Liminal states :: Asbestos underwear, fair information principles, and security…

Liminal states :: Social network activism and the Patriot Act (DRAFT)…

Liminal states :: “Election falsification” and other voting issues in Ohio (updated)…

Liminal states :: Asbestos underwear, fair information principles, and security…

Liminal states :: Asbestos underwear, fair information principles, and security…

Liminal states :: Asbestos underwear, fair information principles, and security…

Liminal states :: A #diversityfail as an opportunity: guys talking to guys who talk about guys…

Liminal states :: Mutual guest-blogging 2.0: an idea for “Ideas for Change”?…

Liminal states :: Facebook Barack Obama discussion board has been deleted!…

- The blatant one-upmanship of the site turns them off
- There’s nothing they can contribute (seriously, many women feel that way)
- They don’t want the grief of getting downvoted (because they are a woman)
- Like me, just didn’t consider contributing
- They use neuter or male profiles
- One or two women were early users and got turned off by the online behavior of the sexism and discrimination they endure in real life.

And I’m still trying to figure out how best to set up my schedule to spend time phoning and skyping with people from the core and customer engineering teams in Singapore. A fifteen-hour time difference is awkward; and while over time I’m sure there’s a way to sustainably balance time with them in the evenings with overly-packed days in California, some experimentation will be required.

Life in the startup fast lane!

So once again by the time Saturday night came around I was more than ready to dance. And DJ Anomaly once again obliged, with a 4+ hour set at Supermoon at the Atrium.

It took a while for me to decompress, with work thoughts still roaming around in my mind to some extent. Fortunately I was in a great mood, and the propulsive music suited it perfectly. By the end of the night, after meditating by candlelight, I was once again much more relaxed.

I heart psytrance.

I’m going to start doing things that in the past have added stress to our lives and made me unhappy. What’s different this time?

– from Gibbous (pt. 1), unpublished journal entry, March 2012

It’s something we talked about a lot before taking my new job, and we came up with a lot of reasons. The last two years at Intrinsa were great but very stressful; my time at Microsoft took it to the nth degree. Since then I’ve done a lot of work to reduce stress and it’s really been paying off: happier, sleeping better, spending more good times with friends and family. Now an amazing opportunity falls into my lap. How to keep from backsliding?

And make no mistake, startups are inherently stressful. This is a tough time, getting started with key deliverables in progress. The team is still jelling and understaffed, there’s so much on our plate that there’s not enough time to think, and we’re all learning how to work together effectively. Ah well, it comes with the territory.

But so far at least it seems under control. Personally, I’m a lot more reflective, nowhere near as overly-harsh on myself as I used to be, and have learned a lot of skills: much improved intuitions about time frames, for example, and far better at coaching, mentoring, setting expectations, and diplomacy than I used to be. I’m getting a decent amount of exercise and thanks to the Atrium and the resurgent SF psytrance scene, plenty of relaxation almost every week. As an added bonus I’ve got some great people working for me — I like all of my direct reports and our skills and backgrounds are very complimentary, more so than any team I’ve lead in the past.

So there there’s a lot of encouraging reasons to think it will be different this time.

We shall see …

And today “Blogger Bob’s” weak response on the TSA Blog is on the front page as well. Here’s how Paul Graham characterized it:

Indeed. Others on the thread make some excellent points too. In fact it’s a very normal Hacker News discussion.

Looks like the TSA is now on topic

Several recent posts have looked at the SUL. Billy Wilson reports

To illustrate just how vast the discrepancy is between those on the SUL and those who aren’t I did some math based on information I found on Social Statistics: http://goo.gl/TMdSa. For the average interactive user with a follower count between 30,000-100,000 who’s not on the SUL they go up on average by 201.4 followers a day and at this rate it would take 7.18 years to hit what is currently the 200th most followed position of 550,441 followers, 10.7 years to hit the 100th position with 795,008, and 29.0 years to hit the top position of +Britney Spears with 2,076,254 followers. The average account that has been on the G+ Suggested User List constantly for the past 31 days goes up by 8,739.6 followers a day, that’s 44.4 times as many per day on average than those not on the list. So there obviously appears to be a large discrepancy in the number of followers one is able to obtain between being on the SUL or not.

