Was having dinner with my friend Scott Faber last night and he said something very profound … he has an equation for happiness.

according to Scott:

Happiness = Reality – Expectations

this is prety profound and likely very true.

All stolen
cars and APBs should immediately get entered into a national stolen/APB car
database. These cars are stopped at
border crossings and automatically alerted to meter maids that are giving
parking tickets. 

I have a
friend who had her car stolen and she got four parking tickets sent to her over
a three week span — all within 5 square blocks in

Oakland

. Crazy. 

At some point in the future, you’ll
be able to back-up your brain on a machine and ensure that you never die. Your brain will live on a machine and might
be able to be transferred back to a body. But if you die before this brain back-up technology is developed, you
won’t be around to experience that world or to experience immortality. 

Unless … unless we can recreate you
somehow.

Question: with the thousands of
letters he wrote, could we recreate Thomas Jefferson? Maybe.

Now look at
people that blog often and write lots of emails. Could we recreate them? More likely. Especially bloggers like Danah Boyd that
really inject their personality into their blogs. Even more importantly, save your IMs as they
might really reveal your personality.

So the next
time your spouse/mother/friend gets mad at you for spending all your time in
front of your computer just remind them that this time will potentially extend
your life (or help you live forever).

after having dinner with Sam Harris (and reading his book: End of Faith), i find myself thinking about religion and higher beings.

it is not a common thing to think about … especially for someone that is rational.

it is not rational to believe in God.   there’s not any proof in God.   and I am a highly rational person and engineer.   yet … yet i believe in God.   even though i am well aware it is not rational.

is it because there are so many unexplained things?   is it because i am a product of society and a specific upbringing?   i’m not sure.

but, as i am thinking, there are a lot of things i do that are not rational.    when i am at a restaurant, even if i will not ever be in that restaurant again, i leave a tip (and i tip the cab drivers, bell-boys, coat-check person AFTER i get my coat, etc).   that’s not rational either … but i do it. 

i also believe that most people are inherently good and that people often put others in front of their own self interest.   and this makes the world a better place to be in.   

maybe, even for us super-rational types, there is a side to life that is beyond the rational.   not sure if that means it is supernatural …

so … i sit here in a small struggle.   knowing i strongly believe in a higher being while knowing there is not proof to support my belief.

People often talk about economies of
scale … which essentially means big companies can buy pens cheaper than little
companies. But when is comes to
innovation, large companies rarely use their leverage to their advantage.

Companies like SAP, Microsoft,
Oracle, IBM, and others have amazing distribution channels. But they rarely take full advantage of
them. They rarely invest in upcoming
companies or help promote these companies. But they could.

Let’s look at Microsoft … I’m not
aware of any involvement they have with any of the vertical search engines
(SimplyHired, Oodle, Trulia, Become, etc.) why? With a little involvement
they could help catapult a good company into a great company. They could provide strong distribution
through MSN, the desktop, and channels. MSFT could evaluate the market, finds what it feels are the companies
with the best people and best technology, and then really focus on helping the
start-up grow.

I know this sounds a little
pie-in-the-sky (ok .. it sounds a lot
pie-in-the-sky). But companies like
Yahoo and eBay (and potentially Google) are making it work. They are investing strategically in firms
and growing their market cap because of it. What they realize is that as an investor in private companies, a firm
like Yahoo has an unfair advantage (but completely legal advantage) over a
typical venture capital firm. Because
Yahoo immediately has an impact on the value of a company because it has the
engine and the channels to promote it. 

Comcast has one of the most
successful venture groups. Rumor is
that they are doing 50% IRR while investing in companies and technologies that
are strategic to their business. That’s
huge value.

Large companies have had trouble
growing shareholder value. I bet most
of them could get a higher increase in market share from investments then from
its current operations. Be like Yahoo …
if a competitor is going to form to challenge your business (a la Google), at
least make a big investment in it so you make your shareholders a big return …

you know the feeling when you find an extra $20 in your pocket that you did not know that you had?

i love that.

well imagine finding $1000.   that’s what i felt like last saturday night.    i was in Chile and they moved their clocks back an hour.   it was fantastic.   i gained an extra hour.   

in the future i’ll plan all my travels around time changes and maybe end the year plus ten hours 🙂

Here’s a random thought….

Depressed people tend to make those
around them more depressed. Essentially,
being around depressed people is depressing. Happy people don’t like hanging out w depressed people. Happy people tend to disassociate themselves
from complainers. And depressed people
actually enjoy the company of others they can commiserate with one another. This leads to a circle of reinforcing
depressing views and such where depressed people get even more depressed by
virtue of who they hang out with.

