I’ve been reading a lot lately about the benefits of writing and blogging even in the absence of readers. These ideas resonate well, and I’d like describe the reasons that drives me to write¹:

I blog because it’s one of the best ways to crystallize ideas, short of brainstorming with other smart people.

I blog because it’s the best (and arguably the cheapest) way to gain practice in productizing nebulous concepts, turning them into products that people may actually want to consume.

I blog because it’s the best way to practice summarizing² long and winding thoughts into short, readable nuggets.

I blog because it forces me to capture the essence of an essay in a short and catchy title.

I blog because it gives me a chance to practice writing in a language other than my mother tongue.

¹ “Never before have so many people with so little to say said so much to so few” (Demotivators)

² “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead” (Mark Twain)

Synchronized green lights are designed to enable streamlined traffic flow in major traffic arteries. When you hit the green wave you know it - it feels like all the ­lights are turning green just for you. Nice as this may be for your ego, it’s just a coincidence. After commuting on a such a road for a while, I found a way for making this work almost every time. If you follow the simple explanation below, you’ll save a lot of time and boost your ego at the same time.

The trick is to pass each traffic light in the “middle of the green”. If you have, say, 60 seconds of green light, you want to pass through the intersection at the 30 second mark. If you manage to do so and go at the maximum speed allowed afterward, you are almost guaranteed to hit the next light in the middle of the green as well. Hitting the middle of the green takes some practice and experience. If you have to slow down, make sure to balance it out by speeding up. Here’s the perfect green wave traversal pattern:

If you don’t go fast enough, it can really hurt. You’ll hit many a red light and your trip will become much longer:

Speeding up might actually hurt you as well. While you may end up hitting a similar time overall, your trip will be a miserable stop-and-go experience, not to mention possibly getting cited. Here’s how it looks:

If the traffic is very heavy, no trick will help and you’ll eventually hit a red light. Another factor that might thwart your mastery of the green wave is road sensors that change traffic light patterns based on car presence. Barring these factors, surfing the green wave by trying to hit the middle of the greens is a fun commute activity that can actually save you time, so go ahead and start practicing!

We all suffer through boring, endless, useless meetings but no one is doing anything about it. Here’s a very effective method for reducing the amount of time spent in meetings. In order to work, this will have to be done with the one or two people who really make decisions in your team/group/department/organization/company.

Step 1: Raise hell about time wasted in meetings. Put a dollar amount on it to make it look really painful.

Step 2: Call a meeting to discuss (this will hopefully be one of the last meetings you’ll attend) with the decision makers (and no one else.)

Step 3: Draw a matrix on the whiteboard - rows for required meetings, columns for required attendees. Forget about optional attendees; they are a distraction. Fill up the table, marking a cell only if this person is absolutely required in that meeting.

Step 4: Eliminate meetings that aren’t absolutely necessary, and participants that are not expected to contribute anything. Passive listeners can always get meeting summaries by email - no need to waste their time and yours.

Step 5: Decide on frequencies - not every meeting has to happen on a weekly basis. If you end up with monthly recurrence or longer, the meeting is probably redundant.

Step 6: Have the decision maker(s) announce the change formally and make sure the new schedules get implemented immediately.

Step 7: Enjoy your newly freed time.

On my bi-annual visit to McDonald’s the other day I noticed this sign posted on the drive-thru window: “Two Apple Pies: $1. One Apple Pie: $0.95.” The first thought that crossed my mind was: Is it possible to deduce the actual cost of a single pie from this data? On the lower end of the scale it can be only 5 cents – in which case they make a huge profit on the first one, and sell the second one at cost. On the higher end it could be 50 cents, earning them a large margin on single pie sales but none on doubles. If many customers buy singles, they strike gold. However, it’s almost totally irrational to buy only one when the second one is only 5 cents more, so let’s assume that almost all customers buy two. So why does McDonald’s part with their precious pies in pairs? Probably because this is a good way to move inventory and make good profit. Let’s see how.

There must be enough irrational, diet conscious, or reading-challenged people to guarantee a large percentage of single-pie purchases. Let’s estimate this number at 20%. Even at the high end of the cost curve, at 50 cents, this would guarantee a 9 cent average margin. Assuming a lower cost of, say, 30 cents, the margin soars to 45 cents on average. Pretty nice! If you compound the psychological effect making people buy more because this deal is “too good to pass on”, I bet this store is making loads of money.

