No Vision, All Drive (Book Review)
Feb/080
David Brown, No Vision, All Drive: Memoirs of an Entrepreneur (2005). $14.95. [Amazon
This is a great but odd little book that describes the founding and emergence of Pinpoint Technologies, which created what was apparently the first Windows-based ambulance dispatch software. The odd bit is simply that it doesn’t pause to extract its lessons, so one has to, um, think a bit about the story. David Brown starts by being a software guy at the Quebec Department of Transportation. There, he meets a fellow starting a new business selling computer-aided dispatch systems for couriers. Brown learned from their mistakes, and began a circuitous route through a number of companies providing dispatch services to ambulance companies. Eventually he sees the opportunity to create the first solid Windows software for dispatching ambulances. He finds customers, sells to them; and then eventually sells out to a bigger company, ZOLL.
As a story of entrepreneurship, this is long on story and short on sermon. In other words, he tells what he did but he isn’t very analytical about it. I guess that’s what the title means by “no vision.” But let me draw some conclusions from the book. I think he sets out a very reasonable roadmap for founding a startup without taking on any big investors. The recipe is:
1. Know the business. Brown had been deeply involved in a company with a winning DOS product. He already knew the customers and their business. You will read some startup pundits who will tell you not to be captivated by what is already known . . . judging from his experience, Brown is not one of those. While the Windows program was obviously a good one, he had a benchmark in terms of the existing DOS app. So there is no real innovation here, but rather the good timing of needing to satisfy a shift in the market (the need to have a decent Windows app). My takeaway is that there are great startups that are based almost entirely on market timing, and innovation in terms of the core product offering is not required (indeed, it is probably beside the point). I would bet that Brown would in fact see the Windows product as innovative: Reading between the lines of the book it is clear that it was more graphically oriented and that it ran off of a database (first Access, then SQL Server); but, still, innovation is not flogged in the book.
2. Don’t quit your day job. The way they (David and one of his two eventual partners, David Cohen) did this was to create a company that sold and serviced the DOS product. This gave them the freedom to cook up their own project. Brown also served a stint worked as the Directory of Technology at a company that used the DOS product. Jumping around gave Brown detailed insights into all of the aspects of running the company. They had some cash from these prior engagements right up to taking new money to get Pinpoint off the ground.
3. Get that first customer. In fact, it was the first customer who trusted Brown from the DOS app period who advanced him the startup funds.
4. Get the right amount of starting capital from the right person. They borrowed $100,000 from that first customer (about $140K in 2007 dollars). Based on the next point, they seem to have taken the right amount of money. Just barely. Brown says they should have asked for $150K. Pitches to banks and the Small Business Adminstration were failures because they had no track record.
5. Get the initial product done fast. They started in September of 1994 and had an alpha in March of 1995 (seven months).
6. Make sure that the initial release provides value right out of the box. Eventually the product became more of an enterprise sale, requiring deployment and customization. But at the start, Brown reports that they had created “a concept called ‘RightCAD in a box’ to illustrate one of our biggest competitive advantages, the fact that the software was off-the-shelf and didn’t need to be customized for each customer” (p. 77).
7. Price your product correctly. It is very difficult to glean the exact details of what was going on in terms of cash flow, but it would seem that there were two people on payroll in the first year (p. 58), at, say, $30,000 each (1994 dollars; monthly payroll is said to be $5,000 on p. 76). On p. 76 Brown says that they made a sale for $25K at an 80% discount, so the list price was, apparently, $125,000. So it looks to me as though a single sale could carry them through a year. The book is incredibly hazy on the amount of time it would take to make a sale, but that seems doable to me. Brown never explains how they figured this out, but I would guess that they were led to the right price by the prior experience with the DOS product.