Happy people, by contrast, tend to
generally associate themselves with other happy people. And happiness is contagious. So this yields to a virtuous circle of the
happy people getting even happier because of who they choose to hang out with.

U following
my logic???

So … does
that mean we live in two worlds of happy and unhappy people? my guess is that in some ways we do. Pods of people form in various cliques …
some of them around happy and unhappy lines. Now people can transcend these labels – families have their own pods as
well as sports teams (where criteria of the pod is based on something other
than friendship), but often people of relative happiness stick together.  At least this is my theory. And this being so even though happiness is
not based on social economic status (there are a lot of unhappy rich people
too), gender, or race.

The
internet is really increasing standardization. Language is becoming standardized around English and even odd English
acronyms like IMHO and LOL are becoming commonplace.

But I would
have thought that, by now, the U.S. would be closer to adopting the metric system. Here is an area that America is far behind the rest of the world in …

I wrote
five years ago:

why, o’ why, do we still use
inches, feet, miles, pounds, acres, leagues, ounces, Fahrenheit, tons, gallons,
bushels, hogsheads, horsepower, pints, and teaspoons?

I’m still
not sure. but I have a proposal to
Google … help us slowly move to the metric system.

Here’s the
logic:

First —
the old English system of measurements (that even the English don’t use
anymore) is evil. It is incredibly
inefficient and hard to grapple with. So
here is a small proposal on how Google can help rid some of this evil …

Very
simple:

Just
deliver information in both the English system and the metric system. In Google maps (which for American users
displays all distances only in miles) also display distances in
kilometers. If I type in "weather
san Francisco" into Google, also display the results in
Celsius. Etc.

Very
simple. A few small changes could help
the American public slowly acclimate to this "crazy" metric system.

If you are under-40 today and if you are healthy and relatively wealthy, there is a good chance of living past 140.

Maybe even living past 340. that’s a long time. Technology is going to change our lives.

In general, this is a very good thing. One of the biggest miseries about life is death. Death sucks. And if we can prevent it, or postpone it, all the better.

But people getting older will likely have a few unpleasant consequences that we, as a society, are going to have to think about.

how will aging of our decision-makers change our society? Imagine Rupert Murdoch living for another 500 years. He certainly has the money to do it once the technology arrives. In the past, leadership succession in business has yielded new opportunities and innovation. In general, change is good. But imagine a world where the media titans of today are still the media titans of 50 years from now.

Or think about policy making. Older people resist change more than younger. Their views are sometimes less elastic. imagine when George P Bush becomes president in 2033 and he names Don Rumsfeld as his Sec of Defense again … here we’ll see Rumsfeld as Sec of Defense three different times over a period of 60 years.

ok .. i know … far-fetched … but an instructive example to think about how society will be changing in the next few decades …

Every business school should teach a class called “Built to Fail” … or something like that …

Failure is one of the key ingredients of success of american business. Americans like to fail. We probably like to fail more than any other first world culture.

And failure is a good thing … if you never fail, you’re setting your sights too low. Take for example a signle guy looking for dates. If every girl he asks says yes, then his standards are too low and he should aim higher.

In our quest to live forever, most of us exercise. We run, swim, do yoga, ride the bike, and stay in shape. But while we work out our body, we often neglect our mind.

For most people, brain activity peaks in our late-20s and then slowly atrophies from there. We start to have memory loss, our recall goes … having more and more “senior moments.” and because people are living longer, Alzheimer’s is becoming a bigger threat. In fact, if we lived to be 300, we’d all likely get Alzheimer’s Disease. But generally, we die of something else before that.

The best way to slow our brain’s atrophies is to use it. And, like computers, there are two types of ways to use it. The first is inputs and outputs (read/writes). This is the act of storing, understanding, and using information. Of learning. Of remembering. This is useful and this is what most knowledge workers do every day.

But a far more important usage of the brain is processing … when you are actually computing things in your head. When people say “my brain hurts”, that usually means they are doing something right. One of the best ways to prevent mind decay is by using your brain’s processor. Great ways to do this are chess, scrabble, Go, Sudoku, crossword puzzles, and more. And since most of our jobs don’t require us to use our brain’s processor, and little in life requires usage, it is important we put ourselves on a brain exercise regiment.

This is important. While many of us go to the local gym to work out our bodies, few of us go to the local chess hall to work out our minds. But we should.

(this is from a speech I gave to the Atlantik-Brücke German-American Young Leaders conference last week)

We’re here to answer the question … Is the American economy on thin ice?