The way the sign looks, this is a local initiative and not centrally mandated policy. If the profit margins are indeed so high, they should seriously consider offering this deal chain-wide.

Last night I attended an SVPMA meeting featuring Google’s Shreyas Doshi. Shreyas is a very smart and articulate guy; one thing that caught my attention during his talk is this quote (probably misquoted, but close enough): “The role of a product manager is to discover the right product to make”.
Product management is hard to define, and this quote actually captures the essence of it in a very succinct way (which, as a nice bonus, makes it a good product definition in and of itself). a thorough discovery process involves coming up with a plan, searching for clues, utilizing resources, experimenting, following the wrong leads, gathering facts, putting puzzle pieces together, and coming up with the desired finding. This is pretty much what a good product manager does. Add to that dealing with difficult people and leading with no formal authority, and you’ve got a complete picture of a day in the life of a product manager.

I happen to live about 2 miles away from the Apple headquarters. On my way to the gym I often see Apple employees walking through the campus, carrying a shiny Macbook Air or one of the other Macbook variants. Am I going to see them carrying an iPad on their way to the next meeting?

The device is undoubtedly way cool, and I definitely want one. It won’t fit in my pocket, so I’m going to have to lug it around in a bag. But I already carry a phone and a laptop, so why should I? to replace the Kindle I don’t have, I guess. Or maybe to replace all three of them?

The mass-market use case is not yet clear (to me at least), but the greatest achievement here is Apple’s new A4 chip, which reportedly is extremely fast. This finally lets Apple be totally self reliant, just the way they (rightfully) like it. In a year or so we’re going to see the A4 and its descendants replace the iPhone and Macbook CPUs, and maybe even penetrate non-Apple products.

Two companies entered the prestigious “I’m officially scared of Apple” club today - Intel and AMD. The banter in their executive boardrooms might be giddy and condescending, but they should be revising their 5-year plans instead.

iPad

Describing what your startup does in a video is a must. However, making a high quality video is harder and more expensive than it seems. Although video equipment is cheap, finding and filming a professional talking-head is challenging and achieving consistent quality through different scenes not trivial.
Luckily there’s a quick and easy way to ensure your video is excellent without sweating it: use stop motion. Just stitch together a bunch of pictures and add narration, and you have a great looking and sounding video that will get users engaged. Another option is to do a screen capture movie, but it’s easy to fall into the complexity and boredom traps with these. I’ll focus on animated stop motion videos in this post. Here’s what you need to do:

1) Write the story of a typical user and turn it into a storyboard. For each scene, write the narration and sketch the visuals. Tell a little bit about the user’s background and focus on the main steps they take while using your site and the key benefits they get out of it. Simplify the story as much as you can and use plain language. Revise several times.

2) Find a narrator with an “exotic” accent - Australian, South African (my favorite), Jamaican, etc. Spend $30 on good microphone. Use a wind breaker (like a piece of sponge). Record the narration in a small room with lots of furniture, pillows, carpets etc. to choke the echoes. Make sure the narrator holds the microphone at the same distance from his/her mouth throughout the recording. Record several takes so you have a lot of material to pick bits and pieces from and create one consistent sound track.

3) Draw some simple pictures (or have someone draw them for you) according to your storyboard. Use abstract objects - nothing too fancy or complicated. Make sure you have a few version of each drawing to choose from. Scan the pictures and clean them up in Photoshop. It’s best to remove the background altogether to get rid of small blemishes and tone variation.
You can also take pictures of simple objects; just make sure the lighting conditions are consistent. Take all pictures at the same place, one right after the other.

4) Use good video editing program like iMovie or Vegas Pro to stitch you images together. Use fancy transitions and effects sparingly. Render your video in HD - 1280×720, around 30fps, 44k sampling rate for the soundtrack. Post the video on YouTube and embed it in your site.

