Get out of the building.

Smart people have a tendency to make assumptions about too many important variables, such as how customers will react to their products, how big the market can be, how to sell, etc. But the really smart people know better than to not test these assumptions in the real world. There simply isn’t a good way to do that short of leaving the office and talking to real customers who you’re trying to solve problems for.
 
At AngelPad, the mentors push very hard for us to do things systematically. Gokul likes to tell us the story of one of his favorite AngelPad company founders. The guy would start or end every sentence with “my customer said.” He essentially talked completely in customer demands and left out any personal assumptions. While I believe that is indeed the holy grail, it doesn’t work for every type of product. For instance consumer apps such as games or websites.
 
Investors obviously prefer the solution to hair-on-fire problems; they’re less excited about what they call vitamins instead of cancer cures. Solving an acute pain is the surest way to build a revenue generating business, thus greatly reducing investment risk. That said, without these vitamins, Twitter or Instagram wouldn’t exist today. The mentors are smart enough to recognize that, as evidenced by our diverse group of founders building companies spanning the spectrum of product ideas.
 

Excellent for Media Consumption

iPad Swap Story
With some careful planning and luck, I heisted an iPad2 by swapping in my old one and paying only an extra $100. Expecting the announcement of the iPad2, I sold my original iPad in February on Craigslist for $430 cash. (Remember to keep the box.) Then during SXSW in March I started monitoring Twitter for chatter on inventory levels. The first few days at the pop-up Apple store were madhouse and I couldn’t bother with hours in line for a mere chance to buy. But one night while browsing on my Xoom I came across tweets of a re-stocking the next day. I showed up around noon and 15 minutes later picked up the iPad2. My buddy who came along bought three and shipped them to his family in Hong Kong, it’s like Christmas in March. So remember, use Apple’s fairly predictable product roadmap to plan your purchases accordingly.

 
Hardware as in Heavyware
Both tablets sport very nice hardware specs: the display, underlying processor speeds, battery life, and overall finish. You won’t find either underpowered until way past replacement time. The new iPad’s weight loss pays off using over long periods of time. The Xoom feels quite heavy even compared to the original iPad. One big difference on the Xoom is the 1280×800 resolution which changes the aspect ratio (think longer and narrower) making portrait mode a joy for web browsing and reading articles. Nonetheless I want both to shed more heft as hours long book reading is still preferable on the Kindle. As for the cameras (both devices have front and back facing cameras), I found little use for despite being a heavy video Skype user on the computer. I do believe there will be more interesting usages of the cameras down the road, such as for recognizing input gestures.
 
Wishlist for Apple
For those unfamiliar with the Apple way, Apple places an iron tight grip on every aspect of user experience, curates its app store, and imposes demanding requirements on all the parties in its ecosystem. It’s perfectly within their right to do so. I don’t hold it against Apple to position its products whichever way and letting consumers vote with their wallets. Yet there are aspects on the more open [sorry for using this loaded term] Android platform that compel mentioning. One of them is ability to change input methods, like Swype and Swiftkey to name a few. If the tablet is ever to transform our computing interaction, then the input method should as well. In a thoughtful Future of Touch Interaction talk at SXSW, (ironically) Microsoft researchers presented that our natural input language for touch devices has much room to evolve. Knowing that existing solutions are far from perfect, companies out there are working hard to improve it. My favorite: Swiftkey’s intuitive thumb type method for Android tablets, reminiscent of my old BlackBerry days, runs on top of a word prediction technology that learns from you. Apple’s current and only text input method is still based on minor refinements of a years old method. To observe an exercise in frustration ask an iPad beginner to type a long email. After 4 iterations of iPhones and a whole year of iPad experience, the best Apple can offer is something that makes people long for hardkeys. This is a serious innovation deficiency because it ignores people who want to create messages over 140 characters or otherwise express their creativity in written form.

