I think this is terrific news and I'm really pleased to see Mark Z. setting up a foundation and investing a significant amount of money in such a worthy cause as education. Having said that... am I being too cynical... or is it just a coincidence that this announcement should come just before the release of The Social Effect movie which, from everything I've read, paints Mark in such a bad light? Is the $100 donation announcement an example of Facebook PR in damage control? It doesn't detract from the good the $100 million will (hopefully) do, of course, but the timing is interesting...
Spot on. As much as we'd like to move to the U.S. the biggest barrier is that small matter of a green card! We actually love Australia, and Melbourne is a wonderful city, but we do face certain disadvantages building a startup from here. We're still doing it of course and, interestingly, in our particular niche (tools for domain name investors) Melbourne actually has a few global players (e.g. Trellian, Flippa). Down the track I see us having some kind of U.S. presence. There's always a way...
I really enjoyed that article. What strikes me is how driven and hard-working Michael Arrington is. Actually, 'compulsive' comes to mind. Which prompts me to think that successful entrepreneurs aren't motivated to succeed... they're compelled to succeed.
Do a search on the Internet and you'll find more arguments - from highly credentialed doctors and nutritionists along with plenty of unqualified 'diet fundamentalists' - for and against the idea that gluten is the culprit behind so many health issues. Personally, I really DO feel fine on a largely Mediterranean diet complete with plenty of bread and pasta. I'm also fit and actually underweight (according to BMI calculators). I feel great health-wise and am a positive, up-beat, happy person. So I certainly see no need to stop eating gluten. And here's what I don't get about the idea that a paleo diet is the key to a long life and overcoming the obesity crisis: why did the obesity crisis only come about in the last part of 20th century, hundreds of years after most people (in developed nations at least) had abandoned paleo diets?
>why did the obesity crisis only come about in the last part of 20th century
I can guess at two factors. Firstly, food started to get really cheap in the 1960s.
Secondly, and not entirely unrelatedly, since that time we haven't suffered a major war or plague. (Up till this point, European history had more or less consisted of wars and plagues.)
Instead people have enjoyed prosperity with more and more attendant consumption, not just of food, but of entertainment and culture.
Here's the potentially controversial bit: in my experience, cultural consumption is enhanced by 'lower level' consumption such as eating rich food and drinking coffee and alcohol. The reason these help is (paradoxically) because they distress the body, causing the brain to compensate by secreting natural sedatives.
These in turn allow the mind to race, temporarily free from the constraints of fear and worry. Gluten, being a lectin, is a stressor of animal intestines. Hence bread, cakes and pasta serve admirably in this regard.
The real choice here is whether to live with an "average diet" and thus face average risk rates, or experiment on yourself and try to improve your chances.
Paleo targets overall health, not specifically fat reduction or cardiovascular health. That means that one of its goals is to reduce or eliminate things like long-term degenerative diseases or psychological problems, things which we decided, a long, long time ago, to accept as "natural occurrences" that are manageable only with medication, and not issues of dietary intake. This is a bold goal, of course, so it's right to be skeptical. If it really works, it can be tested. Our bias against the radical ideas comes from only being able to look backwards a few generations of people, all of whom have had largely the same diet. It is only fairly recently that we've gotten this explosion of experimental diet strategies, aided by new research and more diverse food availability. I'm into trying them as a kind of hobby and form of general life-improvement, myself, and for people who suffer from diseases with no known medicinal cure, it offers a lot of hope.
If we are looking only for a culprit for late-twentieth-century obesity, gluten doesn't enter into it. Instead we should look towards the changes in average diet over that time - i.e. increased intake of carbs, refined(fiberless) carbs, and carbs from sugar, and a shift away from animal fats and pressed crude vegetable oils towards solvent-extracted and refined vegetable oils. To explain a broad effect in the population, one has to look towards broad changes, and those are the main things that have changed.
Side note: The popular tendency to emphasize vegetables and/or fruits in diet holds a lot of commercial appeal(since fresh plant foods have difficult, expensive storage logistics, making them more prestigious, and fruits can have their sugar concentrated with drying or juicing, turning them into easily-saleable vice goods) but it's a form of feel-good bikeshedding. The "80% of the problem" issues are different, broader, and harder to completely solve: ideal fats/carbs/protein balance, recognition of allergies, intolerances, and toxicity, and price/time/quality/sustainability ratios. A real solution to those things needs both top-down cooperation and bottom-up education.
I personally haven't seen a huge difference in trying gluten/caesin-free, except possibly for withdrawal symptoms that cumulate in the devouring of multiple bowls of milk and cereal. I may try it again in the future, but while I can usually avoid gluten, I find it particularly hard to get rid of dairy; it helps calm down coffee's acidity, and cheese is one of my preferred snacks when out of the house.
"The popular tendency to emphasize vegetables and/or fruits in diet holds a lot of commercial appeal...but it's a form of feel-good bikeshedding."