Milos Janata has a nice visualization.

Peter G McDermott observes

As an independent content creator trying to find my place in this space and trying to make a living from it, I am at a critical disadvantage from the people that Google has chosen. I have had in-depth conversations with +Eric Rice, +Chris Pirillo, +Robert Anderson, +Hermine Ngnomire, +matthew rappaport, +Bruce Garber, +Paul Roustan and countless others surrounding this topic.

The general consensus is that Google is taking what should be a fair playing field and picking favorites. I think Google was naive in doing this, because they may have not taken into consideration the amount of impact, influence and–potentially–money that they were throwing in the lap of people that they have chosen to recommend.

So … still a ways to go.

Congrats all around!

Danielle Fong (Co-Founder & Chief Scientist, LightSail Energy)
Jean Hsu (Engineer, Obvious)
Jeff Clavier (Founder & Managing Partner, SoftTech VC)
Leah Culver (Founder & CEO, Grove)

Jeff: reducing cost of development has opened up markets. What are people’s experiences?

Leah: my first site I developed myself in 2007, using the Django framework — open source frameworks were a new concept. Companies now use opensource for a lot. And hosting’s gotten a lot cheaper too.

Jean: I just learned Javascript a couple months ago, now using it for prototyping almost everything. It’s all about learning the libraries and frameworks.

Jeff: instead of developing the entire stack, now start by looking what you can reuse from others, and focus in on what your unique value is

Danielle: similar dynamics in the energy space. I left grad school when I realized that the wrong things were getting funded — “big science” isn’t the answer for everything. We were able to develop a prototype for under $100K. It’s not the whole story, but showed the key features, and we were able to use that to raise money. Then we targeted an off-the-shelf natural gas system to show next phase; that took about $6M. Now moving on to the next stage, targeting car engines etc. Outsourcing 90% of what we’re doing, very cost-effective. That’ll take an additional $20M, but at east step we show a lot of the risk is taken out. To get to profitability, it’s about $50M. I think we’re at the cusp of a hardware revolution — there’s no Ruby on Rails for hardware yet, but we’re close.

Jeff: let’s talk about distribution channels, and how social networks let you access hundreds of millions users

Leah: it’s been a hot topic for the last couple years. build up the networks and the base to start marketing. i spent time building my network, getting twitter followers, meeting the press. Funny, nobody’s really talked about it yet in this conference.

Jean: one of the things we’re working on is products that are obvious in retrospect. it doesn’t have to be something on the cutting edge of technology. at first we were thinking a lot about “what’s innovative, what’s new”, but it’s really much more about solving people’s problems.

Danielle: whenever you do something, it seems like the entire world is asking you “so what? i’m sure that lots of smart people have thought of this before”. it’s harder to try to explain why others haven’t succeeded than just do it!

Jeff: the utility drives the adoption; the community drives the retention

Jeff: how to balance passion and analysis — for your next startup idea, do you think it or feel it?

Danielle: both! if your idea is successful, you’re going to be spending years working on your startup. having something you’re passionatee about is extremely important, because there will be some tough times and you’ll think of quitting. something that’s really important in my career is that I knew I wanted to be a major player in solving the energy problem. I’ve pivoted many times: started in academia, then thought about doing a web startup to make billions and finance the research that wasn’t happening. but after two different startups I started on, Ii was excited by the topic but wasn’t totally committed to it, the idea I couldn’t keep myself from working on was related directly to the goal. I was lucky enough to meet co-founders who to work with. you have to let the opportunity pull you, you can’t just be pushed by a fad

Leah: fads come and go. what you’ll often find is that founders are passionate about a particular space. for me it’s communications — chat et. al. Sometimes there’s luck involved, so you may have to wait for the right time.

Jean: I used to work doing Android development full time, and when a new platform like iPad comes out there’s a real rush to say “how can I use the new features?” there’s not a lot of lasting products that come out of it, unless it’s something you’ve been thinking about and really understand

Jeff: we see 2000-3000 plans a year, and there’s a lot of me-toos and ideas that aren’t big enough to build a sustainable company. Sometimes people don’t want to go with the ideas because they think it’s too risky; but it’s much better to try something big than something too small.

