powerhouse families

Cool! This family inspired two of my all time favorite TV characters J http://bit.ly/1PEAq1

Emanuel was not the only brother with a drive to succeed. Ezekiel, the eldest, became an oncologist, joined the faculty at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard University, and is now a prominent medical ethicist at the National Institutes of Health . Ari went to Hollywood and has become an enormously wealthy agent, not to mention the inspiration for the bombastic Ari Gold character on HBO's "Entourage." (Emanuel, too, partly inspired a TV character: Josh Lyman on "The West Wing.")

Jon Stewart is ridiculously good - sometimes

Where are you on the social networking ladder?

 

I spend time along the Creators/Critics/Collectors tiersJ

 

Complete R/W web article here -> http://bit.ly/1P9QHQ

Posted by email from Staysmall's posterous

Revenue is over rated

My wife sent me a link to this awesome story. It is the story of anentrepreneur who decided to stop servicing an account that generated48% of his annual revenue. Now why would he do that? Because 2 yearslater he saw a 11% increase in profits. Profits mind you not revenue."I can do half the business, make twice the money, and have a tenth ofthe headaches," he says.
This is not for everyone but for the one who can define an end goalaround profits this is a very good place to be. Congratulations JimChristy!

Link - http://bit.ly/2qxGM4

Posted by email from Staysmall's posterous

Many hands make valuable work

At least that is what this article claims.  ->http://bit.ly/Vw8gX

It values the linux kernel at 1.4 billion dollars. Thecalculation is based on a 200$/loc valuation and it calculates that the latest Linuxkernel has 7million lines of code.

Fedora 9 (a linux distribution) is valued at 10billion dollars J based on a 50$/loc cost for 200million lines ofcode.

 

Note: they wave their hand at the details of how theyarrived at these $$ figures.

Not sure why the $/loc is 4x more for the kernel thanfor Fedora (OS code is 4x more expensive than application code)?

 

Hrmm… impressive, is this accurate? Let us see

Yahoo – Market Cap – 17B which would implythat Yahoo has 170 million lines of code based on 100$/loc (in between Fedora9and Linux?)

Goog – Market Cap – 112B which would implythat Google has 745 million lines of code based on 150$/loc.

( this is 310,667 lines of code per day, every day for10 years  [745mill/10 = 74560000 /48 = 1553334/5=316666])

MSFT – Market Cap – 197B which would implythat Microsoft has 985million lines of code based on 200$/loc

(this is 181,159 lines of code per day, every day for23 years  [1B/23/48/5]) which would mean that google has been producingcode at 2x the rate of Microsoft. I am just saying J

 

Heh.. okay so I am done having fun with numbers. Mypoint is that while it sounds impressive to claim market valuation for Linuxand Fedora, I am not sold yet J.  I think if open sourcewants to be truly disruptive (as much as it claims to be) – it has tolearn how to also value itself differently than status quo.

 

 

Posted by email from Staysmall's posterous

will the real number please stand up

Slate article that gives a powerful insight into market behavior.http://www.slate.com/id/2202263/

Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin issued a call on Tuesdayfor regulation of the "over the counter" derivatives market, which hasan estimated size of about $596 trillion. By contrast, the value of theworld's financial assets—including all stock, bonds, and bankdeposits—was pegged at $167 trillion last year by McKinsey. How can thederivatives market be larger than the entire world's financial wealth?

Posted by email from Staysmall's posterous

Advice from Sequoia to companies in its porfolio

Worth your time. If you are in a early stage or growth company, pay particular attention to slides 46 and 47.

Sequoia Capital on startups and the economic downturn

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: depression recession)

Posted by email from Staysmall's posterous

Doh! what was I thinking - i should have realized that quadrillion is the answer

In a sign of the times, the National Debt Clock in New York City has runout of digits to record the growing figure. As a short-term fix, thedigital dollar sign on the billboard-style clock near Times Squarehas been switched to a figure — the "1" in $10 trillion. It's markingthe federal government's current debt at about $10.2 trillion. The Durst Organizationsays it plans to update the sign next year by adding two digits. Thatwill make it capable of tracking debt up to a quadrillion dollars. Yep,that should solve all of the problems.

Yahoonews link

Posted by email from Staysmall's posterous

The essence of capitalism

http://www.wescooppoop.com/ is a company that serves seven citiesaround the Austin area :). Their business model is simple, they scooppoop. I am not quite sure why they started this or if this has alwaysbeen a life long dream of someone. But I do know this if this companyis surviving, it is because there is a demand from people who believethat it makes sense for them to pay another person to pick their dogspoop. The market is a strange beast indeed.

Posted by email from Staysmall's posterous

inspiration is all around you

Nancy Duarte and her team found an example of everyletter in the alphabet in real world items. Really cool!!

 

Posted by email from Staysmall's posterous

why does my template look so bad

Well the story began when I discovered posterous. I fell in love withit. Started using it -> staysmall.posterous.com.All was good -- happy days.
Then i realized that I could have posterous automatically forward myposts to my old blogger account. Even happier days. I like creating myposts through email.

Then trouble struck :-/, it turns out that the html forwarded byposterous does not play well with half decent blogger templates. So Ihad to make a choice and I choose an ugly template and kept my postingconvenience. Just thought you deserved an explanation.

Posted by email from Staysmall's posterous

Want to do something fun and different with your family

Get them together, yes your wife and all your kids. Watch a coupleepisodes of The Cosby Show on dvd. Just cause...

Posted by email from Staysmall's posterous

The future of humanity

Small populations which are isolated can evolve atrandom as genes are accidentally lost. World-wide, all populations are becomingconnected and the opportunity for random change is dwindling. History is madein bed, but nowadays the beds are getting closer together. We are mixing into a glo-bal mass, and the future isbrown.”

 

Source: TimesOnline article on evolution.

Posted by email from Staysmall's posterous

Hilarious! (thanks to Grek Mankiw for the original post)

 

Found here.

Posted by email from Staysmall's posterous

A snippet from an excellent Warren Buffet interview

BECKY QUICK: If you imagine where things will go withFannie and Freddie, and you
think about the regulators, where were the regulators for what was happening,
and can something like this be prevented from happening again?

Mr. BUFFETT: Well, it's really an incredible case study in regulation
because something called OFHEO was set up in 1992 by Congress, and the sole
job of OFHEO was to watch over Fannie and Freddie, someone to watch over them.
And they were there to evaluate the soundness and the accounting and all of
that. Two companies were all they had to regulate. OFHEO has over 200
employees now. They have a budget now that's $65 million a year, and all they
have to do is look at two companies. I mean, you know, I look at more than
two companies.

BECKY QUICK: Mm-hmm.

Mr. BUFFETT: And they sat there, made reports to the Congress, you canget
themon the Internet, every year. And, in fact, they reported to Sarbanes and
Oxleyevery year. And they went--wrote 100 page reports, and they said,
`We'velooked at these people and their standards are fine and their directors
arefine and everything was fine.' And then all of a sudden you had two of the
greatestaccounting misstatements in history. You had all kinds of management
malfeasance,and it all came out. And, of course, the classic thing was that
afterit all came out, OFHEO wrote a 350--340 page report examining what went
wrong,and they blamed the management, they blamed the directors, they blamed
theaudit committee. They didn't have a word in there about themselves, and
they'rethe ones that 200 people were going to work every day with just two
companiesto think about. It just shows the problems of regulation.

 

The full interview can be found here.

 

Posted by email from Staysmall's posterous