Curt Doolittle

Theme: Agency

  • (personal)(entrepreneurship)(oversing) You know, most of the time I think I’m ju

    (personal)(entrepreneurship)(oversing)

    You know, most of the time I think I’m just as crazy as everyone else seems to think I am. I mean, who would give up everything, go to a foreign country, start a business, spend twice as much on it what you expected, take twice as long as you expected, all but throw away the first code base, change technologies, get in trouble for overstaying and becoming an illegal alien, doing crazy incredibly risky stuff to circumvent being an illegal alien and getting residency, enduring a revolution much which takes place in your neighborhood, enduring unjust near death prosecution by your own government, enduring an invasion by Russia —- all just to follow an entrepreneurial opportunity?

    I mean, what kind of crazy person does that? Seriously? I mean, it’s not like I don’t get on the phone and ask my friends, Max in particular, to give me moral support on a regular basis just so that I can make it through the next week without jumping off a bridge. It’s not like I don’t lie in bed thinking ‘what am I doing? I just wanna go home.’

    And at the same time I’m working on reforming libertarian and conservative political philosophy, and perhaps solving a problem that’s plagued philosophy for 2500 years.

    I mean, what kind of nutcase does that?

    What’s the Net? Oversing rocks. First killer business app of the 21st century. 🙂

    It might take us three versions to get it out there, but I’m pretty sure it’s gonna be a hard choice to want to keep Outlook/Exchange/CRM, a lot of users licenses for large accounting systems, and a handful of bolted together apps once we get there. If someone like google was smart enough to buy us it would dramatically alter their strategic position in the market. They have no reason for people to use G+. Oversing would give them that reason to unify their services. But the same is true for a handful of companies.

    So, It’s not just vision. It’s persistence, pain tolerance, hard work, and suffering. More of the negatives than most people can imagine bearing. If you aren’t willing to work that hard then you don’t really want the rewards. And furthermore, if you manage to earn those entrepreneurial rewards, then you feel damned justified in keeping them. 🙂

    I love my guys and their wives for their dedication. We are getting very close now. Thank you. 🙂

    Source date (UTC): 2014-07-10 05:51:00 UTC

  • Passive Voice Allows For The Victimism Exploit

    (insightful)(first application of operationalism)

    West Point forbids its cadets to use the passive voice. It’s an excellent practice. In the strict sense we forbid the passive voice in English and it makes for much more solid communication than in French where the passive voice acceptable. Inverted sentences in the passive voice drive me nuts as they seem nothing more than the exclamation of a noun that the speaker modifies with adjectives and participles, which he, in turn, further modifies with adverbs. I think also that the passive voice makes for a cultural vulnerability that socialism and the ‘victimism’ exploit. If you are a people to whom things happen (passive voice), are you not more likely to allow a nebulous 3rd party (the State) act on you? If, on the other hand, you are a nation that makes things happens (active voice), are you not more likely to oppose the usurpation/negation of your liberties?”– Don Finnegan

    Active Voice, E-Prime, and Operational Language place increasing demands on the speaker such that his words cannot contain obscurantisms. (Germans were wrong. English is better for philosophy. lol)

  • Passive Voice Allows For The Victimism Exploit

    (insightful)(first application of operationalism)

    West Point forbids its cadets to use the passive voice. It’s an excellent practice. In the strict sense we forbid the passive voice in English and it makes for much more solid communication than in French where the passive voice acceptable. Inverted sentences in the passive voice drive me nuts as they seem nothing more than the exclamation of a noun that the speaker modifies with adjectives and participles, which he, in turn, further modifies with adverbs. I think also that the passive voice makes for a cultural vulnerability that socialism and the ‘victimism’ exploit. If you are a people to whom things happen (passive voice), are you not more likely to allow a nebulous 3rd party (the State) act on you? If, on the other hand, you are a nation that makes things happens (active voice), are you not more likely to oppose the usurpation/negation of your liberties?”– Don Finnegan

