Clarity of Vision +

 “The trick to being a great founder… is your ability to be presented with a problem unlike anything you’ve seen before and solve it very quickly.

When Sam Altman was CEO of Y Combinator, they were looking at 20,000+ companies per year and tracked the founder qualities that correlated with certain startup outcomes. In no particular order, Sam believes the following qualities matter most:

1. Clarity of vision. “Can the founder explain what they do and why? If the founder can’t explain it clearly to us, then (a) they’re not going to be able to recruit, hire, sell, talk to the press; and (b) it means they’re not the kind of person who is a really clear thinker in general and that’s so important to a business.”

2. Determination & Passion. “There are founders who don’t take no for an answer and bend the world to their will and those are the ones we want to fund. Then there are founders that every time they run across a small impediment just turn around. Unfortunately you run into so many impediments every day that if you’re the kind of person who just turns around, that’s really a problem. You also have to really believe that what you’re doing is important. The best companies are always mission-oriented.”

3. Raw intelligence.

4. The ability to get things done quickly. “It’s not entirely accurate to say that speed and quality of decision-making correlate exactly with startup success but it’s not a bad first approximation. Being quick, decisive, and getting things done quickly—if you look at our data, that would just correlate almost exactly with all of our successful founders. And other founders that look on paper like they should be really successful but fail are often missing this one trait.”

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DFqJAkzoY4O/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

On the Non-physicality of Software

 

This is a relic from the times when software had a physical form, you could hold it in your hand.

In this new age, software comes streaming into your device, nobody touches anything, it has no physical form whatsoever.

The photo is a recent ad on eBay, for the Mac version of a product I wrote in 1985 which (humblebrag) just happened to turn out to be the first of a new class of software, called CRM, Customer Resource Management for people with a PC. Boring, I know, but at the time it was interesting to me.

There was one event that brought into sharp focus this concept that software has no physical form...

I was selling my product, the software I called TeleMagic, to a man in London. He was buying the right to sell my software in the UK. It was a very informal event. We sat at a table at a local café and crafted a handwritten agreement without lawyers involved. We signed, he gave me a check.

And then, for the true magic moment, I opened my briefcase and removed a stack of 10 "floppy diskettes" that contained the source code to the product, and copied them one by one onto the customer's hard drive.

Then I took the diskettes back. The customer had nothing physical at all. I went on to sell a few other countries on that trip, and it was just so delightful to get big checks for something that had no physical form.

Software is pure thought made real, just not real in the sense that you can sense its physicality.

The idea I had for the product was transferred from my brain through my fingertips onto the keyboard and into the computer. I used a specialized language called dBase II to get the computer to understand what I wanted it to do.

That first session of programming TeleMagic into existence was followed by thousands of others, addictively debugging, improving, inventing, throwing away long hours of work after rethinking, and overthinking, all these insane purely mental hours to create something that doesn't exist in any physical form.

Software is an entity that can take thousands of hours to create but can be eliminated in an instant with a simple Delete keystroke.

A product without a physical form has enormous advantages over all other products. It doesn't wear out or break down, it doesn't cost anything for transportation or storage, and it can be reproduced infinitely for almost zero incremental cost. It's this last one that is why software companies are so profitable.

In the pre-internet years, software needed a physical form so you could buy it and put it into your PC to make it do what you wanted. That's what the diskette was for: backup, storage, transportation.

That's all gone now. The software business is now even more profitable without all the mess of a physical product.

I keep having thoughts about getting back into the software business. It was fun...

Shortcut to Success in Life and Business

 

One of the only true shortcuts in life is finding an expert and apprenticing under them.  

James Clear

Learn from Your Mistakes or Other People's Mistakes?

 

It's good to learn from your mistakes. 

It's better to learn from other people's mistakes.

Warren Buffett

Your mistakes aren’t the best teacher—just the most expensive.

You can start at the bottom of the mountain and make every mistake from scratch on the way to the top, or you can take a sherpa with you and master the best of what other people have already figured out.

The successful learn vicariously; the foolish insist on first hand pain.

Farnam Street

Don’t try to figure everything out on your own. Hire advisors who’ve been there before and can offer insights you wouldn’t get otherwise. Test advisors before committing—do a workshop to see how they add value before making a long-term hire. And always be evaluating if they’re still contributing.

