Ho John Lee’s Weblog

Would you rather be “right” or be successful?

Changing your mind about an investment - intellectual, emotional, or financial - is difficult.

Munjal Shah, founder and CEO of photo search company Riya, has been writing a series of posts narrating his experience over the past few months getting his startup off the ground. Highly recommended reading for entrepreneurs and others with an interest in startups, online web services and software applications.

In startups and other forms of investing, it’s common to have a vision or thesis guiding your decisions. Technology companies, and especially technology startups, tend to be big on vision, which can be helpful in achieving internal alignment and for building external awareness among potential customers and partners. It can give everyone a common sense of purpose or mission, and can sometimes take on a religious or political tone (i.e. Apple fanatics, the first Internet Boom, George Gilder’s Telecosm, or lately “Web 2.0″).

There’s an interesting new report out today from the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point (the US Military Academy), titled “Harmony and Disharmony: Exploting Al-Qa’ida’s Organizational Vunerabilities“, which has some useful insights for entrepreneurs and corporate managers as well as for those dealing with global jihadist movements or with a general interest in global security issues.

The report is based on a collection of captured documents which have been recently declassified, and examines some of the strengths and weaknesses of the Al-Qa’ida organizational structure. The merits of a 21st-century, networked, mobile, internet-enabled insurgency have been observed elsewhere at length, as summarized by James Na at Korea Liberator:

Various versions of these observations on project management have been kicking around for a long time, probably for as long as there have been large scale projects. I wouldn’t be surprised if they eventually found something like this painted on a cave wall or inside one of the Pyramids at some point.

This one is from Troy Angrignon’s blog. The illustration style reminds me of Gary Larson’s Far Side cartoons.

How the customer explained it
How the project leader understood it
How the analyst designed it
How the programmer wrote it
How the business consultant described it
How the project was documented
What operations installed
How the customer was billed
How it was supported
What the customer really needed

An excellent and depressing post at Idle Words about the US Space Shuttle and how we got here. (via Anil Dash)

Future archaeologists trying to understand what the Shuttle was for are going to have a mess on their hands. Why was such a powerful rocket used only to reach very low orbits, where air resistance and debris would limit the useful lifetime of a satellite to a few years? Why was there both a big cargo bay and a big crew compartment? What kind of missions would require people to assist in deploying a large payload? Why was the Shuttle intentionally crippled so that it could not land on autopilot? 1 Why go through all the trouble to give the Shuttle large wings if it has no jet engines and the glide characteristics of a brick? Why build such complex, adjustable main engines and then rely on the equivalent of two giant firecrackers to provide most of the takeoff thrust? Why use a glass thermal protection system, rather than a low-tech ablative shield? And having chosen such a fragile method of heat protection, why on earth mount the orbiter on the side of the rocket, where things will fall on it during launch?

Point and counterpoint around Mark Fletcher’s (CEO of Bloglines) post last week, “Stealth Startups Suck“.

Here’s a sample of Mark’s post:

Why go fast? Many reasons:

First mover advantage is important.

There is no such thing as a unique idea. I guarantee that someone else has already thought of your wonderful web service, and is probably way ahead of you. Get over yourself.

It forces you to focus on the key functionality of the site.

Being perfect at launch is an impossible (and unnecessary and even probably detrimental) goal, so don’t bother trying to achieve it. Ship early, ship often.

The sooner you get something out there, the sooner you’ll start getting feedback from users.

…
Some people think that they need to stay in stealth mode as long as possible to protect their exciting new idea. I hate to break the news to you, but unless you’re Einstein or Gallileo, your idea probably isn’t new. I have this theory. The success of a web service is inversely proportional to the secrecy that surrounded its development. There are exceptions of course. But I also think this can be applied to other things. Segway, anyone?

Lot of interesting posts and presentations coming from last week’s Reboot7 conference in Copenhagen. The attendees are predominantly involved with new internet applications such as blogging, tagging, peer-to-peer, voice over IP, social software, and collaborative development, all of which are new, fluid, evolving, and somewhat incompatible with existing business and social models. Progress in new and evolving fields can sometimes get bogged down in “Vision” or “Strategy”, so I’m happy to see this observation about the need and value of small steps from Johnnie Moore:

A theme that seemed to run through Reboot7 was the advocacy of taking small steps over theorising. David Heinemeier Hansson, who built web application Ruby on Rails, stressed the advantage of getting something basic up and running fast. In a presentation on The Skype Brand, Malthe Sigurdsson talked about getting out frequent, small revisions.

Along similar lines, Scoble writes: