Marc Gayle

I am creating compversions with blood, sweat and care.

Compversions allows you - as a designer/photographer/creative person - to help your clients make faster decisions, which makes your life easier.

Beware though, everything here is 100% unadulterated opinion.

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An Open Letter to Larry Page

Mr. Page,

      Good morning. It is a new day.

You have sent shock waves through the blogosphere and the internet industry by your recent moves. 

Google has much potential, and a lot of latent assets waiting to be successfully monetized. I know it is hard to see the forest from the trees - especially when you are locked in a media 'battle' with Facebook. Now is your opportunity to re-invent Google and not let Google be the next Microsoft.

The first step is to realize which business you are in, and which business you SHOULD be in.

You have been in the advertising business. That has subsidized your investment in your greatest asset - and possibly the greatest re birthing the tech industry has ever seen (if you jump on the opportunity that is).

You should be in the infrastructure business. Yes, like Amazon is. Amazon and Rackspace. As technology progresses, more and more people are going to have the need to create all sorts of services. Companies like Amazon, Heroku, Rackspace have lowered the bar for us to get started. You have toyed with the idea with AppEngine, but let's face it, you haven't given it much attention.

The market desperately wanted a successful 'GDrive', but you let Dropbox steal your thunder.

So now is your chance. Continue to use advertising to subsidize the monetization of those assets - but don't be fooled by trying to compete with Facebook. That ship has sailed ages ago.

The real arms race is in Infrastructure-as-a-Service. 

If you don't move now, I suspect that Mr. Zuckerberg will beat you there too. He has already showed inklings of this, with Facebook Credits, and the Platform. 

They have also more recently started showing off their sexy infrastructure. The day FB decides to start monetizing that infrastructure, like Amazon did, I think it might be too late for you.

Please don't let that happen.

We (the Internet) are still rooting for you. You are quickly becoming the underdog again.

Just don't get too wrapped up in the current skirmishes, that you forget the real war.

Sincerely,

Henry Paulson's Pay Cut

Here is a letter I wrote to the editor of The Economist recently (published on April 14, 2011), regarding Hank Paulson's "pay cut"

SIR – You mentioned that Hank Paulson took a 99.5% pay cut. That may be true from a nominal perspective, however Mr Paulson saved $50m in capital-gains taxes because of a law passed by George Bush senior that exempts capital gains incurred by those selling investments to move into the public sector. He was also able to dump all securities shortly before the financial system imploded (without regulators or shareholders causing a fuss), so it was more like early retirement on the back of an extremely prudent financial decision than a pay cut.

Marc Gayle
Kingston, Jamaica


http://www.economist.com/node/18557847?story_id=18557847

How do you get good at anything ?

John Gruber said something in a recent article about Apple that really jumped out at me.

Making money is not easy. Apple has gotten good at making large profits every quarter by building up to that — making ever-increasing profits all along, quarter after quarter after quarter, device after device after device.
This was in reference to a quote by Jason Fried in an Inc. article about how to get good at making money.

I can’t say enough about bootstrapping. Whether you’re starting your first business or your next one, my advice is to bootstrap it. Bootstrapping forces you to think about making money on Day One. There’s a fundamental difference between a bootstrapped business and a funded business. It’s all about which side of the money you’re on. From Day One, a bootstrapped business has no choice but to make money. There’s no cushion in the bank and not much in the pockets. It’s make money or go home. To a bootstrapped business, money is air.

On the other hand, from Day One, a funded business is all about spending money. There’s a pile in the bank, and it’s not there to collect interest. Your investors want you to hire, invest, and buy. There’s less — and in some cases, no — pressure to make money. While that sounds comforting, I think it ultimately hurts. It replaces the hustle, the scrap, the fight, with a false comfort of “we can worry about that later.”
As Gruber pointed out, this is painfully obvious, it almost bears not saying but it is so easy to miss. The way to get good at something is to do it. Over, and over, and over again. Keep doing it.

Whether it is painting, playing the violin, singing, learning a foreign language or programming language, hiring, firing, presenting, public speaking, cooking, writing, reading, cleaning, or farming.

Anything you want to get good at, you have to do it. Over, and over, and over, and over again. This kinda jives with what Malcolm Gladwell had proposed in his book Outliers.

We sometimes forget, so I figured I would repeat it.

Besides, I want to get better at writing so might as well be 'meta' while doing that eh ? 

The YC Dilemma - thoughts about YC Reject

Paul Graham likes to say that the most important quality of a founder that they (YC) is looking for is determination...aka being Relentlessly Resourceful.

Well, one of the things that have always struck me about YC's selection process, is that they are almost self-selecting for a 50:50 success rate (success in the sense of picking the winners).

I am not saying that 50% of their companies will go bust, but given that we know that at least 1,000 applied to the batch before the last one (can't find reference, but it's out there somewhere), and YC only chose 40+, there is a high likelihood that the rejection will be a catalyst to many companies to prove YC + team wrong. Even if just 0.5% of those rejected (950) are the ones that prove them wrong, that's still about 45 companies.

If those 45 companies turn out to be 'significant misses' on YC's part, that works out to about a 50:50 success ratio (where they successfully only chose 50% of likely successful companies from the entire batch).

However, given those odds, don't just assume that because 950 startups were rejected - the most successful of those will migrate to YC Reject and as such YC Reject will be as successful as YC. But it is possible that YC Reject could tap into that latent pool of PG's ideal candidates that were somehow missed by PG himself.

Could the next Heroku, Dropbox, Airbnb come from YC Rejects and not YC itself ?

Interesting times ahead.

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