Mar
02

Scared about doing a start-up? Learn to ski first

skiing is about controlling your direction without really breaking

I am a former entrepreneur, a project manager and maybe I will be an entrepreneur again at some point in the future.

I am also learning to ski and during the few hours I have spent on skis it occurred to me there are a lot of things in common between skiing and starting up businesses.

Here are a few hard-learned lessons I’d like to share.

 

1. You will go downhill.

Sure, you can go sideways and slow your descent but you won’t be able to go uphill without a chair lift. Once you have commited to a track you have to ride it to the end, in a way or in another.

That’s exactly what happens when starting up businesses: you commit yourself to something and there is no turning back. Did you took a red (intermediate) track instead of a blue (easy) one? Too late to apologize my friend!

You can delay some events (go sideways)  but in the end you will face the slope: if you cannot make it on your skis, be prepared to negotiate it on your back.

 

2. Slow does not mean easy

If you are snowplowing throught a slope you will use a lot of energy just to keep your speed low. Much better approach is learning a few turn techniques and be proficient at those: they require less physical effort,  you go downhill way faster than snowplowing and you are in better control of your skiing.

Same applies to businesses:  you cannot afford the luxury to take it slow and easy. Even if you can, most of the time it is the wrong thing to do. Proficient businessman know that they have to grow big and do it fast if they want to stay on a market (slope).

Think about Amazon or Facebook or Google: all of them grew their ‘skills‘ fast and furious in a bid to overcome whatever perilous ‘slope‘ they might have encountered.

 

 3. Fear is your worse enemy

Once you have mastered shallow slopes you will surely try steeper ones and there is a good chance you will freeze: don’t do it, don’t panic, don’t stop! If you stop you will have to face the slope to get some speed for turns and if you panic you won’t be able to turn your skis into the slope.

In business it is pretty much the same: if you panic you find yourself between a rock and an hard place all too soon.

The last thing you want (on skis and in life) is to get stuck on a slope too steep to climb and to scary to ski through.

 

4. Know when to stop

Even if you could master the worst slopes for hours, sooner or later your body would make clear it has had enough. Trust the pain in your knees and back and get off the track.

If you don’t do it, cramps may occour on a steep slope coated with icy snow… and you are going to regret not having left the track when you had the opportunity.

The same in business. When you see margins growing tighter and efforts growing higher it may be possible the market you are exploiting is becoming unprofitable. In that case, don’t hold to your business unless you are *absolutely* sure that the pain is only temporary.

Leave the track at your terms or commit yourself to the consequences.

 

5. Falling is OK

Every skier falls and each fall teaches a lesson. If you don’t try and make mistakes you do not learn, in skiing as well as starting up businesses.

Of course it would be better to learn from other’s mistakes, but not everyone is lucky enough to have lessons taught on other’s shoulders.

 How do I know? I have had no such luxury and fell so many times!

 

 

 

 

 

Feb
26

How to make a fool of yourself in sixty nanoseconds

In a recent announcement scientists working at the OPERA experiment have reported two anomalies in the way they measure neutrino’s flight time from CERN to Gran Sasso detectors. Long story short, neutrinos might either be faster than previously thought or not superluminal at all.

Rumors indicate a faulty GPS cabling as the likely culprit for one of the two anomalies. The error induced by this anomaly would account exactly for sixty nanoseconds that were missing, neat!

The other anomaly is statistical in its nature: each pulse shot from CERN lasts long enough to generate doubts on whether a neutrino observed at OPERA has been generated at the beginning or at the end of it. Reducing the length of the pulse will reduce this uncertainty.

On top of that, GPS systems installed at the Gran Sasso laboratory are quite complex and it is understandable not everyone consider them reliable enough.

With this in mind, while I understand the difficulty of executing this particular measurement, I cannot understand why scientists hurried to publish preliminary results in September.

Everyone knows that Einstein’s relativity theory has been proven down to incredibly accurate figures… a claim invalidating such theory should have been approached with the outmost care, right? Wrong!

While no one will likely complain about the statistical anomaly, wouldn’t have been wise to at least triple check cabling before publishing the paper?

I have no doubt that OPERA scientists have lost a great deal of credibility among their peers. Even worse, I fear their personal shortcoming will be considered an italian shortcoming, like there was any need of it.

