Posts from August 2007

Thanks to everyone who weighed in with the suggestions on how to fix my OS X login issue.

I learned a lot about OS X today and had some fun hacking around in single user mode.

But after I tried all that, and nothing worked, I figured the only way out of the mess was a reinstall which I am in the midst of.

Andrew asked why I posted this question on my blog instead of a forum designed for this kind of question. Well first, I figured there were a lot of readers who knew the answer. And I was right. There are some super smart people who read this blog. And second, by posting on my blog, I was able to post a couple screen shots of the problem that made it easier for me to articulate the issue.

I got out to our beach house last night and needed to do some work on the network. So I turned off all the computers in the house. When I turned on the Mac Mini this morning, I saw this screen.

Now that’s very odd because no users were ever set up on this computer. We’ve never had to log into it before. And of course, I don’t know the name and password since none were ever set up.

So I did some googling and found out that if I reboot the computer with the install disk I get an option to reset the password. That sounded like just what I need.

When I did the reboot with the install disk, I found my way to this screen (this screen shot is from the Apple support page). The only problem is there are no users to select from which of course makes sense because no users were ever set up on this Mac Mini.

At this point, I’d happily set up a new user and login with that user name and password but I can’t figure out how to get into OSX and System Preferences to do that.

So I am stumped. I don’t really want to reinstall OSX on this machine and anyway, I’ve got a newer version of OSX running on the Mac Mini than the one that I’ve got an install disk for.

Does anyone have any good ideas for me? I am all ears.

UPDATE:

Here is a photo of the "reset password" screen I am seeing on my Mac Mini. There’s no system admin (root) user for some reason.

I’ve got a couple teenagers and a pre-teen at home. Being a teenager sucks. Being the parent of a teenager equally sucks. But this post is not about all that. I don’t feel like I can add much more on the subject of parenting teenagers.

Startup companies are like kids to me. We have a bunch of them in our portfolio. And I love them all equally even though some are straight A students who never get in trouble and some are the underachievers who you know could do so much more if they just tried a little harder.

Startups come out of the womb with the same bright shiny hopeful optimism as kids do. They develop quickly, learn, to walk, to talk, get bigger, turn into real people and then they hit their ugly adolescent period. They start to doubt themselves, they get zits, they get distracted with other things, and they start hating you and you start hating them. Even though you still love them.

Jason heard a pop yesterday. But it was a zit popping not a bubble popping.

It’s true that we’ve got some problems on wall street. In fact, we’ve got some problems in our economy here in the US that go beyond the subprime mess. We’ve been running huge fiscal budget deficits and trade deficits here in the US for years. Clinton fixed the fiscal situation briefly but Bush brought us right back to spending more than we take in. The dollar is not wanted. There are many other places global investors can put their money these days. And they do.

But those problems are not what’s wrong with web 2.0 companies. I disagree with Jason that the problems on wall street are going to impact Internet ad spend and VC funding. We are in the midst of a massive move of ad dollars from non-measurable media to measurable media. Ad growth may slow down or stop but the move away from traditional media to new media won’t slow. And VCs have raised so much money that they are not going to stop investing anytime soon.

What we are seeing in web 2.0 are growing pains. Most of these web 2.0 companies were started in ’04, ’05, and ’06 and they’ve now grown into companies with lots of employees, lots of invested capital, and lots of promise. And it’s time to start showing something for all that investment and promise. Some will do that easily. They are the straight A students who succeed effortlessly. Others will struggle. They are the kids that need help and attention and love. And some will just fold the tent and go home. Thankfully I don’t have a kids analogy for that kind of company.

Yesterday we saw Dave Sifry step down as CEO of Technorati. Technorati has been around a long time. They’ve had a lot of promise. I sill use the service every day. But it’s clear that Technorati is one of those kids who drive you crazy. Why isn’t the service more reliable? Why is it harder to use after the recent revisions? Why do I wish someone would build a better mousetrap? Dave and the rest of the Technorati board is probably doing the right thing in looking for a new leader. That’s the most common prescription for ugly adolescence.

But I don’t think throwing out the founder and bringing in a new leader to run the business is a cure for ugly adolescence. I think you just have to go through this stage regardless of who is running the business. You have face the doubts, you have to admit that some of the things you’ve done were wrong, you often have to cut back the ambition and focus on the little things that are working. That takes leadership. If the founder and the team around him/her can provide that leadership, that’s best. If it takes someone new, then you better be sure you found the right person. Because the one thing that will turn ugly adolescence into something much worse is a new leader who is a bust.

