Recent interesting articles

1. Sarah Lacy on Kleiner Perkins [link] – high-performance is difficult to maintain in a hits-driven business…

2. French cafe charges more if you’re rude [link]

French Cafe

3. Desiderata by Max Ehrmann [link] – “Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth.”

4. GQ profile on Avicii [link] – article makes him look a tad douche-y, but it’s hard to blame a 23 year-old who suddenly starts making $250K a night…

5. An entrepreneur’s observations on Brazil [link] – I loved, and miss, Rio’s beaches, fun-and-carefree attitude, the farofa…

6. Korean couple starves baby to death while playing online game…raising a virtual child [link] – this says something…I’m still figuring out what

7. pmarca on bitcoin [link] – I love when he wades into a controversial topic and lays the smack down…whether long-term right or wrong, always entertaining

8. Charles Stross on his first visit to Japan [link] – beautiful writing; it’s the closest someone’s come to articulating my stream of consciousness while visiting japan

9. Japanese man refuses to believe WWII is over, defends outpost on Philippines Island for 29 years [link] – a good reminder, and framework, to face life’s challenges

Here’s a full list of interesting reads and highlights (thanks to Postach.io!). Or you can view the original Ever-notebook.

Startup 101 Series: Updated links and what’s next

Just added ~20 new reads to the startup 101s (collections of great startup reads). Removed a few, too:

I’m also working on a simple ebook which will combine these 101s with some new material and an edited collection of my 1-Read-A-Day lessons (you can subscribe here; warning: it’s a lot of content :)

I’ve also started a new, related project — trying to iterate to something truly useful. So far, the feedback has been great. More on that soon. Still startup content, still about saving you time and finding you the best. I love Joe Wikert’s idea of the content concierge.

Would you pay for some combination of curation and summarization? I’d love to know!

“Doubt is our product” – fascinating memo on the tobacco industry’s PR strategy

I’m not sure how I stumbled upon this document but its contents were illuminating.

The document is a memo from Brown & Williamson, a then-subsidiary of British American Tobacco, reviewing the current state of the tobacco industry’s public relations and proposing next steps.

The Tobacco Institute has probably done a good job for us in the area of politics and as an industry we also seem to have done very well in turning out scientific information to counter the anti-smoking claims.

Yet, trends were moving against the industry:

We are restricted in terms of ability to sell — in colleges and in vending machines. Our products are branded with a warning label. Our ability to advertise has been attacked on all fronts and has consistently deteriorated.

But people want to smoke — and doubt gives them an easy excuse:

Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the “body of fact” that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy.

Even then — 40+ years ago — it was clear that “pro-cigarette science” was pseudo-science:

Unfortunately, we cannot take a position directly opposing the anti-cigarette forces and say that cigarettes are a contributor to good health. No information that we have supports such a claim.

So let’s focus on the arena of public opinion!

Finally, a series of studies are proposed to understand exactly which messages most effectively create anti-smoking sentiment, and then to find the best means “of anticipating and countering the release of misinformation.

Fascinating stuff. Here’s the original document, courtesy of UCSF.

Isaac Asimov should have been a VC

Isaac AsimovVisiting New York’s 1964 World Fair, Isaac Asimov imagines what it would be like 50 years hence.

Here are some of his predictions:

Mostly right

One thought that occurs to me is that men will continue to withdraw from nature in order to create an environment that will suit them better.

Large solar-power stations will also be in operation in a number of desert and semi-desert areas — Arizona, the Negev, Kazakhstan.

Much effort will be put into the designing of vehicles with “Robot-brains”*vehicles that can be set for particular destinations and that will then proceed there without interference by the slow reflexes of a human driver.

Communications will become sight-sound and you will see as well as hear the person you telephone. The screen can be used not only to see the people you call but also for studying documents and photographs and reading passages from books.

Probably in my lifetime…and I can’t wait

Electroluminescent panels will be in common use. Ceilings and walls will glow softly, and in a variety of colors that will change at the touch of a push button.

Kitchen units will be devised that will prepare “automeals,” heating water and converting it to coffee; toasting bread; frying, poaching or scrambling eggs, grilling bacon, and so on. Breakfasts will be “ordered” the night before to be ready by a specified hour the next morning.

The appliances of 2014 will have no electric cords, of course, for they will be powered by long- lived batteries running on radioisotopes.

There will be increasing emphasis on transportation that makes the least possible contact with the surface. There will be aircraft, of course, but even ground travel will increasingly take to the air*a foot or two off the ground.

For short-range travel, moving sidewalks (with benches on either side, standing room in the center) will be making their appearance in downtown sections.

Processed yeast and algae products will be available in a variety of flavors. The 2014 fair will feature an Algae Bar at which “mock-turkey” and “pseudosteak” will be served.

Asimov predicted the internet…yet he thought boredom would be mankind’s greatest disease!

Even so, mankind will suffer badly from the disease of boredom, a disease spreading more widely each year and growing in intensity. This will have serious mental, emotional and sociological consequences, and I dare say that psychiatry will be far and away the most important medical specialty in 2014.

The most errant Asimov predictions involve human colonization (by 2014, he foresaw Moon colonies and underwater housing settlements) and unchecked population growth (still a concern, but who could have guessed that economically-developed countries would stop having babies?).

Sidebar: it seems that we humans consistently underestimate the power of exponential growth, but once we’re convinced of it, we then — with the same consistency — overestimate how long it will last.

His original article is here.

The failures of kindness

George Saunders, NYTThere is no time like college graduation — the propulsion of thousands of fresh-faced, exuberant 21 year-olds into the “real” world — to believe anew in the possibilities of mankind and the human spirit.

Great convocation speeches capture that energy and — to paraphrase Pico Iyer — help us become young fools once again. And George Saunders delivered a great one to Syracuse U’s Class of 2013.

Some excerpts:

So: What do I regret? Being poor from time to time? Not really. Working terrible jobs, like “knuckle-puller in a slaughterhouse?” (And don’t even ASK what that entails.) No. I don’t regret that. Skinny-dipping in a river in Sumatra, a little buzzed, and looking up and seeing like 300 monkeys sitting on a pipeline, pooping down into the river, the river in which I was swimming, with my mouth open, naked? And getting deathly ill afterwards, and staying sick for the next seven months? Not so much. Do I regret the occasional humiliation? Like once, playing hockey in front of a big crowd, including this girl I really liked, I somehow managed, while falling and emitting this weird whooping noise, to score on my own goalie, while also sending my stick flying into the crowd, nearly hitting that girl? No. I don’t even regret that.

So she came to our school and our neighborhood, and was mostly ignored, occasionally teased (“Your hair taste good?” – that sort of thing). I could see this hurt her. I still remember the way she’d look after such an insult: eyes cast down, a little gut-kicked, as if, having just been reminded of her place in things, she was trying, as much as possible, to disappear.

What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness. Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering, and I responded…sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly.

Each of us is born with a series of built-in confusions that are probably somehow Darwinian. These are: (1) we’re central to the universe (that is, our personal story is the main and most interesting story, the only story, really); (2) we’re separate from the universe (there’s US and then, out there, all that other junk – dogs and swing-sets, and the State of Nebraska and low-hanging clouds and, you know, other people), and (3) we’re permanent (death is real, o.k., sure – for you, but not for me).

So, quick, end-of-speech advice: Since, according to me, your life is going to be a gradual process of becoming kinder and more loving: Hurry up. Speed it along. Start right now. There’s a confusion in each of us, a sickness, really: selfishness. But there’s also a cure. So be a good and proactive and even somewhat desperate patient on your own behalf

Full speech here.