8. Get the initial team and process right. This information is sort of buried in the book. The way it worked was that David Brown talked to the customers and defined what was to be done; and David Cohen was the leader in getting it built (i.e., writing the code), though it is clear that Cohen had a major impact on the soul of the company, being the person who later on wrote their company manifesto. Brown actually sums up these roles very early on as a way to organize the labor for getting software written, but it will only dawn on the reader later that these are also the two key roles for creating initial value in the company. In any case, here’s Brown’s statement of the two roles early on at one of the predecessor companies:
I developed a great working relationship with David. As the Center Manager as a reasonably technical person, I knew best what functionality would make our staff’s job easier. I fed that information to David, who would implement it. Later, we tried to replicate that environment at Pinpoint by having a product manager who was the expert on what was needed from the customer point of view and a program manager who actually was in charge of implementing the features. The product and program managers had a peer relationship; they had to work together to figure out what was best. We never achieved, however, the rapid identification of issues and the quick definition of features that was possible with the users across the hall. (p. 25)
Amen. So let me draw out some of the lessons here: The product manager is a “reasonably technical person.” We do not have here a non-technical product manager. The two managers are peers. And note that Brown sees that the best situation is when the customers are co-located.
Later he describes a software development process that anticipates Agile:
We finally got into an assembly line environment; Bob and I would find the problems and document them in lists. David would take the lists, split them with Eran, and make the fixes. Bob and I would then test the fixes and cross the items off. This went on non-stop for the whole week. (p. 68)
Those the the major elements of the recipe. I’ve left out of this list all of the jokes, twists and turns, and personal stories. The main story is only 151 pages (there are another 20 with perspectives from other participants) . . . if you want to read a story of how it all came together for one entrepreneur, this is a good read.
Start-Up CTO Bookshelf
I’m going to start “scoring” books that might be suitable for the startup CTO’s bookshelf. Below is the grade for No Vision, All Drive. Our main categories for evaluation are:
- Impact (15%): Whether the book changes your mind and/or “sticks”
- Utility (15%): whether the book is genuinely useful for day-to-day consultation
- Authority (10%): whether the author can claim personal experience-based knowledge over the book’s main points
- Good story (15%): whether you want to read the narrative from beginning to end
- Reference (15%): including tools such as a great index, table of contents, associated on-line materials, etc.
- Writing (10%): quality of the writing
- Humor (10%): are there jokes?
- Nudge (10%): this is a gut grade so that a book’s score can be pushed up or down based on intangibles
Each grade is on a 100-scale; 75 is a C, 85 a B, 95 an A, 100 and A+.
No Vision No Drive:
Book category: Start-up stories
Impact: 90
Utility: 83
Authority: 87
Good story: 90
Reference: 75
Writing: 85
Humor: 85
Nudge: 75
Start-Up CTO Score: 84
World Made by Hand (Book Review)
Feb/084
James Howard Kunstler, World Made by Hand (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2008). [Amazon
James Kunstler’s novel World Made by Hand is about the end of the world as we know it; it’s a must-read, and I hope everyone I know reads it so we can have a big argument about it!
In the near future (by around 2015, it would seem) both Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. are destroyed by nuclear weapons. As a consequence of this, oil no longer flows to the USA, and therefore fertilizers, insecticides, plastics, petroleum-fueled vehicles, and, generally, modern life, are all swiftly defunct. The power grid comes on only a half-hour a day; the only radio transmissions are the rantings of preachers. The Internet has become a fairy tale.
The story focuses on a small upstate New York town that has the good fortune to have its water supply gravity-fed, and to be populated by a number of residents skilled in the essentials of nineteenth-century living: a doctor, a dentist, a minister, a carpenter, etc. Despite the great changes in the world, they live on. Their population has been decimated though, from flu and encephilitus.
The novel explores the kinds of groups that populate this new world. There are roughly six factions: First there are the townspeople: the remnants of a middle class and “normal” life: the novel is narrated by Robert Earle, who was once a manager at a Boston-based high tech firm. Robert has lost his family to illness. Then there is a Mr. Bullock, who is a de facto plantation master, whose peasants work for him in exchange for stability and a top-down collective economy; Bullock has accomplished some remarkable things, such as getting a small hydro generator going. Another group is the hive-like New Faith Brotherhood, led by Brother Jobe — they’ve arrived recently from Pennsylvania, which they have fled due to race-based fighting among the refuges from D.C. and Baltimore. Wayne Karp is the top dog in Karpstown, a loose-knit cabal of scavengers who live near the town dump, which they excavate for spare parts from the past. Further afield in Albany is Mr. Curry, who runs the docks. Finally, there are those who live outside these groups in isolation.