Jason’s probably right that the rest of this year won’t be a lot of fun in web 2.0 land. Next year might bring more of the same growing pains. There will be a shakeout. Bad companies based on bad ideas will shut down. Some already have. But I think this phase of technology revolution that we call web 2.0 is going to grow into a wonderful adulthood. I am banking on it.

One of the most popular Wallstrip episodes so far is the Blackberry shootout where I lost to Bijan in the finals.

If you haven’t seen it, I’ll embed the original shootout episode at the end of this post.

But now we have the news that you can only text half as fast on the iPhone as a Blackberry or other "qwerty" keyboard phone.

So now that Bijan is a convert to the iPhone, I challenge him to a rematch. He uses the iPhone, I use the Blackberry. Wallstrip can have first crack at filming it.

You in Bijan?

Dave Winer celebrates Facebook opening up a bit more.

Me too.

As Dave said, I believe that there is no viable "winner takes all" strategy on the web. The web is the winner that takes all. Anyone trying to get all the users on a single platform forgets that they already are.

So while I am thrilled that I can now get my Facebook status message into Twitter and subscribe to my friend’s Facebook posts in Google Reader, that’s not enough for my taste.

I want to use Twitter to update my Facebook status. I don’t update my Facebook status. I twitter it to my blog, my friends phones, and countless other places on the web. I hope that Facebook will be another of those places soon.

Jackson, who is the most frequent commenter here at avc, doesn’t like the new comment system and feels that as the most frequent user of it, his opinions should matter. They do.

He doesn’t like the fact that he’s not remembered from past commenting and he hates the fields where you enter name, email, and web address.

His words to me were direct. Fix it or dump it.

My preference would be to fix it. I like that the comment system is divorced from the blogging system. I like the idea that web services are combinations of various services, not one monolithic service. I like that I’ll soon be able to link to the comments on each post from my feed, and I like that you can reply to a comment and see that discussion as threaded. And most of all, I like that Disqus handles the comment spam for me.

So in an effort to improve instead of remove, I am soliciting feedback. It’s been a week since I cut over. I sense fewer comments coming in, although that could be the summer doldrums or a bunch of posts that don’t inspire comments. Regardless, I want more comments not less. So tell me what you don’t like. I’ll point the team at Disqus at your comments and ask them to incorporate the feedback into their product roadmap.

Given that they built the entire thing in 10 weeks, I am certainly willing to give them another couple months to get it working the way you all want it. That may be longer than Jackson is willing to wait so I’ll make sure his two beefs are at the top of the list. As they should be. He has earned it with his words and so have all of you who weigh in on the discussion and make this a community instead of a publication.

I was walking home from work last night around 9pm needing to get something to eat and had a hankering for a fish taco and a beer. So I pulled up Yelp on my phone and looked for fish tacos in the west village. Mary’s Fish Camp came up first and I like Mary’s so I headed there. It turns out that Mary’s doesn’t serve fish tacos but I had a great shrimp taco (and an Anchor Steam) and so that story ends well.

Mary’s was at the top of the list on Yelp because it was well reviewed by 65 people, way ahead of all the other fish taco places in the west village including the places that actually do serve fish tacos.

The Gotham Gal always laughs at me when I take these Yelp reviews seriously. Same with the reviews on Menupages. She points out, rightly, that I have no idea who these reviewers are, what they value, where they like to eat, and if they know good food from bad.

And in fact I ignored a bunch of the reviews I saw on my blackberry walking through the village last night. Let’s take this one:

Cute and enduring? ehhh. Nice and fast staff? Yes. Grossly overpriced
even for west vil? YES! $28 for a lobster roll (just so-so) and $10 for
a plain ol normal sized hot fudge sundae?? these should not be the
prices of a tiny lil neighborhood joint. There are better places for
fish. Although Pearl’s aint all that great either.

This person is price sensitive and rightly so. $28 for a lobster roll is a lot of money. Same with $10 for an ice cream sundae. But if its the best lobster roll and the best ice cream sundae in the world some would be happy to pay that price. Different strokes for different folks.

Which leads me to the point of this post. We need "Taste Neighbors" to filter the user generated reviews that are piling up all over the Internet. It’s nice and all to have ratings for reviewers like Amazon pioneered and everyone copied. But just because most people think that someone’s a good reviewer doesn’t mean their taste matches mine.

This problem has largely been solved in music. Because its relatively simple to watch what music I listen to and what music millions of others listen to, there are many services now that use musical neighbors to drive recommendations. My personal favorite of these services is last.fm and this is a list of my musical neighbors.

I was going to say that I don’t know any of these people, but that’s not true. I know Dave Hyndman and Peter Hershberg. Very cool. So it’s possible that your neighbors in online profile land can be people you know, but most of the time they aren’t. They are people like this 20 year woman from NYC who I’ll probably never meet in person but who enjoys pretty much exactly the same music I do.

