Feral Graphing

Curt Schilling and the first ballot

2012-01-03T20:19:00.005-05:00

In 2007, I attended a Red Sox game with Alex Bain and a few of his friends. That night after the game I made a bet with one of his friends that Curt Schilling would be a first ballot Hall of Famer.

At the time, folks were dubious given his relatively low win count, but I thought his post-season narratives (winning World Series co-MVP honors with Randy Johnson in 2001 during an especially memorable November World Series, and helping Boston to win its first World Series in almost a hundred years with his infamous bloody sock games). A couple months later I looked into some of the work Jay Jaffe of Baseball Prospectus had done on players' Hall of Fame chances. His system, called JAWS predicted that Schilling would almost certainly make it into the Hall of Fame and was about 50-50 to go on the first ballot, based on his career numbers and peak.

Since then, I've been feeling better and better about Curt Schilling's first ballot Hall of Fame chances. Jeff Bagwell only got 41% of the vote last year, which (given his stats and era) seems to imply a distaste for even potential steroid users. The results for 2012 will be out soon & should shed more light on this issue, but take a look at the big names coming up for election in 2013:

Craig Biggio
Barry Bonds
Roger Clemens
Mike Piazza
Curt Schilling
Sammy Sosa

Bonds, Clemens, and Sosa are some of the best known baseball players to have been caught (or at least have enough circumstantial evidence to convince me) using, and as the voters showed with Mark McGwire the past few years, they will be heavily penalized for it. That leaves many voters purposefully skipping some of the best players on the ballot. Schilling has been outspoken against steroid users, suggesting that their achievements should be wiped out of the record books.

Given Schilling's enormous post-season fame and excellent regular season stats, I have to believe that the steroids controversy will help push him into the Hall of Fame on the first ballot.

Catastrophic Success

2011-11-01T17:28:00.001-04:00

There are many ways to fail as a startup, like selling something nobody wants, spending too much on unimportant features, or missing a market’s needs, but one of the most interesting ways to fail is by achieving success past your ability to handle it. The furniture maker who suddenly goes viral and takes thousands of orders that he can’t fulfill and ultimately drowns in cancelled orders and chargebacks. The chain restaurant that expands to dozens of locations in response to demand that turns out to only be temporary. The website that crumbles under the load of sudden popularity. In all cases, a smaller dose of success would have been much better for the firm.

These are all examples of companies experiencing what I call Catastrophic Success: the achievement businesses goals so far beyond your ability to respond that the success turns into a catastrophe.

Income distribution Burning Man attendees

2011-08-01T19:36:00.009-04:00

There was a question on Quora about the income distribution of Burning Man attendees that piqued my interest. The data available from Black Rock City, LLC in their Afterburn Report is a little old,[1] but it also lacked a baseline (i.e., the distribution of US incomes[2]). So, I looked up some income distribution data from 2008 to answer the question.

It turns out that Burners are wealthier than an average US resident,[3] and while those earning under $35,000/year are a bit less likely to attend than average, people earning over $80,000/year are much more likely to attend. Here's the same data with in bar chart form.[4]

[1] And potentially inaccurate. With n=1573 for the data set and over 47,000 attendees it's easy to imagine that some selection bias may have come into play. There's also the question of self-reporting accuracy (for both the US Census and the Burning Man census), but we'll just have to work with what we've got.

[2] Of course not everyone from Burning Man is from the US, but a good portion are, so let's roll with it.

[3] Which makes sense, given that Burning Man is a week-long vacation that requires quite a bit of pre-planning. You don't have to be a millionaire to take part, but having a little extra cash to buy those goggles & all that sunscreen sure helps.

[4] I've been experimenting with OmniGraphSketcher & am enjoying checking out its new features. I thought the area graph did a better job of showing income distributions, but I didn't like the loss of data specificity.

I love my Chrome bag

2011-06-08T19:45:00.006-04:00

I love my Chrome bag. It’s an over-the-shoulder bike messenger bag & I’ve used it as my primary travel bag for the last year and a half[1]. It holds even more than my old roller bag, fits absolutely everywhere[2], and doesn’t make noise going over tile floors.

Chrome started as a messenger bag company in 1995 in Boulder, CO. It now has its headquartered in San Francisco and a manufacturing plant north of the city in Chico, CA. Despite its tenure, Chrome is still a pretty local brand – you’ll see non-bikers in San Francisco carrying Chrome bags, but I only saw about one/month when I lived in Boston.

My bag is one of their older models, from 2000 or 1999. It’s a Kozmo bag. I have fond memories of the company – they delivered movies & ice cream to my dorm room for a few years while I was in college, and we ended up with a small collection of video tapes that we’d been to lazy to return when they went out of business. Kozmo is also a great symbol of everything that went wrong in the dot-com bubble of 1999. They offered free delivery of corner store items in under an hour, and aggressively expanded to cities where the bike messenger concept just wasn’t practical (like L.A., Atlanta, Dallas). By the time they ceased operations, they were in more than 15 cities in the US & Europe, had instituted delivery charges, and were actually profitable in NYC, Boston, and San Francisco. But, by that point, they’d burned through more than $100M in funding and weren’t ever going to provide a reasonable return on that investment, so the company was shuttered.

Almost ten years later, I carry a Kozmo.com bag around both as a reminder of what incredible reach a company can achieve in a few years, and as a reminder that profit needs to be in the plan eventually. I've traveled with it enough that it made it into this self portrait a few years ago:

I’m glad that companies are still trying to get parts of the Kozmo promise to work, and I’m happy that my Chrome bag (and Chrome the company) are still in great shape and thriving in San Francisco.

[1] My roller bag, having served me for 7 years of consulting, gave up the ghost on my very last BCG flight – its retractable handle jammed while fully extended. It was preceded by my old business laptop and several Blackberries and is survived by a leather briefcase.

[2] It really does fit everywhere. I’ve gotten it under the seat in front of me and even the micro-overhead bins in Embraer 120s and CRJ 200s.

Moonwalking with Einstein

2011-03-29T00:42:00.003-04:00

I love participatory journalism. It has come to refer to bloggers and citizen journalists in recent years, but when I first heard the term it was being used to describe George Plimpton’s Paper Lion[1] or Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas[2]. There’s something exciting about non-fiction that still has a protagonist, but isn’t solely biographical. Biography often covers such a long portion of a person’s life that there can be no central story; people’s motivations and priorities change over time. Participatory journalism is necessarily a shorter arc, and is usually narrated by someone just starting out at a new activity, giving the reader a sense that she, too, could do what the protagonist does.

Sometimes these books wander away from straight facts, and sometimes it’s wholesale fiction -- my introduction to the genre was through Roald Dahl’s The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar[3]. No matter what the context, I love the way the authors weave together seemingly unrelated areas (as experts in any field can) to create a new narrative that changes the way I think about their subject. A. J. Jacobs has done two stints -- one year reading an entire encyclopedia, another living by the literal word of the bible. His reflections on vast works that everyone knows of, but no one reads gave me an appreciation for the strangeness of that sort of status in our culture.

 Most recently I’ve been reading Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer. He’s the younger brother of two literarily accomplished siblings[4]. In one year he becomes obsessed with the US Memory Championships and spends a year training for that contest, ultimately competing in its finals. He draws together oral traditions and how memory has evolved over time -- why, for instance, the Odyssey always refers to “Bright-eyed Athena” even when she is tired or weeping. Like all good participatory journalism it reads like a long story from a good friend who just came back from an adventure. I’d recommend it for the beach or the plane ride on the way.

[1] From Amazon: “In the mid-'60s, Plimpton joined the Detroit Lions at their preseason camp as a 36-year-old rookie quarterback wannabe, and stuck with the club through an intra-squad game before the paying public a month later.”
[2] Fear & Loathing is not participatory in the sense that he raced in his assignment’s putative subject (the Mint 400) but is instead about his experience getting so high that it’s often said that the most amazing aspect of the book is that he was able to write or remember anything at all.
[3] While technically a work of fiction, I don’t begrudge Dahl’s invention for its departure from reality. Henry’s Sugar’s ability to see through cards after 3 years of fierce concentration staring into a candle is not something I could ever achieve. Then again, the idea of going on a week-long drug binge in Las Vegas (and living to tell the tale), becoming a highly-paid escort in New York, or learning to memorize a deck of playing cards in 90 seconds all seem equally remote. I don’t discount Henry Sugar’s magical realism because all of this participatory journalism has an air of realistic magic to it.

[4] Jonathan Foer wrote Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close while Franklin Foer was the editor of The New Republic.

Taking an Investment from Chile

2011-03-07T22:25:00.004-05:00

Last year my cofounders and I joined StartUp Chile, an incubator run by the Chilean government and headquartered in Santiago (I wrote about that experience on Quora). We learned a lot, met some very interesting people, built a prototype and tried to do some fundraising in Chile.[1] This is a brief summary of what I learned about the Chilean investment landscape and how it differs from the one we knew better here in the Bay Area. As they say, venture capital is local, and Chile is no exception. Just as New York is different from San Francisco is different from London, Chile has its own idiosyncrasies and standards. The three main differences from San Francisco were in processes, experience, and government leverage.

Processes
There are few venture capitalists in Chile and they are all relatively new. Most raised their first venture capital fund in 2008 or later, although several were involved in later-stage investments in the past. While Chile has long had policies that were very welcoming to new business, much of their innovation has been driven by larger companies, firms entering the Latin American market, or companies started by independently wealthy individuals. A robust angel marketplace does not exist in Chile yet. While some wealthy individuals might invest in an entrepreneur, there aren’t standard terms and there certainly aren’t expectations like there are in Silicon Valley of convertible notes. A result of this newness is that decisions seemed to be taken slowly. We heard that an average timeline for funding was four to six months.

Most companies in the StartUp Chile program were incorporated in other countries and will need to create a Chilean subsidiary in order to take Chilean investment. More about why that is in the “Government Leverage” section below. The process usually takes at least a month (more if the company doesn’t have people on the ground in Santiago pushing the application forward).

Experience
Being in the VC business for a long time gives you experience with being a venture capitalist and lets you build connections to other VCs.

The venture capitalists we met with all seemed like very bright businessmen (all were men; we also met several wealthy individuals who considered acting as angels which included some women). While as of December 2010 none of the VCs had gotten to an exit or a Series B for any of their portfolio companies, we saw nothing to indicate that they weren’t managing their investments well. Everyone we met had significant business experience and was spoken of highly by their portfolio companies.

Chilean VCs have some connections to Silicon Valley (they invested in Bling Nation (opens .pdf), for instance), but as a result of distance they naturally are connected more to the Chilean marketplace than the San Francisco ecosystem. I really didn’t see many links to the New York media scene or the Boston biotech scene, but then again we weren’t pitching that kind of business so its natural that we didn’t see any evidence.

Government leverage
The Chilean government has several programs to encourage investment in innovation.[2] One program was called “F-3.” It provides a forgivable loan of up to three times a fund’s total value, provided its deployed within 24 months and used within Chile. So for instance, let’s say I create a new fund: Deadly Fine Wealth (DFW), get commitments for $10M and file paperwork with the government by April 2011. CORFO[3] will loan RockChile up to $30M. The money won’t be distributed to DFW until the investors cash has been invested and must be used within two years (by March 2013 in this example). So if I decide to invest $4M in a new tennis academy, I call in $1M of my investor’s money & CORFO provides the other $3M. The loans carry an interest rate of near, or slightly above prime. They must be paid back as the fund goes through exits, but can be forgiven if the fund does not make money. So, if DFW invest all $10M in tennis academies, a new talk radio station, and a new cruise line and all the businesses go bust, the fund doesn’t have to pay back anything. If the cruise line turns into a winner and they get a $5B exit, the loans must be paid back in full. If, however, the fund’s returns are something below the cost of the loans (including interest) all of that money goes back to CORFO. An additional caveat is that the money distributed through CORFO must remain in Chile. This doesn’t mean that the company couldn’t be based in the US, but it does mean that the company would need to have a presence (like a development office or a customer service center) in Chile that would spend the CORFO money.[4]

This creates some interesting incentives. The first (and most intended) consequence is that by giving VCs leverage they’re more willing to invest in businesses and willing to commit more money at higher valuations than they would otherwise. That, in turn, is meant to encourage more entrepreneurs to start companies. The second (possibly unintended) consequence is that the funds don’t get anything until their returns have exceeded the CORFO loan threshold. Venture capital is already a hit-driven business, and this makes it more so. The result is that they may push their portfolio companies to take bigger risks, even if it decreases the overall chance of success. The third (definitely unintended) consequence is that a fund could find itself ambivalent about the outcome of its last portfolio companies. For instance, suppose the DFW fund above invested $40M in 10 different companies for a 33% stake in each, and that nine of them went bankrupt over a period of five years. DFW could find itself on the hook for $40M in loans (the $30M with interest), which would mean that its last company would need an exit above $120M in order for them to make money. While rational, a decision to ignore an investment that might make a $100M exit is not what CORFO intended.

To try to address this problem, the government created a new program called K-1[5]. K-1 is a convertible equity instrument for up to 1.5 times the VC’s investment that can be turned into debt on the fund level. Let’s take DFW with $10M again. If they were to invest $2.5M in a new video delivery service at a pre-money valuation of $2.5M, their investors would provide $1M and CORFO would provide $1.5M. DFW would own 20% of the company and CORFO would own 30%. If the company sold a month later for $50M, DFW would get back $10M and CORFO would get $15M. However, DFW would have the option to convert all of CORFO’s equity into debt at ~prime, but only if the fund did it for all of its portfolio companies. This means that if most of the companies in a portfolio have gone bankrupt, the VC can still extract some value from its successes, but if one or more of the companies is wildly successful the VC can also capture most of that upside.

I hope this is helpful to companies in the StartUp Chile program or considering applying to it. I’m sure I’ve gotten some of the details of these programs wrong; my apologies. I’ll try to update this as I (others) identify mistakes.

[1] We talked to four venture capital firms, which I believe are the main ones:

Aurus http://www.aurus.cl/
Austral http://www.australcap.com/ (they also have an office in San Francisco: http://www.australcap.com/austral-california )
Copec-UC http://www.fondocopecuc.cl/ -- a fund of Universidad Católica in Chile
Equitas http://www.equitas.cl/

We also talked to about a half-dozen Chilean angels.
[2] I’m not a lawyer, and my understanding of the program is certainly incomplete. I’m putting down some thoughts here as a start.
[3] CORFO is the Chilean government agency that implements policies related to entrepreneurship and innovation. http://www.corfo.cl/ For instance, it is CORFO who funds StartUp Chile.
[4] It is unclear to me how strictly this rule was enforced.
[5] My understanding of these details is very weak. I think I’ve got the general form of the instrument right, but I could be wrong about major details.

New Word: Gourmandise

2011-02-07T15:37:00.002-05:00

My friend Nicolas taught me a new word that I think should find its way into the English language: Gourmandise (noun). It has the same root as “gourmet” and refers to that final bit of food (usually sweet) served well after you’re full, that is nonetheless too delicious to ignore. Typical examples: a small piece of chocolate, a macaroon, a small chocolate chip cookie given with the bill.

“We were totally stuffed, but the waiter brought some gourmandise with the bill. This is why I’ll never lose those 10 pounds.”

No One From Porlock Can Be Blamed For the Quality of This Post

2011-01-14T10:25:00.003-05:00

I woke up this morning to discover that I'd written a limerick in my sleep.

When I was in my third year at Vassar
I traveled to Chandrapahassar
I was packing my stuff
But then things got tough
When I realized I'd lost my passport

There was only one way out to pursue
A kite-flying contest was due!
We took to the air
With the wind in our hair
Each aiming for judicial review

The field went through diminution
Til only us two sought restitution
I won handily
(there was a trophy for me!)
And thereby achieved resolution

This isn't super high-quality stuff, but I was super impressed that I'd created anything in a dream state and managed to bring it back to the waking world. Happily I got it all down without interruption.

A Theory of Air Travel Agony

2011-01-12T16:54:00.002-05:00

Stories about bad experiences with air travel are dull because everybody has them. Every trip involves indignities, personal slights, and some discomfort. I keep perspective by trying to quantify how bad things are getting. My trips all start with 2 points. Then I adjust based on my mood, what happens, and what I expect. So, for instance: going on vacation? +1; Traveling with someone I like? +1 -- these things help buffer the unpleasantness. Screaming child? -1. No seats in the waiting area? -1 No outlets in the waiting area? 0 (I don’t expect there to be any; laptops have been around for fewer years than most airports).

Using this system, my worst flight ever was BOS-SFO on United. It was terrible, but I know that most of that was because of baggage I brought to the party.

