Justin Mares

Steve Jobs is one of the most influential individuals of the last few decades. The companies he founded and the products he created made Apple the most valuable company in the world. He has certainly made a dent in the universe, and will be remembered for a long time.

“Jony Ive was one of the few people Steve was never intentionally vindictive with“. That’s a quote from Jobs’ wife (from the Steve Jobs bio, which is a highly engaging read). Intentionally vindictive. Is that how I would want my wife to remember me? For all he accomplished, one of the major things I’m taking away from the book is that he was worshipped by those not close to him (Apple fanboys everywhere), and difficult to many who were (said best here). From what I can tell, being more successful than Steve Jobs is nearly impossible. Being a better person, however, seems very doable.

Ultimately, he built two fantastic companies (Apple and Pixar). But he did so at the cost of his health, many of his personal relationships, and the respect of many he worked with. Reading through the book has really made me start thinking about the kind of dent I want to make. Do I want to focus on friends and family, or work and learning? What are the 3-4 things in my life I want to focus on and improve as much as I can? I’m not sure that I have the answer just yet, but reading about Jobs certainly has gotten me thinking.

Is something I’ve been struggling with for the last few months. It’s a tough balance to hit, and involves constant second-guessing. I see so many opportunities where I feel like I could do something, and so many other opportunities where I could work with people far smarter than myself. The hardest decisions I’ve had so far are ones where the outcome would be a good one, no matter the choice. How do you make a decision in those cases?

One of the things I remember from Thinking Fast and Slow is that people will go to great lengths to avoid shutting the door on their options, even if it hurts them. I’m starting to appreciate that. No matter what choice I make, I will be shutting the door on other options that I have. Even not making a decision and delaying is itself a choice.

What’s been helpful is again going back to my principles, realizing that my decision doesn’t really matter. I don’t know that I could make a choice right now that in the long run couldn’t be reversed. Over the next year I’ll learn a lot, be closer to figuring out what I like doing, and have an understanding of what makes me happy in terms of work. All of this will come about regardless of what decisions I make now. And that’s a calming thought.

This has been an amazing week. I met over 50 other student entrepreneurs at Ebootcamp, spent a week in California, got a job offer, and spoke one on one with two billionaires. I’ve been very lucky to with these things, as these are not exactly the typical experiences of a 22 year old senior. And it all happened in one awesome week.

I want to focus on my interactions with the two billionaires and a few lessons I drew from that. The first thing I noticed from interacting with each of them (Peter Thiel and Vinod Khosla) was that I am taller than both of them. The second thing I noticed is just how normal they were. After talking with each of them, it was clear that they were exceptionally smart but still relatively normal people.

One thing that’s interesting about interacting with these people is that you can relate to them on a spectrum you (or I, at least) never thought possible. As I’ve interacted with more and more slightly famous people over the past two years, I’ve come to the realization that every one of the famous people you look up to or are impressed with are completely normal people. My hypothesis for this “surprise” revelation (which really shouldn’t be a surprise if you think about it) is that meeting someone in person involves a collision of two different personal spectrums of experience.

For example, Peter Thiel is literally 200,000 times wealthier than I am. He has accomplished far more than I am likely to accomplish in my career, and many regard him as a visionary.  Before this week, I only related to him in an abstract sense through reading his essays and learning about his various companies, investments and projects. In a career and wealth sense, Thiel is so far beyond my experience and spectrum of experience that it makes him hard to relate to. You can’t imagine having that kind of wealth or influence until you have it. If my idea of making a lot of money (right now) would be making $50k a year, we operate on vastly different planes of experience.

Meeting someone in person removes this abstract separation. Even though in a career and wealth sense I am miles removed from Theil’s status, as a person we are more similar than we are different. A good analogy I recall from Nassim Taleb’s Black Swan is that of wealth and height. If you were to average the heights of everyone in the world, it would follow a normal distribution and would result in a few outliers who were 7-8 feet tall. That would be unusual, and remarkable, but still within the realm of your experience. You can mentally understand how being 2-3 feet taller would affect your life and relate to it on some level. Tall people create a sense of surprise, but not one of awe or long-term admiration.

This is completely different with wealth. Mentally, it is just not possible for us to process the fact that someone like Peter Thiel has as much personal wealth as several countries, or the bottom 5% of the US population – over 5 million people. This type of wealth and career success is so far removed from my (and others) experience with the world that it is difficult to realistically conceive of. Thus, there’s this feeling of awe and extreme respect that makes the famous seem so different from us, as if we couldn’t imagine being in their shoes. Because, literally, we couldn’t.