Ultimately, it looks like sixty nanoseconds it’s all it takes to make a fool of yourself, now we have a scientific paper proving it. Thanks!

 

 

 

 

 

Feb
19

Living in a Borg society

Let’s face it. The digital revolution has made us more like Borgs than we could imagine, and we are enjoying the ride.

Sure, we are not evil cyborgs, we do not roam the galaxy assimilating other cultures, there is no Borg queen to take decisions on our behalf and we still enjoy a relative freedom of action, but what about all the rest?

Like Borgs, we share our knowledge and memories.

It has become common sense that for any given problem someone has likely found and shared a solution. You just need a search engine and a browser to retrieve it. In the rare case you have solved a problem for the first time (you have created new knowledge), likely you will post it online to make it accessible to others. 

Knowledge isn’t stored only in our brains, we can put it in a remote storage (read: write a blog, an howto) to be used as needed, and also use other people’s memories and experience to solve problems we have at hands: as long as you can guess which piece of  information you need and know how to retrieve and use it, there is no way you get stuck into something. At the very least, you can network with others and ask for help.

We don’t share just knowledge, but also personal memories, tastes, ideas. Have you ever uploaded pictures from your last vacation to make them accessible to dear ones? What about your iTunes playlists? Do you have a blog? Do you use twitter? Once something is shared there is no going back, it gets indexed quite fast and likely copied.

Like Borgs, shared information can outlast our lifespan.

When you post something that is extremely useful or extremely interesting, it quickly goes viral and becomes common knowledge: something that most part of the collectivity agrees upon. When this happens to ideas, they easily transcends human lifespan.

Think about Steve Jobs. Even if  he is dead, you can be sure what he shared of himself is actively being studied, memorized, dissected, elaborated, reproduced and posted again, and again, and again. Even more, death has made him an icon. Death is not necessarily a limit anymore.

Like Borgs, we do program things to accomplish any kind of task.

Search engine’s crawlers, for example, can be considered  specialized on-line drones whose purpose is to retrieve, index, and make content accessible. And what if you want to extract content in a specific way? You can easily program your own scraper, like Joel Grus described in ‘Hacking Hacker News‘ a few days ago.

Like Borgs we can program drones (or agents, or software, or household appliances) to do stuff on our behalf. Be it washing dishes, inspecting pipelines, assembling vehicles, sequencing DNA, relaying radio signals from orbit, exploring the universe, searching for a new job or a mate… you name it.

Each one of us can be a Borg Queen to some extent, some more than others, today much more than thirdy years ago.

Like Borgs, a few individuals influence what the community is doing.

We surely are autonomous in our actions but we find constraints in what the community finds acceptable and what not. Since we are social beasts we tend to gather in omogeneous groups: social networking amplifies this natural trend, makes it faster, persistent, more pervasive.

Hence, inside a social group a relatively small  number of trend-setters can act as Borg queens, everyone else either follow or defect to other social groups and in a way or in another you get assimilated.

Is it so bad being a Borg?

Try not to see it in terms of good vs bad, Star Trek is just a movie.

You have to admit, however, that while Star Trek’s authors were trying to envision the ultimate villain race for their fictional universe, they managed to anticipate problems and opportunities we face today as a society:

> possibility to share knowledge to better adapt to the environment

> dependence on shared knowledge to make or help decisions

> loss of privacy and to some exent autonomy

> larger dependance on social acceptance when making personal or collective decisions

With this in mind, how can we deny there is now a little bit of Borg in everyone of us?

 

Feb
17

How to recover Root on your AWS instances

 

A few hours ago I was cleaning my macbook and accidentally deleted a few crypted notes, among those the Root password to this blog’s AWS instance (Doh!).

Had the blog been hosted on a virtual server at the datacenter I work in, it wouldn’t have been a problem. We use virtualization a lot and I know it is quite simple to recover the root password remotely.

You just have to shut down the virtual machine, detach the root volume and attach it on a different VM, login, mount, chroot and issue a passwd. Worse case scenario you can manually update the /etc/shadow using an known hash. It turns out you can do the same on EC2 instances.

Disclaimer: while this procedure worked for me, there is no guarantee it will work for you, it could make your data unrecoverable and I am not able to offer any support. Use at your own risk!

