The Fat Doctor Problem

A few weeks ago, I took an Uber from my apartment to a friend’s place in the Mission. On the way I was making small-talk with my driver. We started talking about his recent divorce and how it’s impacting his finances and his mental health. I felt bad for the guy. He started giving me […]

Evolution and AI

I just finished reading Ishmael, one of the more thought-provoking books I’ve read in months. At one point in the book, during their discussions about evolution and man’s “creation myth”, Ishmael tells the main character a story: This story (Ishmael said) takes place half a billion years ago—an inconceivably long time ago, when this planet would […]

Why Feeling Like a Failure Is a Good Thing

Have you ever tried doing something you aren’t good at? Worse, have you ever really really wanted to be good at something, and yet when you tried you just couldn’t get it? Say you wanted to learn a dance, or tried to hit that high note from “I Believe in a Thing Called Love.” And yet, you just… […]

Munger, Money and Achieving Your Goals

From this transcription of a talk by Charlie Munger: And the one thing that all those winning betters in the whole history of people who’ve beaten the pari-mutuel system have is quite simple. They bet very seldom. It’s not given to human beings to have such talent that they can just know everything about everything […]

2013 Goals – How Did I Do?

Sometime in February of 2013, I decided (inspired by my buddy Scott Britton) to write down and publish my goals for 2013. Though it was a great year in a lot of ways, I didn’t accomplish much of what I thought I wanted at the start of 2013 (original list of 2013 goals here). Goals […]

Replaceability vs. Impact, or Deciding What To Do With Your Life

For anyone, choosing what to do with your life is a stressful guessing game. With hard work and some luck comes no shortage of great opportunities. And, with opportunity, many tough choices. By way of example, let’s take a standard tough decision: what to do after graduating college. Let’s say you have two job offers, […]

Mom, Welcome to San Francisco

“Thanks for visiting mom and dad!” My parents had traveled all the way from Philadelphia to visit me in San Francisco. I was excited. They don’t travel often, so this was my chance to show them how cool the city was. They’re also pretty conservative, so my role for the weekend would be part tour […]

The Benefits of Freemium that Nobody Talks About

There’s a war of opinions going on in the B2B software world, and one side is winning. The war is over one fundamental question – how should I price my product or service? No doubt, pricing is an incredibly nuanced and complex topic. I wrote a rather simplistic piece as a thought experiment, and had […]

What the Non-Technical Need to Know About Tech

For 3 years I’ve been trying to learn programming. And every year, I’ve deepened my understanding of how the web works. Learning the basics of software development and how the web works at a high level hasn’t been easy. The best learning experience has been to dive in. I’ve learned so much in the past year […]

How to Choose a Startup Idea

I’m tweaking this older post as part of Startup Edition, a community I recently joined. This week’s edition asks “how do you turn your idea into a company?” After reading this fantastic post I started thinking about how startup will jump into an idea they’re excited about. The problem is, many of them make the leap without […]

Justin Mares

Thoughts on startups, marketing and life