Meeting these people in person helps you mitigate this effect – you are, in a sense, humanizing them. When you meet someone in person, no matter their station in life they can only be so different than you. They still experience human emotions, have human physical needs and talk in a common language. You come to realize that you share far more with them than not: something that’s difficult to realize and conceptualize about someone that you only read about. Relating to them on a human spectrum, rather than artificially comparing yourself to them on a wealth/career spectrum, makes a world of difference. It’s something I’ve started to think about as I slowly come in contact with more individuals like this.

Like I referenced in an earlier post, there’s also a staircase of emotions and expectations that go along with meeting some of these people.  I was thinking yesterday about the first time I met Justin Goldman, a fantastic mentor who really got me started and helped me figure out to do with all this startup stuff. Now Justin is a great guy and has had some moderate successes, but he’s not a household name (nothing wrong with that). Yet before our first meeting (as a college sophomore) I remember being extremely nervous. I drove into the city an hour early, paid extra money to park in a garage rather than look for a spot and possibly be late for our lunch meeting, overdressed, and was generally just nervous and unsure of myself. Yet just 1.5 years later, meeting with far “bigger” names doesn’t inspire the same reaction. Since that first meeting, I’ve had countless conversations, read hundreds of books and blog posts, and generally become a much more experienced individual. All that translates to an increased level of confidence and a realization that I’m not so different from the most famous individuals out there – at least that’s how I’ve come to think of it.

This is a really long-winded way of getting to the point I really want to make: people are people. Whether or not someone is absurdly wealthy, famous, intelligent or not you can always relate to them on some level. Knowing this, and receiving the confidence bump that comes with this realization, is something worth working towards. It helps put things in perspective. After I met with Vinod, a few of my friends were saying how cool it was that I got his card. Realizing he’s another human, just one with a few more successes under his belt, helps keep my perspective in check. Yea, he’s wealthy and intelligent. But on another level, it was just one conversation among two people. And that’s something I never would have understood a year ago.

* shorter post due to a crazy week *

“Education isn’t a problem until it serves as a buffer from the real world and a refuge from the risk of failure”         – Seth Godin

This is my favorite quote from Seth’s Stop Stealing Dreams manifesto that I went through a few weeks ago. It really resonated with me because I find it so true. In a month I’ll be graduating, and I can see how many fellow graduates are treating education as a fill-in next step because they don’t know what to do.

Higher education is increasingly serving as a buffer from the real world. This buffer is a privilege that has become expected and makes the real world seem scary. For most of human history, there was no easy path to a comfortable life. Only within the past 50-100 years has the idea of college = a comfortable life come to life. Before that, education occurred on the job, in the real world. The idea that you could be more successful by disappearing from the real world and learning only from books was absurd.

I know that I’ve learned more from reading and applying what I read than I have from any class I’ve taken in school. Writing also helps with the learning process, and helps filter what I learned through the lens of my experience. For example, I’m working through Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People right now, and doing so very slowly. I’m trying to apply one principle from the book every day for a week and seeing how things go for me. Someone, I forget who, had a fantastic quote about how reading more is the easiest way to be smarter- you essentially are spending a few hours to learn everything about a subject from someone who has studied the issue extensively for at least a year.

Links I found interesting this week:

Article about Chicago’s new mayor. I especially liked how he is having corporations shape the curriculum of local community colleges, and give those graduates preference when they hire. It’s similar to what I wrote about here where corporations are beginning to assume the responsibility of educating future employees due to institutional failure.

Post from Chris Dixon about how the next big thing will look like a toy. He draws this idea from the Innovator’s Dilemma, a book I just finished this week. Things I see looking like toys: photovoltaic cells, electric cars, drones, and the entire Maker movement. I think all of these things will grow to become far more prevalent than they are now.

Patio11‘s comment really resonated with me – “Indeed, part of me thinks that applications (in general) are a backup filtering mechanism for people who haven’t figured out a more effective way to get what they want yet.”

I’ve been writing a lot more lately and am starting to enjoy the process just a little bit. The more I do it, the better I feel about what I actually write. It helps too that I’m starting to get a little bit of feedback from friends and others I talk with, though I have no goal of building a big community or ever blogging for a living. Most of all, I think the act of writing and publishing is helpful to clarify and refine my thinking. And I get the benefits of slowly but surely improving as a writer.

