Posts related to blogging
You won’t see a lot of posts from me this week. My wife Carolyn & I are expecting our second son, and induction is scheduled for tomorrow. As a result, I’m expecting the next week to be a blur.
As with our first son, I will likely have a Baby blog up so that family & friends can follow the action remotely.
You can look for updates on the Baby Nash website. There will be updates there when we are ready.
I’m finding the trend of venture backing for blog networks really fascinating. Looks like Sequoia has jumped in with $5M for PopSugar out of San Francisco.
Techcrunch has some coverage here.
I’m guessing that the venture backing is a bet that this is a disruptive way to build a new media outfit with a fundamentally lower cost structure, but with all the revenue upside. Media has always been profitable – witness the longevity and economics of newspapers – so this theory isn’t completely outlandish.
VentureBeat has coverage here. Interesting deal for Mike Moritz.
I got forwarded this saga last week from my brother, a recent MBA. Unbelievable.
The coverage on Ivy League Blog is the best.
It’s unbelievable how the blogosphere can grant a relatively unknown person an amazing amount of notoriety and fame – all for despicable acts that are collectively researched and aggregated through community effort. It would make sense if Aleksey was a congressman or senator… but this is just a guy who lies about everything.
Then again, maybe in previous decades it is people like Aleksey who would in fact go on to become congressman and senators.
Who knows, but I haven’t seen this much email on an MBA since that banker had his email about partying in the Philippines circulated to 100 million of his closest friends a few years ago.
One of the fun things about having a blog is that you start discovering that many of your friends have blogs. It’s interesting because somehow, before you start blogging, you are relatively unaware of these blogs.
I find that I learn so much from friend’s blogs, even when they are infrequently updated and silly.
Well, today I learned that Seema Shah, a fellow product manager at eBay, has a blog. So much fun to read through these posts!
Seema is one of the rockstar product managers on next-generation search for eBay. She was an invaluable contributor to the initial launch of eBay Express, and more importantly, a person who really champions innovation and actively blends customer insight with technical insight.
You might not get this all from reading her blog, however, which is why I’m calling it out here…
Now that I’m entering my fourth week maintaining this blog, I’ve decided to come back to the subject of why I really believe that these three topics are intertwined. These three topics are the reason that I named this blog Psychohistory, and these three topics seem to completely dominate my education and professional career.
The reason for this belief is crystalizing, and it’s remarkably simple:
I truly believe that incredible opportunity lies at the intersection of the irrational (human emotion) with the rational (finance, technology, business).
Behavioral Finance offers us the opportunity to design financial systems based on the basic insight that the way that human beings relate to money involves far more emotion than intellect. To understand economics, you must understand your very human economic actor.
Product Design is based on the premise that deeply understanding the ways that people interact with technology can lead to profoundly more useful (and desirable) designs and products. To understand product design, you must understand your very human customer.
Entrepreneurship offers us the opportunity to build companies by figuring out how to replicate the economic miracle of creating billions of dollars in new value by unlocking the very human emotions of inspiration, motivation, cooperation, and self-determination. To understand entrepreneurship, you must understand your very human entrepreneur.
Like all good elevator pitches, I probably need to reduce this in complexity by an order of magnitude before I’ll be happy with it. But I’m excited about this insight, and more importantly, I’m already seeing incredible leverage from it in my industry, where everyone is talking about the intersection of technology, commerce, and community.
I actually got a chance this evening to read the New York Times Business section in careful detail, and I found this gem of a column by Robert H. Frank, economist at the Johnson School at Cornell University:
The More We Make, the Better We Want – New York Times
This is a wonderful piece, because it captures three things that I find equally fascinating in one, elegant piece:
This seems like an incredible economic advantage, and it speaks to the recent incredible growth in the luxury goods market as a secular trend. Economies that continue to generate outsized productivity growth may in fact establish a powerful strategic moat based on their insight into the “next level” of quality in goods & services. That certainly seems to be part of what continues to happen on an ongoing basis in 21st century Silicon Valley.
One of the truly great aspects of economics is being able to read decades and centuries of theory – some of it incredibly insightful, some of it woefully wrong. The reason it is wonderful is because, unlike the hard sciences, economics is fundamentally a study of people – individuals, crowds, and their interactions. As a result, understanding the history of economics and the reasons why very intelligent economists ended up with the wrong predictions is incredibly edifying.
This is an article worth reading, and then letting it digest, and re-visiting again. I also find this line of thinking a portent of an upcoming golden age of economics, as ground-breaking for this area as Max Planck was for particle physics.
As a side note, I also learned that finding an article on the New York Times website is nearly impossible. I did a direct search for this title on Google, Yahoo, and on the NYT site itself, on the homepage and in the business section. No luck. It was only through some very intricate checkboxes and sub-filtering of the NYT search that I was able to find this article – I have the printed copy sitting right next to me!
You have to love the Internet – you can find everything that you didn’t know existed, and you can’t find the one thing you know exists and want.
This is a blog that I bet many of my friends don’t have on their regular reading list.
