Robi Ganguly’s Big Ideas

I’m always reading a lot, soaking in new information and trying to refine how I think about building, based upon what others are sharing about their experiences. Here’s some my recent favorite stuff:

• The most difficult CEO skill: Managing your own psychology: yup, Ben Horowitz is great at saying it exactly the right way. “I didn’t quit,” the answer of great CEOs who made it through.
• From GigaOm: Steve Blank on How Startups Can Take Advantage of The Bubble. I love how he starts out the video by saying that he thinks that entrepreneurs, at their heart, are artists. Resonates with me, for sure. 
• Mark Suster and Bill Gross talk about product development, strategy and many other things. Great stuff here for people who want to solve lots of problems and make progress on a regular basis.

Also, some music to enjoy:

• Tracks from Death Cab for Cutie’s forthcoming (and appropriately titled) album, “Codes and Keys”
• Codes And Keys (Gibbard Solo, Live in SF) by TwentyFourBit.com
• When The Sun Goes Down On Your Street (Gibbard Solo, Live in SF) by TwentyFourBit.com

On the heels of their lead singer’s Op-Ed in the New York Times, Ok Go’s new video is predictably awesome. And look, it’s embeddable! I’m guessing there was some orchestration here on the part of the label and the band, but whatever the case may be, it’s damned entertaining, isn’t it?

UPDATE: Here’s a Wired piece on how the video and the “Rube Goldberg” machine came together. Tons of work, lots of planning.

While surfing around the Yahoo! Music website, I came across this video, from the soundtrack of the movie “Into the Wild”. It turns out that Eddie Vedder did most of the music for the movie (for his pal Sean Penn, who directed it) and this is the video. Being a Pearl Jam fan, I clicked play and 5 minutes later, I’m searching around the ‘Net to find out more about the movie, the story behind it and when/where it’s playing.

Now, while you could argue that this video is meant to be marketing for the movie, I would suggest that this is much more compelling and useful than some 30-second snippet that’s edited for TV. It’s also interesting to note that despite being a song done by a famous musician, he doesn’t really appear in the video at all.

Oh boy. This is about the funniest thing I’ve seen in a long time. I actually had to stop watching it b/c I was tired of laughing.

Here’s an article that demonstrates the sheer power of the Internet. Yes, it’s a human interest story. But it’s more than that, it’s about the meshing of culture, the sharing of ideas and the increasing role of merit in the global economy.

Web Guitar Wizard Revealed at Last – New York Times

Take something you like. Do it well. Share it with everyone else.  That’s Web 2.0 to me

Technorati Tags: meritocracy, global culture, economy of influence, consumer generated content, web 2.0, new york times

The Economist, as usual, does a great job of bringing us back to reality in its article on "The Digital Home" . Sure, it sounds great to be able to have everything networked and seamless in your home (and everywhere, really) and I have no doubt that it’ll eventually become a reality, but I think that there are a lot of people who believe that it’s going to happen sooner than it really will.

They make several points more eloquently than I could:

1. The average consumer doesn’t care about this as much as those of us in the tech/media world believes. I liked the way that a consultant quoted in the article thinks about it, "…adoption is a
   function of the users’ sense of crisis (ie, motivation to change)
        outweighing their perceived pain of switching…".
2. The companies playing in the space tend to think like they’re selling a solution to the customer, rather than the way customers actually buy – piecemeal.
   1. I buy a DVD player and later an Xbox and then maybe later, an MP3 player. I don’t buy them  all at once or even planned as components that have to work together, they should just work together automatically. The caveat, I think, to this method of purchasing is that if any company benefits from it, it’s Microsoft. IF I do care about buying along a set of standards, might as well make sure it works with my computer, which has a 95% chance of being MS based.
3. Vendors are refusing to make their systems interoperable. Some are talking a good game about how they want to, but so far, they’ve inevitably chosen to be proprietary about some part of the solution that they offer. They view it as a necessary part of their strategy, but their strategy backfires, b/c it F’s the consumer and makes it altogether too complex to execute a "digital home".

Despite being a good discussion of some of the challenges facing this broad dream, the Economist does slip up on a couple things:

• As I understand it, Windows Media Center Edition is really taking off of late, to as much as 43% of retail computer sales
• Apple has a control problem. HP might distribute iTunes on their computers but their agreement to make an HP iPod fizzled out quickly. Competing with partners on hardware has to date, been a limiting factor in Apple’s growth
• They don’t explore the possibility that interoperability could expand the bottom lines of the involved players. If a likely scenario is that one winner dominates and owns the market, wouldn’t most companies be better off cooperating and getting a piece of the potential pie, rather than none at all?