I can’t imagine writing for a large, demanding audience. The more I think about it, the more I see a disconnect between what I thought I wanted and what I would actually be happy with. When I started a blog (not this one, but one on another domain 2 years ago), I had visions of writing for thousands of people and becoming a thought-leader in the collegiate education space. Now, after actually writing and not just dreaming, I realize that type of audience brings wtih it a great deal of pressure. There are things that I would struggle to write about with a large audience that I’m willing to discuss here. Even outside of writing, I have come to realize this

So many times I’ve thought about how amazing it would be to sell a company for millions of dollars, or be recognized as a thought leader in an industry. While making my first hire this week, she made a comment that I was obviously involved in startups for the money. I don’t know (since I don’t have money!), but I don’t think money is a strong motivator right now. It would be nice, but with it comes pressure. Making millions at this age only means my next thing has to be bigger – where does it stop? If I didn’t succeed with whatever I did next, I would be a failure. Thanks to philosophy and some really smart, humble people who are willing to work with me, I can’t see the goal of being a milliionaire mattering very much anymore.

As I’m learning and developing, the one thing I’m realizing is that change is a constant, and is happening faster now than ever before. Companies are just now switching from expensive hosted software to cloud-based solutions – how much faster will they make the switch between cloud software providers in the future? How does this affect corporate sales teams? What about accountants and community pharmacists standing behind the counters counting pills? How do they fit in as things rapidly change? As the world changes more rapidly, the most attractive solution I’ve encountered is to hone your thinking and your network. Change is inevitable, but clear long-term thinking is always in demand. I spoke with someone who worked at Amazon a few years ago, and he mentioned how Bezos was negotiating with publishers for full text rights of their books in order to access Amazon’s print on demand services. The publishers gave in easily – after all, there were no options outside of physical printing. Bezos negotiated for the long term, and in these contracts managed to gain the rights to the content even after Amazon began offering digital content. This was a large part of the reason why Amazon was able to launch the Kindle with such a large library of titles – Bezos played a long term game the publishing comapnies weren’t prepared for.

I’m starting to shift my writing style after reading Paul Graham’s post on writing. I find the less I try to prove a point in my writing the more I can write, learn and explore. And in this process, hopefully become a better thinker, writer, and individual.

A man who follows someone else not only does not find anything, he is not even looking. ‘But surely you are going to walk in your predecessors footsteps?’ Yes indeed, I shall use the old road, but if I find a shorter and easier one I shall open it up. The men who pioneered the old routes are leaders, not our masters. Truth lies open to everyone.   – Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

This quote has been on my mind lately. I’m at a point where I have several interesting choices for my next move, and am working to figure things out. I’m going to try and choose my own path and find what makes me happiest. Amazing how some of the best advice can come from someone who lived over 1600 years ago.

One of the things I’ve been interested in lately is the position of power structures in society. Debt is one such power structure that looks different when you examine it. Rather than something that enables the many to buy things they couldn’t otherwise afford, it can be used as a tool from which the rich profit. It limits the abilities and options of those who are in debt, as they have less freedom in their choices. Those who go to medical school have very little choice but to become a doctor once they graduate, even if they hate the job. The massive amounts of debt they take on ensure that they will be working as a doctor until they are at least 40 before they once again have choices in what to do with their careers. The same situation plays out in corporations everywhere. Individuals cannot leave their jobs, as they have house payments to make, and credit card debt to pay down.

It is even worse for those who fall on hard times and are hit with enormous repayment rates and few hopes for recovery or financial solvency.  People have become reliant on the current financial system of banks, credit, loans and debt, which keeps the current financial power structure (with Wall Street at the top) in place. However, we are currently seeing a few ways in which that structure is being subverted. Using the increasingly connected internet, some individuals are able to bypass large current financial structures and create an entirely new system of financial transactions (Bitcoin, Lending Club, etc.).