Here’s an example from a flight I took from Boston to Aruba.
Base score: 2
Vacation: +1
Glow of getting a cheap awesome vacation: +1
Seats with the smallest pitch I’ve ever seen (seriously -- like <20”): -1
Screaming child: -1
2-hour flight delay: -1
Net: 1. Despite no legroom and a screaming child, this flight was a win.

I started tracking this a few months ago. What I realized was that I was virtually guaranteed to have a miserable experience from time to time but that very little was the result of company decisions by airlines (and therefore, very little could be avoided by avoiding particular carriers). Sometimes agents are mean, and sometimes policies suck (but they’re usually industry-wide). It’s a relaxing thing to remember: whether a flight is terrible or awesome, it’s mostly in my head.

Ping Playlists' "Buy All" button does not work

2010-12-18T12:58:00.006-05:00

I bought Alex Bain's excellent annual Christmas playlist through Ping on iTunes yesterday. I was excited that iTunes finally has a "buy all" button for shared playlists. I was less excited when I saw how it worked.

Ping allows you to download all items in a playlist, but it adds no data to them so when they arrive in your music folder they're completely out of order from the way the original playlist was organized. Much has been written about the failure of Ping and I feel bad about piling on, but this is a pretty basic problem: shared playlists are both a collection of songs and an *arrangement* of songs. To sell the group but not the arrangement is a massive fail & I think they would have been better off not offering the "Buy All" button. To re-create the list I took two screenshots of the ping page (I needed two since it scrolls after 15 songs) and displayed them as photos so I could alt-tab between the photo of the original list and my new playlist (staying in iTunes would have meant an awful lot of mouse back-and-forth between Ping and a buried playlist). It's the sort of ugly solution I don't expect from Apple.

All told, the purchase process took me about an hour last year, and about half an hour this year. It was totally worth it for me, but that's mainly because I think so highly of my friend's Christmas music curation skills. For other playlists shared this way, I think I'd pass, which is too bad for me and too bad for Apple.

Creating an "Innovation 8"

2010-12-11T16:50:00.004-05:00

Last week we met with Nicolas Shea, the personal assistant to Chile’s Minister of Economy. He’d just returned from a trip to Israel to learn about the programs Israel sponsored to increase innovation and bring some of those lessons back to Chile. One idea he was thinking about when he came back was creating an “I8,” playing on the idea of the G8. The “I8” would include eight countries focused on encouraging innovation in their country. I8 forums would offer an opportunity to exchange best practices and find ways to work together -- they would foster and expand their countries’ innovative capacity in the same way that the G8 meets to discuss issues of broad mutual concern.

A draft list of the I8:

Chile
Ireland
Israel
Singapore
Finland
Slovenia
New Zealand
Someone from Africa -- Kenya, Rawanda, South Africa?

It seems like a good list of countries that are aspirationally innovative (even if they’re not the top 8 today). We decided to do some research and see if we could come up with a good answer for the eighth country. My friend Albert suggested that the African entry should be Kenya or Rawanda, based on their low corruption, high education, and stated goals around innovation (for instance, Kenya’s Vision 2030 plan)

In the process of discussing this, Albert taught me about innovation measure like INSEAD's Global Innovation Index (GII) (pdf) and the World Economic Forum ranking on global competitiveness (pdf), which can be used as a proxy for business sophistication. It’s interesting that there’s a gap between developed business infrastructure & innovation readiness. For instance, Italy has highly developed business infrastructure, but deep issues that hold back innovation while somewhere like Kenya has less business infrastructure but does a relatively good job of encouraging new companies.

I like the idea of an Innovation 8. I hope it becomes a reality.

From Ramen to Riches

2010-12-02T14:53:00.002-05:00

We met the founders of Needish, a Chilean company that launched ClanDescuento, a GroupOn clone that was eventually acquired by GroupOn to run its South American operations.

The founders were extremely humble. They talked about raising $500k for 10% of their company Needish three years ago on the strength of a PowerPoint presentation and 2,000 users. The site was a personal service lead generation engine. People would ask “Where can I find a plumber to install a new sink?” and Needish would charge a plumber to answer (and presumably get the job).

Two years in, they’d gotten up to two million users and started looking for additional funding, but the business just wasn’t getting the traction they’d hoped for. They were running out of money and distributing equity widely to employees in lieu of cash compensation, which grew their “founding” team from two to six. They were on the verge of shutting down when they heard about GroupOn and decided to copy the business model in Chile. That was in January 2010. They built the product in about 6 weeks, got delayed by a magnitude 8.8 earthquake at the end of February, and launched at the end of March. At this point they had 8 employees. They booked $10,000 of revenue the first day and never looked back.

By June they were trying to fundraise again, but the deal fell apart as rumors of a big GroupOn deal swirled. GroupOn ended up buying CityDeals (the most successful European GroupOn clone), apparently deciding that it was easier to buy their way into international markets, rather than come in as a minor player later and try to dislodge an incumbent.

Later that month later GroupOn bought ClanDescuento[1], and by the end of November, they’d grown from 8 dejected employees in Chile, about to close up shop to 350 employees across all of Latin America and a grand success story.

Nearly every class in business school told a story like the one above about difficult times and difficult choices. There was always a lesson. I’m not sure what to take away from this story other than “keep persevering.” The longer you stay in business and keep pivoting, the more likely it is that you’ll land on a business model that works. That the business model they found worked quite as well as it did may have been luck, but they put themselves in a position to take advantage of the lucky break by refusing to give up.

1. How did they become the leading GroupOn clone in Chile? The buzz is that they may have been doing some pretty spam-y email marketing. If that’s true, they don’t appear to have paid a penalty for it.

Why the extra label on Dogfish Head specialty beers?

2010-11-29T21:08:00.005-05:00

Most national beer brands attach two labels to their bottles -- one on the largest part of the bottle and another on the neck. Small breweries tend to just use one label because the added cost of the second label (materials, machinery, and the complexity of alignment) isn’t worth it to them.

It’s interesting to see that Dogfish Head usually follows this rule, but doesn’t for certain beers. The Dogfish Head 60-minute IPA is their flagship product. It’s 5% alcohol, sold in 6-packs, and has a single label. Their 90-minute IPA is also very popular, but is 9% alcohol. It’s sold in 4-packs for around the same price and has two labels. Why the extra label?

At first I thought it was to prevent people from sneaking the 90-minute IPA bottles into a 60-minute 6-pack, but now that I look at it, they have different color caps as well. So, why does Dogfish Head have that extra label?

Who Will Buy Cisco's Umi?

2010-11-27T10:34:00.004-05:00

Cisco is marketing their Umi (telepresence) service to consumers, but they've set the price at $600 + $25/month. They’ve signed Ellen Paige and a series of extras who look like maybe they had the idea for Windows 7 to help promote it.

I can't imagine who their intended customer is. Certainly not the tech-savvy-looking people in their ads; they've already got Skype for a $50 webcam + $0/month.

The only people I can imagine doing this are the very rich who have a tech person who maintains their portfolio of technical devices. A video conferencing system could be the latest “must-have” feature for luxury renovations. Even then, it’s a challenge since it requires the other end to have the system as well.

I could imagine a use-case for parents / grandparents to use this on one end with children / grandchildren using it on the other. But, if the grandkid is competent enough to set up Umi, she’s probably competent enough to show grandpa how to turn on the computer, with Skype auto-starting and auto-logging in. Maybe that’s a lot of work, but then again, maybe we want video chatting to be harder than phone calls.

I’m sure Cisco will sell some of these systems. I just don’t understand who will buy them.

Today is not Thanksgiving

2010-11-25T09:48:00.002-05:00

Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays. It’s one of the few that’s observed by the entire country (store closings are second only to Christmas), but what really stands out for me is that it’s our most celebrated national holiday. Everywhere else in the world, today is just another Thursday.

I’m having just another Thursday in Santiago, Chile. The only evidence I have that today is a holiday is that my Twitter and Facebook are getting fewer posts than normal.

My CruiseWise cofounders here have offered to do something to celebrate Thanksgiving. They’ve both come to the U.S. in the last few years, so it’s interesting to hear them talk about their Thanksgiving experiences. One said he didn’t think he’d really gotten the full experience because all he’d done was sat around and eaten too much with some of his friends. It took me a minute, but I realized: that’s exactly what Thanksgiving *is.*

Thanksgiving has no ceremonies, no requirements for any day but Thursday, and that one requirement is that you eat with people you like. I used to associate Thanksgiving with returning home, seeing family, and meeting up with childhood friends, but now that I don’t go back to Iowa every year, I think of it as a very long weekend that demands nothing of me but dinner. Say what you will about turkey, but I think friends, family, and relaxation are the essence of the day. Even WikiHow’s article on how to celebrate Thanksgiving uses half its space to discuss food and the other half describing how to relax in different ways!