The answer, of course, is YES. America is on thin ice. And we all know why:

– population is getting older
– there’s have a huge decline in engineers
– There is much more increased world-wide competition – especially from East and Southeast Asia
– A massive real estate bubble
– And America is a debtor nation with big, big debts … and it is really easy to get into debt but really hard to get out of debt. Like my mother used to say … it is very easy to make fish soup out of an aquarium. But it is very hard to make an aquarium out of fish soup …

So … America is on thin ice. No doubt about it.
But … but … at least there is some ice. It’s thin, but if we are verrrry careful, we can slowly walk from one end of the ice rink to the other.

By contrast, that Western European ice rink has melted into a full-fledge community swimming pool. It is tragic, but countries like France, Germany, Italy, Benulux have all the same problems as the United States (older population, decline in engineers, increased competition, big debts) … but only worse. The population problem there is so much worse and the promised benefits are so much higher, that … that unlike most community swimming pools, it is the elderly people and not the kids that are making the water warmer.

So instead of dwelling on the negatives of America being on thin ice … I’m a positive person. I’m going to spend my time today talking about the positives … and I will give you my perspectives, albeit my incredibly biased perspectives, as an entrepreneur in Silicon Valley.

First is population … while America is an aging population, it is actually the least aging of the G10. the U.S. is the only major economic power with a fertility rate able to replace aging workings – about 2.0 kids per woman. As of today, 21% of the population is under 16 years old. And while that might not be high in a historical sense, in today’s world it bodes well for the future.

The second is the immigration melting pot. While America has become much more closed since 9/11, it is still less xenophobic than most countries in Europe or Asia. That’s a huge asset. I have a friend who was born in France and spent his first 25 years there. But he was never treated as “French” because his parents are from Tunisia. He’s lived in Silicon Valley for the past 7 years and he told me that people now see him not as French … or Tunisian … but as an American. And his kids will be utterly American.

But though population and immigration are helpful, entrepreneurship is America’s saving grace.

Unlike some countries where people dream of being a government employee, Americans dream of being an entrepreneur. It used to be that people dreamed of becoming a rock star … but today, even the rock starts want to be entrepreneurs:

50 Cent, P-Diddy, Russell Simmons, LL Cool J and others have all started successful businesses.

Today’s rock stars don’t sing songs, they write software. They are Bill Gates, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Pierre Omidyar, Steve Jobs, Jerry Yang, and Jeff Bezos. And they take risk.

The word “entrepreneur” is actually a French word … but it is now as American as McDonald’s, Levi’s, Microsoft, and Coca-Cola.

The number one reason for the growth in the American economy over the last 20 years is small businesses. Small businesses now account for two-thirds of the private sector jobs, they employ more than half of all workers, and account for more than half the output of the economy. No other mature economy can boast that kind of economic diversity. And white males are actually the minority of small business founders.
Why is this?
One word: failure.
Americans like to fail.

That’s right, Americans love and embrace failure. It is a badge of honor. And Americans love giving people second, third, fourth, fifth, even six chances. Even some of the most successful Presidents, like Harry Truman and the current president, were basically failures until about age 40.

Americans like to fail because we like to take risks. And if you want to take a risk … and if you have a good idea, a business model, and passion … there are thousands of venture capital firms and individual investors that will back you.

I know from personal experience. Right after my 26th birthday, three venture capital firms invested 9 million dollars in my company. No strings attached. We came to an agreement, they got x% of the company, and they wired 9 million dollars into our account.

And this is not rare.

this happens every day in Silicon Valley. Billions of dollars are invested in crazy ideas every year. And most of the companies fail. But a few of them become Google, eBay, Cisco, Genetech, Apple, Yahoo …

There is more venture capital deployed in Silicon Valley than in the rest of the world combined.

And when you embrace risk … you’re essentially embracing innovation. And American
policies are conducive to risk taking. It is easy to fire someone, so you can take a risk, or a chance, on hiring someone. So more people with varied backgrounds are given a shot at employment. It is easy to go into bankruptcy. And the united States has a culture that embraces risk.

Take two ambitious young people – one of them is a McKinsey associate in Paris and the other is a McKinsey associate in San Francisco. Now McKinsey is one of the top consulting firms in the would and if you have a long career there, your expected payout is very high. But what happens if these associates come upon a great business idea. Well … the associate in Paris will likely never leave. Because if he starts a company and it fails, he is going to have a very tough time finding a comparable job because of the stigma of failure. If person in San Francisco started a company, by contrast, she can always get her job back at McKinsey if she fails.

To sum up … America is on thin ice. And it is very, very thin. But American small businesses are constructing a bridge to over the ice … and there might be the potential to go from one side of the ice rink to the other without actually walking on it.