Jeff: what are you excited about?

Leah: our current product is IRC for businesses — group chat as a service. one of the reasons why is that there already products for IRC on all the devices: iPad, Android, everything. the diversity of platforms is really cool

Jean: in the mobile space, phones are so much more advanced than even just a couple of years ago. right now having GPS on all the time or continuously pinging a server will kill your battery life; but the hardware’s moving soo quickly

Danielle: technology is spreading everywhere — from here, and from other places, spreading into the real world. There’s an extremely exciting company called Solen (?) that’s revolutionizing agriculture, keeping people from over-utilizing fertilizer.

—–

Audience questions …

Q: Having a hard time explaining to my audience what “cloud computing” means.

Jeff: try to make it feel simple. the consumer doesn’t care that it’s implemented in the cloud; focus on the value to the consumer and sell that. “Use this because …” as opposed to focus on the technology.

Q: which of the different emerging areas are the ones where we’ll see the biggest number of successful startups?

Danielle: there are more possibilities than I can fit in my head.

Leah: I almost think it’s the wrong question to ask. If you’re thinking about starting your own company, pick something you’re passionate about, aligned with your interests. get really immersed in the area, and you’ll see where it’s going.

Jeff: all these areas can support billion-dollar companies.

Q: when you’re building a marketplace or community, how do you determine whether it’s ready for prime time?

Jeff: it’s really hard. often you prime the pump on one side of the marketplace (typically supply). building the marketplace is like climbing a mountain one grip at a time.

Q: any time of ETA on the fusion reactor?

Danielle: I don’t believe the approach people are taking today is likely to be commercially relevant. it may work. nobody can fit the $30B project in their heads so nobody can answer. A wide-open scientific question.

Q: Kaitlyn … just launched Lovestragram, on top of Instragram’s API. Want to know about innovating on top of others’ platforms.

Lean: great question. It’s a great short-term traction approach, but you don’t develop your own community or network. so if you get acquired by the company, great, but if not then you’ve got a real challenge.

Jeff: look at the Twitter ecosystem as it was a few years ago. then Twitter decided they wanted to build it themselves; and a lot of the ecosystem got wiped out. so it’s very risky

Q: how do you recommend dealing with the fatigue of having to change, adapt, add one more social app and network. Disruption is exciting, but it’s also really hard to drag people along.

Danielle: Disruption is really hard. You don’t want to say “we have a disruptive technology” to entrenched businesses — they don’t like it at all. Often, though, there’s disruptio coming from somewhere else that the entrenched businesses fear, and you can use that to your advantage.

Jeff: another approach is embrace, leverage, and then disrupt. bring people to your system from where they are. building your new social network from scratch would be tricky today. instead, go to existing networks and build the value there.

“Don’t be scared of the technology. If you’re not a technical founder, it’s fine. People who code give off the aura that it’s sooooo hard, so it’s easy to fall into the trap of leaving it all to them — but that’s a mistake.”

Background in mobile, Australian, decided to come to Silicon Valley to work for startups to learn the lay of the land. Did interviews over Skype. A few years later, started Chomp.

The 4 rules of early stage product building

1. over-invest in user research. your primary job is to really understand what it is you’re building,. Sounds easy, but it’s really difficult. When we started Chomp, we knew we wanted to build AppDiscovery … and that’s all we knew. We could have written 100 ideas on the whiteboard for potential solutions. We sat down with users of Craigslist, and asked them questions about how they’re finding apps today. Incredibly valuable. Steve Krug’s “Don’t make me think” (http://www.sensible.com) is a great read.

2. Size the market. Do a sanity-check: am I actually building something that’s big enough? If you’re going to have to earn 20%, 50%, 80% of the market to have a business, that’s not good. When founding Chomp, we looked at numbers like “15 billion app downloads on Apple’s App Store, 10 billion on Google’s Android market”. Look at how much devs are spending on app advertising for a back-of-the-envelope computation to see big the pie is.

