Likes & Launch: Archive

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How many times have you read about startup founders who continued to live inexpensively as their companies took off? Who continued to dress in jeans and t-shirts, to drive the old car they had in grad school, and so on? If you did that in New York, people would treat you like shit. If you walk into a fancy restaurant in San Francisco wearing a jeans and a t-shirt, they’re nice to you; who knows who you might be? Not in New York.

One sign of a city’s potential as a technology center is the number of restaurants that still require jackets for men. According to Zagat’s there are none in San Francisco, LA, Boston, or Seattle, 4 in DC, 6 in Chicago, 8 in London, 13 in New York, and 20 in Paris.

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Cities and Ambition

This speaks to why I left NY many years ago for the West Coast.

(via sawickipedia)

That is absurd. As if the Silicon Valley way is the only way. More restaurants in NYC require jackets than SF because NYC has better restaurants. Nothing to do with startups.

(via caterpillarcowboy)

Agree with Caterpillar — What is a city of ambition if there are no places that require more effort (if only in requiring nicer attire, which doesn’t always translate to success)? Equally, I love that New York is a city that celebrates fashion - so whether you want to dress up or dress down you can. It’s not expected that everyone has to don the same t-shirt and jeans to fit in. If you want to wear a prom dress to a bar, so be it.

Dec 25, 201211 notes

“The 700,000 viewers of my TED talk were charged nothing, but the far smaller group of people who have taken my offline classes were charged, along with the taxpayers, upwards of a million dollars.[2] With these cost ratios, one imagines that many students would appreciate the option of a lower-cost product even if quality were somewhat lower. Quality, however, need not be lower with online education. Quality can increase by increasing the number of students taught by the best teachers and by substituting substantial capital for labor in teaching.”—Cato Unbound » Blog Archive » Why Online Education Works

Dec 10, 20121 note

“It’s not just that if you want to succeed in some domain, you have to understand the forces driving it. Understanding growth is what starting a startup consists of. What you’re really doing (and to the dismay of some observers, all you’re really doing) when you start a startup is committing to solve a harder type of problem than ordinary businesses do. You’re committing to search for one of the rare ideas that generates rapid growth. Because these ideas are so valuable, finding one is hard. The startup is the embodiment of your discoveries so far. Starting a startup is thus very much like deciding to be a research scientist: you’re not committing to solve any specific problem; you don’t know for sure which problems are soluble; but you’re committing to try to discover something no one knew before. A startup founder is in effect an economic research scientist. Most don’t discover anything that remarkable, but some discover relativity.”—Startup = Growth

Dec 7, 20121 note

Dec 4, 20125 notes

“Ms. Popova thought it was the wrong way to spur imagination, so she told her boss she would begin sending around her own inspirational e-mail regularly. It would contain everything from a new piece of research into biomimicry to a haiku by a Japanese poet. Without much thought, she called it Brain Pickings. “It was the opposite of how school made me feel,” she said. “It was a kind of Rube Goldberg-like machine of curiosity and discovery.””—Maria Popova Has Some Big Ideas - NYTimes.com

Dec 3, 20121 note

“The future, he added, belongs to job creators, even if the only job they create is their own.”—

Michael Ellsberg

Saying No to College - NYTimes.com

Dec 2, 20122 notes