The Perfect Store (M. Cohen)

The Internet is built on the resilience of four big players: Yahoo!, Amazon, Google, and eBay. I had the good luck and fortune to work for Yahoo! for two years and got in touch with the inner working of the Internet in a very exciting way. But if I had to say what company exemplifies the power of the Internet more than any other one, it would be eBay.
Networks accelerate transactions. That’s true for social networks, where you can find romance or a new job much faster than if you were all by yourself. Computer networks work the same, accelerating the rate at which people that want to interact can find each other.
eBay works its magic for the most common transaction between strangers: buying and selling. Imagine you have something you want to rid yourself of. Someone else on Earth most certainly needs exactly that thing. Unfortunately, until eBay came into being, there was no way that you and the other person could know about each other’s need.
It’s as simple as that. It’s so simple, it’s magic indeed. And behind all this sits a single Frenchman, Pierre Omidyar. A genius of insight, or just a lucky guy – nobody will ever know now. Pierre created eBay, realized its power, sat through all the travail and the tribulations, and finally launched himself as a commoner with (literally) several tons of cash into a boring existence in France.
We are left over with a company that could not fail, although it surely tried a great many times. Pierre hires Skoll, Skoll and Pierre hire Meg Whitman, and it’s a story with a happy ending.
Cohen seems quite objective with his writing, and succeeds in making the history of eBay alive and kicking. Sometimes he sounds a bit naive (like when he writes for the tenth time that, this time for sure, the management team had understood the value of community, just to fail again after a few pages). Still, the book quite doesn’t compare with other descriptions of the Internet startup world.

Mimosa

What a beautiful day!

It was sunny, and it was warm for a winter day. Spectrum was a huge ride, and everyone that owned a bike seemed to be on Foothill Expressway. Well, except for me, who was stuck in a car going to the gym and then to pack for my upcoming move.

The acacias are in full bloom. What a wonderful sight, what a marvelous smell!

Broken Shifter

Not too long ago, the left shifting cable broke. Now, they always break at the top, in the shifter, just to make your life more miserable. You have to get rid of the barrel that hold the cable in place, and unstick it from wherever it decided to go.

The left one was fun. I didn’t know shit about shifters, and I unscrewed everything that was unscrewable. And all of a sudden a loud POP, and the front cap of the shifter was gone. I labored for days, checked web site, asked on bbs-s. But everybody told me just to buy a new one. I went to PerformanceBike, and they shocked me with $300.

Cycling - Overview

Everybody that knows me more than just casually knows that I am an avid bicyclist. Not a fast one, maybe, but a commited one, someone who waits all week for that Saturday ride, someone who commutes to work on his bike, someone who won’t even fix his car so that he’s got no excuse not to ride.

Seemed quite logical to have a section of this site devoted to biking. Here you’ll find a little of everything, a bit out of sequence, but with the very best intentions.

First Sunny Day of the Year

Saturday. Weird mood, with a strange fog hanging over the Valley.

I had met the founder of one of the most successful startups in town yesterday. Athletic triathlete, a 17 on OLH. (If you don’t know what that means, it’s 17 minutes up Old La Honda). He inspired me to get up and get riding.

First a ride to the coffee shop on Hollenbeck and Homestead. There I saw the Spectrum group departure location for the first time. It was a small crowd, actually, and it more than doubles on its way to Arastradero.

Dark Is the Winter

Haven’t been able to ride much lately. It has been raining a lot, and when it wasn’t raining, I was working.

Sunday I ventured a ride. Not much of it, just up and down Foothill Expressway, dreaming of the spring and my next climb of OLH. Maybe this year I can break the 20 minutes.

Sunny Weekend

Yes, they do exist! The sunny winter weekends!

This one was particularly nice, albeit freezing cold. I skipped the Saturday ride (too lazy) but got to see the huge bunch of Spectrum riders on my way back from the gym. And today, Sunday, I dismissed the tiredness of the guy that has been working (on Saturday) until 4 AM in favor of a short ride up and down Foothill.

It was fun. All the old guys are out, and it’s a waving fest at every intersection. It feels like after a war, when you crawl out of the bunker and greet everybody that is still alive – the rain kills many a biker’s eagerness after a long season.

Long Time No See

Wow! It’s been a really long time since I last went on a ride!

It’s California winter, right now. In case you haven’t read “Guns, Germs and Steel”, this means it’s raining incessantly, and has been doing so since I started my new job, beginning of december.

New gym has new classes, and if I am lucky, I’ll be able to do some of the spinning there. They are very proud of their instructors and equipment, and I fear I have been scared by last year’s fall too badly to go in the rain again. These thin racing tires are really not good for slick roads, and California roads are clearly not made for the winter.

The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest (P. Bronson)

There you have it! What a wonderful, funny book!
Po Bronson is an amazing author. His prose reads very smoothly, he strikes the right balance between patronizing and geeky (which may be just because I am in the same balance point) and he is amazingly witty.
The First $20 Million is the story of a group of geeks that create their own startup doing … Java. Well, in the book it’s something entirely different, it’s a cross-platform scripting language that compiles once and runs everywhere. Sounds familiar?
Po (I’ll just call him that) captures the essentials of nitty-gritty Silicon Valley. The greed, the idealism, the passion of the geek. He makes a nerd’s writing code for days without sleep plausible; he conveys what it is that makes these social derelicts (and I am one of them) able to function and thrive in an environment that nobody else likes.
And he is funny. Not laughing-out-loud funny, more grin-to-smile funny. Frankly, given the subject matter, not easy to accomplish nonetheless.
I like it. I liked his other famous book, “The Nudist in the Late Shift” better, because it was more varied. Somehow Po is more the short story kinda guy.

First, Break All the Rules

Have you ever read a book that seemed to say the obvious, but whose words of wisdom you then started using as a day-to-day framework to explain to others what seemed so obvious to you?
Well, “First, Break All the Rules” is a book like that. It explains how management should be handled, and more importantly how it should NOT be handled, and takes a stand against Dilbertism of all kinds. Should seem obvious, but Dilbertism is quite entrenched in a lot of corporations, and a book with a lot of quotable sentences comes in handy.
To the content: Gallup is famous as a polling company. They have been polling a lot of employees of companies, though, and provided management support services by creating cross-sections of best practices. This book is the summary of that experience.
There are a few surprising results that come out this book. The very first one is that the immediate manager of anyone is the main focus of attention. If you like the way you are managed, you will like the company you work for, and vice versa. This means that all the best speeches from upper management are worth nothing unless they change the behavior of your manager.
The second thing that is really surprising is that the best management style is to reward the able and to punish the unable and lazy. That hardly seemed surprising to me, until I worked myself under a manager that thought everybody is entitled to the same treatment.
With these two pearls, I pretty much summarized the book. Everything else is a list of examples of managers and their real life interaction with their managed. And of course an enormous list of validation. Lots of quotables, as mentioned, will help you get through your day. Whether it’s worth it, your choice. I found the book way overpriced and wished they had a softcover edition.