Christianity is one of the greatest examples of subverting current power structures.  In the early days of the Roman Empire, brutality and power were revered as societally admirable qualities. Power was the measuring stick for the empire. Christianity gained early influence as a slave religion – it provided hope to the masses, and a way for them to increase their self-esteem. Rather than conform to society’s notions of power and money being the ultimate goal, they flipped those ideals around. Now, the meek, the poor and humble could think of themselves in an entirely new light. Rather than lower-class Romans, they became exemplary Christians. They may be slaves, but Christianity allowed them to consider themselves morally superior to the many they couldn’t hope to reach in status. Christianity was the way out of their lower-class status – a new power structure that allowed them to redefine who they were. Perhaps this has something to do with Christianity being the strongest in poorest countries – they are the ones who need a new measuring stick the most.

There is currently a movement going on that works to subvert America’s consumer culture where wealth acts as a signaler. The minimalist movement is extremely popular among bloggers (especially lifestyle bloggers) who tout it as a way to achieve clarity, simplicity and happiness. Instead of being measured in terms of displayable wealth – a game which much of the population loses – the minimalist movement has gained steam as a way to step out side of the game entirely. Rather than measure wealth in terms of the size of one’s house, 401k or flashiest car, these minimalists compare Twitter followers, travel experiences, or who owns the least number of possessions to compare wealth and status. Rather than play a consumerist game they would surely lose, why not compete on who owns the least amount of things, or who drove around the country in an RV?

This subversion of accepted societal standards and power structures is evident in today’s society at large. You can see it in class divides. Artists, startup founders, and students all live a sparse existence. They spend very little on nice things, and instead choose to devote time and money honing a craft or gaining knowledge. They live a frugal existence. The poor in this country, on the other hand, rather than live frugally they live cheaply. They spend money trying to imitate the rich in society, rather than stepping outside the game all together. The rich drive nice cars – the poor drive crappy cars that they raise the wheels on or install mufflers on. They carry fake leather purses or counterfeit purses – the rich carry the real thing, while the student carries a backpack. The frugal step outside of the game and create their own power structures where they are not directly competing against those who they can’t hope to approach in status.

This will happen in our financial systems. As more and more people start losing houses they shouldn’t have been able to buy, and fall further into student loan and credit card debt, there will be change. With the new peer-to-peer technology that the internet makes possible, I think there will be more and more people who step outside of the financial networks all together and start creating their own power structures and financial networks that don’t profit off of their ignorance and benefit only the few. Bitcoin is an example of this, and Square is another step in the right direction. As the markets crash, more and more people will be looking for other ways to invest their money, in a game they can win. This may look a lot like Lending Club, or investing in startups or other local ecosystems. People could become the banks, and have financial power structures on a more local level. But rest assured, change is coming. More and more people will start to subvert the current power structures. You can see it already, as more people pull their money from the markets and fewer are choosing to put their trust in large investment banks. New concepts of trust will be defined. Rather than having a bank backing a loan, it is quite possible you could see many individuals collectively backing a loan for someone they can see has a strong online presence and can be held accountable.

This low point in our economy will lead to large-scale restructuring, and I believe that there will be many forced changes to the financial structure. These changes will be driven by people, not politicians, and many will end up playing an entirely new game.

This post, and tens of others, have been writing themselves inside my head over the past few months since I last posted. I have thought about writing time and time again, but each time I’ve stopped. I have no readers, no post has ever received more than 100 visitors, and I have nothing to lose by writing – yet for some reason I find there is nothing harder in the world than sitting down and writing in a public form. I can’t imagine how someone like Seth Godin does it, knowing hundreds of thousands of people will read every single word he writes.

At the same time, this is the type of stuff that takes practice. This stuff is hard, which is probably why there aren’t enough honest bloggers out there. The hard stuff is the stuff worth doing. Just because it is hard, most people will not do it. Eveyr time I sit down I want to write something epic. And every time  I think that whatever I have to say has already been written by people who are much better thinkers and writers than I could ever hope to be. All I can think of when I sit down to write is that I’m not smart enough, not interesting enough, to have a public opinion on anything.

Reading Ryan Holiday and others, I think the only way you can bear to put something into the public domain is to have an unshakeable confidence in yourself. I definitely don’t have this, but I’m working on it – and I want this blog to help form that confidence. I want to become used to putting strong opinions out there, until it no longer frightens me to say something publicly. I want to be wrong, and and have people tell me so, because that’s the only way I know that I’m doing something worth talking about.  Being “Remarkable” as Seth Godin puts it, requires doing something worth talking about. I’m not there, but I want to be. Everything good that has come in my life has come about by putting myself out there and being willing to take criticism and rejection.

Every single person who I admire professionally writes in some way. Every single one. 

