Alex Payne writes online here.

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What Is and Is Not A Technology Company

When I was a kid, I had a morning routine with my family. Over breakfast, we’d divvy up the newspaper. I’d go straight for the Business section, and from there to the back pages with yesterday’s stock prices. Scanning down the lines of tiny text, I’d look for SUN, ORCL, MSFT, AAPL, SGI. Then back to the front of the Business section, reading whatever I possibly could about the silicon giants of the day. Then, finally, the funny pages. I was a weird kid.

Today, like many, I no longer get a physical newspaper. Most mornings I sit down with my iPad and pull up Techmeme, which more often than not leads me to several different “tech blogs” that deliver a mix of rumor, opinion, gossip, rehashed press releases, and, very occasionally, actual news.

There’s a striking difference between the technology news I grew up with and a lot of what I end up reading these days. The difference is something I only recently cemented for myself: most so-called tech news isn’t about technology at all anymore.

Confusing Startups for Technology

There was always something that bothered me about TechCrunch, and it bothered me more and more over the years that the blog rose to be the sort of force that could wipe a site out with a tsunami of traffic just by linking to it. For a publication with “tech” in the name, technology only ever seemed ambiently present in TechCrunch’s reporting. Software and hardware are background music for the site’s real interests: money and power, success and failure, who’s up and who’s down. TechCrunch often read to me like the parts of the Business section I used to skip as a kid, the boring ones with “merger” or “acquisition” in the headline and a picture of two suits shaking hands.

TechCrunch’s popularity urged on a slew of imitators, and now the majority of “technology journalism” consists of blogs that operate in the same general mold. Even newspapers have adopted TechCrunch’s overall format and pace of publication for much of their writing on technology. This has shifted not just the tone and the depth of technology reporting, but the subject matter as well. Where newspapers tended to focus on established technology companies, TechCrunch has always primarily been about startups. With everyone following in their footsteps, startups have become synonymous with technology journalism.

And why not? Startups are exciting. They’re often headed up by interesting people who want to take on big problems. Startups seem somehow rebellious and alternative, but in a way that’s safe and accessible enough to read about at the breakfast table. Startups have drama. Will they survive? Get bought for a billion dollars? Fail spectacularly? What’s more, startups love to talk about themselves, which makes life easier for reporters. What founder, save one who’s already well-established and cagey, is going to turn down free publicity?

Startups, however, are not inherently technology companies.

It’s now accepted-going-on-cliché to say things like “software is eating the world”, which is an aggressive way of assuming that every company now has to be at least a bit of a technology company, and those that want to grow rapidly even more so. Many new companies targeting industries as diverse as eyeglasses and baby food are, at the outset, leveraging technology for everything they do: supply chain management, marketing, recruiting, internal communication, product development, and so on. This makes these businesses look like technology companies, if you squint. But, of course, they aren’t. They’re eyeglasses and baby food companies.

Somewhere along the way, we confused “startup” for “tech startup” and “company” for “technology company”. Now that every growing business requires significant competence in technology to succeed, the distinction is even blurrier. Is a company that has staff members with “programmer” or “engineer” in their titles a technology company? Are they a technology company if they were funded by venture capitalists who have previously funded businesses that we think of as technology companies? Are they a technology company if their founder was using a laptop when she came up with the idea for the business?

A Definition, But Not a Value Judgment

These questions are pretty easily resolved. You are a technology company if you are in the business of selling technology. That is to say, if your product – the thing you make money by selling – consists of applied scientific knowledge that solves concrete problems and enables other endeavors, you are a technology company.

By this definition, most of the companies that dominate the “tech blogs” are not technology companies. They’re just, well, companies. These businesses might use technology, or develop technology, or even be run by people who used to work at technology companies, but they don’t exist to create and sell technology.

IBM is a technology company. Basho is a technology company. Boundary is a technology company. Apple is a technology company thanks to some of its lines of business (hardware, software), but is not a technology company in all of its lines of business (music, movies, books). Ditto Google and Amazon, which make money both from selling technology and from leveraging technology to sell things like advertisements and socks.

Simple is not a technology company. We use and develop technology, but we are a banking service, and we make money through banking. Zappos, likewise, is not a technology company. They use and develop technology, but they make money when people buy shoes from them. Technology might make our respective businesses run more effectively, or give us a competitive advantage, but it is not our product. An interest in technology might shape our corporate cultures, but technology is not what we sell.

