TDDPirate’s Ideas

Paul Graham, in his How to Be Silicon Valley essay (also discussed in Slashdot), mentions that a Silicon Valley requires that two types of people - nerds and rich people - live in the same city.

I noticed lack of mention of the Israeli experience in the discussions following the essay. The Israeli experience appears to confirm Graham’s thesis. The relevant areas in Israel (Jerusalem, Gush Dan and Haifa) are separated from each other by at most 1-2 hour long driving. They have several academic institutions, which have strong computer science and biotech departments (Weizmann Institute of Science, Technion, Hebrew University, Tel Aviv University, and more). There is another factor - military service in Hi Tech units of the army, which allows teams of people, who trust each other, to form. After end of their army service, those teams go on and build startups.

Israelis are also born entrepreneurs and risk takers. People who “made it” support new startups, like in the Silicon Valley.

Several years ago, this was not the situation in Israel. But several Israelis left for the Silicon Valley, and some of them were successful there. Some of the successful ones brought back to Israel their experience. Some culture was transferred also by Silicon Valley companies, which opened R&D centers in Israel (for example, Intel). Over time, attitudes and policies were adjusted to make the Israeli version of Silicon Valley possible.

Another country, which was successful in attracting High Technology, is Ireland. It was not discussed either, and I do not know how much cultural adaptation they made to the demands of Hi Tech startups.

Few weeks ago I was informed about few software development openings in a startup. I figured that it may be good idea to work for a while for a startup, to peer with strong software developers, to pick up again the last word in the practice of managing software development projects, after few years of having been alone at top of the software development part of another organization.

I contacted the source of the information about the openings. Few questions and answers were exchanged by E-mail.
Then a week elapsed without further progress.
I E-mailed him again, asking what is the status, if they already found people to fill the openings.
He apologized for not having the time to forward my information to the appropriate manager. After I sent him link to my resume, he promptly forwarded it to the manager. During the next few days, I and the manager grilled each other by E-mail.

After having been satisfied with the answers, we set up a date for face to face interview.

One day before the interview, he asked to postpone it by one and half weeks because he has to fly abroad for a week, few hours after the scheduled interview time.

Here I had strong smell of a fiddle, because there was already one-week delay.
I pointed out the delays.
The bottom line is that no interview is currently planned.

I am not sure I made the right decision.

On one hand, their Web site has the look of a small organization, which is too hectic and busy to ensure that the Web site is up-to-date and all external links are working.
They are also at a very busy and disruptive stage of operations - development, capital raising, expanding.
Especially capital raising could lead to unpredictable changes in managers’ scheduling.
I am used to few days’ time constants in hiring decisions (time from initial contact until decision after interviews), and I do not how many startups are comfortable with longer time constants.

On the other hand, interviewing and recruiting is high priority in a busy and expanding startup. The delays were before interview, not between interview and making offer (which could be delayed due to delay in funding or to interviewing more people to round out the team).
I also have my own circumstances (deafness and older age), which may make me less desirable as an addition to a team in a startup, yet managers may prefer to remain politically correct and fiddle away the opportunity to have me in the team.

Technology Predictor Success Matrix - the reason why you are going to stay up awake all night and be glued to the WWW.
Technology Predictor Success Matrix
What · Technology · Prediction

Bounty County - Coding bounties for free and open-source software projects
What can I say, an idea whose time has come.

This evening I found myself with some free time on my hands while in Dizengoff Center.
So I wandered around its less traveled corridors.
Turns out that top floors of the Dizengoff Center have corridors, which qualify to be high-class bohemian areas. The top floors have all sorts of strange shops. Occult, cabala, gifts, scents, tattoos, piercing, you name it. Those shops look well-maintained, clean, high class. Unlike your usual bohemian quarters.
Do not bother to look for those shops at the bottom floors. The bottom floors have more conventional mix of shops - clothes, restaurants and cafes, electrical appliances, bookshops and other conventional stuff.

The big surprise is why Dizengoff Center is not more famous for its collection of strange shops in far away corridors.

Microsoft’s Midlife Crisis
The root problem is that MBAs are taught to grow their businesses.
Shareholders expect their shares to appreciate in value.
Therefore, the top management of every company is compelled to hold to double-digit growth rate even though the company will be greater than the entire Earth in 10 more years.
Everyone is ignoring the reality of the S-curve. If your company already has 50% of the market, it cannot double its share of this market.

One solution is to diversify to other markets. Eventually all markets, which the company can efficiently serve, are saturated. The company then wastes capital on entry into other markets, which it is not competent to serve. The company also gets too big to manage itself efficiently, especially as it is not focused on performing well and efficiently those tasks, which it knows to perform well.

I would like to suggest another direction for advancement for oversized companies. Work on the value added per employee/subcontractor index. Let go of part of the capital, if you do not know how to invest it wisely. Sell off operations, which you do not excel in managing. Streamline and optimize your core operations. Become part of a network of independent companies, which may sometimes collaborate on large projects. Hire new employees only if their contribution raises the value added per employee/subcontractor.