    Active Voice, E-Prime, and Operational Language place increasing demands on the speaker such that his words cannot contain obscurantisms. (Germans were wrong. English is better for philosophy. lol)

  • PASSIVE VOICE ALLOWS FOR THE ‘VICITIMISM’ EXPLOIT (insightful)(first application

    PASSIVE VOICE ALLOWS FOR THE ‘VICITIMISM’ EXPLOIT

    (insightful)(first application of operationalism)

    –“West Point forbids its cadets to use the passive voice. It’s an excellent practice. In the strict sense we forbid the passive voice in English and it makes for much more solid communication than in French where the passive voice acceptable. Inverted sentences in the passive voice drive me nuts as they seem nothing more than the exclamation of a noun that the speaker modifies with adjectives and participles, which he, in turn, further modifies with adverbs.

    I think also that the passive voice makes for a cultural vulnerability that socialism and the ‘victimism’ exploit. If you are a people to whom things happen (passive voice), are you not more likely to allow a nebulous 3rd party (the State) act on you? If, on the other hand, you are a nation that makes things happens (active voice), are you not more likely to oppose the usurpation/negation of your liberties?”– Don Finnegan

    Active Voice, E-Prime, and Operational Language place increasing demands on the speaker such that his words cannot contain obscurantisms.

    (Germans were wrong. English is better for philosophy. lol)

    Source date (UTC): 2014-07-09 07:55:00 UTC

  • I’m envious of the guys who are great husbands, fathers, friends, and providers

    I’m envious of the guys who are great husbands, fathers, friends, and providers who don’t get involved in selfish nonsense like philosophy, politics, public anything, and other self gratifying obsessions. I mean, I wish I could be one of them. I would be suicidal if I tried. I have to feed the merciless dopamine seeking machine in my head with information, competition, and whatever else it needs to keep busy enough to leave me alone. But when I see those family pictures, I see the same thing other people do when they look at athletes, musicians, entrepreneurs and politicians. I see what is beyond my ability to obtain. And while it used to make me sad, I understand that each of us moves humanity forward in our own ways, and we are not able to or meant to be equal in this world. It takes each of us to fill each possible niche. So I content myself with respecting and admiring those that have done what I have not and cannot seem to do no matter how hard I try.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-07-08 10:29:00 UTC

  • Against Dysgenia, Does Not Imply Active Eugenia

    —“Surely you understand how individualists might view your little eugenics project as pretty unworkable, fucked and backwards, don’t you”— [I] don’t have a eugenics project, I make the argument that at some point in your chain of reasoning you must have a means of making judgements between one set of preferences and another, and that the progressive preference is dysgenic. To warn against dysgenia is very different from conducting eugenia. I do not see the political reason for redistributing from the middle class to the lower class if this constructs dysgenia that inhibits the formation of the high trust society which is necessary for the standard of living that allows for redistribution. In other words, i’m making an argument against a logical fallacy. This might seem to you as if I am making a sentimental argument,b ecause you argue largely sentimentally. But I don’t. I might actually be largely incapable of it. Most of my arguments are in the general vein of pointing out the fallacy of the libertarian and classical liberal, and progressive canons that do not account for the problem of trust, intelligence, and impulsivity in the construction of a polity capable of constant innovation necessary to stay ahead of both the genetic red queen, the malthusian red queen, and the technological red queen, and how those three red queens must be defeated in order to preserve economic prosperity that allows us to have whatever nonsensical social order we choose. I suspect that this argument is not obvious to you and most others, but that is my fundamental argument and the insight I am trying to incorporate into political science, political economy, economics, and philosophical ethics. -Cheers

