Interesting co-incidence. Just last week, I sent out an email to my friends, saying that I want to teach mathematics to their kids by a math-by-email service, kinda like the chess-by-email of the old days.
The idea is quite simple: I will send out a daily email with a grade appropriate set of math questions and/or games. Your child provides the answers back by email. I check the answers, provide corrections/feedback. And the next day's worksheet is customized to the child's history. If there is an interest, I could follow the child all the way from pre-K to graduate level Math subjects. Think about that -- wouldn't it be awesome if when you are getting your PhD, you could look back over 20 years of daily problems you solved and how you progressed in your conceptual understanding?
Naturally, you want to balance the gaming aspect with the rigorous aspects. You can start learning Graph Theory with diagram filling, but as you get more serious, there is no substitute to solving several hard problems to get a deeper/intuitive understanding of the concepts. There is no question that people learn different ways, some visually, others through games, and others through mental modeling. I am convinced that if we could tailor math teaching to each kid, we could get rid of the stigma that "Math is hard", or, worse, "Girls can't do Math".
Math, as I say, is a contact sport, not a spectator sport. You have to grab a pencil and a piece of paper to work on 20-30-40 harder and harder problems to master each concept. But to learn new concepts, you also have to cross the significant hurdle of climbing the first few rungs of each concept, so to speak. So let's learn by balancing games and theory.
This analysis is an opinion without proper analysis. There could be many other structural reasons. For instance, my gut says that the poverty is increasing even though the growth is good because the balance of trade for the USA has worsened significantly ever since the global trade took off [1] right around 1975, just at the beginning of the "decline" that this article talks about. So if someone in China is willing to do your job for $2/day, your wages are going to go down even as the investors benefit from increases in profits of the businesses manufacturing more in China. I wish the author had done at least a tiny bit of analysis, rather than spouting opinions based on inanities like "the tide lifts all boats". In this case, the boats of the poor are slowly sinking to the level of global wages for any given job.
I want to bring in a funny point here. Am I the only one who thinks iPad Air screen is too small (not talking about the quality of the screen, which is excellent, no doubt) for reading documents? I have tried it out in Apple Store; it seems like a toy screen to me. This is the single reason that I have not bought an iPad.
I consume passively for about half of my time and produce actively (run programs on a server via Terminal) the other half. So, if I had to read a document, I think Surface 3 is just the right size. Plus the stylus there is very good for annotations. And then I can work in the Terminal using the Keyboard accessory. Also, switch between programs via Alt-Tab, multiple side-by-side windows etc. Install iTunes to bring over my music collection.
So I am very very tempted to move from my 13" MacBook Air to Surface 3. Price is not really a consideration for me. So, what am I missing?
This short interview is quite inspiring. Here is a choice quote:
"I did not bill Intel for consulting hours spent on those aspects of the i8087 design that were transferred to IEEE p754. I had to be sure, not only in appearance and actuality but above all in my own mind, that I was not acting to further the commercial interest of one company over any other. Rather I was acting to benefit a larger community. I must tell you that members of the committee, for the most part, were about equally altruistic. IBM's Dr. Fred Ris was extremely supportive from the outset even though he knew that no IBM equipment in existence at the time had the slightest hope of conforming to the standard we were advocating. It was remarkable that so many hardware people there, knowing how difficult p754 would be, agreed that it should benefit the community at large. If it encouraged the production of floating-point software and eased the development of reliable software, it would help create a larger market for everyone's hardware. This degree of altruism was so astonishing that MATLAB's creator Dr. Cleve Moler used to advise foreign visitors not to miss the country's two most awesome spectacles: the Grand Canyon, and meetings of IEEE p754."
This is good because it solves a problem for small borrowers/lenders in a nice way, just like micro lending does, but this would not work for larger amounts. Over the last 10 years, inflation in the US has ranged from 1.5%-4%. So if you are putting a large amount into a zero interest (or, low interest) Savings account, you are basically losing money.
Unrelated side note: If you have any more than 3-months expenses in your Savings account, take them out and put them in a NASDAQ or S&P index fund with low fund expenses.
No, no such thing for me. I like to be the independent, incorruptible voice. Besides, I would hate dealing with employees. Man's gotta know his limitations. :)
It was very sophisticated analysis. But let me emphasize two things:
- When you start, you are taking a leap into total emptiness. You explore a thousand different avenues, most of them are dead ends. Your day consists of massive amount of mental effort to stay focused, to stay sane, and to make good assumptions. Then you change tack/analyses continuously. You keep adding/deleting datasets. This is not theoretical statistics but sometimes you use arcane things; so you definitely need to be very strong at Stats. My personal dream is that one day, when I have time and money, I will use these methods to come up with a Meta- Statistics approach to empirical analysis -- i.e., to use Analytics to predict, based on the problem definition and available data sets, which methods to use.
- You have to have patient clients. Jumping 10 months into a project with absolutely NO guarantee of success is a huge leap of faith, financially speaking; but the rewards can be huge. One day you are still nowhere, and literally the next day, everything clicks, you check your conclusions once-twice-thrice, make a presentation to the client, and, boom!, your project is over.
There is obvious up trending of terms like 'big data', 'predictive analytics' and 'data mining'. I have worked in this area since 1998. So here are a few thoughts:
- Good analytics (I'll combine the three terms into 'analytics' for the sake of simplicity) requires an understanding of the tools, as well as a significant understanding of statistics so that you know which analysis to pick. But in addition, it requires a lot of creativity (see my examples below) and a significant amount of time to analyze/slice/dice data in a zillion different ways.