Put more crudely: sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken, and having an engineer or a data scientist on staff does not make you a technology company. Having people in these kinds of roles just makes you a company that has to do business in a world that requires code to be written in order to operate efficiently.

This definition also doesn’t suggest that only “enterprise” technology companies are “real” technology companies. There are plenty of companies that make money by selling technology to consumers. But there are also a lot of businesses selling actual things to consumers who get lumped in with technology businesses simply because they sell products via the web. That might have been an important distinction in 1995, but no longer.

What I’ve spelled out is a definition, but not a value judgment. I’m not saying that technology companies are good and other types of companies are bad, or vice versa. What I’m saying is that they are different, and that they require different approaches for investors, executives, and particularly for the press. Because technology companies are trafficking in applied science, an understanding of that science is required in order to reason about and report on their operation with any kind of cogency.

New Terminology Needed

“Tech company” and “tech startup” are over-applied labels that have outlived their usefulness. Calling practically all growing contemporary businesses “technology companies” is about as useful as calling the enterprises of the industrial era “factory companies”; it accurately describes an aspect of what they are (or were), but it doesn’t really capture the totality of their operation. It certainly doesn’t tell you anything substantive about how they’ll behave in the market over the long term, which is probably the most useful reason to label a business at all.

What’s more, this mis-labeling results in the conflation of companies in totally different industries applying totally different business models, all being funded and staffed and reported on by the same pool of people. If we remove the label of “tech startup” – and with it the hypothetically stellar trajectory we like to imagine such businesses are on – we’re forced to confront the reality of a business’s model, independent of the reverberations of the echo chamber.

That said, what TechCrunch and other sites often cover is clearly something distinct: companies that have information technology so close to their core (“in their DNA”, if you can still stomach that phrase) that they seem to have acquired the essence of this thing that they use to get ahead. But in confusing how these businesses make their product and what their product is, we introduce a whole set of assumptions and biases and information gaps that, by the looks of it, have resulted in a distorted market for companies and their equity, salaries, publicity, office space, and so forth.

I’m not sure what the ideal terminology is for today’s burgeoning companies. At startup showcases, terms like “disruptive businesses” are thrown around, but they presume too much to be useful. The word “startup” itself presumes too little, and has become overloaded. In time, a new word will present itself. Or maybe we’ll have to learn to be satisfied by talking about businesses that leverage information technology in creative ways as, simply, “businesses”. But clarifying our language is only the outward expression of clarifying our thinking.

Really, nobody but sociologists and historians should be running around talking about “technology” in the large. It’s a vague word for an even vaguer set of ideas about how humans operate in the world. Our current culture sprinkles this word around like faerie dust, blinding us to the truth of what things are, how they work, and who’s responsible for them. Broad cultural change takes time. As a starting point, the business world seems as good a place as any to wipe away the magic dust and start seeing clearly.

—May 08, 2012

The Game

A few years back, I lived and worked in Northern Virginia, a sprawling collection of suburbs just outside Washington, DC. It’s a place of malls and strip malls, office buildings and office parks, a territory inlaid with and surrounded by perpetually packed freeways carrying government workers and contractors home to planned communities. It’s a place people live because of a job.

At the time, I had a job I liked very much, and so did some people who worked across the highway-wide street. We all got to do challenging things with computers and we had a lot of freedom as to how we went about it. We became friends.

Some evenings, after work, we’d gather at one or another of the area’s strip mall Middle Eastern cafés. We’d order big plates of kabobs and rice and hummus and pita and try to best one another at the ideal combination of flavors of shisha to share in the hookahs that are the cafés real draw. On warm nights we’d sit outside and watch the sons and daughters of wealthy diplomats preen for one another in an endless contest for the nicest car, the chicest clothes, the most beautiful partner on your arm. Farsi music videos blared and the suburbs around us were all but gone in the hanging smoke.

And then, when the plates of food were replaced with mint tea and Turkish coffee, we played a game.

The game is called Zendo. It’s made by a company called Looney Labs who, like many clever small game companies, reuse a set of universal pieces for a number of their products. Zendo is played with signature plastic triangles called Icehouse pieces, as big and as varied a set as you care. The triangles are hollow, allowing them to be stacked. They have a small “pip” on each side that designates a point value. The triangles come in just three sizes, but are available in a whole variety of colors and opacities.