What Kunstler does is spin these characters and groups into a ripping yarn that wouldn’t be out of place in a nineteenth-century novel by Twain or Dickens. There are a couple of levels to this: At the level of individual characters, the novel is a bit of a soap opera, with hair-raising escapes, romance, sentimentality, tears and even some laughs. All this will keep you turning the page. There’s also some solid scene-painting of the post-oil remnants:
The once meticulously groomed grounds of the state capitol building, an impressive limestone heap in the Second Empire style, were now choked with box elders, sumacs, and other woody shrubs. Knapweed, vetch, and blue chicory sprouted from the cracks between the broad front steps where a few ill-nourished layabouts sat listlessly surveying the scene. Inside the grand old building, every surface had been stripped down to the bare masonry. Carpets, draperies, chestnut wainscoting, metal fixtures, all gone, probably long gone. The stink of urine and excrement told the rest of the story. I would have turned and left had I not heard a familiar tapping sound seeming to come from distantly above somewhere up the southeast stairs. (p. 166)
On another level, though, he’s posing a great sociological question: Can civilization survive after this disaster? What combinations of these groups might balance one another into a kind of stability? It’s a little hard to know how serious Kunstler is in this orchestration, because the last few chapters of the novel veer into some weird territory. But I don’t want to give away the ending. For exploring social organization through fiction, he’s right up there with Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, and Robert Heinlein, and I’m a sucker for this kind of speculative fiction that works its way through problems via believable characters.
Some readers are going to wonder how the world could go to pieces so quickly after the destruction of two cities. After all, the United States has recently suffered the partial destruction of New Orleans, an important port city. But Kunstler knows whereof he speaks: He’s the author of an important book The Long Emergency
Kunstler was born in the late 40s, so he came of age in the 1960s and 1970s. One thing that amused me . . . somewhat . . . is that once the power goes off, people revert to a stereotype of . . . hippies! There’s a lot of pot-smoking, long hair, and mate-swapping; taste in music tends towards folk. A brief mention is made of “Smells like Teen Spirit,” but the characters in the novel make fun of it. I wondered at times if Kunstler was having a bit of satire with his melodrama.
But this is just quibbling. It’s a good book, and if you believe “it can’t happen here,” then go read The Long Emergency as a followup.
Pro Active Record (Book Review)
Nov/071
Kevin Marshall, Chad Pytel, and Jon Yurek, Pro Active Record: Databases with Ruby and Rails (2007). $39.99. [Amazon
Pro Active Record is all about ActiveRecord, the object-relational mapping layer that comes with Rails. In this review I’ll call ActiveRecord AR. The book has chapters on SQL, setting up your database, the core features of AR, extra AR goodies, testing and debugging, working with legacy schema, AR and the real world, and, finally, a summary of the AR API (interestingly, the API summary is not a copy of the official docs, but has additional comments from the authors, so there is some real added value in this “back of the book” reference material).
Before I begin I want to note that these kinds of framework books and chapters are really hard to write (I know: I contributed to the O’Reilly JavaEE book). The reason is that a lot of readers come to a subject such as AR without understanding the problem for which AR is the solution. I.e., if you don’t already have some understanding of relational databases and SQL, and maybe have some experience with different RDBMS from more than one vendor, some of what’s going on in AR and in this book can be lost.
Generally I would say that if you do any non-vanilla work with AR, you should own this book as a supplement to the account of AR in Agile Web Development with Rails. There is genuinely useful information throughout the text. Here are a few examples that got a check or exclamation point in the margin while I was reading: executing migrations outside of Rails (p. 49); dealing with migrations in source control (p. 53); a nice discussion of writing good tests (pp. 127ff); more detail on the more obscure test assertions than I’ve seen elsewhere (pp. 129-139); a discussion of transactions and fixtures (p. 141); how to do .csv fixtures (pp. 142-143 — annoying, by the way; this could be a lot better in AR); good stuff on AR exceptions (pp. 144ff); random notes on legacy schema integration (chapter 7), internationalization (p. 204), use of UUIDs for PKs (p. 205), and some canned associations for typical use cases (pp. 208-209).