3. Put just enough process in place. “Minimum Viable Process”. Engineers tend to be fly-by-the-seat-of-the-pants. It’s great in the early days, but it can get you into trouble. So, talk to the technical teams about putting it in place Use version control. Set up commit emails. Don’t track bugs in email. Have a wiki for documentation. [With my software engineering hat on -- great advice!]

4. Know what’s going on inside the system. If you have a catastrophic failure, need to understand what’s going on. Tools like nagios, munin, cacti, ganglia: you have to use them, and start before launch.

Bonus rule: Just ship. Unless you have some compelling reason why not, you should be shipping in the first 90 days.

Deena Varshavskaya (Founder & CEO, Wanelo)

How did I get here? A long and messy path. It started in 2006 with a conversation with a fried about the future of advertising. In 2007, left my full-time job,m did consulting, built an agency. 2009-2010: launched a bunch of features, nobody cared. I couldn’t even get my parents to use the site! so removed all the features that were optional, got to a bare-bones experience … first time users started caring about the site. 2011: closed agency, move to SF, in August went up on AngelList. 2 weeks later, first term sheet, but terms weren’t very good. So started the rollercoaster ,… meetings, no, maybe, meetings, repeat. But kept growing. December 2011: raised $2M

Lessons:
- optimize for people and control, over money
- keep going, target 30-40 rejections
- make your own mistakes

Sheila Lirio Marcelo (Founder & CEO, Care.com)

Raised money in 2006. #1 thing to emphasize: experience. At the time, I didn’t have experience on the internet; graduated with a JD/MBA, went to work as a project manager making half of what I could have as a strategy consultant. Wrote product requirements, learned about technology. Passion is critical as well; my own child was a huge motivator for me.

Pitched to VCs about finding caregivers for loved ones, they didn’t get it. It was all guys! I asked “how many of you are the primary caregiver for your loved ones?” None of them. Many of them are used to funding ideas based on their own experience, so I asked them to put themselves in other shoes.

I believe that it isn’t so much that women lack confidence. We have an image of perfection in our head that gets in the way. Get rid of it! It’s going to give you so much more confidence when you present.

We got funded with the PowerPoint deck — we hadn’t launched yet. Got funded based on the people I had worked with in the past. I collect people in my life. The team is what got funded.

By now, we’ve raised $62M. It’s been pre-emptive rounds.

Key lessons:

$100M in 5 years. Do I meet the criteria? Am I clear on milestones?
– don’t get caught in a twiner round by not raising enough or being overvalued

Do I want headache of politics on the board? Quality matters
– be prepared months in advance and have lots of coffee. get to know the investor who will join your board
– make sure you like the firm. the mother-in-law is the managing parterre

Why get more diluted if you don’t have to? Raise when you don’t need it
– strategics take a long time to close, be patient and manage expectations

My board doesn’t work for mel; it’s the other way around. Fundraising isn’t over when the money is in the bank
– dinner with board members 1-1 at least twice a year
– removes a lot of grandstanding. frees up your time to run the company

Leah Busque (Founder & Chief Product Officer, TaskRabbit)

I was an engineer, didn’t know anything about fundraising. I just wanted to run the company!

Taskrabbit started in 2008. Leverage social networking into “service networking”. Social, Location, and Mobile were the technologies I was excited about.

Coded first version in my house, launched in September 2008. Tough economic times, bootstrapped it, which was difficult. March 2009: raised $150K from Boston Angels. June 2009: participated in fbFund incubator program. October 2009: $1.9M; March 2011, $5M series A. By this point we had understanding of economic model and user experience. Had focused on Boston and SF, now started to roll out. Dec 2011: $18M series B. Investors were coming to us and saying “we want to help you grow faster”

Robin Chase, co-founder of Zipcar and CEO of Buzzcar

“When I launched Zipcar it was in the aftermath of the doctor crash. But the die

Zipcar didn’t invent car-sharing. It had been going on for 50- years, in a low-tech way. The lightbulb went on: this is what the internet is for! It’s something I really really want. I’m an urban dweller, one car, family of 5, it sits in an officer park most of the time — I want part of a car.