This blog is one of a growing number of personal blogs where people display an unprecedented amount of openness about the most taboo of all subjects – their money. More specifically, their personal financial situation. These blogs, many times anonymous, provide detailed information about the author’s finances – salary, savings, goals, and ongoing progress.
I found this blog almost a year ago when it was featured briefly in the New York Times. I keep reading it, and commenting, because it’s incredibly useful to learn from the insights and foibles of other real people.
One of the tragedies of personal finance is that it is so hard to talk about. Personal finance is generally not covered in school at any level, and it’s shrouded in mystery and urban legend. Even close friends and family often have trouble talking about money in an honest and open way.
Blogs like My Open Wallet provide a forum where we can start to learn from each other. They allow people to gather and share information that is incredibly specific. Personally, I’m more fascinated by the common mistakes and misunderstandings that I see in these blogs. It reinforces my belief that we, as a society, do not do a good job of educating ourselves with regards to money.
This trend of Personal Finance Blogs is so large, there are even competing Web 2.0 companies, like NetWorthIQ, that provide a sophisticated toolset for people to measure and share their personal finances.
So, check it out. Let me know if you find these blogs as interesting as I do.
Wow.
It’s hard for me to believe that it has been almost two weeks since my last post.
This is a new form of guilt for me – not unlike missing my regular workout at the gym, or not mowing the lawn over the weekend.
My apologies for those waiting for new posts. Over the past two weeks, life has certainly been busy. Ironically, there were so many times this week that I was inspired to write a post or two. Unfortunately, somehow the timing never seemed to work out for sitting down and typing them out.
Well, the drought is over, at least for a little while.
Many thanks, by the way, to my good friend Igor Lotsvin. I’m not sure how you found my blog, but your encouraging comment is the impetus for me taking a few extra minutes tonight to get blogging again.
It is amazing how positive the response has been to the few dozen posts on this new blog. Some of the comments come from friends, some from co-workers, some from strangers. I appreciate each one, and in a way, each one encourages me to not fall off the wagon.
Well, at least to get back on once I fall off.
It has been a little over two weeks since I began this blog, and I thought now might be a good time to reflect a bit on which posts people have liked the most, and what type of posts I should concentrate on going forward.
I have to admit, the first question is really,
“How can you tell what people like?”
Interestingly, I have already found two measures.
The first measure would be based on which posts have drawn the most comments and/or trackback links.
Based on this measure, the favorite posts to date have been:
The second measure I’ve been examining has been page views, with insight added based on which Google search terms people have used to find my posts in the last 7 days.
This is fascinating to me. I can already see the dynamic that many bloggers have discussed, which is that over time, page views keep accumulating to old posts, even as you add new posts daily.
As a special tidbit, here are the top search terms that people have accessed before reaching my blog yesterday:
As a Product Manager for one of the largest websites in the world, I am very used to looking at various forms of site measurement. But there is something very different and very personal about seeing this information about my own blog.
I’m not sure what it is, but it’s almost like seeing my own thoughts from the outside – the way that the rest of the world finds interest in what I’ve written.
Anyway, after just two weeks, here are my initial thoughts on the information provided above:
I continue to be excited about this blogging experiment. I’ll continue to share more insights as I have them about this experience.
Like everything else, it’s very different to talk about doing something versus actually sitting down and doing it.
Here I am, only two weeks into my pledge to post something to my blog every day, and I’m noticing that my posting is not at all consistent.
Some days I miss. Like this weekend, where I was able to spend some wonderful time with Carolyn & Jacob. Only one post in three days.
Other days, like today, I can have two, three, or even more posts to the blog.
I guess some of that is to be expected – it’s hard to find the time to do almost anything on a daily basis if it isn’t your primary profession.
Still, I’m a little more surprised at the days, like today, where it seems like there are far more topics than time to write about them. I guess it makes sense – the news of the world isn’t evenly spaced out or planned. Some days are just more interesting than others I guess.
I’m pretty sure today will have the most posts of any day so far… a funny combination of news from some personal favorites – Apple & eBay, as well as a nice startup announcement from a good friend of mine.
One of the most fun blogs that I read is one that belongs to my friend and colleague, Jason Steinhorn. It’s called, “The Steinhorn Stare”, I’m assuming after his now infamous poker face, captured on television as part of the World Series of Poker.
Here is a great example of why I love reading Jason’s blog:
Now, I will be the first to admit, I am clearly a voyeur of the recent poker boom that has hit Las Vegas, the internet, and about half of the engineers and techies I know. I really appreciate the way that Jason’s posts capture the subtlety and complexity of the game. Poker is a fascinating blend of psychology and math, with a distinct advantage to those who know how to manipulate the perception of their play vs. just knowing the odds.
As a result, Poker lands squarely into my “sweet spot” of fascination – an arena where the ultimately rationale (statistics) intersects with the ultimately irrational (human emotion & perception).
So while I may never be a great poker player, I like living vicariously through Jason and other friends who participate in these events with $10K buy-ins, and who actually win.
