There has been much hype over these self-driving cars over the last year or so. It was all kicked off by Google’s success in the space, which prompted many to ask, “Is it safe?” 

Nevada set out to answer that question and the answer is yes. They have been testing these cars for a while and have passed a provision allowing them on the streets legally.

Although typical drivers and consumers are likely not going to see self-driving cars pedaled to them by their local dealer anytime soon, there are many immediate commercial uses. Think delivery vans and big rigs. Many truck drivers are paid for driving days, back to back, to carry cargo across the United States and back. Imagine if cargo could drive not only 14 hours a day, with a 30-minute break every 5 hours, but 24 hours a day, breaking only for gas. Imagine if cargo transporters could employ only a gas tank filler or pay a certain surcharge for a gas station employee to fill up each massive tank. That’s where we heading, and fast. It’s safer for the drivers and for the other vehicles that share the roads with trucks.

This is yet another example of technology displacing manual labor workers. The US can no longer rely on a brute work force for jobs. We need better programs and more benefits for technical trades and computer science. 

Smokin Hot Cars At Smokin Prices

Amazing how “affordable” the base model is of the Tesla Model S. When you consider that fact that these are basically the 1.0 versions of electric cars and there is a large amount of America that can already buy them. It’s amazing to consider where electric cars will be in 5 years or even 10. We’re witnessing something here that will change the very face of the global economy. I’m glad that a Silicon Valley company is at the forefront pushing the boundaries and setting a standard for the rest of the world.

Reading more about Facebook’s S-1 and feeling amazed. I love Zuck’s leadership through this whole thing. I love “the hacker way,” the manifesto he released in conjunction with the filing. Facebook is a phenomenon and it’s cool to be a part of it with the rest of the world.

I wanted to write something of the hardship at a startup, because I think that no one is really discussing accurately why startups are so hard.

I read an article by Mike Arrington a couple days ago that talked about never sleeping and working till you collapse and he wrote another post emphasizing his point to be that startups are hard. The reasons that startups are hard, I think, has nothing or nearly nothing to do with the hours worked. I know this because my average day doesn’t start till 8:45 and I leave around 7:00. That’s 10 hours and 15 minutes. And although that might be more than some, basically every doctor, lawyer, and consultant is working at least that long and likely much, much longer.

So, if the hours are longer elsewhere, either everyone launching a startup is a whiner (maybe) or there is something less obvious than mere hours at a screen that makes a startup the hardest thing I’ve ever done.

I’ve briefly gone through some of the hardest moments at my current, very young, eight-week-launched startup Baby.com.br and they fall generally in to two categories. Extreme emotion being one, and extreme pressure being the other.

Emotion

I think if startups weren’t composed of humans, they would generally go much smoother. Humans can be self-centered, brash, insulting, inconsiderate, narrow, and generally unpleasant. And that might be a good day for someone of our species. And it takes a lot of these humans working together for months and months to get a product ready for the public.

To shape a product, particularly an ecommerce product like Baby.com.br, you need to make decisions about thousands of things from warehousing, to product assortment, web design, platforms, software, hiring, office space, and even less tangible things like work ethic, and culture. And when a bunch of emotional, opinionated co-founders get together to hash these things out, the job difficulty escalates.

On top of all that, the earliest people in are usually the most vision-driven. The first few employees believe in something that is nothing more than an idea. They have watched really talented, even slightly famous and regarded people arrive for interviews and walk away. This has an effect on people. An emotional effect.

There is so much risk associated with startups and there are so many horror stories that everyone carries around a shadow within them. Maybe it’s hidden from view or maybe it’s on your shoulder, either way it changes how you work. And when you’re at a startup, particularly a young one, that shadow never leaves you. It’s with you at the office and it’s with you at home. It’s with you even when you sleep. The shadow has an emotional weight to it and it weathers you.

Pressure

At a startup, there is a built in pressure to be moving faster than is realistically possible. Whether it’s an expectation that a news organization inaccurately set, a communication with a peer that escalated by the time it found its way to an investor, a next round of financing, or even just the plain jane dissatisfaction that comes from not having enough wind in your hair, “faster” is a common mantra at startups.

This “faster” mantra makes people do crazy things and consider crazy ideas. Nothing is ever enough. And raising the next round of financing is constantly burning at the back of many of the decisions that are made. How can we grow faster than any commerce startup ever? That seems like the only way to survive. That may be complete crap, but I’m not sure it is. We didn’t get together, move to Brazil with our families, raise money, and slave away to have anything but the number one startup ever founded.