That’s why I’m not ‘doing anything’ for Thanksgiving this year when I’m half a world away. There are no ceremonies to pantomime and expressing the true meaning of the holiday would mean spending the next four days lounging around. I think we’ll keep building a product instead.

Unintentional ease

2010-11-21T16:20:00.003-05:00

The most interesting thing I learned today was that the GRE vocabulary section produces bi-modal results for most French students. The GRE is a computer-adaptive test; it gets harder or easier based on how well you've done. It's meant to more accurately measure ability if fewer questions by reducing the number of very easy or very hard questions for each test taker (in other words, it reduces the questions that a student is almost certainly going to get right or almost certainly going to get wrong).

What my co-founder Nicolas said, though, is that the first few questions were relatively hard for French speakers, but then got progressively easier if they did well. The esoteric vocabulary words with obscure latin roots were just part of his normal French vocabulary! But, if he got the first few questions wrong, the test fed him progressively shorter, and generally Saxon words that were unfamiliar.

Probably not what the test-makers had in mind.

Whaelstrom

2010-11-15T19:24:00.003-05:00

New word today:

whaelstrom (noun): an event or series of events that cause a surge of traffic to Twitter, effectively shutting it down, i.e., a maelstrom of tweets that cause a whale storm. Whaelstrom is a portmanteau combining maelstrom and whale storm. For instance, "Why is Twitter down? Oh, the Justin Beiber - Britney Spears duet just caused a whaelstrom."

A maelstrom is a restless, disordered, or tumultuous state of affairs (from the original, "a large, powerful, or violent whirlpool").

A whale storm is a failure across Twitter that produces Fail Whales for a large number of users. It can be caused by high use or by technical issues.

Forever stamps are not a good financial investment

2010-05-15T12:48:00.004-04:00

The US Post Office's "Forever" stamps have seemed like a pretty good buy these days. It's seemed like the cost of postage has gone up substantially in recent years.

Of course, this needs to be adjusted for inflation. Over such a long time, the deflation measure you choose makes quite a difference. From my perspective, I care most about a consumer price index. Unfortunately, once you adjust for inflation, it appears that the real cost of stamps has been pretty steady. In other words, if you'd bought a "Forever" stamp in 1958 and your friend bought an instrument that would return inflation-level returns that same year, by 2009 you'd still have a valid stamp and he'd have just enough money to buy a stamp today.

But here's the thing -- for the post office, the future is not like the past. Mail volumes have been plummetting and USPS is under serious financial stress. Maybe that means that there will be further increases in stamp prices that will make "Forever" stamps a good buy. Or maybe they'll reduce services, making the "Forever" stamps less useful. Either way, the purchase is worth it for me because of the reduced hassle, even if they're not a good financial instrument.

Choosing My Own Adventure

2010-03-21T18:06:00.005-04:00

Growing up, I was a big fan of Choose Your Own Adventure books. I’d been thinking about doing something with CYOA principles for a while, and during a 2009 vacation I started the project. Over the next couple of months it became a "20% project" for my free time. Here’s the result: A Tweet Your Own Adventure … on Twitter! I'm SteveD503 on Twitter, and this post explains how TYOA came to be.

Choose Your Own Adventure is cool

Choose Your Own Adventure seems to be experiencing a resurgence lately. It was just last year that the series turned 30. This amazing animation of the several CYOA books by Christian Swinehart appeared last year, and I’ve seen a couple visualizations of CYOA books recently. The Choose Your Own Adventure people even have their own Twitter page now. Interestingly, they chose almost the same logo as I did, but with the distinctive “A” from their font. It also looks a little like they took the “O” (and design/color scheme) from Robert Indiana’s “LOVE” sculpture. I was a little less inspired – I just wanted to fit all four letters in a square and used Arial because it was my default typeface.

Getting started

To prepare, I graphed out the story from Choose Your Own Adventure #98: You Are A Millionaire to understand how the stories worked. It looked like most threads had 6-9 choices and there were about 20 endings. There was one place where you could rejoin a storyline, but most of the threads continued straight to their end.

On my vacation, Matt Couch and I went to the library and brainstormed all the things that we’ve had happen or almost happened to us on Friday nights out to come up with a list of ~30-40 endings. We weeded out the unreasonable ones, grouped the remainder into endings that could be reached through similar evenings, and built a tree of choices that led to each:

The final result was a neater tree that looks like this (the page numbers don’t match up because I randomized them before I published on Twitter to give it more of the CYOA feel):

The story ended up having 91 pages and is made up of 1,350 tweets (It’s not Page_01 to Page_94, though – some of the pages were already taken when I started).

Other TYOA attempts

After writing the story, I went back and thought about the mechanics of how I wanted to publish it. I wanted to use Twitter in an unconventional way. There are a TYOA efforts already out there, but I thought there was room to innovate. There’s one person publishing a choose your own adventure using a single account and relying on user feedback. It only lets you go through one thread, though, and requires the reader’s attention over a long period of time. I wanted to let users find their way at their own pace. There’s also a group that tried to let people roll their own adventures on Twitter using its search function. Unfortunately, this requires an enormous amount of user-work, and reliance on the Twitter search function means that the stories only persist for about two weeks. As of this writing, their hashtag (#TYOA) did not appear in Twitter’s search results. Jonah Peretti did his own version, but it looks a little more proof-of-concept than fully-baked story. It has some neat ideas, like using bit.ly links to make each ‘page’ a new webpage, which allows easy (if messy) backtracking. It also eats up almost 40 characters for the 'next' options.

The nuts and bolts

I did a few things to make the story more engaging. In addition to the main storyline, each page has a link to something related where people would normally put their “Web” link. I also tried to include an occasional link or picture instead of just text, and shortened all the pages so that none of them were 20+ tweets (after 19 tweets, twitter.com hides the remaining tweets, forcing you to click “more”). There's also extra content, both in the 'bio' links of every page and in some hidden pages.

After putting up the first few pages, I realized I hadn’t given much thought to virality. I believe in the idea that virality is all about making your users look awesome in front of their friends and thought about ways that readers could publish their experience to their friends. I settled on a retweetable conclusion that users could retweet from their stories.

I know that most of Twitter’s traffic doesn’t go through the website, so I tested out TYOA on a few different platforms. It works better in some than in others.

I hope you enjoy the story! Send me feedback if you’re interested. I’m SteveD503. If you’re ready to get started, go ahead and Turn to @Page_01!

Nice job, eh

2010-03-17T20:13:00.002-04:00

A few weeks ago I claimed that Canada hadn’t optimized its portfolio properly. Now that the Olympics are over, I can answer the question more definitively. Did Canada “Own the Podium?” Yes. According to the IOC’s convention, Canada ‘won’ the Olympics by winning the greatest number of golds.

Did they do so in a cost effective manner? That’s harder to answer. According to Own the Podium’s website Canada spent CDN$70M in pursuit of their 14 gold medals, or about CDN$5M per gold. However, they spent only CDN$14M on the 7 gold medals they won in 2006 (CDN$2M per gold). That makes sense because there’s some level of medal-winning to be expected even with no government support (e.g., the hockey team’s players were developed by amateur and professional leagues). It also makes intuitive sense that additional medals would take more effort to win if Canada had been deploying its resources effectively in the past (i.e., spending on the sports that were cheapest to win). In the end, those additional 7 golds cost CDN$55M extra – an incremental cost of CDN$8M per gold medal. That seems like a lot.

To put things in perspective, though, the operational budget for the Olympics ran to CDN$1.75B, which would make “Own the Podium” expenses 4% of the budget. In that context, Canada did just fine. They made a relatively small incremental investment and became the first host country to win the Winter Olympics gold medal count since Norway did in 1952. Nice job, eh?

How Canada's Plans to "Own the Podium" Failed

2010-02-23T15:05:00.002-05:00

This year at the 2010 winter Olympics, Canada made moves to shed its humble image just a bit with a program they titled "Own the Podium." China was successful with a similar program called "Project 119" during their 2008 Olympic hosting, in part because of their willingness to invest heavily in relatively unpopular, but highly medalled categories.