True story: Last year, Jason & I were both managers in the same division of eBay Product Management. At our regular Monday managers’ meeting, Jason was nowhere to be found. He was still in Vegas, having won 2nd in the World Series of Poker, and close to a quarter of a million dollars.
That news would be cool enough, but what I liked is that Jason had faxed in the winning check – like a “doctor’s note” to be excused from class that day.
This is Jason’s last week at eBay, and he’ll be sorely missed. But he’s off to a new adventure at another cool company, and I feel extremely fortunate to have been able to learn from him these past two years.
Now, if he would just post more regularly to his blog…
In the spirit of hilighting some of the best blogs that I read and given Google’s product announcement today for “Applications for Your Domain“, I’d like to point you to this humorous press release on Don Dodge’s blog today:
Don Dodge on The Next Big Thing: Google Announces New 24X0 Support Service for Business Users
I find Don’s blog particularly interesting because he:
A worthy addition to anyone’s RSS feed…
Eric Cheng is a good friend of mine from college, and an extremely interesting person. Like me, he did the co-terminal program at Stanford Univerisity in Computer Science (which involves getting BS and MS degrees) with an emphasis in Human-Computer Interaction. Eric is also an accomplished cello player. After school, he worked for a few years at a software company called E.Piphany, which was pretty much your typical late 1990s success story.
After leaving E.Piphany, Eric decided to pursue his interests in digital photography, becoming one of the first to really specialize professionally in digital underwater photography. He now has one of his pictures hanging in the Smithsonian, and travels the world constantly on diving expeditions.
You can find a blog of his travels and insights at his blog:
Eric Cheng’s Journal
He also runs the site WetPixel, which is dedicated to digital underwater photography.
I’m lucky to count Eric as one of my close friends. If you are interested in either diving or photography, it’s worth subscribing to his feeds.
The first question that people ask me about my blog is:
“Why is it called Psychohistory?”
This is, of course, a great question, and I think it ties closely to the first question that I had to ask myself when I decided to start blogging again: “What am I going to blog about?”
I’ve been fortunate enough in my academic and professional careers to have had exposure to a wide variety of subjects and businesses. However, I’ve realized in the past decade that my primary interest has always been the intersection of the rational (technology & economics) with the irrational (people).
As a software engineer, my primary interest was in human-computer interaction and the recognition that technology is useless without significant thought given to how people perceive and interact with it. As my interests shifted to the study of economics, I developed a deep fascination with the study of behavioral finance and the recognition that classic economic models fail to predict activity in many cases because people are often not rational actors.
These insights are fascinating to me because I firmly believe that in fact, there is a method to the madness. People are irrational in many situations, but in many cases predictably so. In my recent professional roles in early stage venture capital and product management, I have been repeatedly astounded with the level of value generated from insights into human behavior with technology and economics.
When I was in junior high school, I voraciously read the works of Isaac Asimov, and to this date I remain a fan of his intellect and insight. In his “Foundation” series, he introduced a fictional science called Psychohistory, which was based on the idea that even though individual humans were not statistically predictable, large groups of humans were. This was a direct analogy to the growing awareness of the impacts and contradictions inherent in quantum mechanics: there is uncertainty when evaluating the velocity and position of a single particle, but yet we can still accurately predict where a large mass of them (a baseball) will go when dropped.
When I think about the topics I will blog about here, I know since it’s a personal blog that there will be a fair share of “books I’ve read” and “baby/puppy/family” posts. But in the end, my guess is that the relatively unique theme to most of what I share here will lie somewhere in the intersection of my passions for technology and economics and my fascination with people and their motivations. This means common topics will likely include:
As a result, I decided that Isaac Asimov’s simplistic vision was probably the best title to capture the essence of my personal blog.
As I mentioned yesterday, I’ll be experimenting with a new post to this blog every day for the next 30 days. We’ll see how close my guesswork here comes to the actual topics I post to this blog.
Thanks for reading.
Adam
BTW I do realize that there is now an actual field of study called psychohistory which is defined as the study of the psychological motivations of historical events. Obviously, I think that this is unfortunate nomenclature, and I’m siding with Asimov on this one.
This is the inaugural post for the personal blog of Adam Nash, tentatively titled “Psychohistory”.
For those of you who know me, you may know that I’ve had three separate blogs in the past six years, but each time they faded due to lack of attention, change in responsibilities (personal and/or professional), and in some cases lack of purpose.
My hope is that this time will be different, largely because I’ve learned a lot over the past few years about what makes a blog successful and rewarding, both for those who read it, and those who write them. I’ve also realized that I have a possibly irrational passion for sharing interesting information and opinions with others, and receiving feedback, information, and opinions in return.
So, for the next 30 days, consider this the trial run for Psychohistory. I’ll be posting at least once a day for the next 30 days, with an evaluation at the end of that time.
Just to be extra clear, this blog is intended to be purely personal, and will not necessarily reflect in any way the opinions or policies of my employer.
My next post will be, of course, an explanation for why I picked the title Psychohistory for this blog.
Psychohistory 