BobbyVoicu.com

Curious about stuff

A Real Life Robot Cue Stick Playing Pool

By Bobby Voicu

You know how sometimes you go on YouTube and you discover a video that grips you and makes you forget about anything for a while?

I’ve just found a video about a guy that created a robot cue stick to play pool with you in real life. Yes, like an online pool game in real life… which kinda makes and doesn’t make sense at the same time.

It’s more than that, because the robot knows what ball to play, when to play, how hard to hit the cue ball… it’s AMAZING!

Watch the video below and thank me later for making you lose 20 minutes of your day:

I didn’t know one of the Adobe founders was kidnapped for ransom in 1992

By Bobby Voicu

One of the founders of Adobe, Charles Geschke, died recently, at 81. He is the guy that brought PDF into our lives. You can read more about his life in this Verge article.

But what I found it interesting was that he was kidnapped at some point in his life for 4 days, by some people asking for a ransom. I mean, I never thought a tech executive life would be so exciting (with the exception of John McAfee, of course). Truth is I’m surprised we don’t hear about more new like this, seeing how much wealth is focused in the Bay Area.

A computer software executive kidnapped at gunpoint four days ago was freed Saturday when a suspect caught with $650,000 in ransom money led authorities to a bungalow hideout, the FBI said.

Charles Geschke, 52, president and chief operating officer of Adobe Systems Inc., had been in the house in Hollister, 60 miles south of San Jose, since he was seized by two men as he arrived for work Tuesday, FBI agents said.

″The two men called him to their car to ask him a question, then at gunpoint took him away and secreted him,″ said FBI agent Richard Held. Geschke was abducted at the company’s headquarters in Mountain View, about 10 miles northwest of San Jose.

From here: Computer Company Executive Rescued By FBI.

How People Get Rich in 2021

By Bobby Voicu

The best way to build wealth from scratch right now is building a company. So what are you waiting for?

In 1982 the most common source of wealth was inheritance. Of the 100 richest people, 60 inherited from an ancestor. There were 10 du Pont heirs alone. By 2020 the number of heirs had been cut in half, accounting for only 27 of the biggest 100 fortunes.

Why would the percentage of heirs decrease? Not because inheritance taxes increased. In fact, they decreased significantly during this period. The reason the percentage of heirs has decreased is not that fewer people are inheriting great fortunes, but that more people are making them.

How are people making these new fortunes? Roughly 3/4 by starting companies and 1/4 by investing. Of the 73 new fortunes in 2020, 56 derive from founders’ or early employees’ equity (52 founders, 2 early employees, and 2 wives of founders), and 17 from managing investment funds.

From here: How People Get Rich Now.

What is the hardest thing you ever worked at?

By Bobby Voicu

What is the hardest things you ever worked at?

It’s such an interesting question, right? When I thought about it, I immediately thought: “MavenHut”! I’ve never felt as tired as I felt while building that company, so that was my first answer.

But was that the hardest thing I’ve ever worked at? I mean, yeah, it was hard WHILE doing it, but I didn’t specifically work hard to create that opportunity.

Then I thought of a big campaign I’ve been a part of creating and running while I was blogging: Rediscover Romania (Redescopera Romania). That was hard as well, but again, it was hard while doing it, not working AT it.

And I think I worked the hardest at my relationships: with my family (didn’t really have a great relationship with my mom), with my fiancée (it was really difficult for both of us during my hardest MavenHut years).

What is the hardest things you ever worked at?

It’s an interesting because I always thought the hardest I worked at something was my businesses, my career. But if I look at it, it never seemed as hard as it was working on building and maintaining relationships with the people that matter to me.

It’s an interesting question because it asks you how much you WANTED something, how much effort you put into something happening. And that’s a lot different than the effort you put into something while it happens.

Oh, and I got the question while listening to the Building Bridges podcast episode with Toni Cowan-Brown from Idee Fixe newsletter.

Photo by Jordan Whitfield on Unsplash>

The first 18 months of a startup

By Bobby Voicu

This is a good Twitter thread to remind you what the first stage of your startup is about.

The full thread is here, on Twitter, from @Suhail. I’ve also saved it completely below, so I can go back to it when I forget.

1/ The first 18 months of a startup:
After starting my 2nd company in 2019, I decided I would write down useful lessons I learned or re-learned along the way. Some were hard-earned & others required steady focus. A thread that I hope may help other founders starting out

2/ Clarifying your plans: the first thing I did was write down a 7-page Elon Musk- style master plan. Write down what problem you plan to solve, how you’ll solve it, and why it’s important. Then have your smart friends critique it. Let no valid question go unanswered.

3/ End every conversation with an expert about your industry with: “Why do you think I am going to fail?” to lean into brutally understanding what you need to de- risk.

4/ Think of a way to make your users have some skin in the game enough to yell at you to make your product better. Charge or trade for it early on. Waiting for your product to be “good enough” reduces the amount you’ll learn each day. The first set of users paid me $20 on Venmo!