But, Canada has largely failed to win medals, and Nate Silver suggests it has to do with their investment strategy. A quick graph illustrates this nicely:

Canada has over-invested (relative to the medal count) in its "heritage" sports like curling and hockey and under-invested in sports like biathlon and cross-country skiing -- sports that would be good targets both because they are medal-rich and because they are not professionalized.

You might expect to see an investment strategy based on those two criteria:

High medal density: each dollar spent will increase the odds of winning several medals at once
Lack of professional financial support: each marginal dollar spent will have a greater impact

That's just not what we see in the graph. Instead, it appears that they're just trying to avoid the embarrassment of losing in their traditional areas of strength. Ironically, by setting less amitious objectives, Canada increased the chance that it could all go sideways with a single loss.

It looks like "Own the Podium" was more about avoiding embarrassment than dominating the competition. How Canadian.

VCs' blogs do not appear to drive web traffic to their funds

2010-02-04T12:05:00.004-05:00

A classmate of mine from HBS, Rob Go put up an interesting post yesterday about the relationship between venture capitalists’ website traffic and blog traffic. In short, he found that there was very little correlation between the two. I thought a graph might clarify the data:

It appears that most VCs are tightly clustered around 10,000 hits/month to their websites (Sequoia and First Round Capital standing as outliers, but excluding those, the standard deviation was ~2,000 hits). What Rob (and I) found surprising was that while blog traffic varied widely, it didn’t appear to affect website traffic.[1] If we assume that website traffic is a loose proxy for entrepreneurs’ interest in a fund (as opposed to blog traffic, which seems to indicate interest in the person writing), that seems to indicate that blogs may be building independent brands for the entrepreneurs, but it doesn’t (from this data) appear to be increasing deal flow.[2]

This really isn’t enough data to draw a conclusion, but it does raise the question for me: “If not increasing interest in their fund, what value do VCs’ blogs deliver?”

1. The best fit trendlines are all negative (i.e., a negative correlation between website and blog traffic), and statistically insignificant (R-squared<.1). This remains true even when removing the sites with zero blog traffic or when removing the website traffic outliers.

2. Yes, website traffic is a *very* loose proxy. Yes, the blogs could be delivering value by helping entrepreneurs focus on the funds more suited to them, lowering website traffic, but increasing lead quality. But, website traffic still seems like a very preliminary step in investigating a fund; I’m surprised there isn’t a stronger correlation.

In defense of Incandescence

2010-01-29T21:13:00.005-05:00

A few days ago, @ataussig pointed out that 75% of Americans unaware that most incandescent light bulbs will become illegal starting in 2012-14. I was certainly among the ignorant. I know that environmentalists have been pretty excited about CFLs (compact fluorescent lamps). I’m not.

I’m not against CFLs because I don’t believe the energy savings math.[1]

The mercury content gives me some pause, but doesn't tip the scale. Mercury poisoning is bad, and it doesn't take much to hurt you. Mercury from CFLs gets into the environment when people throw them away.[2] But, CFLs also get mercury into your environment when they break. Check out the EPA’s 206-page study on how to clean up a broken CFL while minimizing toxicity risk from mercury poisoning. For parents that go nuts about what food additives their kids eat, I’m surprised there isn’t more concern over the mercury in CFLs.

No, the real reason I oppose a switch from incandescence to fluorescence is that it just looks terrible.[3] Fluorescents produce more green and less red hues, making everyone look vaguely diseased (lighting experts call this “cool” light). I’m willing to compromise environmentally in other areas of my life, but destroying my visual environment after sundown just isn’t worth it.

The new incandescent ban doesn't seem to be based on good science or good thinking, and that makes me sad. Here's an article that can tell you more.

1. Marginal energy savings http://j.mp/aDOSxH to CFLs works out like this: 6x the energy to make; last 6-10x as long using x/4 the energy. So, the energy to use them is a wash, but energy savings from lighting the bulb is ~75%.

2. CFL Fun Fact: CFLs cannot safely be thrown out in the trash, but everyone does anyway.

3. CFLs! Now with more wan!

Closer still

2010-01-06T14:00:00.010-05:00

To continue my self-analysis of exercise routines, and specifically to follow up on my squash post, @Bain asked the following: “I'd love to see win percentage by game # within a match. I'd guess that Steve was 75% in the first two games; I was 75% in the third and fourth games, and we were even in game five.” His hypothesis sounded right to me—I also perceived that I tended to come out strong, then fade. Turns out, we were wrong again.

Here are the totals for the full set of games. I think that past the first match we've got some pretty small sample sizes and weird incentives with added on 1 or 3 game sets[1]:

But, this isn’t exactly right, since matches don’t always stretch to five games. Someone’s going to try a lot less hard in game 5 if they’ve already lost the match. In the match-relevant games[2], here is my win percentage by game:

It looks like I had a *slight* edge in game 1, Alex had the edge in 2/3 and I completely dominated Game 4 (reflecting, in part that it's often a "must-win" for me, and in part that I tend to win matches 3-1 and Alex tends to win them 3-2). A final note is that within the games that determined matches we're 44-38 in match *games* (my advantage) even though we're 10-9 in matches. I've won more matches 3-1 while Alex has won slightly more 3-2. Here's how our match scores have broken down (again, all from my perspective)[3,4]:

Put one way, Alex converts his game wins more efficiently into match wins than I do.

1. E.g., “Now that I’ve lost, let’s bet lunch that I can take game 6”*

2. (ignoring games after the match was concluded; e.g., counting only the first four of a LWLLW match -- this is why there aren't 18 games for Game 4 and Game 5)

3. There's one match missing because I recorded only that Alex won the match, not the game totals (methodologically, I also credited Alex with one game in the game totals, since you must have taken *at least* one game more than I did from the first five).

4. Also, methodologically, I’ve got two fewer match win/losses in this analysis than I did in the last one because I excluded three round robins in which we played two games against each other (result: 2-0, 1-1,0-2) for simplicity.

*Most matches included a wager on the match. A post-game Gatorade was common, as was a beer (though those rarely got redeemed). Big bets were usually lunch. Oddly, the post-match bet was often higher stakes than the first bet; e.g., a beer following a Gatorade, or the loser had to listen to a podcast of the winner’s choice or purchase and read a book of the winner’s choice.

As close as it gets

2010-01-05T23:03:00.006-05:00

I’ve been keeping a log of working out since 2003. For the last ~12 months, I’ve been recording the game-level detail of squash matches as well (e.g., WLLWL for a 2-3 loss). I’ve been playing @Bain since 2008, and we’ve made some jokes about how our matches have always seemed very even, but I realized this week that I have the data to test that. I did a quick look through my data and sent off this email to most frequent 2008-09 squash partner:

“So, what I have learned (in addition to the depressing stat that I've averaged 9.5 minutes/day of working out since December 2003) is that Alex and I are 11-10 in matches and 60-60 in games. That's pretty much as close as it gets. Awesome.”

Alex posted this to Twitter with the aside, “I'd thought it was much closer :-)”

Turns out, he was right. Alex had a suspicion that he had a huge advantage in the first few months we played, and that more recently I’ve taken charge. Nope – if that were true, you’d see his game total climb much faster than mine, then see me catch up. Not the case:

In fact, over 120 games, neither of us have ever been ahead by more than five games:

Not only that, but squash is notoriously streaky. If that were true for Alex and me, you’d expect wins to tend to be followed by wins and for losses to follow losses. Or, perhaps each win takes so much out of the winner that he tends to lose the next game. Nope, once again completely even. Following a win, I was 30-29. Our games are exactly as predictable as a fair coin: dead random.

Overanalysis of a Kindle Purchase

2009-12-31T17:12:00.004-05:00

I was thinking about buying a Kindle recently. I wanted to think through whether it would be a good economic purchase. I started with the assumption that the user experience would be identical (or at least comparable enough that I wouldn’t pay more for one than the other) and asked myself how long will it would take me to pay back the purchase of the hardware. And, will that payback period be shorter than the expected life of the device?

I looked at my Amazon purchase history for June 2008-December 2009 to assess what my book purchasing habits have been. I found 28 books that I purchased for myself.(1) I then added the four books that I purchased in physical book stores. This gave me 32 titles purchased over 18 months to consider.