How do we apply this technology to user generated ratings and reviews? It’s not so easy to figure out who likes the same movies, restaurants, and books as I do. The consumption of these things is done offline (for the most part anyway) and its not as easily captured as music.

I think the first step is to perfect sentiment analysis so we can automatically determine the sentiment of any review. I like what Summize is doing in this area, today it’s largely for Amazon reviews but hopefully they can extend it to the rest of the web. Once we know the sentiment of every review we can start to match reviewer and the sentiment of their reviews to build online profiles of people who fill out user generated ratings and reviews. We can use cookies to identify who they are but it would be better if we had some kind of universal registration system, maybe built on Open ID, to better identify and track who is leaving what reviews.

Once we have profiles of reviewers/raters, we can start to match them up with others, to create taste neighbors. But what about the people who don’t review and rate? It’s generally true that only about 10% of all consumers of user generated content actually contribute to user generated content. So we need some way to tell you who your taste neighbors are if you don’t rate and review. Thumbs up/thumbs down style rating of reviews would help. If the 90% that don’t rate and review would simply vote on the reviews we could determine taste neighbors for them that way.

But I am more optimistic about watching what they actually do. As my former partner Bliss used to say, "watch what they do, not what they say". With online finance services like Wesabe (one of our portfolio companies), you can easily build a database of every restaurant you eat at, every movie you go out and see, every book you buy from Amazon, etc.

If I contributed that data (with the financial data stripped out) via the Wesabe API to a "Taste Neighbors" service, it would be simple to profile me based on my actual behavior. You’d know, for example, that for sushi I prefer Blue Ribbon and Yasuda, for burgers its Shake Shack and the Burger Joint, for Italian, Babbo, Lupa, and Esca.

People who share those restaurant preferences with me are going to generate much more reliable reviews and ratings for restaurants than the person who panned Mary’s Fish Camp. When I look at her profile in Yelp, I see that she also panned Stantion Social, a place I like very much. So we are not Taste Neighbors. And that’s fine. But we need a system to figure that out in advance. Otherwise the Gotham Gal is going to keep laughing at me for reading these reviews. And that’s gotta stop.

I was meeting with someone who reads this blog on a regular basis. Someone I have great respect for who is an important person in the world of Internet business. And he said to me, "why don’t you write a book?"

I hear that a lot. The Gotham Gal asks me that question too.

I am writing a book. It’s called avc.blogs.com. I write a chapter a day and it is available for free for anyone who wants to read it. It has a beginning and I suspect it will have an ending as long as I can still type on my deathbed.

I don’t mean to diss the art of writing a book. I realize that it’s a different thing than blogging. I have friends who write books like Steven, Kurt, and Seth to name a few. I have no idea how they do it. I can’t focus on a single story for more than about an hour.

I wasn’t born to write a book in the traditional sense. I, for some reason, was born to tell my story bit by bit, day after day, year after year.

And so that’s what I am doing.

A Y Combinator is a mathematical trick that provides a way to do recursions without the need to define symbols and therefore is a way of performing recursions with anonymous functions. I learned that from Paul Graham last Thursday at Y Combinator‘s Demo Day.

For those of you who don’t know, Y Combinator is one part incubator, one part angel fund, one part classroom, and one part alumni group. It all flows from the genius of Paul Graham who selects young teams of hackers, helps them with rent and food money in return for a small amount of equity, and inspires them to go from idea to a launched product in 10 weeks. The end of the 10 week period is Demo Day, a rapid paced show and tell.

This current crop of startups numbers 19 in total and it took about three hours to get through all of them when you include the breaks for food, drink, and rest rooms.

I love going to YC’s demo day. It’s more fun than anything else like it. I think its the young hackers who are laying it all on the line that make it so much fun. And please don’t take this to mean that I don’t enjoy seeing older hackers at work. I like that a lot too. But the youthful enthusiasm on display at demo day is such an optimistic vibe and you can’t help but enjoy that.

Here’s a post by Don Dodge with his thoughts on the day and a photo of him and me during the event. And here’s two twickrs that I did during the event.

There are five or six really promising companies that are coming out of this batch of startups. I am not going to name any of them as I think it would do a dis-service to all the others. And they are heading out to Silicon Valley later this week to do it all again for the west coast VCs.

So I’ll just say congratulations to Paul and Jessica for such a strong group of companies, to all the companies for getting launched in 10 weeks and doing great at demo day, and I’ll say to the west coast VCs that they should carve out some time on their calendars for the west coast stop on the Y Combinator tour. It’s a blast and there are some gems to mine as well.