5/ Occasionally someone you respect will give you unsolicited advice that may cut you down. First, absorb it. Later, try to put their advice in a way you would’ve wanted to give yourself. This removes the hurtful part allowing you to hear it in a way you can benefit from.

6/ Rolling out of bed in my pajamas and getting back to work with things precisely as I left them was the most underestimated superpower that brought me joy, focus, and speed—I had forgotten how much goes into getting ready for work.

7/ Learning from users is a practiced skill just like programming. If you don’t have experience, make a plan. Start with simple questions, then go deep.
Here was mine going into early customer interviews:
👇

8/ Be married to the problem, not the technology. If you’re married to technology, you might easily give up due to stress induced by setbacks or boredom. Being married to the problem will motivate you to have the perseverance to continue through hard times or tedious work.

9/ As your relationship with your co-founder changes, there will be times of tension. Confront issues early. Be explicit about how you will divide & conquer. Lean on each other’s passions. Don’t confuse working style differences with how the company ought to work. Get a coach.

10/ I think startups often take half pivots early on. Mine did. The 1st idea might be wrong but if you stick w/ it a bit longer, you’ll often discover a deep problem people care about. All that’s stopping you is if you want to run that company to achieve that particular mission.

11/ Sometimes smart people didn’t like my idea. You don’t need to persuade everyone! Instead, I used it as an opportunity to understand their opposition & worked hard to see the truth of their opinions. I used it as a moment to strengthen my understanding from a smart critic.

12/ During the first 6 mo of my startup, I largely focused on the eradication of risk: Will people want this? Will people pay? Can this make a profit? Can it scale one day? Will the tech work? All in the pursuit of what will kill me? You just need to know there’s a solution.

13/ If you’re worried about something that will cause your inevitable demise, use my patented Threshold of Worry ™:
1. Set a quantitative value for the worrisome issue.
2. If it’s above the value, worry!
3. If it’s below the value, focus on the next risk & ignore

14/ Every month I ran my current goals/plans by another founder outside of the company. I found it better to assume my current thinking had a subtle fatal flaw I couldn’t see. That will often save you time or make you think differently enough to break out of a local maxima.

15/ Early on, each hire should be a little anti-sold before they join vs only passionately persuaded. Every startup has setbacks, makes mistakes, might pivot, and must overcome unforeseen obstacles. The early team must be sufficiently optimistic & capable of rapid recovery.

16/ Momentum is oxygen for a startup. Without momentum, you let fear, uncertainty, and doubt cause your demise.

17/ When building a startup:
If you have fear, de-risk by talking to users.
If you have uncertainty, build a prototype to rapidly rebuild your conviction. If you have sudden doubt, sleep. Try again tomorrow.

18/ The first goal I set for our company was narrow: make 10 happy users use our product. A happy user uses it, pays for it, and organically praises it. Focusing on a few wonderfully happy users is a better recipe for great retention. Then go from 10 → 100 → 1K → 10K → 100K.

19/ I was ruthless about ensuring I had as much deep work time as possible. Live somewhere boring. Eliminate meetings. Don’t meet investors if you’re not raising. Build a rhythm each day that enables the largest chunk of hours to get great work done. Users will notice your pace.

20/ If you’re a 2nd-time founder, resist the urge to button everything up. It’s a trap that makes you think you’re doing meaningful work. The first time around this blissful ignorance helped me focus on what mattered most: making a great product. It’s okay for things to be messy

21/ Your company culture doesn’t need to be set & written in a handbook on day one. I think culture is best formed organically & needs time to bake with a small team. From there, you can discover what works & what breaks. The values of a company need not be preserved, they evolve

22/ Last but not least: talk to users. talk to users. talk to users. talk to users. talk to users. talk to users. talk to users. talk to users. talk to users. talk to users. talk to users. talk to users. talk to users. talk to users. talk to users. talk to users. talk to users.

I’ve put the list of twits together using ThreadReaderApp, a really good service for something like this.

Do pandemics ever completely end? Sometimes…

By Bobby Voicu

I genuinely love this kind of articles, animated and full of information. This is particularly interesting because it’s about the last 1000 years of pandemics for humanity and what happened with them.

I, for one, didn’t know the bubonic plague still kills people now (even if not a lot, sure) and that smallpox is the biggest ever success for vaccines, since it is the only human disease completely eradicated.

And as the eradication of smallpox proved, when the world’s scientific community comes together, great things are possible.

Although the new coronavirus is a much trickier challenge, because of its high levels of asymptomatic transmission, Prof Riley is optimistic the “incredible” global quest for a solution will win through.

“The world has never had a shared project like this before,” he says. “Hopefully it becomes a shared success at some point.”

However, it may serve us well to remember that most of the pathogens that rampaged through societies in pandemics in the past are still around. While the crises ended, the viruses and bacteria – and their resulting infections – remain.

From here: Covid-19: How do pandemics end? – BBC News.