I discovered that ~60% (19/32) of those titles are available on the Kindle at an average savings of $4/book.(2) If I’d bought every one of the available titles on a Kindle instead of in paper format, I would have saved $77 over 18 months—about $50/year. At $250 for the device, I’d need to keep my Kindle for 5 years to break even. That seems unreasonable, given an two-year(3) product life cycle for most of my electronics, provided that having a Kindle doesn’t change my book-purchasing behavior.(4)

Were there additional factors to consider? I would gain some value from being able to download and enjoy on a non-backlit screen many out-of-print books like Alice in Wonderland or the complete works of Shakespeare.(5) It would be easier to carry books and I wouldn’t have to wait for them to be delivered. I’d also avoid the need to ‘complete’ orders by getting them up to $25 to qualify for free shipping. Then again, I’d lose the ability to easily make notes, couldn’t loan these books to my friends, and, for those books that weren’t available on Kindle, it would be even harder to ‘complete’ the orders up to $25. It’s all pretty hard to quantify.

So, I ended up getting a Kindle. It’s great and I’m very happy with the purchase. In the end, the portability and instant delivery of books justified the cost to me. It’s a good reminder for me that the ‘economic’ justifications for most of my consumer decisions are less important than the user experience ones and that the attributes hardest to quantify can often drive purchase decisions.

1. I excluded books purchased for others – I’m unlikely to buy someone an electronic copy of a book, and even if I did, whether I could do that is controlled by whether they have a Kindle.

2. Most Kindle titles are $9.99. My purchases ranged from $7-20, with an average cost of $13—strangely this means that there was a small bias in my sample towards the cheaper books being unavailable in Kindle format.

3. I recognize that the Kindle would likely last longer, but it remains true that my devices have a habit of lasting fewer than 3 years: T41 laptop: 2.5 years, then too slow to use; T43 laptop: 20 months then too slow to use; 3rd generation iPod: 25 months then “dead Mac” face (AppleCare warranty lasted 24 months); iPod Shuffle I: 2 years, then lost; iPod Shuffle II: 2 years, then stolen; Samsung A160 phone: 7 months, then its inability to call internationally became relevant; replacement phone running Windows mobile: 18 months then died with a tiny curl of smoke; Motorola RAZR: 24 months, then dropped for an iPhone; 2G iPhone: 23.5 months, then touchscreen failed (leading to two weeks without a phone while my contract expired); 3GS iPhone: still working after 6 months. Whether through obsolescence, the appearance of a sufficiently superior product, failure, or theft, the only device I own today that has seen its third birthday is the CD player/tape deck combo I bought in middle school.

4. Anecdotally, I’ve heard people say that Kindles make reading easier, but don’t actually increase book purchasing behavior. At any rate, I’d have to believe that the device would more than double my book-buying in order for it to make economic sense.

5. How to value these marginal titles? Most can be purchased as “Penguin Classics” for $1-3. The fact that I haven’t yet, even at such low prices indicates to me that I value them very little. For the purposes of this evaluation, I’ll round that down to $0.

Red Spidering Wikipedia

2009-07-28T17:40:00.004-04:00

Occasionally websites are overwhelmed by the amount of traffic they receive. This is often the result of a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack in which thousands of computers all try to connect to the website at once. However, sometimes it happens as a result of a popular site (one with millions of visitors) linking directly to a much smaller site, unprepared to deal with the traffic.

This is sometimes called the Slashdot Effect for the popular metablog, Slashdot, although other phrases like being “Farked,” “Drudged” or “Wanged” are also common. Slashdotting can overwhelm a server, or it could just represent a large increase in traffic. What I found interesting recently was that the comic xkcd produced a similar bump in traffic, but without a link. This comic from a few months ago referenced the Voynich Manuscript, a 15th century undeciphered illustrated book.

xkcd is known for a geeky following, but this was a bit too obscure. Wikirank shows a 10,000% increase in wikipedia traffic.

I’d call this indirect effect “red spidering” or “a velociraptor attack.”

Infinite Failure meets Unbounded Optimism

2009-07-18T16:52:00.009-04:00

I've been participating in Infinite Summer, a challenge to read David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest during 2009's 13 weeks of summer. I greatly enjoyed his nonfiction books, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again and Consider the Lobster, so I figured I'd give Infinite Jest a chance. Here's the rub: it's more than 1,000 pages long.

Infinite Summer set up a schedule to help people get through it (as well as some great content guides and guest posts by authors, professors, etc.). My problem is that after a strong start, I seem to be falling behind (a real problem, with constant reminers from my friends on Twitter using #infsum).

I'm falling behind at my current rate, and slowing down: a deadly combination. Nevertheless, my Infinite (-related) Failure can be overcome by Unbounded Optimism today (and every day that I haven't yet caught up)....

Twitter is Addictive OR Public Commitment Dooms the Outcome

2009-07-01T22:12:00.005-04:00

I noticed a while back that my Twitter usage was following a very predictable upward swing, thanks to the enlightening data-driven TweetStats. That’s basically a full year of upward trending. I’ve never been so consistent about anything.

I increased my Twitter usage because my network grew (more time spent with the app), I got in the habit of posting more (better at tweeting, and better at thinking to myself, “I should tweet this), and because I expanded my usage (more @ responses and more direct messages).

Sometimes people want to restrict their Twitter usage. For instance, in April Amy Senger (@sengseng) said she wanted to tweet less to spend more time with the real world. There may have been some problems with this statement, though. First, “tweet less” turned out to describe a trend, not a decision. Second, her method (Reducing followers to reduce @ responses) didn’t address the urge to tweet. The result? An initial commitment that gradually fades.

Perhaps the public commitment to tweeting less was the act that doomed the outcome (and it seems especially true given that usage decreased right up until the moment of public declaration). Then again, maybe Twitter’s just too addictive to quit.

Cambridge Brewing Company has Perfect Coasters

2009-06-27T11:27:00.011-04:00

Last night I had a beer with my father and two of my friends at the Cambridge Brewing Company. When we first got there, we commented on how much we like their logo of three beer beer rings. It's classic, communicates the brand perfectly, and unlike most coasters, is free of advertising.

Of course, with coasters like that, we were going to have to turn them over and draw graphs. One of my friends quit his job recently to move to San Francisco and just yesterday came to the realization that his living expenses are about to go up 30% (Boston to San Fracisco move) while his income goes down 100%. He's excited about the change.

Just saying it out loud gets the point across, but somehow these graphs always get made in both draft form (back of a coaster) and polished form (PowerPoint). The high quality, adverising free, blank-on-one-side coasters at the Cambridge Brewing Company are a wonderful thing. It's funny how something done in pen on a coaster in 30 seconds can be more compelling than something done in PowerPoint in 10 minutes....

Emoticonnections

2009-04-22T16:44:00.001-04:00

I’m generally scared of change. I’ve been a late adopter of, among other things, email, the Internet, cell phones, and girls. And, dubious Lincoln-era claim aside, emoticons are a recent innovation. So, it was with some trepidation that I started using emoticons. Now that I have, the embrace has changed me.

Once I do get into a trend, though, I tend to get in deep (e.g., despite being late to the cell phone party, I got an iPhone the first day it came out and now that I’m on the technology bandwagon, I’m a Twitter evangelist with @SteveD503). I worried that by using emoticons I was acting like a middle school student, and given my past, I’d be unable to stop. And yet, their adoption signals something important: emoticons are useful! They add some of the non-verbal cues that are lost in electronic communication.

I started small with the generic smiley :-) and gradually moved to the cuter wink smiley ;-) I still work with a limited set, more because I fear using an ambiguous emoticon that my listener won’t recognize. However, I have added the beaming smile :-D and the squinting eye grin ^_^

This is where things started to get strange. The beam wasn’t altogether new for me (it partially supplanted “*beam*” for me in emails), but using it made me think about “beaming” more often while I communicated, both by email and in speech. Now I’m breaking out the ear-to-ear more often in real life. My brain has actually been rewired by cleverly arranged punctuation. Unexpected.

The importance of asking questions

2009-04-01T19:15:00.003-04:00

I’ve been giving a lot of presentations recently at work. We’re rolling out a Six Sigma-like cost savings methodology across a large corporate client and so I’ve sat down with groups of 3-30 a couple times per day to explain what it entails. After about 30 iterations, I’ve got the information-giving down pat. But, I’ve given presentations before. What I’ve been reflecting on recently is the importance of asking questions at the end.

Questions are important to help listeners clarify the material, but they also help listeners demonstrate understanding and set themselves apart from the other members of the audience.

I hit the end of the presentation after 20 minutes, which leaves about ten minutes for questions. My audience often take this as an invitation for further information to flow from the presenter to the participants. This is partly true, but not entirely. If, at the end of a presentation, someone’s unclear on some part of what’s been explained, by all means they should ask a question (but only if they’re reasonably certain that their confusion is at least somewhat universal, to avoid wasting everyone’s time. If they can’t tell, they probably should ask later, in private). A well-asked question serves both the questioner and the audience, as they all learn something.