When letting go of capital, disburse it as dividends to your shareholders (in fact, Microsoft paid huge dividend to its shareholders in the last year). In effect, this throws back to them the responsibility to wisely invest their capital investments, as your managers are not better than your shareholders in this task anymore.

Does anyone know what happened to Philips Semiconductors, which used to operate in Herzliya, Israel, and which represented the international Philips Semiconductors in Israel?

I looked for information on Philips’ Bluetooth chips and development kits. Philips’ Web site directed me to the aforementioned company, listing phone and FAX numbers for them (no E-mail). The FAX number did not work. Today the relay service (operated by Cellcom as a public service project for the deaf in Israel) informed me that the phone number connects you to a recorded reply saying that the number was disconnected.

Philips’ Web site provides a Web form for E-mailing them messages and requests for information, and I used it. The automated response arrived quickly, but it was only an acknowledgement. For human response I am still waiting.

It is amazing that an international company’s rep goes out of business and the company in question did not modify promptly its Web site.

Review of “Business Under Fire” by Dan Carrison, published by AMACOM. ISBN 0-8144-0839-7

When I attended August Penguin 4 (last Thursday, Aug. 4 2005), ComBooks had a booth, in which they offered books for sale. Most of the books were about Linux, PHP and other technologies. However, they had also some business oriented books.

I figured that most of the technical books are either too fat, prone to be obsolete soon, have downloadable equivalents, or already owned by me. So I went for the business book “Business under fire”.

Today I finished reading it, and here is my review.

The book is about the ways Israeli businesses coped with problems caused by the Al-Aqsa intifada, and what can businesspeople from elsewhere learn from the Israeli experience. The best thing I can say about it is that it is effective in filling Israeli readers with pride of their countrymen. The years after 2000 were bad for the Israeli economy. But, according to the book, the Israeli economy did very well considering the circumstances, having contracted only by few percents, rather than having dropped by tens of percents like, say, the Palestinian Authority economy during the same time.

Most of the book consists of interviews with business managers and leaders, large percentage of whom are hotel managers. The interviews are preceded and followed by discussions and checklists of conclusions. Overall, the impressions and conclusions look reasonable, if a bit superficial. However, I found some factual errors in the book. The city name is Tiberias, not Tiberius (pg. 27). The Dolphinarium bombing happened at June 2001, not June 2002 (pg. 142). Israel was hit by exactly 39 Scud missiles, not 40 (pg. 138, 176).

Notably missing were details about the counter-examples, of Israeli businesses, which were not as well managed, and failed during the Al-Aqsa intifada. It was mentioned that the Hyatt chain pulled out of Jerusalem (pg. 29) but there were no further details about the facts and opinions, which led to this decision, except for the murder of Rahvam Zeevi (not mentioned by name), the then Minister of Tourism, in the Hyatt hotel in Jerusalem.

Missing were also figures and statistics about the business climate in Israel. How much did the Israeli GDP drop as function of time? How large hit, as function of time, in tourist traffic and expenditures did the Israeli tourist industry have to incur? Overall effect on Israeli imports and exports? How much were other sectors, besides tourism and Hi-Tech, affected by the Al-Aqsa intifada? What was the impact of having to fly Israeli managers for meetings in New York on administrative and general expenses of running Israeli businesses with customers and investors outside of Israel? What was the impact on investments in non-Hi-Tech, non-tourist sectors of the economy?

My recommendation: buy the book if you are Israeli and need encouragement. Otherwise, wait for a second and revised edition.

According to Paul Graham’s What Business Can Learn from Open Source, people are more productive when they work at their own hours in their homes. He uses the examples of software startups versus established software companies.

This leads me to wonder how should businesses, which have a lot of capital invested in equipment, manage the work hours of their employees. The employees have to be in contact with the machines at scheduled times, if the machines are to be operated efficiently and economically. Examples: Intel’s semiconductor FABs with their process developing and monitoring physicists and chemists, airline companies and their pilots and airplane maintenance technicians, car assembly plants.

Maybe it is a significant fact that those businesses, which have expensive equipment, do not lock into uniform office cubicles those employees, who deal with the equipment on daily basis. Sailors on a ship sometimes need to be available 24 hours a day to handle emergencies. They work under different weather conditions. They have shore leaves. Shop workers need to be in the shop during its work hours, because it is when the customers come in. However they do not sit in offices or waste time in meetings. They stand and serve customers, reorder the inventory, or whatever. The “expensive equipment” in their case is the shop’s inventory and fixtures which entice customers to leave their money in the shop.

So it seems that it is only those businesses, which do not need to provide their employees with expensive capital equipment, do lock their employees into a 09:00-17:00 day in boring offices and lots of meetings. It is precisely those companies, for which Graham’s conclusions seem to be true. The work done for those companies could be done from employee’s home at his own hours - the inexpensive equipment (such as a PC with one or two specialized peripherals) could be installed at his home. The profession is not necessarily software development. It could as well be a telemarketing operation (heaven forbid).

The Manager FAQ