  • Against Dysgenia, Does Not Imply Active Eugenia

    —“Surely you understand how individualists might view your little eugenics project as pretty unworkable, fucked and backwards, don’t you”— [I] don’t have a eugenics project, I make the argument that at some point in your chain of reasoning you must have a means of making judgements between one set of preferences and another, and that the progressive preference is dysgenic. To warn against dysgenia is very different from conducting eugenia. I do not see the political reason for redistributing from the middle class to the lower class if this constructs dysgenia that inhibits the formation of the high trust society which is necessary for the standard of living that allows for redistribution. In other words, i’m making an argument against a logical fallacy. This might seem to you as if I am making a sentimental argument,b ecause you argue largely sentimentally. But I don’t. I might actually be largely incapable of it. Most of my arguments are in the general vein of pointing out the fallacy of the libertarian and classical liberal, and progressive canons that do not account for the problem of trust, intelligence, and impulsivity in the construction of a polity capable of constant innovation necessary to stay ahead of both the genetic red queen, the malthusian red queen, and the technological red queen, and how those three red queens must be defeated in order to preserve economic prosperity that allows us to have whatever nonsensical social order we choose. I suspect that this argument is not obvious to you and most others, but that is my fundamental argument and the insight I am trying to incorporate into political science, political economy, economics, and philosophical ethics. -Cheers

  • guy is 21, and the perfect entrepreneur. The reason I think his story is valuabl

    http://digg.com/video/meet-new-yorks-youngest-truffle-dealerThis guy is 21, and the perfect entrepreneur. The reason I think his story is valuable to share, is that, he’s a master of his niche. And largely, entrepreneurship requires mastery of something that few other people master.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-07-05 21:09:00 UTC

  • OUT THERE ON THE HORIZON WITH WHATEVER CAPITAL YOU HAVE. I used to be so patient

    OUT THERE ON THE HORIZON WITH WHATEVER CAPITAL YOU HAVE.

    I used to be so patient with business partners, customers, employees, and to really work with them to try to help them to understand whatever broader point I was trying to get across. And I worked constantly on my business partners and board members in particular, to help them ‘see’ what I always took to be relatively obvious, or to get them to test what I saw what but was unsure of.

    As a CEO I assume I am wrong, and use my management team to test my theories. If I cannot get them on board, then I assume my theory is either wrong or insufficiently thought out. For this reason we did and I always did, try to get unanimous consent. (This turns out to be a deterministic behavior resulting from INTP personalities, but I didn’t know that at the time.)

    Of course, back then, while I understood the scientific method, Popperian skepticism, the theory of incentives and Austrian economics, the problem of ‘calculation’, and of course, market competition, I did not have Propertarianism figured out, or the relationship between Operationalism and Intuitionism and performative truth, even though I had intuited some aspects of it much earlier.

    So what I saw as open to intuition if I just pressed on with people, and kept trying to ‘help them see’, was really not available to them at all. I think like most people they saw pedagogy, fragments of reason, end results of my efforts, but they never really understood much at all. And that’s because it was so vast a leap, that it was impossible.

    So in retrospect, while I am still angry that I could not get them to help me avoid the recession-depression, nor recover from it, they paid in their wealth for not helping me.

    But it was far too much to expect from even well read, well educated, scientifically knowledgeable, technology savvy, financially sophisticated, business savvy people. I might as well have been talking to high school kids.

    And I sort of feel sorry for them instead. An myself. For my naivety. Lacking sufficient empathy, I was unable to intuit what ordinary people do, or what ordinary professors usually do.

    This is the first time I have felt this kind of revelation. Which is again, a problem of autistic incompetence. Incompetence only solved through the kind of neurogenesis we get from time and mental exercise. Just as we repair our ability to walk or think after an accident. Food, water, sleep and mental exercise.

    Businesses are run by above average people, employ average people, and by and large serve average and below average people. Very smart people rarely accumulate great wealth, because nothing in that process is all that interesting really. Until the rise of technology, which all but eliminated the capital requirements for the creation of disruptive business value. (although, I suspect, like the competitive value of electricity, the competitive value of this era of ‘calculating’ software has nearly reached its zenith. And it will require ‘thinking’ software to create another such leap. And as such the world returns to normal: above average people run everything of consequence, in the service of average and below average people. And exceptional people make-do with the playthings and problems available to them.

