Last-Minute Lunch

On the way back from my Monday morning meeting, I was pulled into the Rainbow to pick up a baguette, some cheese, and salami. Yes, one of my favorite lunches – but why now, why today?

Turns out, I had a very important, last-minute lunch meeting:

Beware of Geeks Bearing Platforms

“Building on top of someone elses (Apple’s) platform is getting scarier and scarier. They are constantly making sweeping changes that effect our bottom line and provide no transparency, or analytics of almost any kinds, for devs. If I didn’t know better I’d say apple hates devs and thinks of us only as a necessary evil… Just throwing us enough of a bone to not jump ship.” – tseabrooks

“When Flipboard becomes [a way to bring advertisers in front of our community], I would love to reengage and reinvigorate our product. Until then, we have to wait and see and not allow intermediaries to build their own platforms without direct monetizable benefit back to us.” – Howard Mittman, VP and publisher, Wired magazine

The most important things are quiet

“…it’s easy to be distracted and place value on outside noise instead of focusing on the task at hand or important things in life. With this…I am taking myself out of FB and quieting the noise around me. It’s just not necessary for me to keep in touch with those that mean the most to me.” – a recently deactivated Facebook friend

Get Comfortable

“We tend to massively underestimate the compounding returns of intelligence. As humans, we need to solve big problems. If you graduate Stanford at 22 and Google recruits you, you’ll work a 9-to-5. It’s probably more like an 11-to-3 in terms of hard work. They’ll pay well. It’s relaxing. But what they are actually doing is paying you to accept a much lower intellectual growth rate. When you recognize that intelligence is compounding, the cost of that missing long-term compounding is enormous. They’re not giving you the best opportunity of your life. Then a scary thing can happen: You might realize one day that you’ve lost your competitive edge. You won’t be the best anymore. You won’t be able to fall in love with new stuff. Things are cushy where you are. You get complacent and stall.” – Stephen Cohen