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This past weekend I was happy to have watched I Am – one of the most compelling documentary films I’ve seen recently. Watch the trailer for a brief intro:

Tom Shadyac, producer of Bruce Almighty and Ace Ventura, sets out around the world to interview some of the leading thinkers on two questions: What’s wrong with our world? What can we do about it?

Shadyac ignores the typical responses such as hunger, greed, and global warming. Instead, he digs deeper with the belief that every single person can effect positive change by changing the lens through which they see the world. The most visceral story described by Shadyac is his description of moving into his new mansion in the Beverly Hills. During the first moment when he walked in the door, he did not feel one bit happier. And yet this is what society had been telling him all his life: “If you make a lot of money, you can buy these luxurious items to make you happier.”

The lesson is that money and materialistic possessions do not always lead to happiness. Shadyac goes on to discover that the strongest human characteristic is our ability to work together through cooperation and sympathy. This is of course contrary to the competitive and survival of the fittest theory that is misunderstood in Charles Darwin’s book On The Origin of Species.

My take from the movie is that modern culture is like cancerous bacteria… humans are becoming a self-destructive species because we take far more than we need. We cultivate distinction from each other, and we encourage cut throat competitiveness. I’ll save the rest of the spoilers… but this certainly hits a chord that I’ve been thinking about lately.

Phil Libin, CEO of Evernote, was asked give advice to aspiring entrepreneurs. He responded by saying “Don’t do it.”. Read this article to explore his rationale. I am in complete agreement. Money, power, and boredom are especially dangerous.

The culture in Silicon Valley is rich with high hopes for money and power. This is the exact type of cancerous thinking that is a detriment to both humanity and the chance that your startup will succeed. The second type of cancerous behavior to watch out for is the Latte Factor. People who can not sacrifice the little expenses for the sake of saving towards a larger goal are dangerous for your startup. Instant gratification items add up when consumed in excess!

The expectation that you can build a startup and make lots of money without hitting a few bumps is the road is unrealistic. Motivations based on money and power will make it easy to give up when your startup seems doomed.

You have to want to wake up in the morning and love what you are doing because at the end of the day, you can’t throw money or talented people at any challenging problem. And each person you surround yourself with needs to be passionate about the problem you’re solving. Great results are achieved when you pour passion into any problem. Passion prevails.

Perhaps the most noticeable difference in lifestyle after setting out to do a startup is your sleep schedule. While this certainly varies from person to person, it’s not uncommon for founders to endure the hacker life. Coding sprints and endless desire to do “one more thing” tend to push your working hours farther and farther into the night. Before you know it you become nocturnal.

The founders of Stripe first dropped out of Harvard to start their payments company, and can you guess their first stop? Silicon Valley? Nope. They moved to Buenos Aires. The cafe’s in Buenos Aires are world-famous for opening up around 1pm and closing around 5am. In essence, this is the best fit for the hacker life… Nightly hacking and breakfast after noon.

I’ve noticed a similar pattern in my working schedule. The work at night is of course supplemented by various caffeinated beverages and an endless supply of salty snacks or pizza. I like to joke that I’ll be going to the gym at the end of my work day, and this just happens to be when the gym opens at 5am. This is the hacker life.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the properties of excellent user experiences that transcend industries and market changes. I think speed is one of the requirements for a positive user experience. In other words, modern software applications need to have speed in order to retain users. Speed is a requirement because users expect to quickly get what they want.

The absence of speed is slowness, and the pains of slow software have become intolerable. I cringe when it takes minute(s) for iTunes to burn a CD. If modern computing equipment gives us all of processing power we need to run applications quickly, your application no longer has an excuse to be slow. Speed is a requirement.

Let’s put speed into perspective: Time is the greatest equalizer. We all have the same amount of time and we all want to do more things with less time. So, if you sell me a service that prevents me from wasting time doing something else, then you already have a compelling value proposition.

Greplin allows me to quickly search all of my accounts online. Amazon allows me to buy and download a whole book in one-click. Stripe allows you to install payments on your site quickly. Uber picks you up faster than any cab company. CrowdTilt let’s me quickly collect money from my friends. Mixpanel lets me track events in real-time. Spotify let’s me play any music without having to download the track. FedEx guarantees my shipments will be delivered overnight.

We are buying access to speed. For example, Amazon doesn’t win my business because they have the greatest selection. Amazon wins my business because they give me free two-day shipping on all of the products I order.

Even Paul Graham, founder of Y Combinator, recently chimed in on this subject:

If you made something no better than GMail, but fast, that alone would let you start to pull users away from GMail.

GMail is slow because Google can’t afford to spend a lot on it. But people will pay for this. I’d have no problem paying $50 a month. Considering how much time I spend in email, it’s kind of scary to think how much I’d be justified in paying. At least $1000 a month. If I spend several hours a day reading and writing email, that would be a cheap way to make my life better.

I recall my high school crew coach repeatedly saying “Speed kills. Seek speed.”. We were in a constant race against the clock and higher speed was the mechanism for reducing our time. All of the coaching, race plans, technique adjustments, and rigging configurations were optimized to produce the greatest speed. As you might be able to tell, higher speed was not always a direct result of higher power. All of the rowers in the boat need to sync with the rhythm of the boat in order to achieve the highest speed. Competing on brute power and strength is not a strategy for success.

I believe the analogy can be applied to software applications (and businesses in general). There’re many moving parts in any particular software application and they all need to be configured correctly to reach the highest possible speed. From a high level we all have fairly similar processing power and internet connection rates. The difference lies within the software developers that make a user experience optimized for speed.

Speed is a requirement. Always seek speed.

The fastest growing companies in the next 2-3 years will enable collaboration and shared experiences that leverage the “network effect”.

Companies such as Airbnb, Pinterest, Dropbox, Facebook, and Path are changing the way we consume things both online and offline. Recent startups like Turntable.fm, Crowdtilt and many more are out to shape their own collaborative and shared experience. The old adage “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” proves true. The Internet is enabling enormous non-linear systems which become most valuable when we can make use of the connections, incentives, and constraints in each network.

Making use of the connected networks requires filtering through the sea of data in order to surface what is most relevant and reliable. For example: Airbnb shows their curated collections. Pinterest shows you pins in your social network. Facebook shows you a personalized news feed. And the best DJ’s spin all day on Turntable. We find these services addicting because they do all of the filtering for us, and we value their work tremendously.

If you’re building your startup, think about how your startup can be more useful because other people are using the service.

16hours is a new photo magazine created by two photographers who are curating each issue using a combination of images submitted by photographers and their own favorites on Flickr. Checkout their coolest idea yet… an issue dedicated to instagram photos made by iPhone users like you.

It’s a universal belief most people just want to be happy in their lives. Yet the research shows we’re really bad at predicting the things that actually make us happy. (How’s that for Irony-with-a-capital-I?) – Tony Hsieh

Pursuing happiness is often a tricky battle that everyone struggles with throughout their life. It usually follows the following sequence of statements:

When I get ____, I will be happy, or when I achieve ____, I will be happy.

Many people spend their entire lives pursuing a goal that fits into the quote above. Unfortunately studies on happiness levels before and after these milestones are mostly similar and do not lead to sustained happiness. Lottery winners are the canonical example of people who are surveyed one year after winning and find themselves at the same or worse happiness level compared to when they had no great fortune. Our gut instincts often do not reveal the the things in our life that will truly make us feel happy for life. Tony Hsieh has done quite a bit of reading on the science of happiness, and hopefully his summary will help you rethink your goals.

Page 233:

Happiness is really just about four things: perceived control, perceived progress, connectedness (number and depth of your relationships), and vision/meaning (being part of something bigger than yourself). This framework can be applied to business as well.

My summary of advice from Page 234:

Perceived Control

Do you have the opportunity and decision making power to grow your skills?

Perceived Progress

Have you setup short-term goals with measurable results?

Connectedness

Psychologists believe happiness does not come from within, but from between each other.

Vision/Meaning

Finding a higher purpose is the longest form of happiness. This has to be something beyond money or profits.