There is also an enormous amount of pressure from co-founders (Their blogs here and here). Everyone feels an ownership over their areas of the business and when something isn’t inline with our goals, there is disappointment, and usually a little banishment. When nothing in an entire company will move forward unless you do it yourself, there is a pressure that mounts and weighs and wears. And it doesn’t bring out the best interpersonal communication practices with those involved.

I’ve written before about hardship and how it yields the greatest experiences of life. However, the concept I’m attempting to articulate is that it is very hard at a startup and not for the mere time I happen to be clicking at a screen.

It’s been two weeks since my last post and my only excuse is that I’m finding that I’ve been busier than at any other time in my life and haven’t had a moment where my mind was free enough to share anything worthwhile. I mean, I can only post a new playlist so many times.

I read an absolutely maddening post on TechCrunch this evening and could help but calm myself down by posting about it.

Josh Constine writes:

“Users still expect to have to actively share something in order for it to reach their audience. That’s no longer true. Instead we’ll need to learn to filter out the noise in reverse, opting out when we don’t want to share instead of opting in when we do. That’s a huge behavioral realignment that will take time and won’t come easy. If learned, though, we’ll be able to dance across the web from one piece of great content to the next, sharing it all effortlessly, and only having to stop when something deserves to be struck from the record. And as algorithms improve to show us what’s most relevant, we won’t have to unshare as often.”

Algorithms? Josh, please. The reason Google is on the ropes is because it thinks it can solve problems with algorithms, while the rest of the web moves on. Automated curation is not dying, it never worked to begin with. Facebook’s social solution is the first that approached the problem with a sense of realism, let friends curate the web for each other.

However, that isn’t even my biggest problem with his post. The biggest problem is that Josh thinks that the web by default is interesting enough to share with our friends as we dance from webpage to webpage and story to story. It isn’t. I read, watch, view something like hundreds of pieces of content for every one I share throughout my networks. Why? Because there is a social responsibility amongst those you are connected with online that we won’t pollute each other’s feeds.

Josh’s point ignores human behavior and social context all together. He acts like Facebook’a new live ticker some how reworked the human race and even somehow took over Facebook. It didn’t. The ticker has been a small addition to my Facebook usage and I don’t expect it to change the way I think or act or even surf the web.

Josh is completely of point in his post and to think that it might be read with the same credibility as yester-month is frustrating to me. I’ve written before, a few times, about the unfortunate fall of TechCrunch with the exodus of ALL of its key players (and no, I don’t consider Erik Shonfeld a key player). This article tonight by Josh Constine typifies my exact point. In the old days rubbish like this would be reserved for a guest post, but these days this stuff is coming directly from full-on TC staff.

Human behavior hasn’t changed and won’t change and Josh, you’re an idiot and part of the next TC class that will teach all of us why we shouldn’t come back to TechCrunch for anything but to reminisce.

I’m nearing the end of Steve Jobs’ biography where there is a section about music. Walter Isaacson has a discussion with Jobs about his iPod and what he keeps there. Jobs has a deep appreciation and love for Bob Dylan and for The Beatles. I had known this before. However, some additional tastes were revealed in this section and as I was reading, I felt it fitting to experience the music as I was reading about it. I pulled up my own iPod, which is in my iPhone, and flipped to tracks that Jobs described as influential to him. I listened to U2 and Yo Yo Ma. I listened to John Mayer, whom Jobs described as one of the greatest guitarists ever. 

In this same section in the biography, there were several stories about the creation of iTunes ads. As I was reading I was reminded of one of my favorite iTunes ads which featured Paul McCartney and his mandolin playing Dance Tonight. I decided to flip over the YouTube app on my iPhone and watch it. As he plays he skips around a white place with rainbow colored houses floating in the air and a place where every step you take is met with explosions of paint. At the end of the commercial he begins whistling which signals elements and feathers to wisp around to create the Apple logo. It was great. Just as great as I had remembered. The book described a few iTunes ads I couldn’t recall from artists U2 and Bob Dylan. As I read about them I would return to the YouTube app and watch them. Knowing the story behind something offers an enriching context that makes appreciation both more likely and more lasting.

