Share Conference - Day 1
Last week I was lucky enough to attend the Share Conference in Belgrade. My friend Elizabeth (@starkness) was speaking and I was in Europe.. so hey! why not :)
I didn’t know what to expect of Belgrade, but I think the verdict was that everyone was pleasantly surprised, murmurs of ‘berlin meets milan’ summed up the vibe (there were definitely a lot of very stylish people hanging around the conference). We did see a couple of rather large political rallies for the current nationalist party, but other than that it was a sunny time in a cool city with a lot of great clubs and restaurants.
The conference swung around internet ideas and activism - which was a nice break from product focussed events like SXSW.
Here goes a summary of my notes, there will be lots of good stuff I have missed, but here goes.
Peter Sunde - Pirate bay / Flattr
The key idea was the importance of retaining the decentralization of the internet. He pointed out that even DNS is centralized more than we think, and basically controlled by the US govt.
He also touched on one of my pet topics which is the centralization of user data. I may be wrong but I think he suggested the idea of people hosting their own data via peer to peer style social networks (Along the lines of what was proposed by Diaspora), would be interested to hear him elaborate more on this front (how granular would things go in terms of personal servers?).
Having met Peter it pains me to know the pressure he is being put under by lawsuits etc attracted by the Pirate Bay. He’s a thoughtful guy with progressive views about content distribution and copyright (also, his uncle has a pet wolf).
Jérémie Zimmerman
A recurrent theme of the conference was the idea that govt is no longer acting for the people - it is in fact acting on behalf of industry lobby against the people - at least in the case of internet legislation.
There has definitely been a slew of bad news in the last year - Internet disconnection provisions for copyright infringers in many countries, SOPA / PIPA in the USA (breaking the core of the internet, creating mechanisms for censorship, all in a doomed attempt to protect copyright), and now a series of legislation to increase the ease with which governments can obtain personal data about people and monitor communications.
Jérémie was very emphatic that this is war, and I agree.
On the surveillance note its time we sent a clear message to the government to get the fuck out.
Its simply not their job to be spying on people. Anti-terrorism rhetoric is massively overinflated, and (as much as I enjoyed The Wire) I don’t really want to give up my civil liberties so the police can more easily catch drug dealers. Lets not get me started on whats wrong with copyright law and the content industry.
We are at a rare moment in history - young switched on people have control of channels that can reach billions of people - the Tumblr / Reddit / Wikipedia blackouts being a prime example.
In my opinion its time for internet activism to reach beyond internet causes and go after bigger issues.
Campaign finance reform would be a good place to start - bringing democracy back to voters and decreasing the influence of money in politics would go to the root of many problems.
Quinn Norton from Wired talked about leaderless networks such as Anonymous and Occupy Wall Street.
Leadership can represent a bottleneck in the speed of organizational movement - independent groups and individuals do as they please without waiting for top down approval / planning.
What emerges is a ‘network collective’ - people feel connected to something larger than them selves, but still have a high degree of freedom to act as they please.
Protests against ACTA(?) in Poland had no known organizers - they seemed to stem from the mimetic momentum of anti SOPA protests.
Sound a little scary? Yes.. ‘From the point of view of existing power internet activism looks like the zombie apocalypse - and it already has their children.’
She notes that one of the important aspects of OWS was a reclamation of agency - people actually bothering to think that their political perspectives matter (The two party system in the USA has left people indifferent / apathetic for good reason - its hard to see potential for political change)
Khannea Suntzu spoke about transhumanism, the emerging possibility of 3d printing of organs and the resulting potential for life extension, and the holy grail - uploading consciousness.
(All your favorite things from Bruce Sterling / William Gibson novels..)
It was good to see him mention the economic factor (something I thought was missing from Ray Kurzweil’s SXSW singularity talk) - most people are broke - is this sort of technology really going to be available en-masse?
(Note, read ‘The Spike’)
Discussions of ‘The Singularity’ are often criticized as techo religious - but these ideas are based on analysis of existing tech so this isn’t entirely fair.
Once we have all these awesomely smart robots there is going to be a new economic hierarchy - who ever owns the robots will win.. And most people will be irreversibly unemployed - as different skill sets become important for humans there is no way you can retrain everyone, not even within a space of 10 years (more than enough time for most peoples lives to fall apart)
He accentuates the importance of functioning democracy because wealth gaps will otherwise be accentuated as we head towards ‘the final disillusion’.