Have you ever waited on the phone for a customer service representative? Have you waited in a lengthy line to speak with a ticketing agent? Have you raised your hand in class hoping to share a clever thought and ended up being ignored? These are examples of controllable flow. Have you ever read an email and waited for days before responding because you didn’t have enough spare time? Have you felt compelled to respond to a text-message right away, even though you might be preoccupied with an important activity? The root of overload in communication (specifically email) is uncontrollable flow.

In-person communication is generally focused towards one-to-one interaction, or one-to-few. Thus, social cues keep us from being overwhelmed when communicating in person. Digital communication can be a variety of setups, including many-to-one which often makes my inbox a chaotic mess.

You can stand in a room full of strangers eager to have a conversation with you, but unwritten social rules prevent a crowd of people from swarming you with questions all at the same time. This is because there’s a natural flow to social gatherings. You simply can’t have a personal conversation with many people at the same time. Some people will have to wait to get your attention. Or when you’re calling someone on the phone, you can only listen to one person speak at a time. Anyone else that tries to call you will get a busy signal.

The problem with email and SMS messaging is a lack of flow control. An infinite number of people and requests for my attention can flow into my inbox at any given time. There aren’t (yet) any acceptable social cues to control the flow of emails. Email overload is a social problem.

I’m currently thinking of ideas to automatically sort the most common items that flow into your inbox. If you’ve attempted to implement flow-control measures on your email, I’d be interested to hear what did or did not work.

There’s usually nothing easy about moving 2,500 miles away from home where the people and culture are unfamiliar. Fortunately for me, on the New Years day I moved from New Jersey to familiar territory in California with two friends to pursue a startup dream. The technology-centric culture is fantastic, the people we’re working with are results oriented, and the weather is beautiful.

I’ve been surprised by many things that I had taken for granted up until this point, such as paying an electric bill and cooking my own food. I suppose most young people (including myself) forget to consider the miscellaneous costs of living that add up to a large sum just to get settled. Even mundane tasks such as buying groceries require serious thought when planning out the upcoming weeks. We don’t currently have a car but we’ve found Silicon Valley to be an especially bike-friendly place to live. There’re bike lanes on nearly all major roads and many trails or residential roads to bike safely. I’ve been biking 3-5 miles per day on average.

On the work front, it’s now easy to understand the hacker lifestyle. There’s a lot of thought, debate, and careful deliberate decisions on what course of action to take… Many hours of careful consideration are required because each decision we make at this early stage can drastically effect the success of our user experience. I’ve also found that I’m reading a lot more, including real books. A lot of the challenges I’ll encounter are troubleshooting situations where the best solution is to figure it out I go. Flexibility and open-mindedness are key towards making solid progress.

Services that have been particularly helpful to me during this time:

• FedEX – I sent a package from Wake Forest and they put it on hold for no additional cost during the Christmas week.
• Southwest Airlines – 2 bags fly free! Excellent for moving my entire wardrobe.
• Safeway  – $3 grocery delivery any day of the week.
• Ikea – Affordable and reliable furniture.
• Staples – Free shipping on any office furniture.
• Amazon Prime – Free 2-day shipping on any “prime eligible” products. — This has been huge.

I’m currently reading Delivering Happiness and the author Tony Hsieh included a list of principles he learned during his brief stint as a competitive poker player. I believe the principles apply to nearly all pursuits outside of poker or business and I’d like to publish them here for everyone to read:

Evaluating Market Opportunities

• Table selection is the most important decision you can make.
• It’s okay to switch tables if you discover it’s too hard to win at your table.
• If there are too many competitors (some irrational or inexperienced), even if you’re the best it’s a lot harder to win.

 

Marketing and Branding

• Act weak when strong, act strong when weak. Know when to bluff.
• Your “brand” is important.
• Help shape the stories that people are telling about you.

 

Financials

• Always be prepared for the worst possible scenario.
• The guy who wins the most hands is not the guy who makes the most money in the long run.
• The guy who never loses a hand is not the guy who makes the most money in the long run.
• Go for positive expected value, not what’s least risky.
• Make sure your bankroll is large enough for the game you’re playing and the risks you’re taking.
• Play only with what you can afford to lose.
• Remember that it’s a long-term game. You will win or lose individual hands or sessions, but it’s what happens in the long term that matters.