    The only place for people like me (and some of you) is in entrepreneurial positions where we do not require a great deal of external consent in order to compete and innovate. Because it is impossible to equip external parties with the knowledge and understanding to make rational choices. They can only gamble on what they cannot understand using fragments of what they do understand. And for us, that means largely self funding one’s efforts.

    If you are sufficiently out there on the horizon then you are standing there, alone, with whatever capital you have.

    Same goes for philosophy.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-07-05 12:16:00 UTC

  • RUMINATIONS ON THE STATE OF THE PRODUCT AND THE STATE OF LIFE (personal)(state o

    RUMINATIONS ON THE STATE OF THE PRODUCT AND THE STATE OF LIFE

    (personal)(state of the product)(thoughts on strategy)

    So, over the past week or two it’s become clear that the guys have fixed Oversing’s performance without doing a rewrite of the UI in Backbone. I’d thought it wasn’t possible. Next, Vitally will virtualize the remaining UI’s central panel. And Alexey will keep improving the back end (sometimes dramatically). And with the rate at which he is cutting milliseconds we will have exactly the performance we need, even for enterprise scale data sets. I am going to keep the UI rewrite in my pocket, but at this point I think we’ve all determined it isn’t needed.

    The first project management reports are done. Kirill has chosen to add the sales report at Steven’s request. And so the reporting continues to evolve. I think as we work through the standard reports, we’ll have to revisit some functionality, but that’s just normal. There are quite a few reports we need, but most are variations on a theme. No one has incorporated the social factor into those metrics before, and so those reports will wait for last, and I will have to design them myself I suppose unless I can get Steven to do it.

    Alexander has been incredibly impactful on the product already, and we were lucky to hire him. Oversing is non-trivial and tracking and reproducing bugs is equally difficult. But I see all these wonderful notices from Oversing as the bugs are opened, and both oversing and github all day long on the fixes are put into the source and published.

    Kirill all but runs the development side of the house now, mostly without my intervention. So my little experiment, at his suggestion, is working out. The team is an extended family and self operating as long as the goals are clear. By the time we are ready to launch and turn into a real business, I will have the independent development team I was hoping for. (Gambling on maybe. 🙂 ) And my goal of having a team I don’t have to sit with will have been accomplished.

    HONEST ASSESSMENT OF STATUS

    -errors-

    I have made a few design errors that we will need to fix.

    1) messaging / mail outside of profile page. I don’t know at this point, why I made that leap but I should have stayed in the paradigm. I think that once I understood that oversing could eventually replace much of the current microsoft stack, that I got too fascinated with email interfaces, and lost sight of the value of the work oriented rather than message oriented paradigm.

    2) workspace first or profile/messaging first. I think I made a mistake. The initial impression is blown by this decision. We should default to the profile/stream page first, then let the user pick his workspace. And then allow the user to select a profile option as to whether to show the workspace first. This will allow new users less ‘blank slate’ exposure when first using the app, but allows sophisticated users with lots of data to get immediately to work.

    I have not spent enough time thinking through the reports that are needed for each object in the system, and I think that each object will require one or more reports. The system currently supports a god awful lot of object types. (Which is why its so powerful, and you can run your entire business on it). But each of those objects does require a some sort of reporting (it may overlap considerably), and some UI differences. I have tried to do this a number of times and discovered that the differences in properties are minimal if at all, but the differences in reporting I don’t think are as minimal as the differences in properties. I could be wrong but I need to go look at it. What is the report for a set of contracts for example? Or for a set of employee reviews? I just need to give that some thinking now that we’re far enough along.

    -priority/strategy errors-

    I think incorporating the email functionality is more important, and more necessary than I had assumed, and I think that is a big oversight, and something that I must fix – and that will be expensive to fix. It means integrating with email systems and supporting the data in email headers for routing mail. It may be true that we can put that off, but the more I think about it the more troubling it is. Mostly because of the impact it has on marketing and positioning. It saves the customer an absurd amount of money in Microsoft licensing fees if I pull it off. And that is an enormous incentive.

