Adeo Ressi

There is a bubble in the start-up world today because new companies are creating real economic value. This differs sharply from the 2000-era hype machine, though there is definitely some hype today as well. Just look at my speaking schedule.

Reality outside of the world of start-ups is getting fairly ugly. Major businesses, like GM, are firing smart people. Small businesses can’t survive. More and more people are joining the un-insured, and someone is going to need to pay the price for all of this.

Internet usage will grow dramatically during this downturn, as people look for stuff to do. Monetization will be tricky, but it will likely be centered around decentralized buyers and sellers in micro-markets with a lot of successful infrastructure providers.

When this all started, most of the banks were collectively facing trillions of dollars worth of write downs and losses, which would put many of them out of business. My prediction is that all significant gains since 2001 in the real estate markets will be lost. The funny money created by Wall Street bankers to float internet companies re-materialized as complex sub-prime derivatives and hedges. The raw asset value of the housing market no longer supports the current housing bubble, and money is evaporating as banks can not maintain their reserve ratios. Even Bank of America warned about this with the Merril Lynch acquisition.

The US stock markets have priced all of these losses in already, so I don’t expect too much more carnage. We have a different worry. If oil goes above $175 per barrel and stays there for some time, we face massive economic problems that may result in the collapse of numerous financial institutions, as the very way that we lead our lives in the United States will become economically unfeasible.

Despite all of this craziness, it’s one of the best times in history to start a business, especially if you can afford to. Everything is getting cheaper by the day.

Downloaded and installed SPORE on a Vista macine earlier today. The whole process took about 90 minutes. To be clear, SPORE is by far the best game that I have played in years.

The leveling, or “stages,” are incredibly well thought out. Just as you are getting bored, new stuff appears and then you level up. Even though the stages may have a simplistic game mechanic, such as the well reported PacMan-esque approach of the primordial soup, they are sufficiently interesting to keep you engaged.

Based on my game play so far, there are clearly VERY many ways to “skin the cat” - cooperative, collaborative, solo, death monger, etc. So far, I have been playing the death monger style, and it’s definitely fun. I would like to try some more collaboration, but everyone in the game is afrais of me… I wonder why?

Anyway, I strongly recommend that you take the 90 minutes and install SPORE. From everything that I can tell so far, it is well worth the effort and the money.

All of the time that it takes to schedule things end up being a significant amount of the time that you end up doing things. Here are my new “freestyle scheduling” rules:

• Calling 1: No scheduling of one-to-one calls. Feel free to call me.
• Calling 2: Schedule calls of more than two people only if necessary, and the initiator sends at least three time options when making a request.

• Meeting 1: My business meetings cluster around lunchtime, from 11:00 AM to 2:00 PM. If you want to meet for serious advice, offer a three alternative days to do lunch on University in Palo Alto (my favorite spot is Lavanda). If it is less serious, we can grab a quick coffee at Couppa Cafe on Ramona off University in Palo Alto.
• Meeting 2: My social meetings center around collective dinners or drinks, normally starting around 7 PM. If you would like to come, you can ask “to join in the next evening event.” These rarely get planned longer than a couple days in advance, and NO BUSINESS is discussed.

• General 1: When a time is proposed to be scheduled, send out at least three alternatives in an easy to read format.
• General 2: Any time that anything is scheduled, the initiator sends out an iCal compliant meeting reminder so that no data entry is needed by other participants.

The theory is to simplify things. If you want to speak with me, call my number. If you want to meet with me, come to one of my events or known locations.

You know that it is bad when your bug-laden iPhone 3G provides a far superior computing experience than your $3,000 top-of-the-line Lenovo X61 Tablet with touch screen functionality. Initially, the X61 struck me as a giant iPhone. Now, it appears to be a gilded paperweight. It’s sad to see the once venerable brand of ThinkPad laptops sink to the level of plastic blinky rings bearing the same “Made in China” markings.

Outside of the fact that the machine itself with top installed RAM, CPU, and hard drive specifications simply can not run Vista, it suffers from a cheapness, poor quality, and unthoughtfulness. I am writing this on a MacBook AIR that cost literally half as much money and is vastly superior in every way. Leaving the OS aside, the AIR is actually small, versus the clunky “brick factory” design of the X61. The keyboard on the AIR is backlit, versus no lighting of any kind on the X61 keyboard. The touchscreen and tablet functions are “cool,” but they rarely can keep pace with the painfully slow Vista OS that performs as if it calculating the future polar ice climate models even when idle. To change the orientation of the X61 screen when you move the device around takes 30-90 seconds with each adjustment, backlogging switches as you move the device.

The very fact that a top of the line device left a factory floor with such poor standards is a testament that nobody is leading the company anymore. It is only worsened by the fact that my X61 broke shorlty after arrival, and it took a whopping SIX MONTHS to be repaired, versus walking into an Apple store and getting a new machine with all of my data backed up in 6 hours. I sent it to a central repair depot twice, and then they actually sent two seperate people onsite without necessary parts. Need I say more.

Avoid Lenovo. Avoid ThinkPad. It was a difficult $3,000 lesson for me to learn. Buy a cheap computer for a cheap amount of money instead…

While camping deep in “gold” country this weekend, we learned about the practice of hydraulic mining in the mid 1800′s. Large water pathways were carved through the land, and water was funneled into smaller and smaller tubes until the stream became a powerful jet that washed away mountains in the quest for gold. A good read about the practice is available here.

They found a lot of gold, killed a lot of people, and completed wiped out hundreds of miles of habitat. Over 320 million wheelbarrels of material were moved by one hydraulic operation that I visited.