We're in the process of moving data from 106miles.net to PandaWhale.com.

This was complicated by our unexpected but welcome coverage in AllThingsD.

From now on, please start new convos on PandaWhale.com instead of here.

Moving is so much fun! :)

One of the more interesting things about the redesign is the shift from "ALL SPACE"...

At what is currently the common space of "All Convos" will now be the stash of the user 106 Miles.

Each of the authors who has started a Convo here will also have those Convos in their own stashes as well.

In essence, the 106 Miles user will have stashed those Convos from the original authors.

And all current users of 106miles.net will be following the 106 Miles stash.

If we've done our job right, it will be easy to understand this when we all migrate...

Hello citizens of PandaWhale Nation! Next week we're planning on rolling out the new version of PandaWhale.

Here are some major changes to expect...

1. NEW WEBSITE: PANDAWHALE.COM

We're ready to have all activity hosted on PandaWhale, so we're doing the REVERSE of white label: all user accounts will automagically be migrated to pandawhale.com ...

We'll set up redirecting so if you type in a 106miles.net address in your Web browser, you'll land in the right place.

The 106miles.net site you've come to know and love will have a new life as the user 106miles on pandawhale.com ...

2. PANDAWHALE WILL BE ABOUT STASHES WITH CONVERSATING, INSTEAD OF CONVOS WITH STASHING.

We launched the first version of PandaWhale last May, and in 10 months we've noticed a lot more people giving props and stashing things, than making comments.

So we're redesigning the user experience to reflect that.

3. PANDAWHALE WILL LET US STASH AND TALK ABOUT ANYTHING OF INTEREST.

For the last year we've started with a small community of several thousand people, around a single interest: Startups and Entrepreneurship.

The new PandaWhale will allow us to stash and talk about anything we want, and (optionally) organize those stashes by interest.

This is going to be fun.

4. PANDAWHALE WILL NO LONGER BE INVITE-ONLY.

Anyone with a Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn account will be able to use OAuth to create a PandaWhale account.

We've eagerly awaited the day we could be open to all. It's so exciting!

Any questions? :)

GREAT find! I love an article that starts with this...

In 1969, Ted Turner wanted to buy a television station. He was thirty years old. He had inherited a billboard business from his father, which was doing well. But he was bored, and television seemed exciting. "He knew absolutely nothing about it," one of Turner's many biographers, Christian Williams, writes in "Lead, Follow or Get Out of the Way" (1981). "It would be fun to risk everything he had built, scare the hell out of everybody, and get back in the front seat of the roller coaster."

...and just gets better from there.

MUST STASH !!!

I'm loving the article Break Bad Habits By Developing an If-Then Plan:

Most habits are loops that we automatically repeat: a cue or trigger in our environment sets off our routine and the reward we get from the habit. Once we recognize this loop, we can develop a plan to change it. Here's how.

See also: Lifehacker, How to Break Bad Habits.

From http://twitter.com/the99percent/status/168140950063951873

I found a book entitled, How to Be Amazing at Anything. It only had single page inside & was just one word long: “Practice.” -James Shelley

Author unknown:

Take chances, take a lot of them. Because honestly, no matter where you end up and with whom, it always ends up just the way it should be. Your mistakes make you who hyou are. You learn and grow with each choice you make. Everything is worth it. Say how you feel, always. Be you, and be okay with it.

Get enough sleep. Then, get up early:

When I interview creatives, I often ask them what advice they would give to the next generation, the up-and-comers. Curiously, there’s one incredibly important habit that nearly all of them possess that is almost never mentioned. So what is the secret ingredient in their productivity regime? It’s simple: They get up early.

...

If you’re getting up early, you probably already have a good idea of what you want to accomplish that day – otherwise it would be hard to motivate to get up in the first place. Being an early riser also indicates a natural affinity for ritual and discipline – both key traits of especially productive people.

Here’s none other than Ernest Hemingway on the merits of getting up early:

When I am working on a book or story I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write… You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and you know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again. You have started at six in the morning, say, and may go on until noon or be through before that. When you stop you are as empty, and at the same time never empty but filling, as when you have made love to someone you love. Nothing can hurt you, nothing can happen, nothing means anything until the next day when you do it again. It is the wait until the next day that is hard to get through.