Swiftkey’s Double Thumb Tablet Input

So what I saw around me were great kids who had been trained to be world-class hoop jumpers. Any goal you set them, they could achieve. Any test you gave them, they could pass with flying colors. They were, as one of them put it herself, “excellent sheep.” I had no doubt that they would continue to jump through hoops and ace tests and go on to Harvard Business School, or Michigan Law School, or Johns Hopkins Medical School, or Goldman Sachs, or McKinsey consulting, or whatever. And this approach would indeed take them far in life. They would come back for their 25th reunion as a partner at White & Case, or an attending physician at Mass General, or an assistant secretary in the Department of State.
…
As I thought about these things and put all these pieces together—the kind of students I had, the kind of leadership they were being trained for, the kind of leaders I saw in my own institution—I realized that this is a national problem. We have a crisis of leadership in this country, in every institution. Not just in government. Look at what happened to American corporations in recent decades, as all the old dinosaurs like General Motors or TWA or U.S. Steel fell apart. Look at what happened to Wall Street in just the last couple of years.

We live in a system that churns out intelligent drones who create massive societal problems. Instead of generating true value for the world, they’ve destroyed economies in the name of creating shareholder value or personal gain. In essence we’ve trained generations of bright people on how to game the system to maximize their own gain (again, our own fault for elevating wealth as an aspirational value system) at the huge detriment of those who cannot. Yes, the Goldman’s and Carly’s of the world are labeled as leaders in the sense that they are so successful at fleecing their way to unimaginable personal wealth while creating so little, if not outright negative, real world value.
 
Deresiewicz argues that thinking and reflection, what he loosely labels as solitude, as a major way to develop personal leadership. While I explicitly warned against the distractions of thoughtless media in the previous mentioned posting, a year later things have become harder with the explosion of social media. My identity as a technologist, pits using these tools in trying to understand and improve against falling to their addictive cheap calories to the brain. It’s easy to slip between experimentation and mindless consumption. I must keep reminding myself that ideas or thoughts of deep value, require a level of thought and work that cannot be generated quickly.

Thinking means concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea about it. Not learning other people’s ideas, or memorizing a body of information, however much those may sometimes be useful. Developing your own ideas. In short, thinking for yourself. You simply cannot do that in bursts of 20 seconds at a time, constantly interrupted by Facebook messages or Twitter tweets, or fiddling with your iPod, or watching something on YouTube.

I find for myself that my first thought is never my best thought. My first thought is always someone else’s; it’s always what I’ve already heard about the subject, always the conventional wisdom. It’s only by concentrating, sticking to the question, being patient, letting all the parts of my mind come into play, that I arrive at an original idea. By giving my brain a chance to make associations, draw connections, take me by surprise. And often even that idea doesn’t turn out to be very good. I need time to think about it, too, to make mistakes and recognize them, to make false starts and correct them, to outlast my impulses, to defeat my desire to declare the job done and move on to the next thing.

I/we often succumb to mistaking conventional wisdom for original thought. After reading the same convincing argument from multiple sources over a period of time, it’s easy to assimilate it and claim as my own, without performing the sufficient work to challenge that thought, testing it with real research, and deeper thinking. The scariest part of this process is how unconsciously it occurs.
 
Along the same lines, my personal challenge in thinking about technology’s place in the world is rising above all that input and generating original ideas that sprout from the varied connections. As efficiently as I consume ideas from the best (which is absolutely necessary), the hardest step is still that of origination, inception if I may loosely borrow that term.
 
To close, if you’ve missed the essay, I highly recommend spending a chunk of time and reading it in one session. And then practice the introspection it touts. It will help you figure something out, either about the world, or yourself.
 

Hard to believe it’s been nearly 3 years since I was last in Europe, where did time fly? Even harder to believe that it’s been over a year since I attended a wedding.

Having been so occupied with work and life, this long planned trip snuck up on me. And even though at the last minute I was still resisting the notion of breaking away from work, now that I am in Europe and transiting through 5 airports (LAX-JFK-LHR-OSL-TRD), I’m now immersed in this mini-adventure. 2 days in, I already feel like it’s too short.

Look forward to catching up with some friends and celebrating this wondrous occasion.