The book also handles well the true core of AR, setting up associations between models, and validating models (chapter 4, “Core Features of ActiveRecord”). The example “domain” is about managing Farmers, Cows, and Milk, which I found just weird and kinky enough that I learned something. A peculiarity of this chapter is that it kicks off with Callbacks rather than Associations and Validations, so a beginning reader is going to have to wait before getting to the core of the core. But I digress.
A brief tour de force is a detailed example of extending AR with Ruby meta-programming (pp. 109-123). This is one of the longer discussions I’ve seen anywhere regarding AR that provides insight into how it actually works, and how you create your own convenience apparatus for easy-to-write queries.
Now some less good news. The book’s title makes it sound as though it is going to be complete and exhaustive, but it is not. There are lots of little things that are missing. Just for example, I couldn’t find a discussion of :source for the has_many :through association, which is necessary in some cases and has vexed my students. In fact, the chapter that gives the API doesn’t even document ActiveRecord::Associations, which is a major gap (to be sure, there is much information here on associations, but if you’re going to detail the API for ActiveRecord::Base, why leave out stuff as important as ::Associations?). Another aspect that is missing is dealing with some of the cases where you need to have multiple belongs_to foreign keys: AR can get confused, and it would be helpful if someone played this out at some length; this book doesn’t do that. Elsewhere, mention is made of a discussion of SQL injection (p. 150), but that discussion never appears.
Had the title been something like “ActiveRecord Techniques” I’d be less concerned about these gaps. I hope they’ll be addressed in a second edition that is larger and more capacious: We need a single-volume “big book” on AR, and this could be it with some additional work.
In sum: Good book! Great bits! 2nd edition has potential to be awesome.
The Sound of Our Town (Book Review)
Sep/070
Brett Milano, The Sound of Our Town: A History of Boston Rock & Roll (2007). $24.95. [Amazon
Brett Milano, frequent contributor to the Boston Phoenix, the Boston Herald, and other publications, has written a great little history of Boston rock and roll. If you have friends who saw a lot of local music in the 60s, 70s, 80s, or 90s, this would be a wonderful holiday gift: Tell them to start with the chapters on their decades. The opening chapters are more straight history, and the latter are a bit more of a “scene” history with insider anecdotes and reports of famously-gossipped-about events. You’ll learn something here about the key perfomers from the 50s to the present: Freddy Cannon, the Remains, the Lost, the “Bosstown Sound,” Aerosmith, J. Geils, Boston, the Modern Lovers, the Mezz, the Real Kids, DMZ, the Lyres, Mission of Burma,the Throwing Muses, the Pixies, Dinosaur, Jr., Morphine, Buffalo Tom . . . they’re all here. Much to Milano’s credit, he doesn’t fall prey to the mistake of Legs McNeil’s Please Kill Me or Clinton Heylin’s From the Velvets to the Voivoids which provide the scensters way too much leeway to alter history with varnished versions of what really happened. Milano also knows many of the people he reports on as friends, and he does a good job of telling a true story that is also not inflammatory or embarassing to its subjects.
One thing Milano tunes into that was plausible to me but not something I’d cough up if you asked me to characterize the Boston sound is that Boston bands have written a lot of sad songs. Occasionally Milano mentions New England weather and overcast skies. He’s right. There is a real tradition of get-out-the-razorblades songs (many disguised with upbeat melodies).