Free Internet Panel - Elizabeth Stark, Katitza Rodriguez, Samir Allioui, Jérémie Zimmerman, Désirée Željka Milošević
Key points-
Its outrageous that most discussions about copyright law are happening behind closed doors. Lobbyist are cooking up unpopular crap with govts and trying to give people least possible spectrum for involvement / response.
Govts are spending relatively large amounts of money (5-10M in UK) on hardware to send spammy messages to people who use bittorrent etc.
Zimmerman sees opposing this as a distraction from more important issues - such as the potential idea of hardwiring copyright controls into the hardware that runs the internet - detection of illegitimate content, and flags for users with a record of offending..
We have all seen how awesome that sort of technology is with You Tube nixing all sorts of things it shouldn’t due to flaws in automatic rights management.
Cool that Elizabeth gave a shout out to the Copyright math talk from TED (the figures the RIAA /MPAA post about losses due to copyright infringement are beyond ridiculous and patently false).
Lots of studies show that copyright infringers are also the biggest purchasers of legit media - Pirates are still consumers, often more so than non pirates.
Many artists support internet freedom even though their industries don’t.. Its seen as a case of businesses not being willing to change or innovate.
Other countries often follow the USAs lead with laws, but often only the pro copyright bits, not the other protections for people.. Such as fair use, DMCA safe harbour, etc
The idea was raised of some radio spectrum donated back to the common good.. We own the air.. A space for public mesh networks.
Garbage in, Awesome Out
I’m slightly embarrassed to admit that I do a lot of things in my email client (mac os x default). I’m even writing the draft for this blog post there right now.
Email is always open, it lets me type and correct spelling, it saves automatically and even syncs to my phone.
Writing notes in mail is a valid use case, but the other thing I use it for is task management.
I have notes open where I have listed things that need to be done on our current projects. These span a team of around 6 people and three different products. I write notes about bugs, new features, thoughts, whatever, usually inserting or removing items in the rough order of priority.
In terms of ease of input it ranks high. There is no UI flow to step through, no buttons to click, no setup, no need to categorize my data via an outside logic, I can even paste in a screenshot if thats the easiest way to note something.
The problem is the point where it becomes necessary to communicate these notes, delegate tasks, and track completion/history of issues.
Currently I either paste tasks for the day into a Skype chat or email (fine for a small set of instructions) or enter them into a Google Docs spreadsheet where we also have fields for ‘raised by’, ‘assigned to’, ‘screen’,’problem’,’notes’,’priority’,’status’.
This works relatively well. I like the fact that we can mix numeric and text descriptions for priority (2.Urgentish), create our own statuses (‘reopened mofo’), and also enjoy the collaborative editing nature of google docs - our team is scattered around the world and typing on the same doc at the same time is about as close as we ever come to sharing an office.
Ultimately the form of a spreadsheet like this is the essence of task management - an ordered list of things to do that can be easily sorted/organized via a number of filters.
But there is still a point of friction where I transfer my notes into the sheet, and this system would fall apart at scale.
There are tools out there to handle this better (Pivotal tracker seems like #1) but every time I go to shift to these I stop.
In my mind the interface is going to get in the way - there will be team and projects to be set up, UX flows to navigate, buttons to click, categories to choose from, different states for read / edit, and inevitably one or two annoying things I can’t do with their system.
My mail notes are in essence a natural language interface.
Aside from speech raw text is about the simplest form of input.
Lets also consider space to be a form of natural language - not gestures so much in this case, but layout hierarchies (i.e. top item is most important relative to heading).
As computing becomes more sophisticated it will be more common for systems to accommodate the idiosyncrasy of the user - instead of entering information in the way that is most convenient for the computer we will enter it a way that is both more intuitive, and open to expressiveness.
Think of what Google has done with search - you can spell things wrong or type queries in garbled language, and it still gives you results that match ‘what you wanted’ - most people agree that this is awesome.
When entering a search there is a kind of syntax.. its not explicit, but we have an intuitive grasp of how we should use it (that may or may not be correct).
If I were to produce a task management tool I would approach data entry along similar lines.
You start with text based input that is basically a blank note page.
It recognizes spatial language - top item below a heading is most urgent, and it also interprets a range of shorthand syntax for describing priority via a folksonomy (i.e. -urgentish). It will pick up names. (i.e. ‘peter- do this’ for a line, or maybe a set of tasks under a heading ‘peter-‘).