    Otherwise I think the ongoing release of Sales, Recruiting, Career development, and other features sets as planned MAY BE ok. Even though I’d love to get them in their earlier. The reason is that the market for PM related products is saturated, and given that I worked so hard to make sure we were in the ERP/PSA category, I don’t want the product to get tagged in the tool category along with Jira and the like. Oversing is much more than that.

    -completeness-

    I think that once we are feature complete, that will mean that all the features are 75% complete. 🙂 Which is what we used to aim for at MSFT anyway – IMHO. So it will still take us a bit to take everything from feature complete, which is the designer and developer’s concept of feature complete, to expected functionality, which is the user’s conception of feature complete. 🙂

    The application paradigm is simply ‘moving’. It’s a pleasure to work with. But going through the app today I found what seemed like a limitless examples of “we have to do x here for this to make sense”. It’s all little stuff. But there is a whole lot of little stuff.

    For the app to perform its function, the karma system (the social rating system) and the subscription/follow/friend model has to be everywhere.

    We will soon enter a period where the content becomes a critical work product. And Oversing is a content heavy application. In order for it to provide value right out of the box, we have to prime it with a great deal of content: the skills data alone is something we need to hire someone to compile – or perhaps many people to compile.

    We need to prime all the business and corporate organizational models, all the workflows for those models, all the messages for those models, all the instructional help for those models, and all the sample data for those models.

    For example, we currently have both English and Russian dictionaries, but we need german, french, spanish, Italian, and whatever else we can get in there from the developed world. There is no reason why the app will not tolerate right-to-left languages, but the UI doesn’t ‘flip’ to accommodate them – although, given that our UI template does, it shouldn’t be all that challenging at some point to accommodate third world languages. The Google translate functionality primes all of the text values for us, but human beings must still go through those translations and improve them.

    But more importantly, the short videos that teach people how to use Oversing have to be pretty exhaustive. They must be delivered by a person not only who sounds intelligent and understandable, but that has intimate knowledge of the product, and maybe a different person for every role, just to make it less monotonous.

    GOING TO MARKET

    It’s not like once we build it people will come play baseball. We still have the Web site, license purchasing ability from inside and outside the application. Ecommerce functionality. Marketing and sales programs. Sigh. Analyst presentations and meetings. Jurisdictions and taxes. Copyrights, trademarks, patents. Helpdesk, help desk staff and databases. Policies. Licenses. Service org that can perform installs and configure enterprises. Or even convert and transfer data.

    Building the product is the most controllable and predictable part of the problem. But adding the content, help and tutorials, product support, configuration and training services, selling and marketing, customer service, and financing to take a product to market is an act of logistics just as challenging if not more so than the development of the product itself.

    Which leads me to the next issue: my time.

    PERSONAL LIFE AND BUSINESS LEADERSHIP

    My personal world has changed over the past 18 months. When we started I was recovering from a near death illness, my second bout of cancer, my decision to leave the company I’d founded, and my divorce. I was a basket case physically, emotionally, and mentally. But after a year and a half of good ukrainian food, good ukrainian people, and fully exiting the previous company and its endemic infighting, my health is considerably better, my mind and soul are considerably better, and my mind has returned to that thing I remember having once upon a time. 🙂

    Furthermore, at that point, I merely thought my work in philosophy was to merely reform libertarianism as a means of assisting american conservatives. I did not realize where that project would end, nor the influence that such a work could have on the political sphere in this era of change, as well as upon intellectual history. And at this point I do understand it. And I am both inspired and frightened by it. Inspired to continue working, but frightened of missing the opportunity, now that I understand that the continental and cosmopolitan enlightenment, from which the modern war on the west emerged, is as damaging as the forcible adoption of christianity was – and for the same reasons.