 

Strategy

• Don’t play games that you don’t understand, even if you see lots of other people making money from them.
• Figure out the game when the stakes aren’t high.
• Don’t cheat. Cheaters never win in the long run.
• Stick to your principles.
• You need to adjust your style of play throughout the night as the dynamics of the game change. Be flexible.
• Be patient and think long-term.
• The players with the most stamina and focus usually win.
• Differentiate yourself. Do the opposite of what the rest of the table is doing.
• Hope is not a good plan.
• Don’t let yourself go “on tilt.” It’s much more cost-effective to take a break, walk around, or leave the game for the night.

 

Continual Learning

• Educate yourself. Read books and learn from others who have done it before.
• Learn by doing. Theory is nice, but nothing replaces actual experience.
• Learn by surrounding yourself with talented players.
• Just because you win a hand doesn’t mean you’re good and you don’t have more learning to do. You might have just gotten lucky.
• Don’t be afraid to ask for advice.

 

Culture

• You’ve gotta love the game. To become really good, you need to live it and sleep it.
• Don’t be cocky. Don’t be flashy. There’s always someone better than you.
• Be nice and make friends. It’s a small community.
• Share what you’ve learned with others.
• Look for opportunities beyond just the game you sat down to play. You never know who you’re going to meet, including new friends for life or new business contacts.
• Have fun. The game is a lot more enjoyable when you’re trying to do more than just make money.

Credit: Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos. Additional reading.

I’m sitting at the gate in the Greensboro airport for the fourth time in the last month. For the first time I’m flying home to New Jersey, and for the first time I’m not coming back. Let me explain my story:

College

My thoughts on college are a mix of emotions. I think the college experience is fantastic. I lived in a suite with a Korean game designer from Baltimore, a politics enthusiast from Iowa, and an ROTC cadet from North Carolina. I worked on a project researching electric grid problems in Zimbabwe… with a student who grew up in Zimbabwe. Some of the people I studied and socialized with on a daily basis hit close to home in New Jersey, and my future plans in California. I can’t imagine a better selection of good people just trying to enjoy themselves while they work hard to figure out their future.

Why Wake Forest?

To me, Wake Forest offers a distinct experience that can not be found anywhere else. Andy Chan, VP of Career Development, says it best in his blog post about his decision to transition from Stanford to Wake Forest:

“The visionary leaders at Wake Forest are committed to creating the premier collegiate university – a higher education institution that offers the best of a personal, intimate liberal arts college with the best of an innovative, prolific research university. One key area is a focus on the career development and character formation of each student.”

Moreover, the the type of education each student receives here is holistic, including both the humanities and the sciences. Steve Jobs, perhaps the most prolific innovator in the past generation, is most well known for his creative application of technology in the intersection between humanities and sciences. Even Mark Zuckerberg thrived on this principle as a philosophy/computer science double major at Harvard. Solving 21st century problems requires people who can function in the cross between art and science.

Wake Forest takes technology seriously. Beginning in 1996, Wake Forest issues laptops to all students in an effort to integrate educational technology in the lives of faculty and students. This strong foundation of technology on campus has held strong as proven by the recent introduction of Google+, and Cisco WebEx for all faculty and students. The real benefit of the technology introduced here on campus is an education environment where there are no boundaries for access to people and information.

So, what about the business school? For those concerned rankings, they would probably advise me to seek an undergraduate business education at UPenn’s Wharton School of Business. Take a look at the rankings for yourself, and you’ll see that Wake Forest is #1 in Academic Quality; ahead of UPenn and the rest. Well, if you go to college for the academics, Wake Forest is the place to be for those seeking the highest caliber undergrad business education.

To the surprise of many, Wake Forest is the only school that accepted me. This is largely due to their leading effort in re-thinking the admissions process. Wake Forest remains the only top-25 national university to make interviews highly suggested and standardized tests optional. Achievements in grades and activities that take years to accomplish are often a better indicator of determination and success than excellent performance on a four hour test.