You are still here? Good.

Login to your AWS account and reach the EC2 console. From there, click on your instance and take note of the following:

> the zone where the machine is located (mine was in eu-west-1a)

> the device where the root filesystem is held (mine was /dev/sda1)

> the AMI of your Instance (for example, Ubuntu_x86_64)

Once you have done that, right click on your instance and then select “Change Shutdown Behaviour”: ensure it shuts down the instance without terminating it. If need be, change the behaviour appropriately.

Now you should be able to safely shut down the instance.

Go to the navigation panel on the left and select ‘volumes’ from the ‘elastic block store’ drop down. If you have only an instance there should be only one volume, otherwise make sure to select the proper one and detach it. 

It generally takes a few to detach a disk, once its status is ‘detached’ create a new instance. Let’s call it ‘Recovery’.

The virtual machine has to be created with the same AMI and inside the same zone (eu-west-1a, for instance) of the machine you want to recover.

When the instance is up, go back to the block store and attach the volume to it, login and issue a ‘dmesg’ command: it should indicate on which device the volume has been attached (In my case it was /dev/xvdf).

Now mount the device in /media, and modify the root password either by chrooting and issuing ‘passwd’ or by manually editing the shadow file located in /media/etc.

Shutdown the recovery machine, detach the disk and reattach it to the instance it rightfully belongs. Be sure to use the original device (/dev/sda1 in my case), otherwise it will not boot.

Fire up the instance, login, enjoy.

 

Feb
15

How I learned to manage my time by playing a videogame

 

I have two different lives

In one I am a regular guy, I have a job, a place to call home and wonderful wife. In the other one I am an hardcore industrialist, I roam  New Eden’s skies and thrive turning other’s people sweat into truckloads of money.

The funny thing is, my virtual life actually taught me about time management more than real life did.

Don’t jump to conclusions! I am not a video-game junkie, nor I believe that being successful in a game makes you successful in life. However, when the same sandbox is shared among 300.000 players social dynamics do emerge and what you learn in game likely turns out to be useful in life.

The first thing I learned is to relentlessy calculate the opportunity cost of my time. 

I like to play for free, everyone does. When I realized I could use in-game currency to buy game time, I became very aware of  its value. Suppose a 30-day subscription costs 500 million ISK (the game cash), one hour of game time then values about   700.000 ISK. Since I play at most two hours a day, one hour of my time then values 8.300.000 ISK. Any activity paying less is wasteful.

Once I learned to calculate the opportunity cost of my time, I dedicated myself only to those activities that kept me playing for free. More than that, the habit stuck in real life, empowering me to choose the career path that was more profitable in terms of wage, effort and risks involved.

By then, however, playing free wasn’t enough anymore: I wanted to be rich.

I discovered that several in-game activities could be controlled remotely, scheduled and multi-tasked. I found myself capable of producing items, researching blueprints, setting up market orders and compressing batches of minerals while peacefully scraping gases from the clouds of a gas giant. All at the same time.

It is not weird, people do the same in real life. Nothing prevents me from baking a cake, scraping the web for informations, profiting from automated orders on the forex market while having my cloth dried and peacefully chatting with my wife.

I learned to know what I want, how much it is worth to me, whether it can be automated and how to leverage multi-tasking so that I could make the most of my time, at the workplace as much as in my spare time.

Once that knowledge sunk too, ISK was rushing into my wallet and in turn I craved to become ridiculously rich. Well, in a game you can.

Eventually, It became clear that time and gameplay mechanics were limiting my ability to multi-task: they made it more like an awful grind. I needed to band together with fellow capsuleers and manage task delegation in an effective manner if I wanted to advance in game. I founded a corporation.

I discovered rather soon how difficult it is to properly delegate tasks.

Not only I had to choose a profitable business and run it. I needed to carefully choose the pilots I was flying with, break the production chain into separate measurable chunks, task each pilot with an appropriate chunk, train them to carry out the task, establish an appropriate communication chain, progressively entrust pilots with larger responsabilities, manage internal politics and defend the corporation from market competition and the occasional war declaration.

Suffice to say that in real life I am still learning how to properly delegate tasks and playing in a sandbox provides an ideal learning environment where I can fail big time without the pressure of having my job on the line. This is especially useful when training delegation, time and production management, because a big screw-up or a wrong time-to-market decision might burn a few billion ISK at most.