There are some oddities: Salem 66 and November Group get their major mentions in the chapter on 1977-1980 (I guess because as gurls they get bundled in with Robin Lane and the Bristols, who are discussed in that era); the Neats are sadly neglected (a few brief mentions; they were terribly misunderstood and under-appreciated: I wish Milano had set the record straight here); ditto for Scruffy the Cat; Nat Freedberg doesn’t really get as much attention as he deserves; and Milano uses the Turbines “Wah Hey” as a way to introduce a chapter, but you don’t really get the details on why they were so compelling. But these are quibbles; having griped a bit here, there are bits that Milano gets so right. For example:
Most Lyres fans can recall the night they’ve dragged some music-snob friend, or maybe just a timid girlfriend to one of their less coherent shows and gotten only a puzzled look: you really think this could be one of Boston’s greatest bands? Damn right they are. You just have to see them on a good night, when those elemental chords are pounded out like the future of civizilization depends on it. (p. 110)
This is true. I was a lucky one who dragged someone to the Rat to see Lyres and they were spectucularly on and crazy, igniting a quasi-mosh pit frenzy. But talk about hit or miss . . . So everywhere in the book past 1980 or so Milano brings a valuable “you are there” perspective to what he narrates.
In fact, the book could (should?) have been twice as long, and I sincerely hope there will be a second edition (there has to be, right? Boston rock doesn’t stop!). There are a lot of opportunities to “drill down” on individual bands. Take Dumptruck, for example: Milano calls it Seth Tiven’s band (p. 190), but the shared leadership of Kirk Swan was crucial in their early years — and I can recall stories of their origins in two New Haven kids trading licks in their bedrooms: How else could you get that kind of guitar interplay? I am sure there was a page limit Milano was fighting against. Just for example, Milano touches on Big Dipper, but never mentions the connection to the Embarrassment; that’s a flaw, because there are going to be readers who are catching up on the Boston scene who know well the Embarrassment’s importance in mid-America. Yet another thing that would have helped would be to have given the street addresses of the clubs that have disappeared: Milano mentions the Unicorn, which was near the Pru. Really? Wow. Where!?
Also missing from this volume is a discographical essay. Brett! This is your chance to sort through it all and pick and choose and help out all of us hopeless record collector slime! An annotated discography would be a great thing (maybe one could be written for the book’s web site?); an accompanying CD would be even better.
The last thing I wish could appear in an expanded edition would be a “where are they now” section. Just for example, it has always pained me that people are still toiling away on the local scene with only occasional but sometimes astounding appearances (e.g., the Bags) — a word or two about how they’re still getting out there, what their day jobs are: That’s real life, and it has a place in a book that is so generous about the scene.
Battling Intervals (Book Review)
Aug/070
Stuart Isacoff, Temperament: How Music Became a Battlefield for the Great Minds of Western Civilization (2001, 2003). $13.95. [Amazon]
Go over to your piano and play a middle C. Now play the next higher C. That’s an octave difference; the string for the lower C should be twice as long as the higher one. That’s a 2:1 ratio. Another ratio is to play the C, and then play the higher G. That’s a fifth, and the ratio of the lengths should be 3:2. Pythagoras — or his school — figured all that out in the 6th century B.C.E. But here’s the bad news. Produce a series of octaves where you keep halving the length of the string, and see what it sounds like after you’ve done it seven times. Now do the same thing with the fifths. This time, you will need to do twelve times. Pythagoras believed that you would arrive at the same final tone (i.e., tone with the same name) at the end. But guess what? You don’t:
The tones sounded by his two instruments were, however, almost the same, yet slightly — disturbingly — out of tune. The fact is, octaves and fifths, when created with Pythagoras’s pure mathematical ratios, are incommensurate: The further they move away from a common starting point, the more the structures built from these “perfect” intervals diverge. (40)
Thus ensues centuries of argument between those who seek to keep the standard octaves and fifths, and those who advocated something that came to be called “equal temperament,” where the distance between the tones are fixed, and, apparently, you can’t hear the slight dissonaces that are introduced. It’s this equal temperament that your modern piano uses. In this great argument are major players such as Descartes, Mersenne, Vincenzo Galilei (Galileo’s father), Rousseau, Rameau, and many others. They really go at it. I know these figures from the history of science and philosophy, and it was amazing to me to see how invested they were in music; this probably says something about how intellectual disciplines isolate their objects of study like so many individual bees — you forget the variety of flowers they serviced. On the one hand, it would seem, are those who might be called the Pythagoreans, who believe that there is some mystical force in the “just” intervals. And there are the moderns, who advocate equal temperament.
