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.

Pages
Sites I Like
Archive
2011 (36)
2010 (49)
2009 (25)
Obox Signature Series

Regulation can create moral hazard

There has been much talk about bailouts causing moral hazard over the last 2+ years. In an attempt to counteract the notion that when you get 'too big to fail', you will be bailed out, policy makers and regulators have been hard at work at new reforms to ensure the crisis never happens again.

However, the Economist just pointed out something that blew my mind (because I never thought about it before) and figured I would share it. Here is the passage:

Besides, the regulators’ reluctance to second-guess bank executives was well founded, because it can take them onto dangerous ground. If regulators underwrite certain strategies that seem safe, such as lending to small businesses or helping people buy houses, they may encourage banks to crowd into those lines of business. That can drive down interest rates and lending standards and push up asset prices. If enough banks pile into these markets, downturns in them can affect not just a few banks but the whole system. Paradoxically, the very act of signalling that a market is safe can make it dangerous. It also introduces a form of moral hazard, because banks and their creditors may assume that the government would be duty-bound to bail them out if a closely monitored institution were to fail.

I added the emphasis.

Talk about damned if you do, damned if you don't. Thank God I am not a regulator, because this type of paradox is just ridiculous. 

The most common suggestion for getting rid of moral hazard has been to 'break up the big banks'.....but with this new consideration, even if you break up a big bank into 3 smaller banks and all those banks crowd into a line of business deemed 'safe' by the regulators, that creates the same problem highlighted above.

So what is the answer ?

If anyone has any thoughts, I would love to hear it.


P.S. You can follow me on twitter here.

Free Site Idea: Controversial YouTube Videos

I have been meaning to write this post for a while, but forgot about it until I saw a tweet recently by a friend that reminded me. 
Here is an idea for an interesting side-project that I thought I would be able to do, but I have too much on my plate, so I figured I would put it out there for the internets to run with.

Idea: A site that just has a 'hot' video - determined by a variety of factors. The site should be simple, and very elegant. Ideally it would just have that one video embedded on each page or rather be the main focus. It can then have many other sections. I will provide details and a back story below.

I never realized that YouTube publishes both the likes & dislikes of videos - see the classic example (below) of Rebecca Black's 'Friday' video (look right below the number of views, that image has 2.7M dislikes). 
Rebecca_blacks_friday_video_li
So rather than just doing the 'most viewed' videos (although you could have a section that shows that if you would like), the main feature of the site would be the video that is 'most controversial'. The way you calculate that is the disparity between likes and dislikes and views. Digg used this with their 'most controversial comment' and that's where the idea comes from. 

To break out the illustration some more, let's look at some numbers, you can have different levels of 'controversial'. If a video has 1 like and 1 dislike and 2 views...well, that's not controversial yet. If it has 1,000,000 views with 100,00 likes and 0 dislikes, that's not controversial. But if it has 50,000 views with 20,000 likes & 20,000 dislikes and is adding view numbers at a steady clip, that could be considered controversial.

Also, like Rebecca Black's video that has 140M views, but 2.7M dislikes, that definitely is controversial. If it is so disliked, why do people like seeing it ? Which pushes up the views and likely pushes up the like-to-dislike ratio, which will likely push up the views and keep the cycle going. 

So I would say, you would have a 'controversy' factor, where it's measured 0 to 1, where 0 is not controversial at all, but 1 is perfectly controversial (the Friday video would be perfectly controversial).
So that would be the main section. Then you can add other sections, like 'Most Liked', 'Most Disliked', 'Rapidly Gaining' - where you measure the rate at which the views are increasing along with likes, etc.

That's it. Nothing too fancy, but could very easily be very viral.

If YouTube had a Ruby API, then I might have considered doing it, but based on the preliminary digging I couldn't find one, and I don't have the time to go through figuring out anything else that might cause me to have to do too much learning right now.

I imagine, a site like this could surface some very interesting videos and act like a nice filter of all the stuff put up on YouTube.

If you do find a Ruby API, please let me know in the comments and maybe I might re-consider.

Good luck!

 

P.S. You can follow me on Twitter here.

Self-Doubt: The Unspoken Truth of Founding a Startup

Founding a startup has been a dream of mine, for as long as I can remember. I methodically went about learning as much as I could about what it took to build a company from nothing to a going concern.

I don't remember the exact moment (I was between 8 - 10 years old though) when I realized that in order to build a business, I had to come up with an idea first. Ever since then I conditioned myself (almost literally) to constantly come up with ideas. So much so that I became the annoying sibling/son/friend that always had a new idea. Luckily for me, I have another friend that was just as prolific, probably even more prolific, at coming up with ideas as I did [wassup Simms :)]. When I was ridiculed, I wasn't the only one receiving it. As a result of that, I have learned to speak less, and do more. I only share with a select few (my poor wife has to bear it all the time - for better or worse, right ?).

 

But somewhere along the way, I realized that there is more to building a successful business than coming up with an idea. So I set out to do everything I could to learn about business and startups before jumping into mine. For instance:
  • I have read every single Paul Graham essay
  • Subscribed to Inc. magazine for three to four years while I lived in the US - read each issue cover to cover for my entire subscription.
  • Subscribed to Entrepreneur magazine and did the same.
  • Read most of Founders at Work by Jessica Livingston (Paul Graham's wife)
  • Read books/articles/stories about many tech founders from Fairchild Semiconductor to Facebook. I know many of them by name and obscure facts about many of them, e.g. Apple had three co-founders (not just two), etc.
  • Convinced I was going to do a tech startup, I did my undergrad degree in Computer Science and did my MBA with a concentration in Finance (finance is the life blood of every company, right?) after.
  • I love economics, finance, and all that good stuff. I day traded currencies for a while. I understand markets - supply & demand and the battle between Capital & Labor.
  • I know all the startup theory - Lean Startups, Customer Development, etc.
  • I have decent-ish karma on Hacker News.
  • I worked with a startup company for a while, and understand the internal struggles of having to produce a lot with very minimal resources.
  • Once I finally decided to take the plunge and do my startup I taught myself all the programming I need to know to build the product I wanted to build.
  • I finally launched and got a good reception from many quarters. People like what they see. Had a few bugs, but have squashed most of the ones brought to my attention so far, and making good progress on the rest.
Now what? Now I have to go and sell it. Oh Crap! 

This is where the self-doubt kicks in.

Sure, I spoke to a bunch of people before building it. I validated the idea and I knew that this was a particular problem, because I experienced the pain and I know others that had this problem too. But now.....now I have to collect money from people. People I don't know, and who don't know me.

The transition from hardcore development to sales/marketing has been a tough one for me. I think I underestimated the mental switch needed to jump from one to the other. Especially since I don't have the luxury of having someone else carry on with the development while I do the sales. If I do nothing, nothing happens. Knowing that, makes the self-doubt worse. But, it also makes it better. Because I know that if I do nothing, nothing happens. So I have to do something, so I end up doing something.

Self-doubt, when you are doing this for the first time (or second, third or fourth time) is perfectly normal. That's how it is when you are just learning to ride, drive, fly or anything else new.

The trick is to persevere, because the only way to become confident in your abilities and be successful is to push through the doubt and get better little by little.

So stop distracting yourself with Hacker News, TechMeme, TechCrunch or any other activity/site you use as an excuse to escape the doubt you feel when you think about what you have to do.

Take a deep breath, and push through.

As the saying goes...Keep Calm, Carry On.

P.S. I help businesses get feedback from clients on their images, simply.

P.P.S. I was inspired to write this from a wonderful blog post and the ensuing discussion on Hacker News.