (2) build a huge humungous business, which is a proxy for making a huge impact." She goes on to talk about how they spent years looking for the Homejoy idea since they did not have any personal problem that they cared enough about. At 22:00 she talks about getting $25K each from Max L. and PG: "It's like skydiving... and a hundred feet before hitting the ground, you magically get pogo sticks and bounce up. ... Now we have over 40 million in investment and we are living the dream. ... The good news is that you only fail if you stop trying." She also ends saying that her success is due almost entirely to hard work, not luck.
For engineers, the last paragraph is the most pertinent:
"The key weapon is abstraction," he says. "If you can build abstractions well enough, you should be able to break things down into bits you can handle." That maxim guides every other discipline in engineering, not least the design of computer hardware. Why not apply it to software, too?
One the whole, we do. But sometimes abstractions leak [1]. Sometimes you get impedance mismatches when you try to layer them. Sometimes the abstraction isn't what you think it is or want it to be.
An example of the last point is alluded to in a comment by efaref about a binary search algorithm that turned-out to be broken because it assumed that an integer type in the implementation language behaved the same way as integers in mathematics, but it didn't because it didn't allow arbitrary-size values. The abstraction provided by the integer type was faulty.
If one were using formal methods in these circumstances, they should, in principle, reveal those leaks and impedance mismatches to you (or, more precisely, reveal to you any problems they cause in your specific design.) The existence of leaks and impedance matches in informal abstractions is an argument for formality, not against it.
I agree in principle, although in practice I am sceptical about the practicality of applying formal methods to large systems. The ratio of effort to reward just seems too large for most domains.
Culture is made up of many abstract ideas ranging from values and customs that combine to make an interdependent complex system, prediction is impossible. And as the norms and values were shaped by situations that were random and or completely different to the situation we currently experience, we get another layer of complexity.
Yes, it's a brilliant book that proves what we see as free will is obviously not free and it's not even up for contention that we actually have the ability to decide, even though it feels as though we do.