Why do I want to write? It’s a way for me to push myself. I am getting too comfortable. I work hard, but don’t often reach outside of my comfort zone. Too many times in this past month I have sat down to write and instead read Hacker News for the 100^th time, or checked each of my separate email inboxes 3x each. There are enough distractions to last a lifetime, but that’s why this stuff is hard. And I’m determined to do the hard work and ship.

I recently finished Daniel Pink’s book Drive, and it had some really fascinating components that got me thinking. One of the core principles of the book regards flow and mastery. Mastery is something that can only be obtained over a long period of time, and requires thousands of hours of deliberate practice. This type of deliberate practice is somewhat challenging and out of one’s comfort zone, but not beyond the reach of his/her abilities. Such practice is also repeated often with intense focus on improving. Another key aspect of this practice is relevant and timely feedback.

After reading about mastery and deliberate practice, I thought a great deal about what kinds of objectives are worth expending such effort. I want to decide what skills I can master that will serve me best over the course of my lifetime. These are things I want to start deliberately practicing for a few minutes every day. Some things I think would be worth mastering:

1. Writing (including copywriting)
2. Public speaking
3. Easily establishing rapport
4. Reading faces and emotions (for more, see the work of Paul Ekman)
5. Deeply understanding how people make decisions
6. Meditation
7. Critical, insightful thinking with hard problems

For the next few days I will be thinking hard about which skill (or skills) to start working on, and will then work to automate that practice into my daily schedule. I got a lot from Drive, and I think someone in a corporate position would receive even more value from the book.

I recently applied to an incubator program (like Y-Combinator) where I would get a small amount of funding, 4 months, a mentor and office space to further build out the company I started this past year. The application process itself was a learning experience, and I moved on to the interview round which is an exciting opportunity. This opportunity made me think about the incredible chance that my generation has to start companies without requiring tons of money or connections. Over the past month I have started a company for less than $3000, met an incredible team of advisors, several who I initially met via email, and spoken with over 90 representatives of my target market. None of these things could have been done without the internet – it has truly lowered the barriers to starting a company.

I think in general, lowering such barriers is a net positive. That’s what we are trying to do at CloudFab, lower the barriers to producing custom physical products. However, there are also issues that come with these lowered barriers. Today, almost anyone can start a company (or at least test if one is viable) with little money or technical knowledge. Services like WordPress and Hostgator allow people to host websites without needing much of the technical knowledge that was previously required.

Is this a good thing? Overall, I think yes. Unfortunately for many promising startups, I think that with the amount of startups that can and will crop up in the coming years, it will be much harder to get recognized and develop a customer base. I could see StartupLand becoming a lot like the blogging community – tons and tons of blogs, most of them not worth reading, and a few good ones that garner most of the readers and attention. Seriously, just go to any post by a prominent blogger and read some of the comments. Not only are they monstly inane, but click a link going back to each commenter’s blog and you will usually find a poorly written blog about either “changing the world” or “quitting your day job and living the life of your dreams”.

I think with the proliferation of startups, we are also seeing more and more startup imitations. Realistically, how many location-based deal startups can there really be? Outside of Groupon, which has obviously killed it so far, there are at least 3 other companies that I know of who are pursuing the exact same business model – not to mention all the subculture-specific deal sites that have cropped up. For example, I recently got an email asking me to “Like” a University of Pittsburgh deal site. No thank you.

In my opinion, there are only so many deals that people can be hit with from so many sites. For the non-Groupon and LivingSocial sites, the participating business will likely not see a great ROI on their investment (actually, such deals lose them money), and will stop participating. Without the large user base, the imitation startup will fail because it can’t provide for the businesses that allow it to exist. Group buying is not the only area where you see copycat startups – there are tons and tons of new companies trying to capitalize on the trends of local, social, game mechanics, group buying, etc. It makes me wonder how much new, cool stuff could be created by people who have the smarts and the guts to work on forming a new company, but who choose instead to work on a less compelling problem that has already been solved. I loved this article, specifically the following quote: “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,” he says. “That sucks.”

There is a lot of truth to this statement. I can only imagine how much more innovation and good could come from smart, driven individuals who chose to work on hard problems rather than figure out how to increase social media or ad purchases by 0.7%. But because these companies are so easy to form, we will be seeing a lot more of them over the coming years – hopefully not at the expense of innovation.

Edit: This is exactly what I am talking about - http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/mimssbits/26817/