Tasks are maybe separated by double line breaks and I can paste in any content such as screenshots that will become part of the body of the item.
Maybe if a block of text is in brackets after a single line break it becomes a note, maybe there is syntax for steps to reproduce such as a set of things separated by ->.
Like with the markdown language the goal would be to make these formatting syntaxes fairly close to a typical readable note.
Thats the starting point for your input - the next bit would be ‘magic’.
You press a button and your page of notes turns into an ordered data set that can be filtered and sorted in a manner similar to a Google docs sheet (but more so designed for this use case..). Maybe there is a bit of drag and drop / editing that can be done if things need to be cleaned up.
When tasks are marked as ‘done’ in the sheet they disappear from the notes view, but remain tracked in the data view and can be exposed via the status filter.
Maybe the ‘magic’ view can bring together notes from all your team members, and allow for collaborative real time editing. A basic syntax (a // like with code comments..) could prevent draft tasks from showing up in the shared view.
And of course you can toggle the view back to notes mode if you want to edit in messy format, add more tasks etc.
Part of the reason skilled computer users enjoy using a text based interface like the terminal so much is that there is no GUI to navigate - everything is possible from one place so long as you know the commands.
This is also the big barrier for new users of the command line - knowing commands/available tools in advance, and knowing the exact syntax.
In order to make a text based input for a task manager work in the way I have described I think it would be necessary to work to a more forgiving set of requirements for syntax - less is at stake than with managing a server / OS so precision isn’t such a big deal.
But hey.. theres an idea. A version of the terminal where you could type - $ hey computer.. make me a workspace with python + django, add a postgres DB, copy in the file on my desktop ‘dbdump’, all for my admin user, install all the crap from requirements.txt, boot it up when you are done, and make me a shortcut so i can do that easily next time. theres a good chap
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Snap Together Computers
I often think about the future of Apple computers. I am a self confessed apple fanboy - but what would I do if i was placed in charge of the company?
Thankfully thats never going to happen (and hopefully it never will happen to anyone who has done anything less than devote their entire life to the problem of industrial design + computing).
Also - as much as I believe in the capabilities of Tim Cook as CEO and the design skills of the Apple team I think the company’s world changing status was tied to the persona of Steve Jobs.
Apple will endure and mature, but what ever the ‘next big thing’ is it will probably not be Apple, and it will have an ideology at is core different to the ideology of Apple.
For the record, I am pretty certain that the future of computing is seamless AR - contact lens displays, gesture recognition based on video tracking of our hands and eyeballs, high speed super low latency networks, and remote storage / processing.
In the future hardware will disappear.
But thats a while off. What might the next 10 years of physical hardware look like?
One thing that started me on this train of thought was thinking about whether or not people’s tendency to add ugly covers to their iPhones was a design fail.
On one hand it is a response to the fact that the aesthetically beautiful glass material appears to be fragile (and is).
So Apple’s intention to create a beautiful piece of industrial design is thwarted by the fact people feel the need to wrap it in something of much lower quality.
The other aspect of this trend is people’s desire to personalize.
Part of the reason Apple is so wildly profitable is that they have a low number of product lines - there is still essentially only one iPhone.. each new model has just been an incremental development of the previous one, and there have never been different product lines in tandem.
Apple focusses all their efforts on making a single best product to serve a task, and reaps the benefits in terms of reduced costs for R&D, production, and marketing.
Apple doesn’t market to a specific demographic - they market to people who want ‘the best’.
But the downside of this is a feeling of homogeneity amongst people who use their products. On one hand Apple products can be a status symbol - the distinctive white earbuds of the iPhone, or the slim profile of the macbook air that has become the tool of choice for hackers everywhere (even Linus).
On the other hand with something as everyday as a phone it is inevitable that a large core of your users will not identify with the slick almost zen like exterior of the iPhone.
For example I saw a couple of midwestern tourists and they had these very bulky, durable, ‘outdoors rugged’ cases - clearly for them it was important that their phones appear ready for an adventurous lifestyle.
Then of course there are the crazy patterns, the fun fur, and the bling. Is this something Apple could do more to facilitate?
If its inevitable then maybe you should make the process smoother? What if it was easy to pop out the glass on the back of your phone and replace it with a range of other high quality options.