See also: Do the most important thing first in the morning.

And: If you need to sleep, sleep. If you code, code.

Great article, and he makes some great points.

Interest graph is even more important now than when we wrote that article.

See also: Is the interest graph social?

The one-step guide to productivity: Get up early.

http://the99percent.com/tips/6954/The-1-Step-Plan-for-Super-Productivity

I like this so much, I'm making it its own thread.

A day after I wrote this TechCrunch published an eloquent article with the same message and more examples: http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/18/seize-your-opportunities-like-jeremy-lin/

This morning Joyce and I were discussing how Jeremy Lin, someone who couldn't even get a college basketball team to recruit him, has become one of the hottest stars of the NBA.

So I went back and watched a video of a day in the life of Jeremy Lin that he made in November 2011, during the NBA strike when he wasn't even sure he was going to be let back into the NBA. (As it turns out, he got waived by not one but two teams before the New York Knicks optioned him.)

He works hard EVERY DAY: gets up at the crack of dawn, eats a ridiculous amount of eggs and protein, and works hard till he drops.

But the thing is, he was working hard every day even before he got an opportunity in early February when several Knicks starters couldn't play.

He was ready to seize the opportunity and he recognized the opportunity when it came available so he could seize it.

He is the living embodiment of this mantra:

You have to prepare yourself to maximize the opportunities that come your way. Prepare, recognize, execute, and be grateful.

And I bet, now that he's succeeding, he's living exactly the same way.

Before enlightenment: Chop wood, carry water.

After enlightenment: Chop wood, carry water.

Isn't that why we say luck is preparedness meets opportunity?

Which is why I keep #pinning Lin.

The money quote:

"We have a hundred ideas and no execution yet."

Alrighty then.

Are you wasting time thinking of a great name for your product or company?

Don't.

Lots of great companies / products started with silly names (eBay, Google) or generic names (Microsoft, Facebook).

Repeat after me: It's NOT all in a name.

Are you stuck on finding the perfect name or branding for your startup?  I have really been circling around this problem, driving myself crazy for the past couple of weeks, waking up in the middle of the night with AHA moments, only to discard the castoffs of my sleepy brain once viewed in the cold morning light.

And then, this morning, I saw a story in HBR about Angie’s List. 

ANGIE’S. LIST.

1.5 million (paying) subscribers. 40,000 reviews every month.

And the worst possible company name ever.

Names are nothing. Product is everything.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Get enough sleep, and prioritize it over any other task.

Gretchen Rubin just published Seven Tips For Getting Yourself To Go To Bed On Time.

My personal favorite is #3:

Stay away from the internet for at least an hour before your bedtime. Television, too, but I think the Internet is even more apt to make me feel artificially wide awake. I used to try to go through my emails one last time before bed, to get a jump on the morning, but I realized that this stimulating activity made it much harder to go to sleep.

No coding. If you need to sleep, SLEEP.

No iPhoning.

No Facebook or Twitter or Tumblr. And DEFINITELY no Pinterest.

Instead, create a bedtime ritual and do it at the same time every night.

I love this line from Grantland's Person of Interest: Jeremy Lin:

Basketball is at its best when five guys who love to play with one another outhustle and outplay a more talented opponent.

It's why March Madness still remains a viable institution, despite a gulf of talent separating college ball from the pros. It's why every basketball movie follows the same storyline — some cute cartoons are outmatched by some cartoon aliens. They use teamwork to make the dream work.

The Linsanity Knicks run hard, play unselfishly, chest-bump, and play with a swagger that has nothing to do with the other team.

Sounds like a good rule of thumb for anyone working in a tiny startup.

I, for one, hope Linsanity continues.

And now, they're nomming Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion.

That New York Times article mentions some of Google's acquisitions. The 5 biggest:

— DoubleClick Inc. (2008). Google bought the provider of online advertising services for $3.2 billion to help it provide more dynamic, multimedia ads besides the short text links that appear next to its search results.

