9oliYQjP's comments

You can turn a company around in a year. I hate to be that guy who points out Steve Jobs did it. But conceptually it isn't rocket science.

First thing you need to so is deal with cash flow. Can the company sustain itself so you have, in fact, a year to improve things? Now is the time to make hard decisions and cut efforts that make no sense at a strategic level. A weak CEO will wait 6-12 months before making such a decision. That just gives you time to bond to people that the company can ill afford to have on payroll. It takes two weeks to have the top lieutenants justify their existence and for you as CEO to decide whether the effort aligns with the best business model for company survival. Make the hard cuts when you have no ties yet. Apologize, explain it isn't personal and you may even be wrong. Make these the first and last cuts. Tell the remaining employees there will be no more layoffs for a year and that you have seen to it that there is cash on hand to recover and thrive. It is time to move on.

The second thing needed is to assess the talent landscape of those who remain and honestly provide an opportunity for all capable employees to prove themselves. The cream will rise to the top. Those that can reinvigorate the company will volunteer themselves. Now is the time to randomly choose to sit at a lunch table in the company cafeteria and make small talk with employees you don't know.

The third thing needed is to create a strategy that has a solid chance of being successfully executed by a select group of these volunteer go-getters. Steve identified Ives as one of these people and came up with the iMac strategy which could best utilize Ives' talent.

Sir Richard Branson is another exec who has had to employ this kind of strategy except while already running a company. He talks about the pain of having to give up Virgin Records to keep the rest of Virgin alive and then doubling down on a few verticals that he felt could reinvigorate the company. He might yet have another iteration of this with Virgin Atlantic. We will see.

I've always wondered if the down-vote should actually just be an arrow pointing sideways. People use the down-vote like it's a thumbs down. If they don't agree with an opinion, then it's a thumbs down. But really the cancerous comments are ones that, in an offline conversation, a group would quickly and politely move past and ignore. The sideways arrow would represent brushing these comments aside.

Besides, you're supposed to up-vote comments you don't necessarily agree with so long as they are well argued. That is what a good debate is about.

I wish more entrepreneurs would be honest about how they're actually doing with other entrepreneurs, so that they could reveal options that haven't been thought of. Forget amongst fellow entrepreneurs though. Even within business partnerships honesty is hard to come by, lest one partner be accused of being a cynic and not having the faith. Still, I think every entrepreneur should have his or her own personal set of trusted advisors just for discussing topics like this.

To riff on this, it's what Steve would want somebody who truly admired him and was motivated by his life to do. In fact, he'd probably berate anybody trying to live in the past.

"If you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should go do something else wonderful, not dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what's next." - Steve Jobs

Changes to Facebook are like fluctuations in gas prices though. People grumble and complain, then just go ahead and don't change their habit.

I'm pretty conspiracy-theorish on the whole Facebook thing. A part of me wants to believe Mark managed to hack the entire system. He got the maximum amount of money out of the IPO to build up a huge cash reserve for his company. He made his big acquisition before the IPO; future acquisitions may be harder now that the share price is what it is. But he has also sent a shock wave through the entire eco-system. If things cool off a bit, he'll be able to find more talent to work at Facebook at more reasonable prices. He won't have current employees looking to run off and start a bubbly startup. It just seems like a brilliant hack :) I'm probably reading far too much into the whole situation.

During this cooling off period, Facebook can disregard their short term share price and experiment wildly until they figure out something that works. There's not an investor alive who thinks there's anybody more capable than Mark Zuckerberg for Facebook CEO. Nobody will oust him in the short- to medium-term.

Facebook is a very much in the same position that Amazon.com was in around 2001. They have the means to figure this out. Other startups trying to follow suit don't have this luxury any more. But Facebook sure does.

EDIT: For context, this was a contrarian opinion of Amazon.com in 2001 http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2001/...

It's very possible that the Facebook IPO came early enough in this bubble to actually prevent a huge disaster. I did not like where things were headed with most startups in the past couple of years. The Facebook IPO was like a fire extinguisher that happened to contain a small fire before it got way too out-of-control.

If your startup has no business model, you better think of one fast. If your startup has no revenue or a lack of it, you better start generating a lot more really soon. If your startup has a solid business model and is cash-flow positive, it's time to start leap-frogging the competition and adjusting the course. This is the time when good companies become great ones.

How experienced are these developers at Google?

I use node but I kind of felt that this sort of scenario should be pretty obvious before you use it. I never use node to serve up static files, I use nginx instead. Small static files will be cached by the OS, as you said, which makes subsequent reads really quick. Since this is a small text file, it compresses really well over the wire too, so the time to serve up the request is lowered too. There's simply not much I/O to be a bottleneck in this benchmark scenario.

I wouldn't say that this is an unfair benchmark. But then I don't use node because it's "web scale". I use it because using javascript on the server, client, and on the wire (JSON) is pretty damn slick.

I'm interested in checkout out vert.x. But, this goes to everyone,let's not let this whole affair degenerate. Right tool for the right job. This particular benchmark scenario is explicitly the wrong way to use node. I'd suspect that if you were to change the readFile into an HTTP request however, the numbers might change. I also wouldn't be butt-hurt if vert.x still came out on top. There are still a ton of things to love about node.

Let's get on with our actual work now, shall we?

Is it possible that his JVM is setup to execute with different ulimit settings than Node? The Node numbers look too suspiciously close to multiples of 1024 (e.g., default file descriptor limit).

EDIT: whoops, saw 4096 for the stream but it's 4896.

I'd love to see the source code to that site at the point it was handed off to Zuck. If this was really near finished, or at least significantly far along, it would be extremely illuminating.

Here's the thing though. How could the Winklevoss twins get strung along for 4 months? Not that this has any relevance to the ethics of the matter. But their contribution to developing this idea was simply money. They needed technical people to build on that idea. Outside of this one idea they funded, they haven't done anything significant or relevant in business since. And now they're just spending money that they got from the settlement.

I'd much rather take a $5 Starbucks coffee and a conversation with Paul Graham over $1M in funding from the Winklevoss twins. I just don't see what value they bring to the table. Money can be found all over the place.

This was a fantastic read and I'm glad I took the time to read through it. I just wanted to say thanks for posting it. If I wanted to learn more about PostGIS, do any particular resources stand out?

Running your setup and I've seen this problem only with VMWare Fusion running. But they have KB article (http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?langua...) which discusses what they're doing. VMWare Fusion won't let go of memory allocated to a suspended VM, only to a VM which has been fully shut down. The rationale is that the user might unsuspend the VM so it's a performance tweak. But I never use my VMs this way, so I've resorted to shutting down my VMs and everything is back to being snappy.

You sir are a gentleman and scholar. As a laptop user with only 8 GB of RAM and a slow non-SSD hard disk, this one trick just made my day! Thanks.

These glasses are ugly and unfashionable. But so are bluetooth headsets. I wonder if they'll follow a similar trend curve of rapidly gaining adoption while they seem techy-cool, but quickly turn to douchebag-turnoff accessories as they peak and trail off in adoption.

I don't think that his remarks about Rails and Django should antagonize you. What motivated me to explore node.js is precisely the fact that I started to spend more and more of my time outside of Rails trying to push the envelope. Things like Cappucino from 280north showed that more and more of a web app was happening on the client and the server was being relegated to a fancy HTTP wrapper for a database.

His remarks about what node.js does well could be applied to just about any thin HTTP wrapper for Ruby, python and any other language. Rails and Django are still very productive if you're making dynamic websites. For web apps however, simply from a latency perspective it makes sense to push more stuff down to the client. At that level, you're looking at JavaScript frameworks of some sort being a far superior solution to the kind of thing that happens in Rails like this...

http://railsforum.com/viewtopic.php?id=47404

That's not to say Rails or Django suck, but web apps have been pushed to the next level. Rails was developed back when web apps meant more of a dumb terminal style system, with the server driving the display of the clients. Today web apps are more like 1990s style networked PCs where a fat client communicates with a server but the UX is driven client side.

There is no reason you can't write ruby or even Rails code that does this. But you'll have a ton of JavaScript (or Coffeescript or fill in the blank with something that compiles down to JS). Most frameworks treat this stuff as secondary to writing server side views and controllers, because it used to be, back when AJAX just meant dynamically update my drop down list.

EDIT: I forgot to add that Express makes the mistake of trying to apply Rails/Django/Sinatra style to node.js. Don't use node.js this way, it won't work well as just using the aforementioned frameworks.

Just curious, how does internal recruiting usually work?

Nobel peace prizes are not normally awarded to philanthropists. But I'm just going to leave this link here. It's a photo of Bill Gates with Prime Minister Stephen Harper announcing funding for HIV vaccine research in 2007.

http://pm.gc.ca/grfx/news/PM-feature-20070220-Gates.jpg

Source: http://pm.gc.ca/eng/media.asp?id=1544

Ballmer can play as much musical chairs as he wants. The problem is him. Despite a massive Microsoft talent drain, there are still smart, capable people at Microsoft. What Microsoft lacks is a cohesive vision about where they are headed. Bill Gates' vision was a PC running Windows on every desktop. Everything Microsoft did had to be reconciled against this.

What is Ballmer's vision? That's his responsibility as CEO. In fact, it's pretty much his most critical one. At this point, he's too high level to do much else. All I see from him is somebody that installs a really smart person in some new vertical that Microsoft all of a sudden deems super important only to let this person take the flack for things not going properly a couple of years after they start.

I absolutely agree. I'm looking forward to a lot more accounts like this one. I admire Jobs, but I admire him because he knew when to get involved and when to leave smart people alone.

His ability to make decisions and ensure things got done is admirable. I've been involved with far too many business folks who you have to hand-hold through every step of a project only to have them be spineless and scared of making decisions. This account validates my assumption that a significant reason that Jobs was effective was because he could commit to a strategy. Far too many companies can't because their strategy is being dictated to by short term stock pricing.

Business folks have over-simplified Jobs' contribution to the Think Different campaign by making it seem he single-handedly was responsible for it. A handful of people on Lee Clow's team were primarily responsible for the creation of the ad. Jobs originally hated the concept and within a few minutes decided it was the right one to choose. Then he changed his mind again after seeing the script for the ad. This original script -- strictly in my opinion -- sounded bland. It is given in the article. I can see where his "it's shit" comment came from. The agency investigated some other options while the author of the original script got fed up and moved onto other companies campaigns. Jobs then re-visited the original script along with Lee Clow. Jobs was able to use his influence to make this version better by getting Clow to lure more talented writers to tweak the script, voice actors to read it, and nicer pictures/scenes for the imagery in the ad.