September 1999, got the idea, we shook hands. I spent the next three months working on a business plan. In December, it was the unveiling: made an appointment with the man who was the dean of MIT’s Sloan business school. He said, “Robin, this is an amazing idea. You have to go much faster, much farther, scale it up.” Left the meeting, and I was shaken: “wow, I really have to step up.” My kids were 6, 9, 12. So I mulled it over for days. My oldest daughter said “what’s up?” “I have to decide whether to do this or be a fabulous mom.” She said “could you make money and help save the children?” I said “yes!” She said “go for it!”

Class at Sloan, 200 people, 36 women — one of whom was a millionaire. Had her over to dinner, asking about what it was like to do a startup. She turned and said to her husband, “honey, should we invest $50K win Robin?” Lesson: you never know where your money will come from! All the initial money was raised on a bridge note that was convertible to series A, so there was no discussion of valuation.

In corporated in January, first investment in February, but a beta car on the street in May. Spent $50K on the webiste, the database behind it, and the ability to make a reservation. They key to the car was hidden under a pillow on a couch on my back porch; the first 22 drivers would come there and get the key. But they could reserve online!

Networking, networking, networking. I felt like a mole underground. Wanted to go up, not sure just way up is. Looking back, you can see there was a path; but wasn’t clear at the time.

So we were going to launch in June. I went to the leasing company to get the three cars, and they said “we need $7K/car.” I only at $68 left from the first $50K. I was at Salesforce.com, ran into an angel investor, he said “Hey Robin, what do you need?” I said “I need $25K by tomorrow morning.” He said “OK” and wired me the money.

We launched the company on $75K — and I’m not an engineer.

Over the summer, we raised another $500K on a note. Angel investors, friends … the very first car was a lime green VW Beetle — one of only 10 Beetles in Boston. We put the logo on the car, first company to do that. I got a call from AP, “I saw one of your cars:” They did a story on us, three days after we launched, went viral around the world — including NPR. Another classmate of mine was driving down the road in Kentucky, heard about Zipcar, and sent me $50K.

We raised the A round in November, $1.3M (but had already spent 600K). Launced in DC in September 2011. Raised a $2M bridge in late 2001 — raising money without a valuation is a snap! Launched in NYC in Feb 2002, in December did a B round for $4M.

My first big pitch was in April, I had practiced and had it down. The 2 minutes of Q&A was all about “who puts the fuel in the car?” Every single time I did the pitch, people would ask that. Every single person you talk to is a free consultant — their questions aren’t dumb; if you’re not explaining it, you’re dumb. And my real-life elevator pitch I was at a Goldman Sachs event for female CEOs, and wound up in an elevator from floor 36 to floor 5 with the female CEO of Enterprise.

Focus and technology development: know what you have to prove. What is minimum needed? Iterate fast,. Remember and remind yourself. One of our first failures: thought we’d have a device in the car where people would put in a PIN number to give us feedback. (Back then only 25% of people had cellphones.) We did a couple iterations on prototype devices. Each time it was a fiasco within three weeks — LED didn’t work, connectivity didn’t happen, etc.. So we decided to cut it. The simplicity of Zipcar’s technology today wasn’t my first vision. It was a big mental shift.

Lessons:

Can be done fast if you are clueless
Money comes from unexpected places: be alert
Listen and learn to all feedback
Luck happens — when preparation meets opportunity

With the first $1.3M, I was proving that people can reserve cars without a warm body next to them. I wasn’t spending huge sums on marketing, just needed to make the technology work.

Staffing: try before you buy. People initially were working for free, or paid hourly at low rates. Some of them turned out to be fabulous … and then you hire them. Diversity and expertise are so critical. You start with your experience, and then your co-founder’s. Every one of the “hobbies” lines on a resume is so important — you’re doubling your expertise set. Are you a person when you see something, do you say “I can buy that” or “I can make that?” If you’re an entrepreneur, you say I can make that.

