Wandering Wandering Star

A million dollars isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? Six thousand dollars

“How do you know which companies and services are going to be the biggest successes?”

… look for the companies and services that are mocked and misunderstood. For some reason, that correlates highly with the biggest breakout successes.

“Have you ever been to a drive-in?” MacLachlan asked.

“Yeah,” Armisen said. “ ‘Jaws 2,’ I think.”

“ ‘Jaws 3’ would have been better,” MacLachlan said.

“Were there three?” Brownstein said. “Let’s see. Two was Quaid, one was Dreyfuss and Scheider … ”

Armisen broke in: “Then, there’s the prequel, where the sharks are little babies—cute, really cute.”

“Yeah,” Brownstein said. “It was called ‘The Little Mermaid.’ ”

Portlandia is an extended joke about what Freud called the narcissism of small differences: the need to distinguish oneself by minute shadings and to insist, with outsized militancy, on the importance of those shadings.

Brownstein, who is also one of the show’s writers and producers, told me, “In general, things in a place like Portland are really great, so little concerns become ridiculous. There are a lot of people here who can afford—financially but also psychologically—to be really, really concerned about buying local, for instance. It becomes mock epic. It’s like Alexander Pope’s ‘Rape of the Lock.’ I was standing in line at Whole Foods, and the guy in front of me says, ‘I really wish you guys sold locally made fresh pasta.’ And the cashier says, ‘Look, we do.’ And the guy says, ‘No, no—that’s from Seattle.’ Really? You don’t have a bigger battle?”

It seems to be celebrated in our tech and startup culture that in order to win you need to be as busy as possible.

Doing a million little things and running fast is what will get your startup on a Bloomberg show and praised on VC blogs. I’m not sure this model is sustainable.

We all have dreams of creating companies that last and aren’t built to be a plugin for Google or a talent acquisition for Facebook.

To build a long lasting company requires a tremendous amount of thought. We all know this, but we don’t practice it if we spend our day optimizing for being frantic.

If you’re not being charged for the service then you are not the customer, you’re the product being sold.