— YouTube Inc. (2006). Google's $1.76 billion acquisition of the online video sharing site turned out to be a good bet. The site once known mainly for pirated material and home videos of kittens has become an entertainment destination on the Internet.

— AdMob Inc. (2010). Google paid $681 million in stock to buy this mobile advertising service provider in a move to push ahead in this fast-growing market.

— ITA Software Inc. (2011). The $676 million purchase of this airline fare tracker helped Google muscle into the online travel market, though it had to make big concessions in order to clear regulatory hurdles.

— Postini Inc. (2007). Google bought the email security company for $546 million to beef up the security and storage products it offers to businesses.

Note that there are many companies Google has acquired for amounts it does not have to disclose.

What strikes me most is that the big acquisitions for Google are still few and far between.

Which makes this Motorola acquisition a Big Deal.

Bigger than all their other acquisitions combined.

I love the Business Insider article 11 Dumb Moves That Should Have Cost Mark Zuckerberg His $25 Billion Fortune.

My favorite anecdote comes at the end and is about Steve Jobs:

Even the most successful geniuses have bad ideas and get lucky!

Steve Jobs, for example, didn't want third-party apps on the iPhone.

Woops!

He was talked out of this stance, to everyone's benefit.

The rest of the article is about 11 screw-ups that could have ruined Facebook, but didn't.

No startup is free from screw-ups, so it's best to be resilient.

Thank you, Steve Jobs.

I enjoyed this part of The 10 rules of a Zen programmer:

Kodo Sawaki says: if you need to sleep, sleep. Don’t plan your software when you try to sleep. Just sleep. If you code, code. Don’t dream away – code. If you are so tired that you cannot program, sleep.

I like the concept of Zen programming, too:

Focus. Keep your mind clean. Beginner's mind. And so on.

From Forbes' The Seven Habits of Spectacularly Unsuccessful CEOs Hall of Shame:

Isn’t it a good thing that the CEOs think they and their companies can “dominate” their competitors? Isn’t self-confidence and the desire to run through walls — like an excited football team before a game — a good thing?

Well, Finkelstein’s research showed that – in small doses – all of these 7 habits were positive things. However, they all become negatives when taken to extremes. You never want self-confidence to cross the rubicon and become self-delusion. The best leaders always have a clear sense of reality as it is today, even though they might be trying to move towards a different vision for the organization’s future.

The CEOs who fail at Habit 1 have a ‘King Midas Complex.’ They think that anything they touch will turn to go. They believe they can succeed in any business that they enter – no matter if they or the company have any relevant experience in it. They believe that they’ve been successful before and can do it again – no matter the industry. Signs of this habit are when a company over-expands – usually through doing too many acquisitions that they can’t digest.

Yeah, don't do that. Leave enough in the ecosystem for other players, please.

Read more.

I love that she learned to code through Learn Python the Hard Way.

David Ogilvy was one of the original "Mad Men".

I love these 10 Tips on Writing from The Unpublished David Ogilvy:

The better you write, the higher you go in Ogilvy & Mather. People who think well, write well.

Woolly minded people write woolly memos, woolly letters and woolly speeches.

Good writing is not a natural gift. You have to learn to write well. Here are 10 hints:

1. Read the Roman-Raphaelson book on writing. Read it three times.

2. Write the way you talk. Naturally.

3. Use short words, short sentences and short paragraphs.

4. Never use jargon words like reconceptualize, demassification, attitudinally, judgmentally. They are hallmarks of a pretentious ass.

5. Never write more than two pages on any subject.

6. Check your quotations.

7. Never send a letter or a memo on the day you write it. Read it aloud the next morning — and then edit it.

8. If it is something important, get a colleague to improve it.

9. Before you send your letter or your memo, make sure it is crystal clear what you want the recipient to do.

10. If you want ACTION, don’t write. Go and tell the guy what you want.

David

For more, I encourage you to read the Brain Pickings article.