A round of Zendo begins by designating a “master”. In her mind, the master comes up with a rule that describes multiple configurations or structures made up of the triangular pieces. A rule might be: “blue triangles must always have a red triangle stacked atop them”. Or: “the total number of pips in the structure must be divisible by two”. The master builds one structure that satisfies the rule alongside one structure that does not, and the two structures are marked accordingly with white and black stones respectively.

Each turn, a player who is not the master builds a structure from the shared pile of spare triangles. Each structure a player builds is marked with a stone designating its adherence to the master’s unspoken rule, just as with the master’s original example structures. If a structure fits the master’s rule, an additional green guessing stone is earned by the player that built it. A player can trade a guessing stone for a guess at the rule, asked of the master in front of the other players. Play proceeds until someone correctly guesses the master’s rule.

That, modulo some details, is the game.

Zendo and Understanding Programming As A Collaborative Endeavor

Zendo is a game of inductive logic. Anyone can enjoy it, but programmers take particular delight in it. In broad strokes, a round of Zendo mirrors the intellectual process programmers engage in when debugging. You know there’s a rule in the machine undermining the task you’re trying to accomplish, but you don’t know what the rule is, so you build and rebuild and think and observe and rebuild again until you understand the rule, and then you win.

Zendo’s process of becoming gradually un-blind could even be said to be a metaphor for how many of us learn to program, particularly if you’re self-taught. You’re thrown into a black nexus of thousands of unknown rules and made to reason in the dark. With each rule you discover, a little less dark. (I’ve been programming in earnest for sixteen years and presently find myself in a sort of early-evening twilight, plus a couple of sconces in the corner and maybe a night light.)

For me, the interesting thing about Zendo is not its parallels to the task of programming as an individual, but thinking of the game as a model for collective problem-solving.

One strategy for Zendo is to hole up in your mind, obsess over the structures you’ve built, and try to crunch through every possible permutation on your own. This approach works well if you’re a genius, I’d imagine, but most of us are not. It’s also a good way to lead yourself astray, convinced that you can see the general shape of the master’s rule when in fact you’re thinking along entirely the wrong lines.

A more broadly applicable strategy is to throughly observe the plays of your opponents and treat “solving” the round as a kind of computation distributed across all the players. Together, you and your fellow players are brute forcing the problem of discovering the rule. Every (motivated) player at the table decreases the time it takes to win.

The best rounds of Zendo I’ve ever played are ones in which the master has chosen a devilishly hard rule, a rule so difficult to guess that the players cease to be in competition with one another and are instead in a collective war against the inscrutability of the master. When one player finally wins, it’s due to the combined efforts of all the players building structures, making guesses, exploring the solution space. That shared victory is a wonderful moment.

Flashes of brilliance are few and far between. Even when they strike, turning a brilliant insight into something reproducible is almost always an effort beyond just one person. Programming lore is full of stories of lone-hacker-in-the-night heroism, but the reality of what we do is one built on collaboration: between pairs, amongst teams, amongst companies in the marketplace, amongst universities and laboratories, amongst contributors to open source projects.

I write this by way of encouraging you to:

  1. Play a round of Zendo. It’s out of print, but you can still buy Icehouse pieces.
  2. Remember that people are everything. It’s easy to get caught up in a problem, particularly if you aren’t a naturally collaborative person. Don’t forget that the people you work with – peers or partners, managers or interns – complete your work and vice versa. If you don’t at least observe the successes and failures of their work, you’re going to be that much more in the dark.

One last thing about Zendo: it’s not much fun to be the master until someone guesses the rule.

—Apr 09, 2012

Are We Experiencing an Information Technology Fin de Siècle?

It is a strange and interesting time for information technology.

For every example of technology dominating both markets and mindshare – Apple as the most valuable company in the world, Groupon and Zynga accounting for 31% of all IPO money raised in 2011, Facebook’s own massive upcoming IPO – there is an equal amount of nay-saying, second-guessing, and soul-searching. It’s easy to find people who are excited about making money off technology-driven businesses. At the same time, it’s becoming harder to find people who are unreservedly excited about the overall state of information technology and its impact on our lives.