Common Craft has some good ideas on how to do these videos, although they are using a video camera, which makes producing a high-quality video harder with limited time and resources.
If you are on a tight budget you can definitely do this yourself. If you can afford to pay someone like Common Craft and focus on what you’re really good at - go ahead and do it; at the end of the day, however, it might be cheaper and take less time to do it yourself. It took me 3 days to do the video below with a little help from my friends:

Have you noticed how easy it is to buy applications on the iTunes App Store? Apple made it stupid-easy by skipping purchasing step typically found in most online and mobile stores. Simply find an app you’re interested in (Apple makes it increasingly easier to do so), click it’s price, click BUY NOW, and you’re done! no “Are you sure?” no shopping cart summary (in fact, no shopping cart at all), no tax, no suggestions for other apps you might be interested in, and no shipping options (duh). Click BUY NOW, and voilà. No questions asked. Apple emails you your receipt later on, and that’s the last you’ll hear from them.

Here’s the flow:

Stage 1: Click the app icon

Stage 2: Click BUY NOW

Stage 3: App is immediately installed

Stage 4: Ready to roll!

Isn’t it genius? it’s borderline ethical for sure, but fully legal according to the terms of service which everyone agrees to (do we have a choice?). Apple licensed Amazon’s 1-click patent which allows them to do this. I hope Amazon fails to defend this overused piece of pseudo IP, after profiting from it for so many years. It’s about time the playing field is leveled for the benefit of all players.

Marking the return of Steve Jobs to Apple and in the spirit of 4th of July, here’s one of the best inspirational speeches of all times.

Full transcript:

The 2005 Jobs Stanford Commencement Address:

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first six months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out okay. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned Coke bottles for the 5-cent deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the seven miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But 10 years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards 10 years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something–your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky–I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation–the Macintosh–a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30, I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down–that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the Valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me–I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, “Toy Story,” and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything–all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure–these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up, so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying, because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma–which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called “The Whole Earth Catalog,” which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960’s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: It was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of “The Whole Earth Catalog,” and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

After who-knows-how-many years of collecting bolts, nuts, washers, nails, and other metal nicknacks, I finally decided to sort them all out and put them in nice little drawers. The task was formidable – I estimated the number of items at more than 10,000. Picking them all up one by one and placing each one in the right drawer would take forever, so I had to come up with a quicker strategy. As it turns out, the strategy came about after I already started, and this in fact is lesson one:

1. Start doing whatever it is you need to do, and sooner or later you’ll figure out how to do it better. Experience is your best guide.

2. Adopt a utilitarian approach. Ask yourself: how will you (or others) use the items? If you just need a few items once in a while, which items will it likely be?

3. It’s not going to be perfect.

4. Optimize the number of categories you’re going to use - the smaller the number of categories, the faster the sorting process will go. In the long run, however, it will be harder to find individual items if you only have a handful of drawers labeled “Nails”, “Screws”, “Nuts”, etc.

5. Sorting can take a while, and your categories will tend to drift and change. Be very clear and consistent on what goes into each drawer, or else you’ll end up with a greater mess and a lot of time wasted.

6. Dump the rusty nails and crooked screws. Don’t waste your energy on these, unless it takes less than 2 seconds to wipe off some dirt that just happens to look like rust. If a nail is rusty, it’s not going to get un-rusty. If it’s bent, you’ll spend a while banging on it and trying to straighten it up only to find out that it’s still not straight. If the threads on a screw are not even, you’ll regret using it when it actually comes in handy one day. The bottom line – with so many items at hand, you can always find a better one. Just dump the rejects.

7. Having said that, the smaller the number of items you have the more important each one is. If you believe the number of items is small enough to make each one count, choose one of these approaches:
a) If you already have it but it’s not up to snuff - fix, groom, and develop it, and eventually you’ll get your efforts’ worth.
b) Even though you already have it, if it’s crooked you’d be better off dumping it and getting another one instead. In other words – lesson #6 applies even for a small number of items.

8. You don’t have the resources to build the ultimate screw sorting machine, but wouldn’t it be great? Just imagine this big contraption - you simply show it a nut and it fetches the perfect screw in 2 seconds flat.

9. Some items won’t fit in any other drawer, and there’s no use in starting a drawer for each one-of item. Just put them all in a drawer marked “Misc.”

10. Sorting a big pile of items actually takes less time than you’d imagine. Just start, zero in on your strategy, and you’ll be over and done with before you know it.