Yes I am aware that you can do exactly this via some third party services - but what if this was an immediate ‘non hackish’ option at the point of sale?
Does it seems like something Apple would do? Not historically - unless you count the flower power iMac shells as a step in the direction.
But maybe the modularity of an idea like this is not entirely offensive to Apple’s design paradigms. Or maybe they have an e-paper style shell for their phones in the works that will ‘solve’ this problem of customization in a clean ‘one button’ kind of way.
Theres something I like about the idea of ‘snap together’ computing - and it is entirely counter to Apple’s core - which is to create products and systems that are basically hermetically sealed.
Apple retains a level of control over their whole ecosystem and thus are also able to offer a high quality user experience. This is the ‘devils deal’ we accept when using Apple products.
From an early stage Steve Jobs was against the idea of ‘tinkerers’ messing with his Macintosh by adding extra boards & components.
But now hardware and software have further evolved perhaps it is possible to create ecosystems that are modular, expandable, tinkerable, and yet still elegant and functional.
(UX especially is evolving to the point where you really have to be a douche of a company now to make an interface thats hard to use)
An interesting idea for a hardware company would be to create a number of modular components - I imagine them as thin ‘slices’ in rectangular shapes with a smooth cleanly finished exterior.
There might also be a system for locking the components together that would allow wired transfer of power and data (to some extent you could use conductive power and wireless data).
A phone might consist of:
- a larger rectangular screen touch screen module
- a number of smaller flat components put together in a mosiac on its back
- a long thin ‘phone’ module with mics /speakers at either end, an antenna
- a processor unit
- a camera that includes its own storage
- battery and storage tiles that you can swap out at will
- maybe a case to wrap the back and provide finish
Or maybe rather than design the exterior its simply that the components are available, but its simple to assemble them and drop them into a 3-d printed case.
But the idea would be that the phone would not stop at the components you attach to it.
Like with the pebble watch your phone (or tablet) might become a hub for other devices.
In the office? maybe now you can pull out a larger screen component and stand it up on your desk, grab a flat keyboard and away you go, you have a larger work station.
Once you get home maybe you have other screen components that can wirelessly receive video / images.
Maybe at home you have a couple of larger processing / storage modules that the phone is going to interface with and delegate processing needs to.
Gear keeps getting smaller and lower powered. It feels like we are already close to a point where scale is as much dictated by other usability concerns (screen / input area size) as it is by hardware.
As this trajectory increases it should be possible to cram a lot into a small space without such complex product engineering considerations as would go into the iPhone today.
So here we are - your computer isn’t a single product. its a number of bits that can talk to each other, and spread through environments where we live and work, united by networks and cloud storage.
There goes my vague idea for ‘the next apple’ and an intermediate state for hardware before it dissolves into AR.
Its not wildly different to how things are right now, but it would be cool to see someone tackle the problem holistically.
If you see a stylus, they blew it
I just saw a billboard for one of those android phones with a stylus. Aside from the obvious reasons a stylus is pointless (i have fingers, you can loose them, stylus WTF) here goes the glaring one for me:
As soon as you use a stylus with a phone it becomes a two hands device.
Lets face it.. how often do you use your phone with both hands?
Smart phones are devices we use while multi-tasking.. for better or worse we use them while we walk, talk, eat, work, play.
The revolution of mobile computing is that it makes using computers part of other things you do, not a complete thing to do in itself.
Having a spare hand seems like an advantage on that front.
Socially encrypted data
Playing with ambient social apps like Highlight got me thinking again about the problems / potential of centralized social data.
If an app is going to do something interesting like try to introduce me to nearby people that have complimentary interests then it can only do that if it has access to high quality data about what I do / like.
Facebook is the go to source for that info right now, and (as I ranted about last week) they are making leaps and bounds in the amount of ambient data they gather about what people do on the web.
My problem with Facebook wasn’t that they are gathering data about what I do, it was that I don’t feel much control over what info is on my timeline (random open graph app spam) and that I know for many people my Facebook page will be perceived as a key part of my online identity.
But centralized data is also a serious issue. To quote colloquial wisdom ‘knowledge is power’, ‘power corrupts’, etc, and yeah, in my opinion if you centralize a lot of information eventually it is a recipe for trouble.
