bijan sabet • Getting promoted too quickly.

In the early days when the company is small, the 10x achiever stands out. The founder/CEO looks at that person and appreciates all of the contributions. Then the next thing you know, that one person goes from being the first UI person or first iphone dev, to being in charge of a soon to be built team.

And that’s when it starts. All of a sudden that person who used to be an amazing individual contributor, doesn’t know how to manage a team. His team misses deadlines, quality of work suffers and the biggest red flag of all happens – he can’t get amazing people to work for him.

I am celebrating Christmas holidays vacationing with my wife and kid in Sedona. The weather has a slight chill to it but the views are beautiful and the resort is amazing.

People who know me knows that I do not believe in any religion. However, I still enjoy many of the traditions that come with religion. Christmas time is one of those. I love getting in the holiday mood at the end of the year; reflecting on things that past and the year that lies ahead. And most importantly just getting together with family and friends and neighbors and be a part of the community. Realizing we are part of something bigger than just ourselves.

So, wherever you are, hope you have a community of friends, family and neighbors you care about and who care about you.

Merry Christmas !!

Let me start by saying that I had no idea about US healthcare till I co-founded my current company in 2009. However, in last two years I have spent some time talking to some very smart people who work with health insurance companies as well as government departments that are responsible for regulating them.

Like most highly regulated industries, these companies and departments are filled with bureaucratic processes and a large number of people are dedicated just to ensuring how they stay on the right side of myriad local, state and federal regulations. On the flip side, precious little time is spent on innovation.  I have also met and heard about many capable investors and entrepreneurs who see the opportunities in the healthcare sector and want to build creative solutions for the domain but are frustrated by too much government interference.

This has led to some rather perverse consequences on how healthcare is delivered or paid for in this country.

• Its not an accident that most states and regions in this country have only one or two prominent health insurance plans and only one or two hospital systems that serve the community
• Its also not an accident that most unions and employees in this country consider healthcare a key benefit that their job should/would give.
• Its not an accident that the health commissioner of a state is the most powerful position in most states after the governor and the attorney general. This last point is worth repeating. The most important person in a state after the State Governor and the-Person-Who-Prosecutes-The-Crimes is the-person-who-regulates-health-insurance-companies. How fucked up is that?

And yet, we take that all this for granted. No more than a simple nod is given to these observations when we discuss healthcare in our legislatures and newspapers. No solutions are suggested on how we can decrease the power of regulators here (and I am  not just talking about state commissioners. I am talking about Medicare and Medicaid too; where federal CMS agency essentially controls and pays for the entire industry.)

When I hear the political debates in the media about what troubles the healthcare sector – very little attention is usually directed towards about how over-regulated the sector is, how much power is in the hands of government and how by just creating a more free market we can solve many of the ills.

Where are my capitalists who want end users to become consumers? And pay real money and get real choice instead of getting it for “free” in Medicare and Job Market?

Where are my business advocates who want to create free market? Why we do not hear of  proposals to create a health care market so a small startup can thrive and an innovative big company can bring in new ideas without involving army of government lobbyists?

Where is my tea party that can liberate healthcare from government control?

The good news is that the American economy is back to its pre-crisis size. The U.S. GDP is now about $13.5 trillion, a bit above what it was in 2007. The bad news is that we are producing the same amount of goods and services as in 2007 with 7 million fewer workers.

There is now a single world market for many goods and services, and about 400 million people — from China, India, South Africa, Indonesia and elsewhere — have entered the global labor force, offering to make the same things Americans make for a tenth the price. That’s why growth by itself won’t create enough (American) jobs. The economy increasingly has the capacity to grow nicely without adding many workers.

(via @bussgang)

An eight character, case sensitive, alpha-numeric password should take less than two hours.

All you need is a machine with 4 Radeon GPU cards and some software !
Upgrade your password to at least 12 characters from the normal 8, friends. And start including some special characters in them. Even better, just use something like 1Password.

After email, SMS and iOS messaging, Twitter will now become a key social layer over the top of many of the apps on iOS devices.

The features that app developers will have access to closely resemble what other platforms make possible with Facebook integration, and Twitter’s being the one to land this deal is a pretty big deal for the world’s 2nd place social network.

Watch out, facebook. You are now in Apple’s cross-hairs !!

In 1990, brain cancer rates in US were 70 per million. Today, there are roughly 60 times more cell phones, and each one is used for an average of about 20 minutes per day, up from just a minute or two in the industry’s expensive early days. so 600-1200 times more cellphone usage but brain cancer rates have not gone up at all. In fact, they are down to 65 per million.

Once iMessage launches, I am cancelling my SMS family plan ($30). Almost everybody to whom I send text messages is on iPhone anyway.

I’m sure we’re not alone, but Expensify is the only startup I know that tracks hours. (If you do, please share your data.) Unless you’re actually billing hours to clients, there might seem little reason to. But tracking hours gives two, extremely powerful benefits:

• Everybody knows, objectively, when they’re not living up to the team’s expectations, and by how much.
• Everybody knows, objectively, when they’ve gone above and beyond their obligations, and by how much.

What do you think? does it make sense to track hours (on an honor system) not for billing but to “tweak” expectations?

Babies act as boot camp…Even though I’d heard a million times that “being a parent changes you!”, I’d never put it in the context of it changing behaviors the same way that other boot camp-style processes do.