Nick Bilton, the New York Times technology writer, thinks today that the fun is leaving technology. Malcom Gladwell thinks networks aren’t the tool for political and social revolution that they’ve been built up to be. Jolie O’Dell, another technology journalist, lamented two years ago that technology companies aren’t solving real problems. Hermione Way, a British tech PR consultant and journo, argued much the same last year after spending some time immersed in the Bay Area technology community. Meanwhile, Silicon Valley technology journalism itself is under fire as a pay-for-play ‘cesspool’ run from the pockets of venture capitalists.

Peter Thiel, one of the more notable figures at the intersection of technology and finance, has argued very repeatedly that technological innovation, particularly in America, is decelerating. The business press echoes this sentiment, having spent the past several years questioning Silicon Valley innovation (when not celebrating the apparently un-innovative but business-savvy people making piles of money there, inclusive of Thiel). We’re in a technology bubble, they say, but not one that’s likely to directly produce technologies with much lasting social good. The claim is that wallets are expanding, but our list of big unsolved problems is not shrinking proportionally.

Moving into longer form writing, the world of books is full of voices that are at least as critical of the state of IT today, if not more so. Nicholas Carr is worried about what the Internet is doing to our brains. Sherry Turkle thinks technology is undermining our relationships. Jonathan Zittrain is worried that the coming corporatized, locked-down Internet will end a cycle of innovation. Jaron Lanier thinks social technology undermines humanist values. Eli Pariser thinks collaborative filters are narrowing our world. Evgeny Morozov is suspicious of the promise of digital democracy. Interestingly, several of the aforementioned authors spent the earlier parts of their careers as staunch technology advocates and innovators.

I’ve only carved off a sliver of the tech-whinging of the past several years. The summary is basically that people think we’re both not innovating enough and innovating in the wrong directions. Regardless of what you think of the individual arguments, the sheer volume of the chorus of voices criticizing the state of IT today is interesting.

There are any number of possible interpretations of all this criticism, questioning, and doubt:

  1. Technology really is going down the wrong track and these critics are picking up on that first. Or:
  2. People are always critical of new information technologies, and they’re usually wrong. This is just the latest round. Or:
  3. Technology has become so commingled with the rest of our lives that we can’t see the forest for the trees anymore. See Sequoia, don amongst technology venture capital firms, funding a chain of grilled cheese restaurants. Or:
  4. Technology is about to head in a new and different direction, but we’re not yet sure that what that direction is, so there’s a lot of tension and malaise and last-gasp profiteering as we milk the last fifty-plus years of research for all they’re worth.

Or something else entirely.

At any rate, it’s interesting right now. Interesting and strange.

—Mar 06, 2012

How Not To Sell Software in 2012

Though most of our stack at Simple is based on open source software, we occasionally try commercial software. Mostly, we don’t end up buying it. A big reason why is the incredibly time-consuming, aggravating sales process that most commercial enterprise (that is, non-consumer) software vendors insist on. I’m between vendor calls today and channeling my irritation into this post.

It’s 2012. Practically everyone who’s paying for software is doing so through an app store: one click or tap and you’ve got what you want. Heck, even free/open software people have an app store these days.

Similarly, more and more people who are paying for remote computing resources, whether servers or software, do so through instantly available, transparently priced cloud services. I can give Amazon my credit card number and have everything I need to run a growing business without ever talking to a salesperson. I like it that way.

Today’s startups are tomorrow’s enterprises. Many of the other startup folks I know share the same expectations about how software should be sold. Basically, if a given software package or service isn’t free/open, it should be as easy as humanly possible to try it, pay for it, and start using it in production. If it isn’t easy to get started with your product, I’m going to find another vendor.

The List of Don’ts

If you’re in the enterprise software business, you’re going to be dealing with more and more potential customers like me as the demographics of our industry shift. So, if you’d like to keep making money, here’s what not to do:

  1. Don’t require that I waste my time on a sales call – or, worse, in a “webinar” – before I can give you my money. Instead, provide all the information I need about your product on your website.
  2. Don’t make it hard for me to try your software. If I can’t play with a trial version or sandbox immediately, I’m moving on.
  3. Don’t hide your pricing behind a sales process, and don’t play pricing games. I can find and talk to your other customers basically instantly in order to determine what they paid for your product and if they’re getting the value they expected from it. I will do this. So just put the price of what you’re selling on your site and skip the games.
  4. Don’t make me read a whitepaper in order to get essential information about your product. Put it on your website. In HTML. Not in a PDF, not in Flash, not in Silverlight or ActiveX or whatever. What your product does, on your website, in HTML.
  5. Don’t automatically sign me up for a newsletter about your company or product when I give you my contact information. Ideally, don’t request my contact information at all until I’m giving you money.
  6. Don’t make it hard for me to talk to a technical person at your company about the nitty gritty details of how your product works. If you don’t provide a forum for those discussions, someone else will, and you won’t control it.
  7. Don’t make it hard for me to pay for your product. I have a credit card. I also have a PayPal account, a Google payments account, and an Amazon payments account. Any of those are fine (although PayPal is not ideal). Any other billing process is not.
  8. This should go without saying, but don’t cold call or spam me. If your product is good and meets my needs, I promise that I’ll find out about it.

Basically, the farther away you get from being like an app store or Amazon Web Services, the less likely it is that you’re going to get my money.

Examples, Good and Bad

I’m sure some vendors think that they’re special and unique snowflakes whose products couldn’t possibly be sold without high-touch interactions with potential customers. Yet, somehow, a new generation of companies is managing to meet the above requirements, and I sincerely hope they eat everyone else’s breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Beyond aforementioned Amazon, here are some companies doing it right:

And, some companies doing it wrong:

Conclusion

I want to give you my money. Your sales process may be a bigger barrier to you getting my money than your competitors. Please join us in the year 2012, where software is available instantly and transparently priced and the word “webinar” is only used ironically.

—Feb 29, 2012

On Business Madness

I am not intentionally a business person.

Over the course of my career to date I’ve worked at companies of various sizes, and have been situated at commensurately varying distances from the concerns of running a business: funding, sales, forecasting and planning, marketing, payroll, legal matters, and so forth. In that time, I’ve developed an interest in the mechanics of business. It seemed prudent to know where my paycheck was coming from. Still, I got to keep my distance from the “business stuff”.

Being now a co-founder of a startup has made it difficult to stay impartial when considering how businesses work, how they succeed, and how they fail. I’ve made a couple of angel investments, and I advise a couple of other startups. It’s hard to spend one’s time and money this way and not develop an opinion about what is a “good business” or a “bad business” and the practices and decisions that support such outcomes.

But, as I observe discussions of business matters in the startup community, I can’t help but think that none of us – for all the blustering blog posts, crowing keynotes, self-published manifestos, and chest-beating sound bites fed to hungry reporters – have little more than the slightest idea what we’re doing.

We mistake dumb luck for a machine that produces success. We rely on induction when we should rely on deduction, and then, having realized our mistake, we lean on “data-driven decisions” in lieu of common sense. We chase patterns that aren’t there and miss eager markets right in front of us. All this while projecting the confidence, real or manufactured, that’s necessary to play the game.

This madness takes many forms.

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 well-defined concept and a feature of more interesting programming languages.

To a programmer, pattern matching is a slick way of looking for a needle in a haystack of data. The haystack must be a known quantity: a thing, or maybe a collection of things. The needle, too, we must be able to describe: a particular value, a type of thing, a collection of things grouped in a particular way. Once we have our haystack and describe our needle, the computer does the rest. But pattern matching is not fuzzy logic. It is clean-shaven logic. Logical logic, of the sort programmers tend to like.

For venture capitalists, pattern matching is a way of saying: “I’ve seen this result in people making money, but I haven’t seen that result in people making money, so you should probably do this and not that if you want to make money.” I have to admit, I was somewhat disappointed when I realized how the term was being employed at the negotiating table. I thought maybe VCs had access to some brilliant new software that evaluated prospective investments in startups. But no. What we’re talking about is good old fashioned experience, which is what you get to call induction when you’re making money and what you say you earned instead of cash when you were losing money.

Many firms make their venture capital investments with a “shotgun” approach: fire chunks of money at a bunch of companies and hope that a couple of them make it big. That is to say, the VCs who operate this way make their money from anomalies. Talking to some such investors, though, you wouldn’t know it. If they haven’t seen it before, they’re not interested. They want something new from something known. They rely on exceptional outcomes from circumstances that align with their experience.

Apparently, experience hasn’t worked particularly well for the last decade.

