Noah Lackstein

I see much deeper and broader reasons for learning to code. In the process of learning to code, people learn many other things. They are not just learning to code, they are coding to learn.

Mitch Resnick, MIT Media Lab, founder of Scratch

 Learn To Code, Code To Learn | EdSurge News

(via fred-wilson)

10 years ago I sat down with my brother. He was about to attend a high attrition special forces course.  The vast majority of candidates drop out.

Aren’t you concerned about the failure rate?

I still think about his answer: “Attrition is a group statistic. It doesn’t apply to me.”

He explained that statistics are created for groups, not for individuals. As an individual, its not relevant to you. He went on to pass the course on a broken ankle.

That makes me think about some startup founders. Their companies should have died, since most die. They should have given up, since most give up. But, somehow they willed their company to exist.

Startup failure is a group statistic, it doesn’t apply to you.

“Attrition is a group statistic. It don’t apply to me” - startup thoughts

Government is a hackable system — an operating system that can be optimized.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/24/nyregion/mayor-bloombergs-geek-squad.html?_r=0 (via wmougayar)

The smart high school grad no longer just picks a school, borrows money and wings it. Your future depends on your ability to assemble an educational plan that gets you on your path of knowledge and discovery without putting you at risk of attending a school that is doomed to fail , and/or saddling you with a debt heavy balance sheet that prevents you from taking the chances, searching for the opportunities or just being a fuck up for a while. We each take our own path, but nothing shortcuts the dreams of a 22-year-old more than owing a shitload of money.

Will Your College Go Out of Business Before You Graduate ? « blog maverick

I live life with the belief that the best is yet to come. There’s never failure or disappoint, only learning. It’s just that between two peaks, there always is a valley..

And, after all, what would peaks be without them valleys?

Dealing with Disappointment - Rohan

Hi Fred, nice post. It’s always interesting for me — someone who has designed and launched several social networks — to read about someone else discovering social mechanics.

You are more correct about this than you may realize. In fact, single-user utility is necessary for a successful social network, not just a nice-to-have. Often though, that utility is a happy accident by designers that were aiming at something else.

Optimal single-user actions have two ingredients, which — when multiplied by the whole network — result in “viral” effects:

1) A single user’s actions should be part of a feedback loop. You might be familiar with this. These loops follow the pattern of: motivation > action > feedback > motivation. For example, you want to brag about your sexy outfit (as you do), so you post a pic on Facebook, people like it, and therefore you want to do it again next weekend.

But if that is all they accomplish you only make one person happy.

2) The second ingredient involves more of what you’re discussing: the action you take should create small-world connections within the community. This is where features like “popular” pages and “followers” originated from. They create short pathways between otherwise distantly-connected people in the network.

In a properly-built social network, actions not only create feedback for the user, but create actionable content for others, in their own feedback loops.

Once started, this is an endless machine that allows Foursquare to perpetuate something you did, purely for your own individual purposes.

You shouldn’t just encourage this in your social portfolio companies… you should create, measure, and optimize it at every turn.

Joel Marsh comments on A VC: Single User Utility In A Social System