- This is a huge opportunity. Much, much bigger than people realize and much bigger than past trends of new technologies like client-server in early nineties or web apps of 4-5 years back. Why? Because it has the power to affect business processes very powerfully.
- Example 1: I spent 10 months working for a $5B shipping company analyzing data from their Marketing department. I combined it with several hundred global data sources. I worked on over 100 hypotheses. At the end of it, I came up three specific actions that their existing customers take about 6 months before going to a competitor. The Marketing department was thrilled. They spent $17 Million coming with a plan to tackle this. It has been a few months since then; and they have not lost a single customer. This is a powerful proprietary competitive weapon for them now.
- Example 2: I analyzed 10 years of power meter reading data for a large utility company. I combined it publicly available data sources of power consumption of major appliances and census data on family composition/wealth for various neighborhoods. I was able to reliably predict the lifestyle of every family, down to whether the person living in the house streamed a movie on Friday evenings and a whole lot more. So the company decided to use this analysis to change their Direct Mailers with very specific, personalized offerings. Their response to the first test mailer sent to 10,000 people? Twenty seven percent!!! They predict that a significant portion of their profits would come from DM's.
Setting up an email server is a non-trivial task. I am in a rush right now so I can write a more detailed response. But I hope others will chime in and provide some links to support my argument.
Curiously, this topic comes up every few days and we don't seem to have made any progress towards a good self-hosted email solution in the last 10-15 years. This is a start-up idea waiting to be implemented well; and for substantial profit, I might add.
Let me answer the question you asked, and, then the question that you did not ask.
The fastest and dependably assured way to make a million dollars to build a product/service that is profitable and sell it. If you can project annual profits of more than $100K, you can sell it for a million dollars. Want concrete examples:
- There is this guy who provides "Text Messaging" service to his B2B customers. So, he will go to your local gas station, ask them to sign up their customers' telephone numbers, then sends texts to their signed up customers with their coupon special on non-busy times like "20% off on oil change on wednesday before lunch". These coupons get pretty good response. If you use Twilio, it costs $1 to send 100 coupons. So he charges them $30/Month to send out 4 texts to 100 customers. Net profit: $26/month per customer. Spend this year, and, go around within your 30 mile radius, sign up a bunch of businesses and get rich.
- This guy built a profitable business in a very unsexy category: maidsinblack.com. He writes about it on Reddit sometimes. Check it out.
- A guy places, seriously, mylar balloons at flower shops, hospital shops, etc. And takes a cut of the sales. Makes $60K a year.
Ok. So now the question that you did not ask: to college or not to college.
I know there is an opinion floating around that in this age of easily accessible self learning, you can skip college. Here is the thing though: to be a successful business owner/manager, you have to make a lot of decisions. And that means a lot of analysis, data etc. Intuition/gut-check helps; but analysis is the foundation that can not be taken away. So working backwards from this, to do/understand analysis, you have to be pretty good at unsexy things like Math, Logical Reasoning, Model Building. Now, you can learn all that on your own. But will you have the self-discipline to do it on your own -- or will the structure/rigor of a college (even evening courses at a community college) be a better way?
Sometimes when you look around, you think people like Bezos just sit in meetings and make decisions while someone else does the analysis and presents them with alternatives. That could not be further from the truth; to make good decisions, 1-2 big ones and 10-20 small ones every day, you have to be able to quickly understand the "insides" of an analysis -- and for that you can not avoid at least the foundations of an numbers based education. And, don't forget, there was a time not too long ago (1995?) when Bezos went around looking for money for his start-up; he did all that analysis/projections all by himself. It doesn't hurt your persuasion skills if you are good with numbers and can counter with numbers when they have objections.
I did not say that they have 20 sales people for VIP. I said they could hire 20. I also did not say how many customers they have for VIP. I was doing a what-if analysis of sales expenses.
What is your analysis? Are they worth $1B? If so, why?
I think it is not clear from the article why Mullenweg (CEO) suddenly thinks they are capital constrained. Let's do some back-of-the-envelope numbers.
Their Enterprise VIP service (managed hosting basically) is useful, no doubt. And @ $5-10K a month, it is chump change for enterprises. But how many massive blog clients like New York Post, NYT, or CNN, would you need to make back $160 million. If you had 100 such clients, you would be grossing $10-20MM, and, probably netting $2-4MM profit. You would need a lot of clients to make back that $160MM but it does not matter.
Let us say you hire a sales team of 20 to do full time enterprise sales. That's $5MM investment per year. Let's say they bring in 50 new enterprise customer every year. That's $5MM/year recurring revenue. So the money spent on Enterprise sales is well invested.
But you can't spend $160MM on marketing/infrastructure for managed hosting.
Did they just take advantage of frothiness in the market? I wouldn't blame them; I mean if investors want to give them the money, then great.
Make no mistake. Wordpress is a useful platform. They could a lot to keep improving blogging for a long time. And there is lot of value in being the CMS host for enterprises. But $1.16 billion?
Can they IPO at this valuation? I think they can; money goes from small investors pockets to big investors pockets in the unending cycle.
I think that's what this is about; this will unfold over the next 2-3 years, as the new investors want their returns.
