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.
]]>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 !!
]]>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?
]]>Tax hedge-fund gamblers. For starters, we need an immediate repeal of the preposterous and indefensible carried-interest tax break, which allows hedge-fund titans like Stevie Cohen and John Paulson to pay taxes of only 15 percent on their billions in gambling income, while ordinary Americans pay twice that for teaching kids and putting out fires. I defy any politician to stand up and defend that loophole during an election year.
How one feels about carried-interest should reflect how one feels about sweat equity.
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According to Judith Vidal-Hall (2006), ” Naxal guerrillas control an estimated one fifth of India’s forests, as well as being active in 160 of the country’s 604 districts”. It claims more lives than terrorism.
From an earlier article:
THIS WEEK marks the first anniversary of a brutal attack by the banned CPI (Maoist) party on India’s paramilitary forces. On 6 April last year, 76 policemen were massacred in the forests of Chhattisgarh. One year later, the same forests have witnessed another brutal carnage. As TEHELKA’s investigations reveal, this butchery comes not from the enemy, but from the ‘security’ forces. Those attacked are India’s most invisible citizens.
In the course of a five-day operation in the second week of March, police torched three villages deep inside the jungles of Dantewada district. Three hundred huts were set on fire. Hundreds of tribals left homeless. Three women sexually assaulted. Three civilians killed. Granaries incinerated. Gold jewellery and thousands of rupees looted. One corpse left dangling from a tree. Another sliced with an axe. Two villagers kidnapped. Livestock stolen.
The irony is: Barring reports in Hindi daily Rajasthan Patrika, The Hindu and a few local television channels, media stayed quiet. The tribals are India’s invisible citizens.
]]>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 !!
]]>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.
]]>There is one crucial missing link in India’s otherwise thriving and robust democracy, the absence of which will complicate the country’s political response to this economic problem: principled, motivated political parties. There is no party in Indian politics that could genuinely build a reform-oriented agenda crossing the country’s left-right political divide.
Rather, each of the major, viable parties is what political scientists call a brokerage party. As David Frum defined them, they are “a political entity without fixed principles or policies that exploits the power of the central state to bribe or bully incompatible constituencies to join together to share the spoils of government.” No party such as this will be able to responsibly solve the problems of corruption and inequality.
- Vivek Dehejia in Atlantic
]]>Our first store, in Tysons Corner, taught us our first lesson within the first 30 minutes. We had just opened the doors when we noticed the steel already needed polishing. With a special polishing solution. And a special polishing tool. That’s when we learned that blasting steel with virgin sand makes it less prone to scuff marks. We’ve also learned that glass can be much more than just glass. We’ve learned that a 32’6” transparent glass box can stand tall even among the giants of the Manhattan skyline…
Did not know that my local Tysons’ Corner store was Apple’s first.
]]>]]>Life comes to a point only in those moments when the self dissolves into some task. The purpose in life is not to find yourself. It’s to lose yourself.
Kern.js is a simple javascript bookmarklet that adds powerful functionality to Paravel’s first-rate Lettering.js. Rather than having to guess-and-check CSS and make repeated, tedious adjustments, Kern.js allows you to kern letters like you would in a desktop app like Photoshop — simply and visually. It then generates the CSS for each individual letter, which you can plug directly into your stylesheet.
If you do not know what we are talking about here – dave rupert provides a great intro to lettering.
]]>Groupon has filed its S-1 and hopes to raise $750M in its initial public offering. Given they’re currently losing a staggering $117M per quarter, despite revenues of $644M, they’ll be burning through that cash almost as soon as it hits their account.
At the moment, it’s costing them $1.43 to make $1, and it doesn’t look like it’s getting any cheaper. They’re already projected to make close to three billion dollars in revenues this year. If you can’t figure out how to make money on three billion in revenue, when exactly will the profit magic be found? Ten billion? Fifty billion?
]]>The study, conducted by the National Foundation for American Policy, found that 70 percent of the finalists in the 2011 Intel Science Talent Search competition — also known as the “Junior Nobel Prize” — were the children of immigrants even though only 12 percent of the U.S. population is foreign-born.“
These aren’t just any “immigrants”. While former H-1B visa holders comprise less than 1 percent of the U.S. population, 60 percent of the finalists had parents who entered the U.S. on H-1B visas, which are generally the only practical way to hire skilled foreign nationals.”
So, H1B visas not only help fires America’s growth today, they also are an important factor in keeping America ahead in science and technology in the future.
(Via Sepia Mutiny)
]]>Three items for men to travel in style and comfort:
- Dark, premium denim This is your ultimate travel item. The dark wash can be dressed down or up, looks great with everything, and is comfortable in-flight.
- Blazer or stylish jacket A navy blazer is the most versatile option, as it transfers easily from day to night/dressier looks. A charcoal sport coat is another good choice. For casual travel, a stylish city coat is an excellent bet.
- Quality loafers or street sneakers Brown loafers are the king of travel footwear: comfortable, stylishly versatile, and a breeze to slip on and off in the security lines. (Black is more formal and less versatile for casual looks.) Brown loafers look excellent with everything from business suits, to chinos, to denim.
Wear those with t-shirt (casual), polo short (polished casual) or shirt (dressy).
And, gentlemen, always wear your undershirt !!
]]>“One challenge with browser page loading is that various images – big and small – requires many calls to the server.A sprite is a conglomeration of all the (non-repeating) image assets of your design into a single image to be referenced and obscured and in doing so having a single HTTP request to retrieve any number of pseudo-’images’.
Creating a sprite is hard and maintaing is even harder. Spritemapper to the rescue”.
(Via Monday By Noon)
]]>Even though he realizes that the law is now a liability for him. He said, he is proud of what he attempted to do as governor.
I salute you, sir. There are not many politicians that honest.
From: The Hill
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Somebody should convert it into a tool where people can type in their zipcode and household income etc to find out their coverage options.
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I love the intelligent algorithm used to figure out “dark mode”.
I wish all reading apps (Kindle, newspaper apps, safari..) on iPad and iPhone have such a “dark mode”.
]]>A nice ad for a nice app.
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