Nothing that I couldn’t replace in the space of  few weeks and learn from.

 

 

 

Feb
12

When too much SaaS is too much?

Recently I stumbled in Sacha Greif’s post about SaaS fatigue, it made me wonder how much ‘something’ as a service do we really want (or need) in our daily routine.

Sacha listed which SaaS he pays on monthly basis, and wondered which is the saturation point where an average user would eventually stop paying for new services.

In his analysis he considered the visible cost (the monthly fee), however the SaaS model carries also hidden costs. This also applies to services that appear to be free.

An example of hidden cost is the time spent learning to use a new online service when you could have kept using your old software. It is hidden because the average joe does not calculate the opportunity cost  for each choice to be made and guess what, this is exactly one of the reasons why SaaS models with low pricing are so popular.

The low price makes your buy decision easy, repeat the process too many times and fees start to quietly add up.

One could also argue that prices are not the issue and that learning curves on SaaS products are quite shallow. Ok, granted. And what about the following:

  1. security management: do you keep a separate password for each account you have? Do they keep your credit card too? Do you ever need to recover your password?
  2. ownership of your data: are you owner of your data or is the SaaS  provider acquiring (totally o partially) some rights on it?
  3. legal jurisdiction: under which law does your SaaS provider operates? If it is under US law and you live in Italy, how can you defend your rights?
  4. high exit barriers: granted it is easy to subscribe a SaaS, how can you save your data in case you decide to unsubscribe?

While these points are hardly new and get regularly raised as pro-cons of the SaaS model, only a handful of user really care about them until they run into troubles like “google deleted my mail, the provider x scrapes my contact book, etc etc.”

To me too much SaaS is too much when you over-use it to the point of replacing things you could easily do without it. 

A few examples?

Safari books online. Why in the world should I pay a monthly fee to access a bookshelf when I can buy a book from Amazon and read it on whatever screen I need for free?

Flickr. Granted I have a few pictures there, but paying for the account? And what if I need to move the pics out? (I guess Sacha has the same problem)

Almost any Google application with the possible exception of gmail and analytics. I do not like the big G. harvesting my data and I like even less how the collected is used to skew search results.

The myriad of vertical social somethings out there. I can happily live with Twitter and Google for al my basic needs and that’s enough personal data handover already.

And don’t you even try to convince me to use an online Todo service: pen and paper are more than enough and Todo lists are probably  overrated.

 

 

 

Feb
12

Something about the Vega launcher

 

The last years have not been good ones for Italy. When we make the headlines, we are depicted more like a bunch of buffoons rather than a country where, in spite of all difficulties, innovation still happens.

This is the reason why I look forward to Vega’s liftoff on monday.

While the rocket is a multi-national effort, Italy has largely contributed to its development. 65% of the compontents and avionics are designed, built and tested in Italy. We should be proud of such achievement.

Italian Space Agency will also provide the payload for the maiden voyage, the LARES satellite.

LARES is a neat experiment aimed to precisely measure the frame-dragging effect predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity. The satellite hosts 92 retroreflectors that will bounce any laser light aimed at them: they will allow scientists around the world to pinpoint the satellite’s position with extreme precision and map the frame dragging effect with accuracy.

The launcher is designed to lift light payloads to polar or Low Earth Orbit. It is rather cheap, partially based on proved Ariane technology and launches from the french Guyana spaceport in Kourou.  Each Vega rocket comes at an estimated price tag between 22 e 35 million euros.

What I like most of this launcher is its ability to re-ignite the fourth stage several times. This will allow the placement of several payloads at different altitudes furtherly adding value to each launch.

I had expected to the launch to make the headlines, after all  just  a bunch of countries are capable of producing their own rockets and use them to launch their own payloads to low earth orbit.

I saw very few coverage instead.

It is sad that we are unable to advertise our accomplishment the same way we advertise our mishaps.

 

 

Feb
08

About making a blog for profit, and failing

This is a post-mortem assessment of my first attempt at running a blog for profit.

When I created liftoff I was hoping to beef up my income with some blogging. While it didn’t work as expected, it turned out to be a valuable learning experience and that’s why I am giving it a second birth and sharing my thoughts in the hope someone might find them useful.

