I was at a breakfast meeting recently with a handful of American colleagues and some visiting Italian investors.
In lieu of bread, the restaurant we ate at served a basket of little blueberry muffins.
“What’s the word for muffin in Italian?” an American colleague asked.
“We don’t have a word for it,” one of the Italians replied.
“Then what would you call this?” she persisted.
“Well,” the Italian said, “I think we would call it ‘cake’.”
“What I love about the consumer market, that I always hated about the enterprise market, is that we come up with a product, we try to tell everybody about it, and every person votes for themselves. They go ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ and if enough of them say ‘yes,’ we get to come to work tomorrow. That’s how it works. It’s really simple. With the enterprise market, it’s not so simple. The people that use the products don’t decide for themselves, and the people that make those decisions sometimes are confused. We love just trying to make the best products in the world for people and having them tell us by how they vote with their wallets whether we’re on track or not.”
– Steve Jobs, June 1, 2010
“As the details about the bombings in Boston unfold, it’d be easy to be scared. It’d be easy to feel powerless and demand that our elected leaders do something — anything — to keep us safe.
It’d be easy, but it’d be wrong. We need to be angry and empathize with the victims without being scared. Our fears would play right into the perpetrators’ hands — and magnify the power of their victory for whichever goals whatever group behind this, still to be uncovered, has. We don’t have to be scared, and we’re not powerless. We actually have all the power here, and there’s one thing we can do to render terrorism ineffective: Refuse to be terrorized.”
\- Bruce Schneier, [“The Boston Marathon Bombing: Keep Calm and Carry On”](http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/04/the-boston-marathon-bombing-keep-calm-and-carry-on/275014/), *The Atlantic*
Sometimes, a new product is so clearly superior that, as soon as you see it, you stop using anything else.
For weather, that’s the case with [Forecast.io](http://forecast.io).
Like hiring [Nate Silver](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nate_Silver) as your meteorologist, it collects weather data from a slew of sources, then aggregates it statistically to generate the most accurate, current, local forecast possible. You may know the developers – and the accuracy of their data – from the Dark Skies iPhone app, which can uncannily alert you it’s about to start raining a few minutes before it does.
Combine that data with a clear, user-friendly front end, and you’ve got an easy winner.
*[Nota bene: head to [the same http://forecast.io URL](http://forecast.io) from your iPhone’s browser, and you can install the site as an app, too. Like the desktop version, it will instantly supplant whatever else you’re using now.]*
Jess (& co.) have now knocked out the indoor [Dobbin](http://www.dobbinclothing.com) shoot, and just in time; if the production schedule holds, their Spring ’13 line should launch next week. Just-in-time fashion: excellent for incorporating trend and customer feedback; terrible for a startup company’s mental health.
[Ed. note: yes, friends and family who wrote in to correct, I know that the phrase is ‘compliments to the chef’ with an ‘i’. This was an attempt at cleverness – entrepreneurship being a complement to cheffing – that apparently wasn’t so clever after all. Tough crowd.]
Recently, I’ve started to notice how many entrepreneurs are interested in both cooking and photography. Which makes a lot of sense.
Entrepreneurship is basically the art of slogging daily through nebulous victories and vague defeats, for years and years at a time. Successful startups are those where the victories at least slightly outpace the defeats, consistently enough for the edge to compound gradually. Even in today’s world of lean startups, of building minimal viable products and iterating fast and always shipping, the process of slogging and compounding moves excruciatingly slowly. It takes a long time to see anything happen, and an even longer time to see anything incontrovertibly significant – anything big enough to impress your mom or your non-entrepreneur friends.
Like entrepreneurship, cooking and photography are about making something from scratch, and about sharing it with others. Unlike entrepreneurship, they also let you do so exceedingly quickly. Over the course of an afternoon, you can create something that never existed before, yet that’s still good enough to be appreciated by family, friends or the broader world. And it’s not just the immediate validation – that appreciation (or lack thereof) also provides fast and clear feedback to quickly guide iterative improvement.
After a long day of slow slog, it’s hard to explain how very gratifying that can be.
Back in 1999, attending the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, I stumbled across a small booth at the back of the show from a Canadian company called Research in Motion. While they weren’t drawing much of a crowd, I was hugely intrigued by the product they had just launched, which they were calling a “Blackberry”. It looked like a Motorola two-way pager, but it didn’t send pages – instead, it let people send and receive email.
At that point, most people didn’t care much about – or even have – email on their desktop computers. And everyone I showed the Blackberry to, including the people in the tech and finance worlds I was working with at the time, told me that they would never, ever carry some sort of hand-held email device if they did.
But, even back then, even on a kludgy pager-sized Blackberry, it was clear to me that carrying your email in your pocket all day would completely change your relationship with that email.
Hop to 2012, and the [Pebble Digital Watch](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/597507018/pebble-e-paper-watch-for-iphone-and-android?ref=email), a Kickstarter project [I blogged about backing last year](https://www.joshuanewman.com/2012/04/watch-this-2/). I received that Pebble about a month ago, I’ve been wearing it on my wrist ever since, and I can honestly say it’s no less of a revolution than that Blackberry.
The downside of the Blackberry, the thing I hadn’t foreseen at the time of my early purchase, was the degree to which those little screens would one day run our lives. If you want to despair about a *Blade Runner* dystopian future, head to any public place, look around, and notice that literally every single person – even, largely, people sitting together in groups – is engaged in their own separate world, entirely mediated by the little glowing screen in their hands.
It’s something I’m guilty of myself. Sure, most of the time, nothing of any import comes in via my phone in the middle of a meeting. But, every so often, something urgent actually does: an important question from Jess, an emergency at work. With that kind of intermittent reinforcement, pretty much every time I’m at coffee or lunch or dinner or drinks, I and the other people there all put our phones on the table, waiting for them to buzz with some update that perhaps plausibly might be important but almost certainly isn’t at all.
Hence the Pebble, which notifies me of calls or texts by buzzing my wrist, while my phone is tucked away in my bag or jacket pocket. That might not sound like a big difference – an interruption is an interruption – but, in fact, it’s a big one. Because I can’t actually respond to those calls or texts from the Pebble, I actually have to decide that responding is important and proactively get my phone out to do so, rather than just reflexively reacting to every ping and ding.
As Viktor Frankl pointed out, choice – as well as our growth and freedom – exists in the space between stimulus and response. The Pebble lets me engage with the stimulus – those texts and calls still roll in – but makes the space just big enough that I can more thoughtfully make the right choices about what, when and where warrants a response.
As I said, it doesn’t sound like much. But, in practice, on my actual wrist, it feels like meaningful progress.
Spent yesterday helping Jess wrangle a last-chance photo shoot at the [Morgan Libary](http://www.themorgan.org/home.asp), as [Dobbin](http://www.dobbinclothing.com) counts down to releasing their Spring ’13 line:
“EMPLOYEES of Neverware, a small tech start-up company in Manhattan, agree that CrossFit reinforces workplace cooperation. “When we were spotting each other on squats, we literally had each other’s backs,” said Daniel Ryan, 22, a software developer and Princeton student who was an intern at the company last year.
Until recently, the Neverware team worked out three times a week at CrossFit NYC. The workouts took place around 3 p.m. — the hour when employees had begun to nod off — and offered a much-needed interruption in 12- to 15-hour workdays. Jonathan Hefter, 27, the C.E.O., said he expected his staff members, then all men, to participate.”
\-[“We’re One Big Team, So Run Those Stairs”, *The New York Times*](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/31/business/crossfit-offers-an-exercise-in-corporate-teamwork-too.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0)