POSTING YOUR WORK ON PROPERTARIANISM.COM
A lot of people’s work is hitting the bar, so I’ve started posting to Propertarianism.com those pieces here that add value, using the tag line ‘Guest post by…”.
So far that’s Eli Harman Michael Philip (whose every utterance is panned gold), James Santagata , William L. Benge and Johannes Meixner.
– Cheers
Source date (UTC): 2014-11-28 17:39:00 UTC
COMING OUT OF THE STEALTH-CLOSET – Reality By Chanting, and our product, Oversing.
–“We are the first company …http://lnkd.in/dFbtqAV
Source date (UTC): 2014-11-09 13:15:58 UTC
Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/531435024868859905
http://shar.es/10DBuXCOMING OUT OF THE STEALTH CLOSET – Reality By Chanting and Oversing on Crunchbase.
I wanted to have zero attention until we were close. So now that we’re close…
Source date (UTC): 2014-11-09 08:13:00 UTC
FOR AMERICANS, ENTREPRENEURSHIP IS LIKE BREATHING.
It is absolutely impossible to explain to the rest of the world (particularly Ukrainians) how much better the average american is at business – as a universal general rule – than the minority of those people almost everywhere else.
Sure, context matters, but there is playing context and there is market function. And the more I travel, the more I understand that it’s not just our risk tolerance alone that makes us different – it’s immersion in a culture of entrepreneurship, wherein social activity itself is always conducted under the premise of selling.
We are ignorant and untalented on many levels. But the art of voluntary organization of production in the service of consumers is like breathing – it’s just what we do. We don’t really do anything else – we don’t know how.
Source date (UTC): 2014-11-08 12:54:00 UTC
PARTNERSHIP AS THE MORAL RULE OF BUSINESS
If you are lucky enough to choose the right people, and you work hard at it, the feeling of having partners in business, or in the business of building a nest, or in the business of raising a family – there is nothing like it.
I had a twenty year marriage with a partner I trusted and could talk to. I had a twenty year business relationship with a partner who I could (most of the time) talk to. An I have had investor relationships that you can talk to even under the most hostile of conditions, even when you are absolutely competitors, and you still understand one another and can act with trust.
Right now I have people who work with me as partners. And when you can just hammer on an issue, and come to one resolution after another with some comfort that you all have done your work of prosecuting an idea to the best extent that you can, there is no feeling in the world like it.
I see a lot of my fellow younger libertarians and I realize that the only thing stopping them from doing the same, is sufficient capital to prosecute and test an idea. One of the things I will always support the american way of life over any other country,is that it is far easier to do this in american than in any other place in the world I have yet found. our founders were business people and they made it possible and as yet the socialists haven’t succeeded in seeking sufficient rents against us that we are hobbled like europeans are.
White Europeans worry. White Americans just try. And you can see it spread into black and Hispanic populations. Jews have it by nature. Asians just need permission to separate from the group.
The secret to partnership is trying to make the other person happier than you make yourself. The secret to marriage is the same. The secret to commerce is the same.
The secret to life is the same.
The golden rule – do unto others.
The silver rule – do not unto others
And partnership means applying both.
Source date (UTC): 2014-11-08 07:22:00 UTC
OVERSING – UPDATE, LESSONS LEARNED
Iain’s doing our taxes.
Seeing how much we’ve spent.
It’s not cheap.
I’m crying – sort of – a lot.
I have learned something.
It’s an expensive lesson.
But I couldn’t do it any other way at the time.
And in retrospect, I wouldn’t do it any other way. 🙂
Net is that the savings from being here is not as attractive as it seems.
You only really, all said and done, save about 50%.
What these low burn rates buy you, is the ability to slowly develop the software you want, rather than sprint to develop the software you THINK you want.
We have thrown out the base code twice, and this summer, we even converted to websockets to preserve the user’s experience – and it was very expensive to do that.
So I could not afford, out of pocket, to develop an experimental product like Oversing in the states. It would be impossible at US burn rates (which is why no one does it).
Here I could not develop a product (of this complexity) under US conditions because we just don’t have the experienced people in this country to do it. So it’s not POSSIBLE really to develop a product like Oversing here under normal USA schedule pressure. Because no one knows how.
But if you want to save half the cost, and take half-again or more as long as doing it in the States, then doing development here is awesome. It’s beautiful. I’s ENJOYABLE.
HONESTY:
My health, the work on my philosophy, my state of mind because of my health, were really expensive additions, and the communication barrier was much more expensive than I though – as much as 1/2 or more of the cost to date has been a function of maintaining my stress level so that I could get healthy again (which eventually worked) and the fact that I must incrementally develop the product because of the combination of lack of available UI design analysts and talent, and because it’s just not possible to communicate across these various boundaries that easily. I feel, only in the past four months or so have we achieved that level of transparency and communication that is taken for granted in any west-coast-startup.
I attribute that to the ***CULTURE OF US ACADEMIC INSTITUTIONS***. While the USA teaches very little in university of much consequence, it does seem to teach you the important western cultural values of trust, transparency, collaboration and teamwork. (Something I hear from asians pretty regularly.)
But had I been in better condition (Not recovering from my second near-death experience in three years) but also a divorce, and tossing my life upside down, I would have been able to drive the product more consistently.
I am not one to look back and ignore the lessons that life has taught me, and aside from three regrets (my divorce from a perfect wife for me, not staying quit when I resigned as CEO of Ascentium, and not joining the Literature department when they asked me to) I don’t have all that many really.