Lenny's Newsletter

It's a (human) process

A couple of days ago I had just finished coding a feature in EZchecklist that I'd wanted to do for a long time. It took about 5 hours to get working, and it looked good, but the underlying coding was so ugly that I couldn't bear it if anyone ever saw it. The odds of someone seeing the ugliness were extremely remote, but before I went to sleep I promised myself to rewrite the code so that it was more presentable (to myself, at least).

That opportunity came the next morning because I just couldn't live another day with all that ugly code living inside my computer, even though it was invisible to the world except me, of course.  Another five hours and it was done.  Two hundred plus lines of code replaced with 39 lines.

Feeling much better about the transformation, I then had the thought that chatGPT 4.o might be able to do better, so I copied and pasted the code into the AI and asked it to optimize it... if it can. AI got it down to about 18 lines and did it in about 5 seconds, tops, but it's not as easy to follow as my code.  Sure, it would run a bit faster but speed is not the issue here.

Having a coder to coder chat with AI about the various approaches to the problem was amazingly educational.  For me.  I doubt AI learned anything, and sure didn't have that warm fuzzy feeling of getting something to work.

Maybe I'll go back later and implement AI's optimized coding.  Maybe not.  There's something to be said for pride of human workmanship rather than the sterile perfection of AI.

And I'm happy that, at 82, my mind is still capable of learning new approaches to coding.

Note: I asked AI to illustrate the concept. It took about 10 seconds. I couldn't have done it in 10 years.

Full Moon Brings Major Update to EZchecklist

Click Here to See the details at the EZchecklist page

Checklists for software development

(October 30 is National Checklist Day)

ThinkPlanDoRepeat - Shortest possible checklist for Success at Anything

The checklist is one of the most high powered productivity tools ever discovered.

Brian Tracy

No wise pilot, no matter how great his talent and experience, fails to use his checklist.

Charlie Munger 

Introduction to Checklists

Big Picture  

   What is a checklist - Wikipedia

   The Checklist Manifesto, How to get things right - in depth, the best book about checklists
   To Do List vs. Checklist - what is the difference?
   Advantages of using checklists - from Quora
   Quotations about checklists from the Checklist Manifesto

Who needs checklists?
   We don't need no stinkin' checklists! - if you're like these guys, you can forget about it.

Origin of checklists
   How the Pilot's Checklist Came About - people have to die before anything changes

Poor Examples of Software Development Checklists

Any piece of software reflects the organizational structure that produced it. (Conway's Law)

Planning

   App Development checklist - from Enola Labs, What to consider before beginning
   20 Things to do before you build an app - from Blue Cloud Solutions, Mobile development

Design

   Usability checklist - from Stay in Tech, Catch common usability problems before user testing

Programming
   This is NOT a checklist; it is a list of Do and Don't, right and wrong, but not a checklist.
   This is a checklist. Not a great one, but you will notice the difference.

Testing
   US Department of Energy software testing checklist

Deployment
   Ultimate Checklist for App Deployment Success - from Stackify (Not app specific)

Build Your Own Checklists

   A checklist for building checklists - of course there is one of these!

   Checklist.com - very basic, free, and worth what you pay for it
   Checkli.com - very basic, free, and worth what you pay for it
   Process Street - better, freemium model, inexpensive
   Google Spreadsheets - free, basic yet very powerful, sharable, recommended

Checklist Secret Sauce by DoubleM

Research. Google for existing checklists to do what you need done. Modify to suit. No ego.

Begin it Now. Any checklist is better than no checklist, if continuously improved with feedback.

Delegate. Every team member has responsibility to create/use/improve checklists.

Manage. Team managers must approve changes, and for adherence to standards.

Reward. Recognition and rewards for excellence in checklist development, use, feedback.

Standardize. Add the following to your checklist for building checklists.

   

   Standard Heading at the top of every checklist 

      Checklist name

      Checklist number (Form number)

      Department

      Responsible Person - Who is the "owner" of this checklist

      Date last updated.

      Link to Change log - (Who made the change, When, What changed, Why)

      Signature of team member Who executed this checklist, When, and for What job.

   

   Sections. Break up the list for readability. Lots of white space.

   Standard Formatting

      Standard font, point size, colors, links, etc.

      Headings for sections. Indent items under sections.

      Keep it short. One line per item.  Maximum of 10 items per section. 

      Action verb to start each item, if possible. See above.

      Graphics, charts, photos. What is that about a picture is worth... how many words?

      Paginate.

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Update:

11/2/2017 - First time user experience for product success