The first half of this book is great, as you see the Pythagorean ideal crumble when faced with the prospect of constructing a playable keyboard– the illustrations are outrageous (the key ones are woodcuts or engravings from Marin Mersenne’s Harmonie Universalle [1636-1637]; try as I might, I couldn’t find reproductions on the mighty Internet). The 2nd half gets a bit tedious, with many digressions, but still worthy if you can stick it out. There are nuggets all the way through, and having finished it, I can say that I’m just about dying to listen to a couple of things: Adrian Willaert’s Quid non ebrietas (16th century), which was apparently designed to show the pain of just intervals, and then some new pieces by Michael Harrison, a sometime collaborator of La Monte Young, which strives to evoke the mysticism and physical sensation of the early systems.
I’ll close this with a juicy quote from d’Alembert:
All freedoms are bound together and are equally dangerous. Freedom in music implies freedom to feel, freedom to feel implies freedom to think, freedom to think implies freedom to act. (223-224)
Amen.
Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich (Book Review)
Aug/070
Timothy Ferriss, The 4-Hour Workweek (2007) . $19.95.
This is a provocative book which I hereby recommend to all of my friends, colleagues, acquaintances, and students . . . especially my younger friends. The book looks like a business self-help / how-to-succeed / make-money-quick book — the type of book my friend Paulina Borsook calls “business porn” — but it is subtly different.
In many ways the book is yet another book of organizational trivia: How to systematize your time, life, and money better, or, specifically, how to eliminate almost all of the tedium but still make your monthly nut. On this basis a lot of people would say that it’s a silly read, because there are a million books out there with all of the same stuff (e.g., all those little “getting things done” rules like don’t read e-mail right when you get to work; batch it, etc., etc.).
The main way the book is different is because of its existential realism about the reason for needing to escape everyday tedium (others would call this existential realism “cynicism” or “nihilism” or possibly even “atheism”). At the end of the book, Ferriss talks about how he deals with the “big questions,” such as “what is the meaning of life?” He suggests that if you (1) can’t define the meaning of the question with clarity, and/or (2) can’t define the consequences of what an answer would entail, then the question is pointless. With this stroke, he brackets a great deal of navel-gazing and anxiety. At the same time, he advises taking a spiritual retreat, but more to leave the world’s cares behind that to get answers. I was not surprised that this section of the book is headed by a quotation from Victor Frankl. All of this is smuggled in at the end. I think I know why.
Why? Because most people who are working 80-hour weeks aren’t in the position to even formulate a good philosophical question, let alone think about it or evaluate some answers. The reason to reorganize your life into a 4-hour work week is to give you the freedom to . . . do what you want, which might well include such philosophizing. As Marx said in the famous passage in the German Ideology (1845), we need a way of living that
makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.
For Ferriss, the freedom he has gained through his method is devoted to learning and service, and I suspect he will have a lot more to say about such topics in future books. I suppose the sad fact is that Ferriss’s personal utopia is nestled within and enabled by what used to be called late capitalism, but at this point, that’s all we’ve got.
OK, as for the “content” of the book. The book says: Figure out a product. Why? Because if you’re in a service or consulting or wage-labor business, you’re always engaged in needless communication, and you don’t get the upside. The best thing about a product is that once it’s done, you just sell it. (And guess what, you can pay other people to sell it.) If you can get the profit high enough, you may be able to automate the whole thing. Ferriss provides lists of resources for creating a professional profile for yourself, creating “expertise,” getting a web-based presence, advertising your product, outsourcing payment and fulfillment: A 360-degree view of automating your business. (In the area of product definition and validation, the book is very much like a miniature version of Cooper’s Winning at New Products, with the key difference that Ferriss is trying to set up a business that will return a relatively small monthly return — a personal life-style business.)
After the business setup stuff, he gets into the fruits of that labor, i.e., what do you do during the rest of the week not occupied with your 4 hours of management. There are some interesting parallels here with the outsourcing argument in the business section: I.e., just as there are deals overseas to automate your business, similarly you can conduct geo-arbitrage to get deals for sitting on a beach or in a cafe.
