From The Big Picture | The Innovator, the Imitator, the Idiot:
“Buffett once told me there are three ‘I’s in every cycle. The ‘innovator,’ that’s the first ‘I.’ After the innovator comes the ‘imitator.’ And after the imitator in the cycle comes the idiot.”
Great list up at The Big Picture | Bob Farrell’s 10 Rules for Investing — these three really resonate with me:
3. There are no new eras — excesses are never permanent
5. The public buys the most at the top and the least at the bottom
9. When all the experts and forecasts agree — something else is going to happen
VMware shares plunge on CEO change, slowing growth — seems like a buying opportunity to me, it is hard to imagine a better systems software CEO than Paul Maritz.
Phil Howard – Organic Industry — nice charts, the industry is way more consolidated than I realized. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.
OK Yahoo could have been a Microsoft division, all of Microsoft’s internet ambitions would have been handed over to them, they would have been able to run semi-autonomously.
Or they can be ripped apart by private equity guys like Icahn — massive layoffs, milking their current traffic levels for cash flow, spinning off parts.
This is preferable? Did Yahoo management not foresee this??
I’ve had it with 1800flowers, with proflowers, with marthastewart’s site. In the past year I’ve ordered flowers from each and they have all resulted in various disasters — flowers never arrived, arrived damaged, or were pathetically bad.
From now on I am dealing with real human beings at local florists. Lindvall florist in Florida, Marion Flower Shop in Ohio.
This points out a large flaw in current SEO-crazed environment — pissing away a lot of money on SEO and SEM is pointless if you can’t back it up with a solid operation. You need to do something well, something of real value, before you start trying to slurp up traffic.
Ask The Readers: How Do You Recession-Proof Your Career? — some ideas from others.
In my first real job, a wise mentor who had lived through recessions and layoffs gave me this advice:
TechForward: Guaranteed Buybacks for Consumer Electronics — via Marginal Revolution. Ideal for someone like me who surfs the wave of the latest technology.
Chris discusses The Siren Song of Local Reviews as does Andy. Both these guys have a lot of hard-won scars from their experiences. It is a continually intriguing space.
A Sack of Seattle: Judy’s Book lesson #1: markets win — nice post from Andy — a large growing market trumps all
Marginal Revolution: No More Making Fun of Canadian Money. Wow. The world has voted on the US economy and government policies.
I don’t know what R-67 is, but I’ve seen this group — Consumers Against Higher Insurance Rates — running numerous inflammatory ads against it. Google reveals that one of these “consumers” is State Farm, who has given $284K to the campaign. Another is Professional Insurance Agents of Washington. Here’s the whole list — note that it is free for individuals to join, and they have a damn small list. And I wonder how many of these are employees/members of the insurance industry companies/groups?
The duplicity of this campaign pretty much convinces me to vote for R-67, whatever it is.
UPDATE: OK I don’t know why this ticks me off so much, something about these monied interests wrapping themselves in the cloak of consumerism. You can browse all the group’s filings here — you will quickly see that real washington consumers have donated maybe $300 while insurance companies (mostly out of state) have donated millions and millions of dollars to this campaign. The group founders are not consumers but come from this tort reform group. Here’s some Seattle news coverage about the media buying from earlier this summer.
The Big Picture | Great Market Quotes — I especially like John Maynard Keynes — “Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.” and Kin Hubbard — “It is pretty hard to tell what does bring happiness; poverty and wealth have both failed.”
It is nice to think that there is some field out there in which I can still be productive…
blog.pmarca.com: Age and the entrepreneur, part 1: Some data
# This peak in productivity varies by field, from the late 20s to the early 50s, for reasons that are field-specific.
College grads see higher starting salaries this year – Jul. 12, 2007 via The Big Picture. Engineering rules yet again. Might be a tortoise and hare thing tho, I’m not convinced the picture is the same 20 and 30 years out of college.
blog.pmarca.com: The Pmarca Guide to Startups, part 4: The only thing that matters
In honor of Andy Rachleff, formerly of Benchmark Capital, who crystallized this formulation for me, let me present Rachleff’s Law of Startup Success:
The #1 company-killer is lack of market.