Thank you Desiree Niemann for this idea. Original thread: http://www.facebook.com/desiree.niemann/posts/729107101862

When you have to make a hard decision, flip a coin.

Why?

Because when that coin is in the air, you suddenly know what you're hoping for.

From Motivational Jiu-Jitsu: Staying Positive in the Face of Negativity & Indifference:

I have a simple activity that I do to identify the problem areas, and think about how I can counteract them. Start by drawing a simple diagram: Place yourself at the center of the diagram (you don't have to be an artist, a stick figure is fine). Now, around your picture, draw the people that you deal with regularly: your boss, your clients, your coworkers, your friends and family. Add anyone who provides you with feedback or should be providing you feedback. For example, if your boss is overloaded with her own work and rarely has time for you, put her in the diagram.

The more demanding your job is, the more likely it is that you are having to field negative criticism on a regular basis.

Make sure that one of these "people" is your Inner Critic, since each of us is continually providing ourselves with feedback. You should also add your Work Environment, since a good work environment provides you with positive feedback and an unpleasant work environment provides you with constant negative feedback.

The article goes on to explain how to eliminate negative feedback. I think it's worth a read.

Reading time: 3 minutes.

Thank you for sharing this.

Here's the money quote:

Let’s say you were…a college student who’s on Facebook in the first year, and they wanted to fund their servers. You could own a little piece of a product you really like, and Facebook could have raised up to $2 million under my bill, and they could have done it [as] $1 from 2 million people across the country. That is a way to open this up and let the crowds determine the products we’re going to support and the companies we’re going to support.

This legislation, if passed, decouples angel investment from seed-stage startups.

Fascinating implications.

On the other hand, many an open-source project got its legitimacy because a startup had a need. :)

Is it fair to say that Founder CEOs tend to be Vision-driven and Professional CEOs tend to be Consensus-driven?

And then Startup Bus gave the opposite advice. :)

Here's the money paragraph for me:

Smaller companies not only bred more entrepreneurs, but also bred more successful business owners — with some caveats. For financial performance, the larger the previous employer, the lower the entrepreneurial income. However, if the entrepreneur was a sole proprietor and had only himself on the payroll, the previous employer size had no effect.

If you want to start a company, work for a small company.

And work hard to understand all aspects of starting and running a business.

A simple lesson I keep needing to learn as an entrepreneur is The importance of sleep in a startup.

Leo Widrich writes:

A discovery that took me quite a while to understand is that your productivity doesn’t come in hours. It comes with the energy you have every day. A great book that Joel made me aware of  titled The Power Of Full Engagement, puts it this way:

“Managing energy, not time, is the key to high performance and personal renewal.”

I am sure you have realized this before: you can complete tasks that can take you hours if you are tired, in minutes if you are fresh and fully focused.

Embracing the single idea, that there is a set of highly important tasks you need to get done, not a number of hours in the day, you need to be working, is what can make all the difference.

Amen. Also, this is right on:

Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. ~ Cyril Parkinson

Hallelujah!

I will reread this line from Bakadeusuyo... Sleep loss means mind loss.

...until I can make good sleeping a habit. Memo to self: Get enough sleep.

Another thought about Mark Zuckerberg's letter in Facebook's S-1.

The day after the filing, Zuckerberg published this photo on his Timeline:

Stay focused and keep shipping.

The slogan was so good that TechCrunch wrote an article about it.

So then a humble Puerto Rican entrepreneur made the posters for his Puerto Rican startup community because he was inspired by them.

The entrepreneur was then savaged by a Facebook designer for stealing -- and selling -- them.

(Aside: Who knew that Facebook was one to cast stones about making money off someone else's design?)

Then the Facebook designer apologized and Creative Commons Attribution licensed the Facebook slogan posters.

Take your pick:

• Done is better than perfect.
• Fortune favors the bold.
• Move fast and break things.
• Proceed and be bold.
• Stay focused and keep shipping.
• What would you do if you weren't afraid?

I sure as heck hope Facebook is licensing the DESIGN not the SLOGAN. Otherwise they'll have to sue Virgil for "fortune favors the bold".

I like Done is better than perfect the best...