Tom Hulme - Design For Emergence →
Tom outlines his four trends he sees in startups and how to design for emergence.
Wired:
Peter Thiel, expressing his dissatisfaction with technology’s progress, recently noted, ‘We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.’ Do you agree with him?
Bill Gates:
I feel sorry for Peter Thiel. Did he really want flying cars? Flying cars are not a very efficient way to move things from one point to another. On the other hand, 20 years ago we had the idea that information could become available at your fingertips. We got that done. Now everyone takes it for granted that you can look up movie reviews, track locations, and order stuff online. I wish there was a way we could take it away from people for a day so they could remember what it was like without it.
—
Bill Gates in a recent Wired interview with Steven Levy
[via Gary Tan]
(via whitneymcn)
Whether she’s at a festival, the front row at Fashion Week or on the red carpet, style crush Jameela Jamil always looks effortlessly chic. Show us your Jameela inspired outfits in our latest style challenge > http://bit.ly/XYDA4c
Company with the “World’s Least Powerful CEO” Makes $2.5 Million Every Day
The popular depiction of the CEO is the titan of industry who rules with an iron fist. The CEO’s will is the employees’ command.
Not so at Supercell, a remarkable Finnish company that’s making $2.5 million dollars every day and has been described as “the fastest growing company ever.” Supercell CEO Ilkka Paananen, calls himself “the world’s least powerful CEO”, and that’s not the surprising part. What’s incredible is that Paananen made himself a weak CEO by design:
As its name implies, Supercell is organized as a collection of small, independent teams called cells tasked with developing new games or building new deep features for existing games. Cells are given complete autonomy in terms of how they organize themselves, prioritize ideas, distribute work and determine what they ultimately produce. Describing himself as the “world’s least powerful CEO”, Ilkka encourages cells to exercise extreme independence and prides himself on having no creative control over them once they are constituted. The company as a whole is merely an aggregation of these cells; a Supercell.
The only thing to say is that it’s working. Their organization and philosophy is letting this team of 100 take on the behemoths at Zynga, which has 30 employees to every 1 employee at Supercell.
The organizational and cultural design decision was purposeful: Supercell’s founders had witnessed first-hand “the downfall of too many companies that had turned into bloated, bureaucratic behemoths with many design studios in multiple time zones requiring massive management overhead and crushing hierarchies to coordinate.”
If it’s hard to fathom how an economic miracle could result under the leadership of a weak boss, consider another organization that designed its CEO to be powerless: the United States. The founders of America purposely set up the government to have a weak CEO, compared with Europe’s monarchs.
Having experienced misguided local tax policy decreed by a head of state thousands of miles away, the founders pushed decision-making authority out to a federated constellation of state governments, local governments, small groups of people, and individuals. That structure set the stage for the American economic miracle.
https://cobook.co/ is rocking our world. Do you have it installed yet? Mac and iPhone now, there is a signup for Android.
Sean Ammirati: What I mean by "pattern" ... →
Alex Payne wrote a post about a year ago where he critiqued VC’s use of the term pattern matching:
There is a term that venture capitalists use: pattern matching. My ears perked up the first time I heard this from a VC, because in the world of computer science, pattern matching is a …
Ville Miettinen - How To Run A Startup Company While Being On The Road
You will be hard pressed to find someone that loves startups as much as travel as the following speaker at our HackFwd Build event. Ville Miettinen runs Microtask and shares just how to travel and run a startup concurrently. You can follow him on Twitter here.
Ville Miettinen - How To Run A Startup Company While Being On The Road from HackFwd on Vimeo.
Update: Cobook Livecards, now on the web
We are really excited to launch our first web version of Cobook Livecards, the digital business cards that automatically keeps your contacts complete and up-to-date. You can sign up today via cobook.co.
The web app is complementary to Cobook for iPhone and lets you update your contact info as well as view and download info of your connections.
Currently Livecards requires a Facebook account but alternative email sign up is coming soon.
Want to Learn to Code? Start Small & Have Fun.
I liked a lot of things about Zack Shapiro’s post Want to learn to code? Start here. I actually remember reading his original post dedicated to Ruby on Rails last year, and thought it was a great starting point for the framework.
Zack’s obviously a smart dude, but there’s a certain hostility in his newest post and others like it towards those who “don’t want it enough” and I cringe every time I see it. Coding isn’t a secret club that requires a pledge of undying loyalty to join; it can be enjoyed on all parts of the spectrum. So advice like, “Nights, Weekends are bad” is incredibly damaging to the cause. If someone works days, then what? They just shouldn’t bother? Quit their job? Worst-case scenario they never try, and best-case they think they’re screwed from the get-go and have an easy excuse to quit. “Well, I could only code at night… so obviously it didn’t work out.” A more helpful way to phrase it would be, “The more you can give yourself to learning the better” which is both true and doesn’t alienate the rather large group of “people who do things during the day.”
Cobook Blog: Launch: Cobook Livecards, the easiest way to keep your contacts up-to-date →
Today we are proud to announce Cobook 2.0 with Livecards, the simplest way to keep your iPhone address book complete and up-to-date.
Livecards allows you to share your contact info with friends and colleagues and get their info in exchange.
How it works
Tell us who you are. Currently…