As your company goes, you have to stop thinking “I’m the guy who knows everything.” Hire people whose values you share and who you respect, trust their judgement — that’s how you can grow the company without being a jerk. Intellectual honesty: we all like to think we can be CEO together, but is that really the best? I didn’t hire my co-founder when we got funding, and she was very pissed off. She told me “Robin, you’ve ruined my life — I was going to retire at Zipcar”, and I thought “wow we have such different expectations.”

Zipcar today, went public in April, 900,000 cars. Each Zipcar takes 10-20 cars off the road. Here’s some maii we got recently

Have I told you I love you?

I encourage you to build companies that people write love notes to.

Why is Caterina an entrepreneur? “I like making things.” The best thing about being an entrepreneur? “Making products people love.” True success is when people make cakes and cupcakes with your logo on it.

“Without money, your startup can’t go anywhere. The biggest reason for startups ending is lack of money.” Quotes Disney: “I don’t make movies to make money; I make money to make movies”.

“The internet is built on a culture of generosity.”

Caterina’s investments include Etsy, Kickstarter, 20×200. All of them are deeply human, soulful, fun. “VCs will tell you to build a company based on one of the seven sins — greed, lust, envy, gluttony are all perennial. I think this is a terrible way to design software, totally misguided.”

Computers do some things well — they’re good at handling bits, making connections. But computers do somethings badly. they don’t handle emotions, they don’t forget, they don’t forgive, they can’t handle love — happy Valentine’s Day! Those require people. And worst of all, computers treat people like things. So technology can be dehumanizing.

One of the terrible things about computers is that they never forget. This is one of the things that makes us human, makes us able to love. I often think we should build in some forgetting mechanisms. Heidegger: “Forgetting is not a failure to remember, but rather a positive mode.” We should be building in Proustian memory: not what memory recalls, but what memory evokes.

Unfortunately, we live in a plague of fantasies. If the central idea of enlightenment was reality, the central idea of our time is imagination. Many of us have studied game mechanics that keep people collecting things, getting kudos and hearts, compulsively trying to level up. The neurochemistry of why we check social media sites is very similar to addiction, the same reason we like pornography. FOMO: “fear of missing out” Social media feeds FOMO, creates FOMO. Instead, we should be taking our lead from …

The Amish. The Amish have a reputation for being anti-technology, but if you look a little closer it’s a lot more complex than you might thing. They’re some of the best makers, hackers, tinkerers … very much technologists, just not the way we think of them. This is the kind of technology we should be building: brings us closer together instead of apart, very human.

Each of us is an individual. Everybody sitting in this room can build a product that makes us better. We can humanize technology before it dehumanizes us.

A few other miscellaneous notes:

- For the PITCH competition, 40 judges went through over 170 applications to get the finalists — about the same ratio we have for First Look Forum

- from a quick show of hands, at least 1/3 of the people here are starting their own companies. it’s a mix of developers, product managers, marketing folks, with a handful of designers and investors

- Something to look forward to: cupcakes at 2 pm!

Next up: Caterina Fake!

Here’s the initial tweetstream, via Storify:

I’ve learned a lot, and now know how to temper analysis with empathy and combine it with experience; at what point does it become enough to understand?

– Scientists in an irrational world, August 2004

2012 New Year’s Resolutions:

• focus passionately on my goals, cutting down on distractions
• finish things, don’t just start them
• listen better
• work out regularly
• spend more time in diversity-friendly environment, online and off, and less time and energy dealing with sexists, racists, and elitists
• find a better balance of femininity, flounciness, and flirtation

And continue my successful 2011 resolutions: get more sleep; meditate regularly; do the things i know i should be doing to reduce stress; listen to new music; take an ABT approach to life;make new recipes; have friends over more often; choose desire over fear; trust my intuition; try not to analyze things too much; fall through the limitations of intelligence into pure and simple creativity; bring inner ecstasy back into my consciousness; have more art, beauty, and fun in our lives; and spend more time with women — and in particular the women I love and the goddesses I know.