Why Writers Write (according to Joan Didion)

By Bobby Voicu

I always wanted to write. I’ve never been actually good at it, but I always wanted to write.

When I was a kid, I would write short stories for school. But when one of my classmates wrote an enthralling story about the Second World War I wanted to be part of the process and I tried to continue what he wrote. And it was bad. And it’s not the adult in me saying it now. I knew THEN it was bad.

Today I found this:

Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear. Why did the oil refineries around Carquinez Straits seem sinister to me in the summer of 1956? Why have the night lights in the bevatron burned in my mind for twenty years? What is going on in these pictures in my mind?

From here, via this BBC article about the best books of 2021 until now (April).

And I’m thinking one of the (many) issues I can’t write as good as I’d like is that I’m too much in my head. I process my thoughts and feelings in my head and when I express them they’re (most of the time) fully formed. And trying to write how i got to the final idea feels futile and inconsequential.

Oh, well…

The power of fans: Taylor Swift’s negotiation tactics

By Bobby Voicu

An interesting article on the power of fans. As well as some interesting points of view on NFTs.

It’s easy to see how this plays out going forward: Swift probably doesn’t even have to remake another album; she has demonstrated the willingness and capability to remake her old records, and her fans will do the rest. It will behoove Shamrock Capital, the current owner of Swift’s masters, to buy-out Braun’s share of future upside and make a deal with Swift, because Swift, granted the power to go direct to fans and make her case, can in fact “change history, facts, and re-frame any story [she] want[s] to fit with any narrative [she] wish[es].”

What is notable about Swift’s tactics is that they are the opposite of what she urged in that 2014 op-ed. Instead of treasuring “Fearless”, Swift devalued it; instead of asking for what her masters are worth, Swift is simply taking them. Patel was right that while art may be important, on the Internet it’s not rare; what he missed is how that makes Swift more powerful than ever.

From here: Non-Fungible Taylor Swift – Stratechery by Ben Thompson.

About Music, Fame and Social Media

By Bobby Voicu

I was reading something on BBC.com today and I got lost in two articles on fame and pressures of fame.

One is about Lana del Rey and her issues with social media and keeping private as much as possible:

Interestingly, though, Daly suggests that Del Rey might care less about her own mystique than she did in the past. “I think she was probably more enigmatic at the start of her career when there were all these questions about who she was and where she came from,” she says. Now that she has proven her artistic worth, she has less need for the protective shield that enigma can provide. “To achieve true Prince-like levels of mystery, I think she’d have to be much more removed from the internet and the press than she is at the moment,” Daly adds. She calls what we’re seeing now with Del Rey “a slow dismantling of mystique in real-time”. Whatever happens next, it will be interesting to see how the next generation of stars present themselves. With mystique becoming even tougher to preserve than in the past, it’s hard to blame any artist who decides it’s just not worth the effort anymore.

I’ve also read this article about Dolly Parton. I’ve been fascinated by her public persona for a while and this article actually puts everything together. It’s worth reading both of them.

You can learn a lot about Parton from how she has navigated the Trump era. These past four years, celebrities have found it hard to duck the question, “Which side are you on?” Taylor Swift, like Parton, has a typical Nashville aversion to controversy but she was labelled everything from a coward to a closet white supremacist for her neutral stance until she finally came out as a Democrat in 2018. Parton, however, remains publicly apolitical at a time when it would seem impossible to be apolitical. Even when her 9 to 5 co-stars Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin were savaging Trump right next to her on the stage at the 2017 Emmy Awards, Parton changed the subject with a trusty boob joke. When the topic came up on Dolly Parton’s America, she flatly shut it down: “I don’t do politics. I have too many fans on both sides of the fence.”

The easy explanation is that she puts business before principle, but for Parton those two instincts aren’t in opposition. She is by nature a bridge-builder and unifier, with a talent for smoothing troubled waters.

.

Here are the links to the articles, again:

1. Lana Del Rey and the struggle to be mysterious in pop
2. How Dolly Parton became the world’s best-loved celebrity

Creators and Freelancers are Taking Over the World

By Bobby Voicu

Patreon just announced they raised a new round of investment at at $4B valuation ($155M in the round). If you’re asking yourself why, here are some interesting numbers about the creator economy and about freelancers.

The growth of freelancing worldwide is staggering. In the US alone, freelancers make up 35% or 55 million workers who collectively earned $1 trillion in 2016. That number is predicted to reach 43% by 2020 with some analysts citing that figure at 80% of the global workforce by 2030.

This is from here (sorry for the Medium link).

And here’s what Patreon were saying in March 2020:

A large number of creators are launching on Patreon. More than 30,000 creators launched in the first 3 weeks of March 2020 alone, and these new creators are acquiring patrons faster than usual.

The COVID pandemic forced some processes to happen earlier than initially thought: it’s obvious that freelancers/creators are on their way to become the main part of workforce earlier than 2030.

I feel that we’ll see a lot of new tools targeting this growing part of the workforce, even more than what we see now.

Image from Canva