Location, Location, Location

Startup founders love to obsess about location. Worrying about where in the world to start your company is a wonderful way to defer the terrifying prospect of working really hard on it and potentially failing.

To wit: as I type, one of the top articles on Hacker News is a guide to where you should locate your startup in the Bay Area, down to the neighborhood level. Read now, lest you lease an office on a block that hasn’t been visited by the talent acquisition faerie!

People outside of the Great Silicon Valley-San Francisco Startup Sprawl also love to talk about location, but defensively. “Hey, we matter too!” they shout from Boston, London, Seattle, Iowa, Berlin, and most anywhere else that a person with a laptop and the eagerness to fill out incorporation paperwork can live. Certainly, a fair amount of agonizing about local startup viability goes on in my adopted home of Portland, Oregon.

A cursory look at the data shows that location pretty much doesn’t relate to the long-term success of a startup. Which, if you think about it for even a second, makes perfect sense. How many of our corporate behemoths have their home offices in unlikely towns and cities? How many of those towns and cities have grown up around companies, and not the other way around?

There are good reasons to start a company in a particular place, or to move your company from one place to another. “Because everyone else has” is not one of them.

Process Cults

Running a business means making many, many decisions. Decisions can be hard to make. Having a framework in which to make decisions greases the wheels, but coming up with said framework is even harder than making decisions. Thus, the wide world of business books.

No, I’m not going after business books as a whole. What interests me is a particular form of Business Madness that often ends up in book form: the Process Cult.

Process Cults form around a set of business practices that, when judiciously applied, are supposed to yield a profitable, successful business run by shiny, happy people. The startup segment of the business book market has its favorites:

I have read all of the above. I don’t necessarily agree or disagree with their contents. What I disagree with is the notion that anyone should start or operate a business in the explicit mold of someone else’s experience, as reduced to a couple hundred pages padded with illustrations and diagrams. It’s a bit like starting a fad diet without considering the particulars of your health and lifestyle. It may be hard to subsist on kumquat juice when your neighborhood grocer doesn’t sell kumquats.

The ultimate use of such books is not so much for the advice they contain, but for the social signaling that comes from adopting one as scripture. Lean Startup people go to Lean Startup meetups to find co-founders. The term “customer development” is dropped in pitches to knowing nods from investors who believe in the approach. Those who have Gotten Real leave supportive comments on blog posts by their brethren, railing against the inanity of whatever venture-funded company is this afternoon’s big story. Bonds are formed and reinforced. Process Cults emerge, putting more faith in ritual than in ideas.

When I look around the world, the businesses that dominate don’t seem to be the ones that formed around process as a rallying cry. Rather, they adapted processes to bolster world-changing, market-creating ideas. The world doesn’t need a lean startup, or a developed customer, or a REWORK’d business; it needs solutions to problems, magic where previously there was darkness. How that magic happens is interesting and maybe even useful as a basis for other people running businesses to compare to, but it’s not a recipe for success.

Conclusion

Given some preparation and calibration, you can bake the same cake from the same recipe the same way every time. But a business is not a cake – not even a cake-making business. You can retrofit “success factors” to businesses that made it big, but you can’t then reapply those factors to another business and expect the same results. Every new business is an experiment with too many variables to possibly control for: the concept, the execution, the stability of the people working on it, market forces, political turmoil, the weather, and on and on.

The factors that appear to make a business successful change from week to week, article to article, tweet to tweet, blog post to blog post. This week, everyone is trying to figure out how to replicate Facebook’s “hacker way” because that’s where the money is going. But eventually, the money moves on, and with it goes our idea of how to manufacture success. It was Taylorism in the 1880s. It was Japanese management theory in the 1980s. A few weeks ago, before our collective attention shifted to the Facebook IPO, it was whatever Steve Jobs had done, from hallucinogens to yelling at your employees. Next week, it will be the philosophy of whoever seems likely to make the most money right then.

How can we be like the successful ones and not like we are: tired, confused, scared, not-rich? Just tell us the secret. There is a secret, right? There must be. They make it look so easy.

I am not a business person. I don’t know what makes a good business. It seems like it helps to have a good idea, great people, the willingness to work hard, and an absolute shit-ton of luck. Being certain about much beyond that seems, well, a bit crazy to me.

—Feb 12, 2012