To give you a specific example of Wake Forest’s benefit to me in just one semester: In October I applied for and received a seed grant for my startup. The grant was made possible through a special fund in their Center for Innovation, Creativity and Entrepreneurship. Myself and a handful of other Wake entrepreneurs now have the funds necessary to execute on our ideas starting now. Not a single Ivy League college makes this type of financial resource available to students in the fall semester. And what about the rest of the student body; what are they interested in studying? The most popular minor on campus is entrepreneurship.

Why leave college?

I’m fortunate to have an opportunity, a Thiel Fellowship, that allows me to continue my education outside of a formal school setting. Yes, that’s right, just because I’m leaving school doesn’t mean my education stops. Call it the Peter Thiel school of thought, or whatever you please. It’s a once in a lifetime opportunity, and I begin my fellowship by working on a web startup, Ingenic. I’m co-founding Ingenic with a team of three college dropouts, and we believe this is the right time to be working on the problem we’re solving.

In the world of technology there is a limited window of opportunity for certain ideas and innovations. The opportunity I’m pursuing might not be as favorable in four years. For example, if the Facebook team waited until they graduated from Harvard to grow Facebook, their success may have been jeopardized. With the Thiel Fellowship, I don’t have to wait four years to obtain a piece of paper that says I’m qualified to pursue my passion.

My thoughts on leaving college extend beyond my personal circumstances and lead to an overarching dilemma: the education bubble. From my experience it’s common for many people to not really have any certainty on what they’d like to do after college. To cut to the chase, college is a place for most 18-22 year-old students to postpone thinking about the future. All to often the result is a college graduate who has not seriously considered the economic potential of their major. To me, this is a scary thought. I think about the future every day. I think the majority of college students neglect this type of thinking because they are occupied with their work from week to week and not thinking beyond the next test. Perhaps this is even why fear of failure and lack of security is so high among college students.

Students graduating with student loans in 2010 owed an average of $25,000. It could take many years for a new entrant in the workforce to pay off these loans, especially if they have difficulty finding a job. Now for the entrepreneur who is burdened by long-term student loan payments, it’s likely the on-going loans will prevent him from taking a financial risk in his life such as starting a new business. By the time the loans are paid off, it’s even more likely that they will be settled into the a stable career. When our best and brightest people are unable to take the risk of starting a company and devote their full attention to a technological breakthrough, that’s a major problem.

Many people have more than enough money to easily afford the degree of their choice, and they value the social aspect of meeting life long friends. But for the so called “99%” who don’t have tuition fully paid for by their parents, they need to seriously reconsider the dogma burned into students’ brains since their elementary-school days: If you want to make something of your life, go to college. And if you really want to make something of your life, gain admission to an Ivy League school.  There are many examples of top tier schools offering a comparable education and a more financially rewarding opportunity.

College is not a one size fits all prescription. To be fair, maybe most undergrads shouldn’t know exactly what they want to do with their lives, but by graduation day they should have certainly started to make a decision. And there’s nothing wrong with taking those years to figure out what you want to do, but you should be there because its best for you and not just a plan for someone else.

The Game

I hadn’t been able to concisely describe the sequence of events in my life until I learned about “The Game” with an unofficial group at Wake Forest: the masterminds alliance. Things in life can be separated into two groups: things you can control, and things you cannot control. Your hometown, your family, taxes, and a few other things are beyond your control. Everything else that happens in your life is in your control with varying degrees of certainty. You control your group of friends, what you wear, what you eat, where you go to college, your career path, and even how long you live.

Aside from the few things you cannot control, you get what you want. The degree of certainty for getting what you want is determined by how well you communicate. So, how do you get what you want? Getting things that you want is a result of your ability to communicate in three ways: written, verbal, and body language.

Even mundane things such as a post-script note, tone of voice, and making eye contact during an interview have significant importance towards demonstrating your knowledge of your surroundings and your desire for recognition from others. If you want something bad enough, think about how you can communicate that you are a deserving candidate for whatever you want. For most people, this tends to be a written diploma that says you’ve graduated from college.

The Future

The weeks and months ahead during my fellowship are largely uncertain. There will be both extreme excitements and disappointments that I have yet to discover. I’ll be working in Mountain View, California from January – April 2012. After March, the opportunities are endless. I’ll be traveling often in 2012; you will likely find me somewhere between New York, Miami, San Francisco, London, and maybe even Hong Kong.