Sure - right now Facebook/Google might be doing nothing more sinister than targeting advertising at us. But we also know that this information is starting to come under more meaningful scrutiny - potential employers, immigration officials, credit agencies etc. Then of course there is the worst case scenario - a fascist government, or powerful corpocracy (wow, that felt darkly conspiratorial to say).
Right. So I am being broad here, and sounding paranoid (I am not especially paranoid (doesn’t mean they aren’t after me)), and I started this post by indicating I was going to talk about something people are actually interested in - i.e. apps.
If a possibly paranoid person such as myself were to envision a future where I would be comfortable with massive amounts of social data being stored about me (and everyone else), and maybe even making that data available to cute apps with trippy logos - how would I want that future to look?
I am not an engineer (I am a front end web developer) so I am going to be general here but I think the solution is a data storage solution that is socially encrypted.
In the database every user would have a personal encryption key and all data would be encrypted. It would be impossible for the people who held the data store to read any persons data, let alone an aggregate of everyones data.
Clients that store / pass the keys would need to be distinct from the data store itself.
When you ‘friend’ people you give them a token that works with their own personal key and allows them to decrypt your data. You can revoke a persons token at anytime and they can no longer read your data (your profile, your pics, your check ins).
You might also allow apps to get tokens that would give them the ability to read aspects of your data, but if those apps wanted other people to read your data then those people would also need tokens.
Maybe the keys don’t need to be attached to real identities, and maybe people can create multiple keys and digital identities (I am paranoid remember.. we don’t want a situation where people are forced to have a single verified identity online).
Maybe part of the qualification for being a client able to read this data is that you also restrict how people can digitally sample/distribute it - i.e. copy, paste, download (or maybe that is futile). But it would be handy to know that one day if I ever decide to run for office I could reliably revoke those photos where I took my shirt off once in a bar.
Its safe to say you can never truly control digital content, not without creating a system that is so tightly controlled it creates more problems than it solves (I bet the mere fact I mentioned a way to control distribution of digital content just gave someone at the MPAA a chubby).
And I should note a few things - this system is intended for certain personal data, not general web content where it would be less useful.
There would be challenges to such a system - especially with how to approach search and tiered permissions for data / user / app access permissions.
Could big companies be pressured too adopt such a system? Would it force too much of a change to their current business model? Could such a system be a draw card for a Facebook / Google disrupter? Could the idea of encrypted data / decentralized access be communicated to people en masse? There are lots of questions..
We really can make some cool apps if we let the computers know things about us, but as our digital life becomes a bigger part of our whole reality we need to think about how much control we have over the information, and who might have access to the information in future.
If you are interested in this idea please discuss on Hacker News
btw, i deleted Highlight. Not out of paranoia but out of nuisance.. It was too hard to pause / quit the app, and it sent too many notifications at times when I had no interest in acting on them :(
SXSW - Lots of things in brief
Here goes a short form log of panels / films I have seen, as much for the sake of jogging my own memory later as for anything else :) but maybe a couple of big posts can save a lot of live tweet spam. No major exotic Jay Z private party windfalls to brag about, but lots of fun.
Tuesday:
Code for America - w/Jennifer Pahika (Who gave a great talk at TED last week!)
The govt is using some super crap technology :) But they spend a lot of money.. apparently its the last undisrupted market.
Code for america - independent teams, fast turn around for projects often at one tenth the cost with much better outcomes.
She has really positive ideas for the future of government.
‘government is what we do together’ - enabling collective action through technology.
Interfaces for government can be simple, beautiful, and easy to use..
Go geek army!
Surviving Technology w/George Friedman - Some interesting points but often i disagreed with him.. esp that online communities don’t self moderate and tend towards civil interaction.
Sure, many people flame and rant online, but many communities also form where people have quality interaction.
I do agree though that we don’t want regulations / security crackdowns to ruin the internet (possibly driven in response to hacker groups like anonymous), and that the internet in its mature state needs to be on the right side of the law - which means getting laws right!
Pinterest Explained w/Ben Silberman and Chris Dixon - Nice to get a better insight into Pinterest’s story. Ben Silberman seemed super nice and humble. Proof again that there is no single path to success for an internet product. Great to see their dedication to their product.
No-one mentioned my theory about Pinterest’s success (but the guy sitting in front of me agreed :)) - that its a way for people to shop without buying things.