2012 goals: change the world and have a great time doing it

• working with great people at a company I’m passionate about
• e-book published and selling
• at least one successful activism campaign and one successful diversity effort
• share more good times with my family and closest friends

January 19:

Resolutions

• get more sleep, work out, meditate regularly, and do the other things i know i should be doing to reduce stress

Major progress on getting sleep — despite other stresses, it’s the best I’ve slept for years. Yay! Good on most of them, except for working out. Plans for 2012: leverage dancing and the atrium

• listen to new music, have friends over for dinner, games, and hanging out more often — and make more new recipes

Yes on new music; had friends over some, but certainly room for improvement. Not so good on new recipes.

• spend more time on diversity-friendly social networks, and less in sexist, racist, and elitist environments

Some progress, but G+ and Diaspora* both turned out to be fairly sexist, and G+ is elitist as well. Aw well. Plans for 2012: start up Qweries; more time on Dreamwidth

• find a better balance of femininity, flounciness, and flirtation

Not so good. Plans for 2012: already in progress

• take a more ABT approach to life

Sporadic.

• continue 2010 resolutions: choose desire over fear; trust my intuition; try not to analyze things too much; fall through the limitations of intelligence into pure and simple creativity; bring inner ecstasy back into my consciousness; have more art, beauty, and fun in our lives; and spend more time with women — and in particular the women I love and the goddesses I know

Yes!

Goals

• Qweries launched and on path to cash-flow positive

Looking at launching by end of January 2012. Too soon to know about cash-flow positive, but expenses so far are minimal.

• g0ddesses.net published and contract signed to publish Change the world and make friends doing it

Did poetry in tead of g0ddesses.net; draft of DJ Anomaly at the Atrium completed. Minimal progress Change the world (although Nymwars is a chapter)

• three successful grassroots activism campaigns

Yes!

• financially break-even by the end of the year

Nope. Potentially break-even for January, though.

• spend more time with my family and closest friends

Yes!

Alexa’s comparison of Pinterest and Quora traffic, late 2011

My first reaction to Pinterest was “It’s pretty!” and so far everybody else I’ve showed it too had a similar response. As well as the visuals, Pinterest’s demographics — more women than men — are a huge contrast with Quora. And the results have been impressive so far, to say the least. In late December, Quora responded.

Q&A site Quora launched a new feature on Monday that has nothing to do with Q’s or A’s. “Boards” function like Pinterest’s “pinboards,” allowing users to collect and organize web content under topics they create.

– Sarah Kessler, Quora Adds ‘Boards’ and Becomes a Little More Like Pinterest Mashable

Writes Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo in a blog post, “As Quora has grown, we’ve learned that people want to read the most interesting content regardless of whether it happens to be in question and answer format or not.” D’Angelo tells me that this shift fits in better with Quora’s new goal, “to connect you with everything you want to know about.” Its old goal was described as “a continuously improving collection of questions and answers.”

– Liz Gannes, Quora Expands Beyond Q&A, Launches Boards

It looks like a pretty big change of pace for the company, whose basic Q&A platform has proven popular in the Silicon Valley tech community, but hasn’t really caught a mainstream audience yet.

,Boonsri Dickinson, Quora Takes A Cue From Pinterest And Expands Beyond Q&A, SF Gate

When question and answer community Quora launched to the general public last year, social media geeks were calling it the ‘next big thing’ and now just over a year later a select few are admittedly still dedicated fans, but most of us have forgotten all about it.

Now in an attempt to make it relevant to a wider audience, Quora is becoming much more like a curation tool than a simple question and answer website. Yesterday Quora Boards was launched, which gives users the means to curate posts from Quora and content from round the web and then save it to a board. Sound familiar? Well yep, that’s because one of our favourite sites, Pinterest, uses boards as a way for users to bookmark things too, but from what we can tell Pinterest is much more visual and Quora Boards will allow users to curate all kinds of content.

– beccacaddy, Quora copies Pinterest, introduces boards, Shiny Shiny

So what do you know, while the details are somewhat different than they were in the draft of g0ddesses.net, it sure looks to me like life is imitating art in one key way. Diversity is outperforming.

Has Quora lost its way? has Quoran’s reactions, including a discussion between me and Mark Hughes about rich-get-richer systems and the Quora 1%.