So, before I make my way down the jetway and symbolically leave my short stint in college, what advice can I offer to you? Take a note from Chris McCandless:

Make a radical change in your lifestyle and begin to boldly do things which you may previously never have thought of doing, or been too hesitant to attempt. So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservation, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun. If you want to get more out of life, you must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life that will at first appear to you to be crazy. But once you become accustomed to such a life you will see its full meaning and its incredible beauty.

Finally, I can best describe my decision to leave college with this quote I found in the Wake Forest rowing room:

“To give up requires no effort, only a decision. To win requires everything you have to give.”

Recently many people have asked me questions such as: “How did you get into this stuff on the internet?”, “Why don’t you play video games?”, or “How did your learn about startups?”.

The best way I know how to encourage continuous curiosity is through intelligent distraction. I read blogs for at least an hour daily, I contribute to online tech communities, I read editorial magazines, and I browse twitter. I don’t play video games, and I rarely watch TV. And my preferred sporting activity is rowing.

To summarize, reading is my distraction and that’s how I learn. I stay curious by discussing or writing about the things I read daily. Two groups at Wake Forest have been valuable to me for facilitating intelligent discussions. First, the Arch Society meets weekly to discuss a high-level issue facing the world and we talk openly about our opinions on the subject. The debate often dabbles into many viewpoints, depending on the background of each participant. Second, the Masterminds group is an unofficial group led by seniors who have taken a special interest discussing social science and psychology. We most recently discussed body language, and how it can invoke positive judgement or actions in others.

It’s these few but precious hours throughout the week that are so critical to me. Take a break from the gossip and TV. Read something cool, and share your thoughts with others.

Social sharing has changed dramatically in the past decade and it’s not uncommon for ordinary people to be sharing the things they consume daily. The common denominators for the majority of sharing activity are the Facebook platform, Twitter, blogs and email. Mark Zuckerberg first predicted that social sharing functions exponentially at the 2008 Web 2.0 Summit:

“I would expect that next year, people will share twice as much information as they share this year, and next year, they will be sharing twice as much as they did the year before,” he said.

Some computer veterans claim the optimistic prediction was on the basis Gordon Moore’s, Intel Co-founder, prediction that the number of chips on a transistor doubles every two years. Moore was right, and in the three years since Zuckerberg’s prediction, Zuckerberg’s been spot on according to Facebook data.

Zuckerberg’s law is represented in the following equation:  Y = C *2^X — Where X is time, Y is what you will be sharing and C is a constant.

The equation may become inaccurate as you move 10-20 years in the future, but the function is a better reflection of behavioral shifts and pain points associated with non-stop sharing. Just about everyone in my life is sharing and consuming more data than ever, especially when I think about life before smart-phones in 2007. I often find myself asking questions about the social sharing growth curve:

How are we going to make sense of the profound increase in data pinging our way? Will the services we use to create and share more data be the best services for showing us what we want to see?  How can we make better connections between the similar items we’re sharing? How can we better understand this problem if we’ve never had access to so much data about ourselves and other people? Where’s the line distinguishing the artistic element of each item and the technological aspect enabling us to share, or are they intertwined?

The dramatic shift towards exponential sharing boils down to the difference between two functions: manual and automatic. Generally speaking, sharing has required a manual user-input in the form of sending an email, text message, wall post, tweet, among various others. Web services will begin to push automated sharing and the inputs will be controlled by any of our behavior connected to technology. To give you an example, ten years ago a person might have traveled to New York City and emailed their friends to let them know of their time in the area. Today we have location based technology on your smart-phone that will automatically share your new location.

Technology is most useful as a mechanization of a repetitive process. What technology will be in place to filter an exponential increase in automated sharing? Or will manual curation remain the best way to navigate exponential sharing? There will be opportunities to see the results from both approaches. The most effective solution for sifting through exponentially increasing shared content will combine elements of both automation and curation.

More reading on this topic:

http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/06/mark-zuckerberg-explains-his-law-of-social-sharing-video/

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/06/zuckerbergs-law-of-information-sharing/