As I understand it, there is a good bit of science supporting the healthfulness of fresh fruits and vegetables (but not necessarily the processed fruits you referred to).
Also the World Cancer Research Fund and the American Institute of Cancer Research published Food, Nutrition and the Prevention of Cancer: a global perspective which found much evidence in favor of fruits and vegetables for the prevention of cancer.
The obesity epidemic as we know, where most people over 30 or so are overweight or obese, is new, but "diseases of civilization" such as diabetes and atherosclerosis aren't. See Good Calories, Bad Calories for details.
As for the timing of the obesity epidemic, HFCS hit the market in 1975. Coincidence? Our diets became a lot less paleo when they started putting that in everything.
Funny, I thought I was about to get a lesson in what words I should be using in our advertising copy. Was the most powerful word 'free' or 'you' or 'sex' or something else? Oh, and then I re-read the article title: 'perspective' and then the article itself. I guess I approached the article with my own very skewed perspective...
The success of a venture is going to have much more to do with WHO starts the company than whether or not there is one or more of them. Look at history and we see all kinds of successful companies that were started by sole founders on the one hand and more than one founder on the other. Maybe there is a statistical likelihood of a company being more successful if there is more than one founder... but no entrepreneur in their right mind is going to base their decisions on those kinds of stats. So much depends on the unique circumstances that you find yourself in. I particularly like this quote:
'But Grieselhuber argues that entrepreneurs should worry less about having "everything perfectly meet other people's criteria," and instead focus on, to quote Nike, "just doing it."'
Here's another take on this: those who are good at teaching, teach and those who are good at blogging, blog. In other words, some people are actually very good at teaching or communicating ideas, even though they may not 'do' them.
In reality, there are good teachers and there are bad teachers (and more bad than good).
Those who are good at teaching, teach implies that somehow teachers are selected by their ability to teach, which is not true. Teachers happen to be teachers for a variety of reasons; but their talent has little to do with the fact that they continue to be teachers.
The case of bloggers is arguably a little different; certainly lack of talent or experience does not prevent people from blogging, but traffic provides at least some objective (if imperfect) measure of success.
But I would expect people who describe the road to world dominance to first document what they really know about it: if they haven't traveled it themselves, have they at least interviewed many successful people? What books have they read before writing anything?
It also occurs to me that while 'bad' teachers can often still hang on to their jobs (I've had more than my fair share), very few bad entrepreneurs can still hang on to a business!
I guess the point I was trying to make was that some people are very good at teaching (or blogging) even though they may not have necessarily done what they teach about. For example, I've had great teachers - politics teachers, English teachers, professors in law school, etc - who didn't practice what they taught i.e. my high school politics teacher wasn't a politician, my university film studies professor didn't make movies, my law school professors were not practicing lawyers or judges (in fact my contract law professor was brilliant yet had only practised law for a year before turning to academia), etc. So it is conceivable that someone could teach or communicate something of value without having the personal experience of practising the profession they're teaching about.
Having said all that, when it comes to someone making grand statements about what constitute the keys to success, etc this may not be something that you can truly and credibly teach purely based on persoaln observations or academic study (as would seem to be possible regarding subjects such as politics, film and law to repeat the examples given above).
This seems more like someone attempting to teach or make statements about what it takes to successfully climb a mountain. Mountain climbing is one of those subjects - to which I would definitely add building a business - that can't really be taught by someone without personal experience. These are subjects where the 'lab' is the real world, so unless someone has been in the real world, they really don't have helpful lessons to offer.
"Lesson: Deeply care about what you’re working on"
This was one of the lessons-learned that resonated with me. My husband and I lacked passion for the first startup we co-founded back in the late 1990s and although we were profitable and did sell the business, I know that had we cared deeply about it we would have been 100x more successful. When you care deeply about something you do all the 'little' things that make ALL the difference.
More generally, I would like to thank Paul for his post. In fact, it may just be mandatory reading for anyone starting or planning to start a business. Even if you don't agree with Paul's assessment of NewsTilt's demise, it makes for a great case study, precisely because it inspires us to think about what went wrong, what should have been done, etc. In fact the combination of the post and this thread is precisely the kind of discussion I find so instructive.
Good point Alex. If TC's real objective is not so much to recover any money but to make it clear to the world that FG screwed TC over (as well as issue a warning to everyone else not to mess with TC!) then I'd say: mission accomplished. No need to rack up even more legal fees unless there is a good chance of recovering both any damages and the costs of the lawsuit.
Thanks for posting the article Tom. I'd say persistence, abandoning bad ideas and a healthy dose of naivete (not knowing enough to be scared to try) are necessary for most startups. Well done on Adioso version 3. Just gave it a spin and it's working great. Once again I'm inspired by the startups good old Melbourne, Australia is producing (almost in spite of itself).
