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I’ve had an idea for a long time now. It’s inspired by one of my favorite feelings: when you order something on Amazon, and it’s put on backorder, and then you forget you ordered it, and a year later it arrives—and it’s like a gift you bought yourself.

Well, I thought: what if I just wrote a program to buy stuff for me? The first iteration of this was going to be a program that bought me stuff that I probably would like.

But then I decided that was too boring. How about I build something that buys me things completely at random? Something that just… fills my life with crap? How would these purchases make me feel? Would they actually be any less meaningful than the crap I buy myself on a regular basis anyway?

So I built Amazon Random Shopper. Every time I run it, I give it a set budget, say $50. It grabs a random word from the Wordnik API, then runs an Amazon search based on that word. It then looks for every paperback book, CD, and DVD in the results list, and buys the first thing that’s under budget. If it found a CD for $10, then the new budget is $40, and it does another random word search and starts all over, continuing until it runs out of money, or it searches a set number of times.

It can’t spend over budget, because it has its own Amazon account, and I give it a gift card. There’s no bank account or credit card info so it can only spend what’s on the gift card. As my friend Daniel Josephput it: “Here you go, child-bot. Have fun at the mall with the other bots. Don’t spend it all in one place!”

How do I manage to do this? With the magic of PhantomJS, a really neat little program that spawns a virtual web browser that I can control with code. My system is basically an automated browser that buys me stuff.

Today I finally got the system working end-to-end, and it bought me $37 worth of stuff (out of a $50 budget. How frugal!). What it bought, I won’t know until it comes in the mail.

– Darius Kazemi

#bravo

… if you can’t predict whether there’s a path out of an idea, how do you choose between ideas?

The truth is disappointing but interesting: if you’re the right sort of person, you have the right sort of hunches. If you’re at the leading edge of a field that’s changing fast, when you have a hunch that something is worth doing, you’re more likely to be right.

In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig says:

You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It’s easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally.

I’ve wondered about that passage since I read it in high school. I’m not sure how useful his advice is for painting specifically, but it fits this situation well. Empirically, the way to have good startup ideas is to become the sort of person who has them.

Being at the leading edge of a field doesn’t mean you have to be one of the people pushing it forward. You can also be at the leading edge as a user. It was not so much because he was a programmer that Facebook seemed a good idea to Mark Zuckerberg as because he used computers so much. If you’d asked most 40 year olds in 2004 whether they’d like to publish their lives semi-publicly on the Internet, they’d have been horrified at the idea. But Mark already lived online; to him it seemed natural.

Paul Buchheit says that people at the leading edge of a rapidly changing field “live in the future.” Combine that with Pirsig and you get:

Live in the future, then build what’s missing.

That describes the way many if not most of the biggest startups got started. Neither Apple nor Yahoo nor Google nor Facebook were even supposed to be companies at first. They grew out of things their founders built because there seemed a gap in the world.

If you look at the way successful founders have had their ideas, it’s generally the result of some external stimulus hitting a prepared mind. Bill Gates and Paul Allen hear about the Altair and think “I bet we could write a Basic interpreter for it.” Drew Houston realizes he’s forgotten his USB stick and thinks “I really need to make my files live online.” Lots of people heard about the Altair. Lots forgot USB sticks. The reason those stimuli caused those founders to start companies was that their experiences had prepared them to notice the opportunities they represented.

The verb you want to be using with respect to startup ideas is not “think up” but “notice.” At YC we call ideas that grow naturally out of the founders’ own experiences “organic” startup ideas. The most successful startups almost all begin this way.

That may not have been what you wanted to hear. You may have expected recipes for coming up with startup ideas, and instead I’m telling you that the key is to have a mind that’s prepared in the right way. But disappointing though it may be, this is the truth. And it is a recipe of a sort, just one that in the worst case takes a year rather than a weekend.

– Paul Graham is finally back to a higher frequency of essay writing.

“I am not scared of failure, I am scared of repetition.”

– David Droga 

“We aim to capture serendipity. You don’t get lucky if you plan everything – and you don’t get serendipity unless you have peripheral vision and creativity.

Peer review and scholarship play by predetermined rules – that five other people agree that what you’re doing is interesting. Here [at the Media Lab], even if you’re the only person in the world who thinks something’s interesting, you can do it.

Our funding model allows our students to do anything they want without asking permission. It’s like venture capital: we don’t expect every experiment to succeed – in fact, a lot are failures. But that’s great – failure is another word for discovery. We’re very much against incrementalism – we look for unexplored spaces, and our key metrics for defining a good project areuniqueness, impact and magic.”

// Joi Ito, on MIT Media Lab, and its Pinky & The Brain networked expansion plans. //

…some of his key principles:

“Encourage rebellion instead of compliance”

“Practice instead of theory”

“Constant learning instead of education”

“Compass over map”

“The key principles include disobedience – no one ever won a Nobel prize by doing as they’re told,” he explains later. “And it’s about resilience versus strength – you don’t try to resist failure, you allow failure and bounce back. And compass over map is important – you need to know where you’re going, but the cost of planning often exceeds the cost of actually trying. The maps you have are often wrong. These principles affect and apply to just about any organisation.”

Because all the rules have been torn up. “Today any kind of science that’s used to predict the future becomes useless. The world is no longer incremental or linear. A lot of risks come from the periphery, not what you’re focused on. In the old days, you needed hundreds of millions of dollars and armies of people to do anything that mattered. Today a couple of kids using open-source software, a generic PC and the internet can create a Google, a Yahoo! and a Facebook in their dorm room, and plug it in and it’s working even before they’ve raised money. That takes all the innovation from the centre and pushes it to the edges – into the little labs inside the Media Lab; inside dorm rooms; even inside terrorist cells. Suddenly the world is out of control – the people innovating, disrupting, creating these tools, they’re not scholars. They don’t care about disciplines. They’re antidisciplinary.”

“My problem is I’m interested in everything – I have a lack of focus,” says Ito. “But my bug turns into a feature at the lab. Because the Media Lab is interested in everything.

My main skill is connecting and trading contacts. When you have 350 random projects and 26 groups and 75 members [at the lab], the director needs to create context, make connections, pull the pieces together. My favourite thing is managing communities and creating energy. That’s really what the Media Lab is – it reminds me of an open-source community like Mozilla.” He knows he will have succeeded when “the Media Lab name is as ubiquitous as the word internet”.

//

“Live in the future and build what seems interesting.”

– Paul Graham

Damn straight. We’re counting on it!

#art #design #music #food #friends #adventure #laughter #hope #dreams 

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Deconstructing the new digital formula for loyalty programs:

WiiFM (What’s in it for me?) + DiFM = Please g*d don’t make me use My Coke Rewards or try to cash in my airline mileage points.

DiFM (do it for me) expects brands to understand what consumers do and want and to intervene with rewards and offers at the appropriate inflection points. These inflection points can be planned and communicated in an easy-to-understand way (e.g. 5% cash back) or spontaneously; which tend to surprise or delight customers usually at the point of sale.  

Similarly the DiFM idea demands that brands create or aggregate deals and offers and automatically communicate them and/or apply them in relevant circumstances. For grocery stores this means  – find all the coupons for stuff I buy, put them on myloyalty card and automatically deduct the discounts when you ring me up.  For other retailers, it means automatically deduct deals and discounts and apply whatever rewards I’ve earned in the moment, when I’m making a relevant purchase. And while the systems requirements to deliver on this expectation are significant, consumers don’t care. If you are not proactively taking care of them, all the cards, points and promises in the world don’t matter.