    I have succeeded I think, in articulating in analytical if not scientific terms, the content of western philosophy for the first time. And given that the other great civilizations have books of lies (myths) and we do not, this has been our civilization’s weakness.

    So while I clearly prefer wealth over lack of it, and I clearly enjoy bringing oversing to market versus a life without commercial competition, I also prefer to advance my work in philosophy more so than I prefer to advance my commercial interests. Or rather, I am very cautious about the time commitment of each. The world might be a little better, and I might be a lot wealthier if oversing is successfully matured into my full vision for it. But the world will be much better, and profoundly better if I continue the current rate of production in philosophy – I have finished creating the language for the moral and ethical debate of various political system in rational and commensurable terms. So I am finally reaching a point of comprehensibility that before I could only suggest. And others are starting to adopt it as well. It works. And at my current productivity, I will literally be able to flood intellectual discourse, and if I get a few others working, seriously flood it, and make a difference. And with that difference construct the possibility of enacting change.

    BUSINESS

    That is profoundly interesting to me. My people are very talented and will be rewarded for their dedication. We will need to increase the size of the team significantly once we are feature complete – not necessarily so much on the tech side, but on the content and administrative side, because going to market requires all the content, and all the education and marketing materials for an application of this scale. There is no reason intelligent folk will need help installing and configuring Oversing for use in an enterprise. But there is every reason that those intelligent folk will need help training and rolling out oversing as an enterprise application – just as they would need help with rolling out exchange, office, MSDynamics, or for that matter, any ERP. So helpdesk, education/training, marketing, services and product management roles all need filling.

    For the past fifteen years I have done fairly well combining work and theory, and I think if I have the right people I can continue it. But in practical terms, if I am to continue my work on philosophy, I cannot afford to really do any of those tasks OTHER than produce the strategy – which is something almost no one else can do – and guide the management team, which I don’t ‘think they’ll let anyone else do. 🙂

    I do realize that Max understands the market and importance of this product better than anyone – probably me included. I do realize that the ‘soul’ of the product’s cultural transformation is Steven’s idea, as is the project management and customer service ethic. I do understand that the scope of the product and it’s revolutionary aspect is my idea and I think I may be the only one (although I think max and Kirill may see it too to varying degrees) who sees that Oversing is a very disruptive technology. Max sees it as disruptive in the PSA market. I think I see it disruptive in that oversing would dramatically influence the market value of a number of companies that lack a value proposition sufficient to increase their market capital. The scale at which I am able, even with a good investor, to take Oversing to market is not the same as an established player with access to capital markets and an established customer base that they wish to increase their value proposition for.

    So I have a few people I would very much like to hire, and I simply cannot afford to.

    I would much rather have these people run the organization, but my problem is that I don’t believe an investor, which I will need to take a product of this scale to market, is going to tolerate me as a chairman / strategist / Philosopher, and I wouldn’t either. But I really cannot afford to spend much time, given that 60 is only 6 years away, on anything other than my philosophical work. I am in my prime and I need to make use of it – torpedos be damned. I am too conscious of the observed decline in faculties of men I see reach 62/63. For the kind of work I do, if I solve the remaining structural (theoretical) problems, I can spend the rest of my life (whatever that may be) on application and advocacy, which do not require periods of such concentration and hard work, only familiarity with the subject matter. But I must make the best use of the next five or six years of my post-45 year old brain, and its inevitable demyelination. I do not work all that fast anyway.

    I had hoped that by writing this down and thinking through it I would see an answer. At present I may just have to keep my feet in both pools until it impacts the business. But if at that point it impacts the business, my role will have to decrease to that of chairman or even board member, because while the product is certainly disruptive (or at least will be by version 3) the world needs the solution to the problem of truth, ethics, politics and economics a lot more than it needs another software product.

    Curt Doolittle

    Kiev, Ukraine

    July 5, 2014

    Slava Ukraine

    Source date (UTC): 2014-07-05 09:53:00 UTC