So life has taught me that I could have done this project in the states for about twice what it has cost me here (about a million here). And that I could have done it for half of that had I been in better health and state of mind.
But that would mean that I had not had the wonderful experience that I have had here, and I would not have the somewhat novel product that I do, and would have only a slightly better version of the product that others have brought to market.
So we are in dead-drop mode here for January,1, and this product will be ready for beta January 1. And it’s time for me to change from repairing myself, while building this product, to the next stage, where we take it to market, and my health and state of mind, have both been recovered.
Cheers.
Source date (UTC): 2014-11-05 05:38:00 UTC
Thoughts: Oversing Update:
In mid to late Q1 we will start to need:
A full time Sysadmin for managing, our builds, and customer instances.
A marketer who will handle relationships with analysts, an agency.
An agency (small cheap) with experience in our industry.
A full time designer for the UI, and web production work.
A full time writer for help, web and training content.
A full time video-clip producer (oversing is a very big application)
One or Two trainer for training customers, a training plan – that makes use of the writing and the video clips and not a new, separate, program.
A customer service (Helpdesk) person, here in Ukraine, and one on the west coast (Seattle). Also responsible for KB content.
One or Two Consultants for configuring instances, migrating data, workflows.Etc.
A Project manager to coordinate it all.
….(I will continue to play product manager role in true Jobs fashion.)
Nine or ten additional product developers in Ukraine – the scarcity being object oriented js.
Two developers (probably in Ukraine, possibly in the states), to build the central repository services.
An analyst for the Skills, Disciplines, Business Processes. Workflows,
A bookkeeper for the usual stuff (although there isn’t much)
An admin chick/office manager for the usual stuff (in Ukraine).
A bank that gives much better service than the one we have now.
Yeah… that’s about right.
It’s ok. I look at burn rates in San Francisco and it makes me laugh. Fully loaded our burn rate would still not hit 3M/Yr at 250K per month. 😉 (Thank you Ukraine.) And Ukraine is very favorable to tech company revenues. 🙂
Source date (UTC): 2014-11-05 04:23:00 UTC
RETURNING ARISTOCRACY, AND THEREFORE TRUTH, TO THE ACADEMY
(worth repeating)
My preference would be to teach War, Politics, Law, Economics, Finance, and Propertarian philosophy as a curriculum in all universities so that the Cathedral possessed internal competition. And it would restore male female balance to the Academy’s numbers of graduates.
I should add to that that in high school or in college, either one, we should restore, grammar, rhetoric and testimony.
if we taught grammar, rhetoric and testimony, within a generation that would restore western civilization.
“What color is the cube”
“From this angle I see two sides of the cube, and those two sides are white”
“So the cube is white”
“No, I cannot testify to that, I can only testify to seeing two sides of the house, and they are white”.
You see, warriors cannot add imaginary content to observations because people will die, or opportunities will be lost, if they do. So testimony evolved in the west out of the cult or raiders, and the rituals of initiatic warriors.
The truth is enough.
But only if people know the difference between observation and imagination.
Filling in the blanks is lying.
You don’t fill in the blanks. Because imagination contains bias.
Source date (UTC): 2014-11-03 05:08:00 UTC
FB, GOOGLE AND THE PROBLEM WITH MAJOR BRAND ADVERTISING
You see, Google merely transferred the money spent on yellow pages to a new medium, that provided, like shareware, free advertising (search results – the white pages), and better placement (yellow pages), and much better placement (advertisement position on the page).
Now I have no idea why google tolerates all these local (sh_t) yellow page listings other than it generates click money for them at the expense of users, instead of creating a very clear means of searching for local services based upon your address, that is edited as the yellow pages were, that places some demand for legitimacy upon the people making the listings. Because it’s impossible to find almost anything local still. So that seems like a ‘miss’ because it’s a hole someone can hurt them with in the future. (Citysearch was awesome and I still miss it)
But back to the broader picture, this plan to transform the yellow pages business onto the net was fantastic. However, it did not help attract major brands. Major brands cannot find success on google or Facebook, nor can these platforms be used to create local draws – events.
Next, because they were designed for consumers, it’s very hard for major brands to use these platforms to advertise to businesses that actually want to see those ads. And yes, there are things that businesses want to subscribe to. If I could see the advertising equivalent of Pinterest, as a user, and select what promises
Now, I’m living in a world where I see mobile as a bit of a misallocation of capital that will come to an end like the housing boom. (or the iPad era). It’s only interesting because like the era where americans immigrated germans into the midwest or the gold rush era in California, or the current migration of Chinese out of the serfdom of rice cultivation.
So I’m giving some thought to a more static world than we have seen for the past two decades.
And I’m more interested (as I have been for some time) in big brands, able to sell complex value propositions rather than trying to get attention from the consumer with A.D.D. from overstimulation.
Now, if we had very detailed profiles on individuals, even if you couldn’t see their names, and you could publish Pinterest-style information (Rich I mean), as a major brand, I would think that would be interesting. I mean, we have all these trivial little publications that try to reach out to people in industries. What if that was always available to them like a separate tab within Facebook?
We don’t want interruptions. But we all like diversions. And advertising property constructed can be a great diversion.
Source date (UTC): 2014-11-02 10:11:00 UTC
Kirill says to me” the secret to all business partnerships is giving your partners more.” Which I take as an ESL phrasing. Then he says that it’s about trust. And feeling you can say the truth.
I think it’s that you try to make your partner happy and successful no matter what -even at your own expense . And you are confident that your parter will do the same.
Source date (UTC): 2014-10-29 13:04:00 UTC