Through its former incarnation liftoff taught me that the blogging market is highly competitive, has low entry barriers, requires a lot of effort and possibly has low margins. I believe this might be especially true if you pick the wrong subject in the wrong country, like talking about space missions in Italy.

My line of reasoning was that if I had written good quality posts, promoted them and pick a subject that wasn’t well covered by italian bloggers then I whould have stood a chance to drive enough readers and land some buck. I was wrong.

I decided to begin with one post per day and to approach each post with a quality-first mindset. In a few days visitors started to pour in and Google Analytics shown me their number was tied to the the daily amount of posts. I felt confident that by increasing that number I could reach a threshold where readers would eventually spread the word and start a positive feedback cycle.

After two months, however, figures where not lining up where I had expected.

To achieve one hundred visitors per day I had to write three posts daily, to make two hundred visitors I had double that amount, when I wasn’t posting there were just a scarce dozen of returning visitors. To make matters worse,  blogging drained a lot of my energy. It took hours to find newsworthy subjects, write them up, publish and promote them on local aggregators, network with fellow bloggers on social networks.

It became clear that if I were to extract any profit from this activity, I would have needed to reach a far broader audience and vastly reduce my efforts at the same time. The figures were showing a linear trend so I would have needed to write thirdy posts per day to get somewhere near one thousand daily readers. At a conversion rate of a dollar for a thousand visitors that was just too much effort and I decided to move on to more profitable activities.

Trying to make sense of this first experience, I didn’t found a sole explanation why the blog didn’t work as expected. Instead I found several concurrent causes:

 

A small potential audience

While Italy is home to several millions of potential readers, how many of them are interested into space exploration stuff? How many of them really need the content to be written in italian?

I came up to the conclusion that my potential audience might have been composed by a fairly restricted number of folks who knew enough english to read news directly from space.com and nasa.gov.

This should have popped in my mind before launching the blog.

 

It is difficult to reach the right readers

While there might be hundreds of blogs, there are only so many ways to drive visitors in: organic search, aggregators and social networking (in Italy Facebook and to a minor extent Twitter).

That means that good spots are all taken by know bloggers and large aggregators. They have quite a large fingerprint leaving social networking as your best chance to gather momentum. But guess what? It takes a lot of time to promote yourself on social networks, especially on ‘uncool’ subjects.

In Italy space exploration is largely considerd not-so-cool stuff (Doh!). If I had wanted to be anywhere on the social radar I should have blogged about the political situation, not space.

 

It is difficult to choose quality over quantity 

Since there was only a limited number of ways to reach readers, my competitors were always close and were likely writing the same things I was writing. They were fast and used the same limited array of aggregators I could use (there are only so many).

When posting about a well known event (read: a satellite falling on Earth) I found myself drowning in a background noise of similarly written non-news. When I managed to stood out from the crowd I found I had written a post on fairly obscure subjects only few cared about (read: the circuitous route of moon probes through sun-earth langrange points).

If I had decided to keep on writing high-quality posts there was no way I could have written half a dozen of them per day. If I had decided to increase the number of daily posts I would have had to lower their quality.

 

There is lack of sort-by-rating aggregators

There are only a couple of aggregators where Italian readers can sort posts by rating them, oknotizie is probably the most known. However these are general-purpose aggregators where you can find political trivia as well as the playmate of the month.

They proved not only to be useful but also the best way to reach potential readers. However I overestimated their usefulness and their reach. They could do only just.

 

So, what now?

Soon after ditching liftoff, I started missing the act of blogging. After all it’s a great way to sort your thoughts and connect to other people, and now I understand that profit is not the only reason why I should be blogging at all.

I am not saying a blog cannot be profitable, I am saying that if you create a blog for the sole purpose of making money either you know what you are doing or you are in for a rough ride.

Also, starting a blog and failing taught me a few things about blogging itself:

  1. it is like any other business, do a proper research before starting
  2. it’s all about quality or it’s all about money, make a choice
  3. don’t underestimate your readers
  4. the internet is a noisier place than you’d expected to be
  5. the internet is a much smaller place than you’d want to be

From now on, I will keep this blog as a place where I can share my thoughts with fellow bloggers, hopefully get in touch with them and keep on learning.

 

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