In retrospect its not surprising that it gained traction in parts of america with troubled economies - where people are still caught up in the idea of consumerism, but can maybe not afford the things they want - so its materialism gone immaterial, one of my favorite topics :)
Monday:
Tumblr Party - Was packed and kinda hardcore (music wise), made some new friends :)
Y-Combinator Start up Saloon - Had a good chat with James Levine from 500 startups, he had some great advice (including ways to describe our services without triggering peoples photo app fatigue reflex)
Hands Off the Internet Party - A party celebrating the defeat of SOPA (great job Elizabeth and Mallory who organized the party!).
I met some really interesting people including Cindy Cohn from EFF, and Josh Levy.
Neat to get some face time with people who are working on these issues for real..
And also throw out some of my own less immediately plausible ideas - such as.. instead of trying to get ageing senators to understand technology how about we get some younger people into govt (yep, I saw bruce sterlings awesome rant last year).
Of course this would probably be about as easy as changing the way campaign financing works (i.e. essential but very hard..). Still, imagine if congress was filled with fresh faces (Alexis Ohanion should run for office!) and how much that could change peoples perception of govt.
Govt isn’t going to go away anytime soon, it would be nice to think it could potentially be less broken.
Foursquare Court - dropped in and had a good chat to fsq platform evangelist ak. Asked him about whether more open APIs for events would be available soon. Short answer.. no. Still licensing issues around making some event data open to the public (especially sporting events) and its not on the immediate roadmap. Good to know.
Hype Hotel - Picked up my pass, little bit of a long line in the hot sun, will be worth it I am sure.
Starlet (film @ the Alamo Lamar) - Still mulling this one over, my initial response wasn’t entirely positive - found the central characters tedious (this was possibly intentional) and the whole old / young beautiful friendship thing a bit hackneyed.
But of course there were other things in the mix that flipped that and were interesting (will refrain from spoilers), its possibly a very accurate and intelligent character study, and definitely a nice capture of the LA burbs.
Sunday
Francine (film @ Alamo Lamar) - this was a really masterful film.. almost no dialog. A woman coming back into the world after a life in prison. Absolutely brilliant performance by Melissa Leo
When Your API is your product panel w/Rob from Twilio,Adam from Programmable web, and folks from Urban Airship, Mashery & Send Grid.
Asked a question about data portability and how to reassure API users who build and host products on third party API’s. Offering an option to buy / licence and installable version of the whole setup for companies who out grow you is one way to alleviate peoples concerns.
Startup Bus Finals - Awesome to see two NYC companies in the finals, despite the fact that a wise cracking SF team won. Good to see dave McClure’s gab in action, awesome panel all round + big congrats to Elias for putting this together.
Mashable Party - F that line no way.
The Driskill - Nice to catch up with Erica my old moscow travel buddy.
Cheezburger/Bing Party - A bit of a walk but it was super cool to see Michelle and Ryans pro light paintings in action, really reaped the benfits of lightsabers i purchased on the street. Good to meet some new people including Chris from Founders Co-op, and some hackers from Dartmouth.
Chicken Waffles at the 24 hour diner on 6th and lamar. Yum. I guess they thought my request for a scoop of icecream on top was a joke :)
Saturday
The Bus - Lean startup bitches.. the bus from the airport to central austin costs $1 and only had 4-5 people on it. One of them happened to be Josh Nesbit who is doing some great work with medicmobile.org, it was also cool to meet a couple of guys from the Mexico Startup bus!
Panel Fail - Missed the panel i wanted to see about collective storytelling, partly by wasting time grabbing a free beer at an over crowded booth, and partly because I hadn’t yet adjusted my watch to austin timezones, doh.
App.net bbq - Was nice to chat to Dalton (formerly of Picplz) and here about what they are up to with App Net + trade some stories re: photo app madness.
Bing - Ok so still not a fan of Bing :) but it was fun to play some foozball and hang with Michelle and Ryan who are doing some light painting (grab their Lightbomber app!) for the Bing / Cheezburger party.
Austin Madness - Re-united with the crew from kiwi company Gladeye, entertained americans with our rowdy kiwi drunkenness, arm wrestling video to come.
“ Don’t worry, it’s not a sign of weakness. Arguably it’s a sign of sanity. The biggest startup ideas are terrifying. And not just because they’d be a lot of work. The biggest ideas seem to threaten your identity: you wonder if you’d have enough ambition to carry them through.”
Another excellent article from Paul graham
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