I lent a book not so long ago to a friend who, for the duration of this post, shall remain nameless. It was Founders at Work, a collection of interviews with the founders of tech startups.

If there’s one line of wisdom threaded through the book, it’s summed up at the end by Michael Dell when asked what the most important quality in an entrepreneur is. “Persistence” was his one word reply. (I prefer the phrase “fucking a terrier” as in “he’s a fucking terrier”).

Click to read more ...

It’s amazing how often I find myself solving the wrong problem. As you may see from my last post, over the last few days, I’ve been trying to wrestle trust metric calculations onto App Engine. However it turns out that for one reason after another that it just isn’t practical (the solution I outlined in the post, Tav points out, is trivially game-able).

So the penny drops and it’s back to the drawing board. All the time I’ve invested figuring out which model entities can go in which entity group and how we can maitnain db consistency and so on is simply a waste.

Click to read more ...