However, a different sort of question is also available. Asking about an implication of the presentation or a subtle detail that might have been overlooked can demonstrate to the presenter that someone has paid attention and is engaged with the material. This can accumulate into awareness if the same person asks that sort of question in several presentations over time. Of course, there’s a danger that the questioner can end up wasting time with a question just meant to score points. It’s a technique to be used sparingly.

Maybe this is all just a cry for greater engagement from my audiences.

My 20s

2009-02-26T13:39:00.005-05:00

I realized most of my achievements have been all about my 20s.

1st grade: Sit still for 20 minutes
High school: Debate with a 20-argument case
College: Write a 20-page paper
First job: Present a 20-slide deck
Business school: Persuade with 20-second statements
Today: Tweet 20-word sentences

It looks like I reached peak verbosity in college with information density increasing (I hope) ever since.

I'm less popular than "Current Resident"

2008-12-04T16:09:00.004-05:00

Sarah gets a fair bit of mail based on her professional status. Every day brings at least one piece of mail offering her (what seems like) enormous sums of money to come be a surgeon in a desperately unattractive location. They seem unable to screen for the fact that she’s currently in year two of a six-year program. She also subscribes to several journals and magazines. I, on the other hand, receive household bills and little else. The result? Sarah gets more than ten times as much mail as I do. In fact, we receive more mail addressed to “Current Resident” than to “Steve Davis.” I only received more mail than this accursed “Resident” on two days out of the last 30. Sigh.

Californians more motivated by Gay Marriage than Obama v. McCain

2008-11-05T15:47:00.005-05:00

With nearly the entire vote in, California has produced a very stranger result. Residents had the opportunity to vote in the presidential race as well as on 12 statewide propositions and a number of local and regional elections. Turnout in presidential elections is normally up compared to non-presidential years, and is partially driven by people who vote for president, but leave the rest of their ballot blank.

However, this year, it appears that an even larger number of people turned out to vote exclusively on Proposition 8 (from the LA Times with 95.4% reporting).

I can imagine the sort of person who would cast a presidential-only ballot, but fail to read through the propositions. I have much more difficulty imagining the ~30,000 people who went in to vote on just Proposition 8, and while they were there, decided not to fill in a bubble for president.

My personal search for alpha

2008-10-30T11:57:00.010-04:00

My earliest experience investing didn’t go so well, but that didn’t completely crush my belief that there’s alpha out there somewhere. I know, for instance, that top venture capitalists have consistently delivered higher (risk-adjusted) performance than other securities (The full argument can be found in Paul Gompers and Josh Lerner’s The Venture Capital Cycle). But that doesn’t seem to be true of mutual funds. What’s the difference? It looks like venture capitalists get to take advantage of network effects (the best VCs have lots of connections, making them better, giving them more connections, adding up to a substantial advantage over median VCs), and market illiquidity (there are very few VCs (and fewer “excellent VCs) providing funding for an enormous number of potential entrepreneurs). These two factors add up to a unique (non-public) informational advantage and strong bargaining power. Mutual funds, on the other hand, rely on mostly public information and trade primarily in liquid markets.

“Illiquid markets and unique information” sounds like a scam, but if venture capitalists can do it, maybe there are opportunities to be found in other areas as well. After reading Amarillo Slim's amusing biography, I realized I’d already participated in a number of illiquid markets, including some with unique information whenever I engaged in proposition betting -- e.g. wagering on who would win a basketball game or which member of our dinner party would arrive next. The reason why these are so lucrative is not only because people don’t always judge probability well and are risk averse, but also because entry into these bets is restricted, making the market illiquid (ultimately allowing 'incorrect' prices and, therefore, high expected returns/high expected losses for the participants).

For instance, in a class I had a few years ago, a professor was explaining expected value and decision trees with the following game: "You pay $2 for a chance to flip a coin. If it comes up heads, you get nothing; tails you get the opportunity to pay $2 to flip a second coin. If the second coin comes up heads you get nothing; tails you get paid $11." The expected value is positive (50%*[-$2] + 25%*[-$4] + 25%*[-$4+$11] = +$0.75), but three quarters of the time you lose money. It was meant to introduce the concept of expected value, then illustrate one of its limitations. After working through the example, the professor asked if anyone would like to play and about half of our class of 90 raised their hands. Then he asked who would like to play if the stakes went up by a factor of 10. Only one person was willing to risk $20-40, even though the expected value was positive. There would certainly have been other willing participants in the world, but they weren't given access to the game -- the market was illiquid because it was restricted.

This left me thinking about poker, proposition bets, and illiquid markets with imperfect information. Eventually, I found one in baseball.

Good argument, questionable chart

2008-10-14T10:12:00.006-04:00

The New York Times had a graphic today showing how the economy fared under Democratic and Republican presidents since Herbert Hoover. They seem to be making a shortened and simplified version of the argument presented by Larry Bartels in his book Unequal Democracy (For those who don’t have a book-length period of free time, Steve Benen summarizes).

While I think Bartels’ argument is fascinating, I’ve really got to take issue with the Times' graphic. They obscure the progression of time and the length of term that each president had. Yes, the S&P 500 grew 10.8% under Gerald Ford, but he was only president for about 2 years. And yes, the S&P 500 grew 15.2% under Clinton, but was that his economic genius, or the continuation of a trend started 20 years earlier and lasting through three administrations under both parties?

I think the time series clarifies things greatly. Here’s a recreation of the original NYTimes graph, which sorts by party and orders by growth rate:

Here's a new one that orders by year, and shows term length:

I think the new chart does a much better job of showing the sequence of presidents, which helps the reader understand larger trends. Maybe the economy is more likely to grow under a Democratic President than a Republican one, but if that's the case, I'd like to see it shown more robustly.

Why I'm in love

2008-10-12T18:04:00.005-04:00

The other day I was reading xkcd and came across this fabulous comic.

It really spoke to me, since I think one of the greatest parts of a relationship happens when one partner recognizes and indulges a socially unpopular part of the other. It might be embracing something geeky like in this comic, or providing a hidden pleasure like Peeps, but it’s touching when it happens. Me – I like graphs.

For my anniversary with Sarah, one thing I got her was a pack of “fruit”-flavored Mentos, which we always have enjoyed on our vacations (consumption-based enjoyment, not science experiment enjoyment). The next day she sent me this graph of the contents of the Mentos pack.

I'm in love.

My early efforts at investing were unsuccessful

2008-09-17T17:01:00.008-04:00

I don't fully subscribe to the University of Chicago's disbelief in alpha, but even if there are people who can successfully pick stocks that will perform in excess of their risk-adjusted expectations, I am certainly not among them.

Fortunately, I learned this lesson early in life, with my first (and so far only) investment in an individual stock: Stratos Lightwave. I made my purchase after getting involved in an investment club my sophomore year of college whose sponsor advised everyone to "put a token amount into a stock you choose; this will give you the motivation to follow the market."

It didn't go as well as I'd hoped:

Early experiences have a funny way of having outsized influences on our later lives, but I was more or less convinced by this to stop picking stocks, and leave my money in index funds. Of course, if you'd like to prove me wrong with a can't-lose stock, feel free to drop me a line.

The point of owning books

2008-08-29T14:01:00.004-04:00

A personal library was originally a repository of knowledge. University libraries or ecclesiastical collections existed, but were rare and far away. Even as late as the 20th century individuals kept private collections of books that were more comprehensive on narrow subjects than most research institutions. That’s just not the case anymore.

Sarah and I own a couple hundred books. They’re mostly paperbacks, not printed on acid-free paper, not first editions, not signed, and usually not read more than once. Until recently I’ve treated these books with the care I was taught as a child so I could “responsibly” handle library materials and grade school textbooks that went a decade between replacements. But now I realize that my books are nothing more than long-form newsprint – around for a while, but not ultimately valuable, archivable, or important. They are temporary appliances of knowledge, just like my dishwasher, television, or toaster and they are only as valuable as I make them through usage.

So, I’ve changed. I think books should be cherished by being consumed, not by being preserved.

I now write in my books (a good practice for any student at any age, regardless of school policy). I rephrase what’s been said to remember it. I make comments to other readers, most notably my wife and my future self. And, I use them as scratch pads for other ideas that relate tangentially if at all.

I also now loan my books out (with the knowledge that two thirds will never be returned). That’s fine. A new copy of anything is two days and $15 away on Amazon, and if I’m honest with myself I know that I go back to old books relatively rarely. This new attitude will probably cost $30/year, but should allow me to loan out ~15 books/year. Just as some say you should publish content for free so that more people support your thinking (and therefore, more people buy your books/ask you to speak), I plan to give away books so more of my friends can discuss them with me.

And now, that project to catalog all of our books doesn’t seem *quite* as silly. Let me know if you’d like to borrow one.

Bill Clinton hated me

2008-08-28T12:56:00.001-04:00

I met Bill Clinton in 1999.

It was just a handshake/10 second photo sort of thing, but I remember it very clearly. I was 18, had disheveled hair, and was wearing a bow tie. Clinton shook my hand and said, “I like your tie.” It made me feel pretty good.

About eight years later, I was talking to a friend who worked in Washington who let me know that I’d missed the subtext. David Maraniss in his book The Clinton Enigma explains that Clinton used to compliment people’s ties when he actually meant “F*** you.” Apparently, it was a way to relieve stress without offending. As a politician you really can’t yell at people, but it feels good to tell the loathsome that you hate them, even if only in code. A tie compliment is the perfect code since just about everyone will read it as sincere.

Sleep greatly impacts my productivity

2008-08-01T11:48:00.002-04:00

Some days seem so productive. Other days, not at all. I find that the amount of sleep I've gotten is the best predictor. I wonder if inability to do work when fully rested is just a visceral reminder that humans aren't meant to sit still for 60% of their waking hours.

Seasonality lowers the 2008 projection

2008-07-28T15:16:00.003-04:00

An unknown Ken brings up a good point about my annualization of 2008 numbers in an earlier post about exercise. He asks if there is a seasonal effect, for instance, a spike in activity in early January while New Years' resolutions are still fresh. I don't think the particular example is right since I tend to make resolutions like "Spend more time at charity events," or "Save money elsewhere to spend it on occasional fancy groceries," but I acknowledge there may be seasonality.

Other than a consistent spike in July (a beautiful outdoor month in Boston), it's pretty hard to see the pattern in this data.

One thing that is clearly highlighted is my 2007 effort to train for my first marathon (the red line that jumps up in February). I went out hard, and while you'd hope to see that line trending upward as the mid-April race date approached, it actually trended down, revealing the results of my increasing knee pain.

Another big jump comes from a decision to start lifting weights in the spring of 2008. That heightened level of activity may be unsustainable, and points to a regression to pre-2007 levels unless I maintain the weight-lifting goal, or establish a new one.

However, the question remains – is there a difference between the seven months of data I've collected and the rest of the year? This next graph should clarify the issue:

Using this new information, we can prepare new estimates for the 2008 full year. With 205 days on record, we can figure the number of remaining projected workouts by multiplying 60 sessions by (365-205)/205 and then applying a 25% discount and arrive at a total of 35 additional sessions (as opposed to the original estimate of 41).

While this doesn't change the previous conclusions, which were based on year-over-year changes, and not just the 2004-2008 change, it does make the increase in '08 seem more reasonable, although 2008 still projects to be quite an increase over past years:

Workout length poised for a regression to pre-graduate school levels

2008-07-28T01:31:00.003-04:00

It appears that 2004-2006, I averaged about 50 minutes per session, while in 2007 and 2008 I averaged about 20 minutes more. The most obvious driving force here is that I attended graduate school September 2006-June 2008, which left me with much more free time than when I was working.

So, what caused the longer sessions? Was it simply that I didn't have work waiting for me at home, and that allowed me to run farther? Partially, yes. I began playing squash on weekdays, something that had been strictly a weekend pursuit for me in the past. That sort of gain is likely to be reversed. Then again, having more time off also inspired me to set larger goals. I ran a marathon in the spring of 2007, and started lifting weights in spring of 2008, both of which made me spend more time at the gym. Those gains may be maintained.

A shift in the type of exercise might also help explain the change in workout length, but the exact composition and its change is unclear. It's also unclear why 2006 shows a decrease in workout length when the last 6 months were in graduate school or on vacation.

It seems clear that when predicting the future, the rise in number of workouts could be sustainable, but that the increase in workout length may or may not be in for a regression to the historical mean, depending on whether changes in exercise mix and goals or weekday squash was a larger driver of the 2007-2008 increase.

Of course, there is a significant observer/actor bias, but we'll assume that exercise is driven by stronger forces than graph creation.

Number of workouts per week has strongly driven increase in exercise since 2004

2008-07-27T15:58:00.006-04:00

Last time I looked at how much I've been exercising over the past five years. It looked as though exercise has been increasing, but I wanted to know why. The first question to address is how more frequent sessions and longer sessions have impacted total exercise. Have totals been padded because I've made exercise a more integrated part of my life or because I've had more time to spend at the gym? First let's look at frequency of workouts:

This shows a very steady growth of ~10 extra sessions/year. I'd expect this data to be pretty noisy since the decision to exercise or not on any given day is based on so many factors, and because the data refers to ~50-70 events per 365 days. Nevertheless, four years of increases of similar magnitude is enough to convince me that something is going on.

I interpret this as a steady integration of exercise into my daily life. While I did occasionally work out in the years before 2004, it was mainly pick-up sports at infrequent intervals. I had never jogged, never used a weight room (with the exception of 3 months in 2000), and never set goals to improve my endurance, strength, flexibility, or agility.

What this means for the future is that I would expect this trend of increasing exercise to continue and gradually level off. This stands in contrast to the other factor responsible for my increase in total exercise time, which I will investigate next: length of workout.

Time devoted to exercise has been growing

2008-07-22T22:57:00.003-04:00

Since December of 2003 I've kept an exercise log. It started as a way to track how far and how fast I ran. At first glance it looks like I've increased the amount I've worked out pretty steadily over the past five years. The graph raises a number of questions, though. Why has exercise time gone up? Has it been from longer sessions? More frequent workouts? Is it driven by free time or is it independent of free time? Are the averages even over the years or do they represent periods of intense activity separated by periods of sloth?

Clearly, this needs some more attention.

Quitting my job to be a poker pro is not a viable option

2008-07-13T21:21:00.000-04:00

My first graph takes a look at my success playing poker online over a three year period 2003-2006. It looks like I’m pretty successful at low limit Hold-’em, but not so successful that I could make a living from it. It also appears I’ve hit my limit online, and that increasing the stakes isn’t a viable option.

I played online at PartyPoker and Paradise Poker, usually sitting at two tables at once (this was possible and advisable since there’s some significant waiting time as the other 9 players at the table act. People who do this for a living will often sit at four or more tables at once, but I found that the loss of concentration and fun I suffered made that a bad choice for me). I chose full table games rather than one-on-one or short handed (six seat) games. As you can see, I won fairly consistently at about $20/hour for the entire period I played after the first few sessions while I was getting the hang of it. You can see that of 32 sessions after the ‘learning period,’ fewer than a third were losing sessions, most of those were small, and a losing session was followed by another one only once. All in all, it looks like a pretty appealing way to make money.

On the down side, playing two tables at once for a long time got to be more of a grind than a relaxing activity. With the rise of programs playing tight poker at the lower tables, games got to be much less exciting, combined with the passage of the port security bill in 2005 it seemed like a good time to quit playing online. I quit entirely after a PartyPoker player obviously cheated, admitted to doing so in the chat box. I notified PartyPoker, they reviewed the incident and declined to discipline the player. That was the end for me.

If I’d been able to duplicate my success at higher limit tables, it might have been a good idea to continue playing. However, as you can see in the next graph, moving up to $3-6 and $5-10 did not result in winning play.

One could believe that what you see here is just the “learning period” that I experienced with $2-4, but I think it’s more than that. I needed more than practice to improve at these levels. As with anything, you need to practice, but you also need to develop technique. In poker, developing those skills requires reading books and articles, tracking and analyzing past performance, and probably playing live games. And, as with all sports, this work on technique is much less exciting than actually playing. I decided it wasn’t producing enough fun or profit to do that sort of concentrated work.

Interestingly, I also tried changing from Limit Hold-’em to No Limit, and played about 125 hours online.

While I started with a lucky run, the last 100 hours of play were slightly worse than break-even online. I’m not sure why my bankroll went up, then leveled off – almost like a reverse “learning period.” I guess this is what people call beginner’s luck, and what I call attention-grabbing, but irrelevant statistical noise.