After I was done watching these YouTube videos, I double tapped the home button on my iPhone and returned to the iBooks app where I’ve been reading the biography. The next section briefly discusses John Mayer’s Gravity. I switched over to my iPod app and saw I didn’t have it, so I then opened up iTunes on my iPhone and began downloading it. Within a few minutes I was listening to something that connected me to the biography and Steve Jobs in a way that was deeper than mere words. We were sharing an experience, in a way.

Two things struck me about this. One, music is a connector of souls. Music is often the instigator and the perpetuator of movements, and connects people to times, events, and other people. It’s powerful. Music is how religious meetings begin and end. Music is often the invocation of political gatherings inside and the riots outside. Music is the anthem for many of the things we do and the places we find ourselves. Two, technology is empowering media to become much more integrated. If I were reading the biography in a traditional book, I would not have the same type of  experience as I had reading it on my iPhone, which has a resolution comparable to the printed page.

I plan on reading more books on my iPhone (this biography was my second) and experiencing a holistic story with each one. 

The Summer of 2010

Life got really strange after UpLoot. It was around this time that Kimball Thomas and Davis Smith moved from their respective east coast cities to Silicon Valley to ignite their next venture. Coming off of UpLoot was sobering. The titans I had read about in TechCrunch and other places were different from me. I would read stories about these people who would do crazy stuff to get their business off the ground and it was beginning to settle in me that maybe I wasn’t like them. Maybe I was missing the germ. The germ that throws off your risk profile enough to where crazy risk is palatable. 

I wanted to know what it was that I lacked and how I could overcome it. During the first few weeks of the summer Davis Smith was doing an internship at a small fledging VC firm in Mexico while Kimball was getting going in Silicon Valley. With Davis out of the country, I became Kimball’s sounding board. It felt good to be in that position again. After UpLoot, I wondered if I would be able to get that fix.

There were a few ideas that were being worked on, but the one that caught our eye the most was a service which would allow customers to text local businesses. It was a huge problem with a huge need for a great product. I even went out to Palo Alto for the fourth of July weekend so we could meet face to face to solve some of the product’s problems. It was fun and fulfilling to be involved, but it never felt like mine the way UpLoot did. There was a clear divide.

After we had a design together and had figured out how the backend was going to work given an impossibly small budget (stay lean, right!) Kimball went door to door and sold the idea to a bunch of hair salons. I think we were both really reticent on how this whole thing was going. It was a huge problem and we were basically testing the validity of this HUGE idea with $500. It never felt like it was going to work. In the mean time, Davis was working on a parallel track with an idea to sell baby products in Brazil. After the first few weeks with the texting idea, all resources were moved to the baby ecommerce idea. I was involved in some things and wasn’t in other things. Anytime help was needed I offered. I actually called and told Kimball that I believed in the idea and wanted to join the team (I’ve posted on this before), but nothing came of it.

PoolTables.com in Flux

It was around this time that some crazy things began happening with PoolTables.com, formerly BilliardEx. There was a possible acquisition in the works. It was crazy exciting, but also a little unnerving. This was also around the time when I got my first job offer at a previously established company.

There would end up being two in around a months time. It was validating and confusing all wrapped in to one. I felt like an entrepreneur inside. I felt the drive to be disruptive and make great products for people to use. But the money I was being offered was significantly better and some of the projects I would be involved in weren’t entirely uninteresting. It really came down to what I wanted my life to become. I looked at these positions and saw where they would lead. I talked with people that worked at these places and saw where their lives led. I read a lot of TechCrunch. I spoke with both Kimball and Davis about it as well. With PoolTables.com in flux and a possible acquisition at the door, I was nervous about sticking around.

Great Teams Build Great People

I read an article by Chris Dixon (I currently can’t find it, or I’d link to it) about the three most important things at a startup. The top one was team. Part of the article had to do with who you surround yourself with and how that rubs off. I decided that the way my life would have the best outcome would be if I surrounded myself with the very best people. I looked at the two companies who had offered me positions and I looked at who worked there. It’s not that they were bad people. They weren’t. They were great people. But were they the kind of people that could help be develop in to what I wanted to become? The answer was no.

That was really the moment (or one of a few moments combined) where I knew where I wanted my life to head. I wanted to change the world. I still do. World changing ideas come from startups and top teams cracking the big problems. This is what I wanted in my life. I stayed at PoolTables.com to stay with the team. It wasn’t 6 months later that I was brought on as co-founder of Baby.com.br and as the UX designer and marketer.

I still have the itch inside me to build something on my own. Not sure what will pacify it. But I can’t keep my mind from wandering even now… where will I be next?