Recent content on Adam Smith
I think of everyone as having a property: How strongly they state their opinions, divided by how right they actually are. 
 There are four common buckets. 
 People with high ratios are overconfident . They always pound the table, even when they’re wrong. 
 Those with low ratios are underconfident . They rarely speak up. 
 Midlevel-confident people speak up, but never with either…
The standard narrative of the entrepreneurial career looks something like this: 
 
 Like all fairy tale narratives, this arc is an oversimplification. Here is a more accurate map: 
 
 It can be hard to think about the big picture while you’re in the midst of building a startup. After all, that first graphic is so much simpler than the second one. Startup life is…
Let’s say you have a deadly illness, and a cure is on its way but not close enough. 
 The science fiction of the past would suggest a world where people freeze their bodies to near absolute zero, only to be restored when a cure is at hand. 
 There are many biological problems with cryogenic “life extension”. For example, water expands when it freezes. 
 The much…
Life is full of new situations, and when faced with one, how do you respond? 
 Most engineers, myself included, have spent time learning mental models that can be used to explain, predict, and reason about these new situations. Every time you learn about a new psychological bias, for example, you’re learning a new mental model that can help you reason. 
 This approach has been best…
Imagine you wanted to run your own fork of Bitcoin, for example as part of a next-generation Bittorrent protocol that discouraged freeriding. 
 Is there any way to do this while taking advantage of the high hashrate (and thus security) of the Bitcoin network? 
 It seems so. Imagine you start your own sub-economy with 1 Bitcoin. Because transaction histories are a matter of public record,…
So you’d like to go to burning man? Awesome! 
 Burning man is one of my favorite things I’ve ever done. What follows is a take on what I would tell anyone coming with me to burning man for the first time. 
 There are many different ways to go to burning man. This is just how I do it. 
 
### Getting a ticket
 It’s best if you can get a ticket straight…
I predict that e-book readers of the future will use smooth scrolling instead of page turning. 
 Page turning requires you to reach the end of a text area, decide you have to perform a UI gesture, perform that gesture, wait for the device to respond, and then find the beginning of the new text. Smooth scrolling uses a continuous interaction style that helps you keep your place on the page, and…
You build a storage router. 
 Given a piece of customer data you want to store, replicate it 2x, and store half a copy's worth across four different raw storage providers. For example, Rackspace gets one half a copy, as does SoftLayer, GoGrid, and Storm on Demand. Keep in mind that you're buying raw storage from each of these guys, not redudant storage. Each provider is just selling you hard…
When I was at MIT all computer science majors were required to take a class called 6.001. I had a lot of college credit coming to MIT so I was able to place out of many other requirements, including chemistry, biology, and calculus. I also had a long history of programming experience, so I wanted to skip 6.001. 
 This was impossible, I was told. Nobody had ever done it. 
 In a saga that…
DesktopBootstrap is like Twitter Bootstrap, but for desktop apps. 
 It's the open source project I got to work on over Thanksgiving. 
 If you've ever written a desktop application before, you probably spent several weeks working on the auto update, installer, and logging mechanisms. Hopefully this will make your next one that much easier!
It’s clear that the existing online dating sites are all broken. 
 I thought about working in this startup space for a few months last year, so I wanted to document my thoughts on the subject. 
 I ended up deciding against working in this space for now, but I still find it highly interesting and know that for the right kind of entrepreneur it could be a great place to dig in.
Recruiting more college students into startups is a constant topic of discussion. Just today Fred Wilson mentioned it as one of the critical ingredients for the NYC community. 
 It always strikes me that more undergraduate hackers go to Wall Street than the startup community. 
 Maybe we can do something about it, and that's what I want to explore in this blog post... 
 Y Combinator is…
“A filing system is absolutely essential.” 
 –Randy Pausch, Time Management 
 
 Unfortunately everyone has to deal with some number of physical papers, CDs, and so on. Enter the personal filing system. 
 Most filing systems fail out of the gate because they don’t optimize for insert time. Since starting my filing system two years ago I’ve organized 112 documents, and in those two…
Warning: personal wikis are much less useful today because we all use smartphones, and editing Mediawiki pages through the mobile web is too difficult. I now use my personal wiki to reference older content, and regretfully use Evernote for everything else. Evernote leaves so much to be desired! 
 --- 
 I would start with a story about how bad my memory is, except for the small…
I used to think I would live forever. 
 When you're young, not only is it emotionally comfortable to ignore death, it's also helpful. It makes you plan for the long term. For example, you should get good grades, get a good education, and build good character habits because those things are going to be especially important if you're going to live forever. 
 This bias continues…
God MIT is a great place. 
 Last week I got to speak at a new MIT class, The Founder's Journey . There were 100+ students. Pizza was had. There was a buzz of energy and ideas. 
 We had a lot of fun, and I'm excited that my friend Drew Houston will be speaking there tonight. 
 After the class last week some students invited me back to their dorm, Burton Conner. Beers were…
"I tell you something that is not right out apparent, but it's getting a huge amount of focus within the company - and it is apparel. We are having a lot of sales growth in apparel. (...) Historically clothing has always been a number one mail order category even pre-internet. And we make it really easy for people to try stuff on - by making it easy to return." 
 Jeff Bezos, Charlie Rose…
Call me an optimist, but I think we're about to see a change in how books are written and consumed. 
 There's a ton of data exhaust coming out of electronic book readers describing, most importantly, how much of each book actually gets read. 
 Imagine looking at a book on Amazon and seeing "We predict that you personally will read 5 pages of this book." Or, on the flip side, "You will read…
There's lots of motion in the ocean in the early stage investing world. TechCrunch has a write-up on the companies that presented at Y Combinator's demo day yesterday. I had several of my own thoughts. 
 
 
 
 Quality 
 
 The average company quality is up. A much greater fraction of these companies will be singles or doubles compared to years prior. I'm not sure if there…
It's been six months since I first wrote that 7 out of the 36 most popular websites sent login passwords in the clear, without SSL encryption. This basic weakness means your password can be read by anyone who can see your Internet traffic, for example anyone using the same wireless access point as you. 
 I mentioned that I wanted to bring those seven sites around to having secure logins. This…
My last post about the future of lossless compression algorithms was about cross-file content-aware dedupe. (Hint: this is different from what most people think of as just 'dedupe'.) 
 Part 2 is about lossless compression algorithms and systems that support incremental addition and removal operations. 
 For example, in NTFS, probably the most popular file system in the world, if I turn…
First, yes – there is such a thing as next gen lossless data compression. 
 Here’s one for starters: cross-file content-aware dedup for images and video. 
 Take a JPEG image, compress it with your favorite lossless compression algorithm, say BZip2 or LZMA, and you’ll get a larger file. Of course that makes sense, as JPEG itself is written to be compressed out of the box.…
I just finished a talk at Web 2.0 Expo titled From Zero to a Million Users with Drew Houston , the founder of Dropbox. It's about what we wish we had known years ago when it comes to growing your user base from 1 to 1M users. We had a lot of fun with it. The slides are below! 
 
 
 From Zero to a Million Users - Dropbox and Xobni lessons learned from Adam Smith
Here’s what you do. 
 Amazon S3 charges money for each gigabyte that you store. You go to their top 50 customers, and tell them: we’ll dedup your data with the other top customers, resulting in overall cost savings. We’ll split those cost savings with you 50/50. 
 You're basically stealing the economies of scale of redundancy elimination from Amazon. 
 You could also get sophisticated…
New technologies often start out serving the high end of the market where quality is more important than price, and over time a new disruptor comes in to serve the lower end of the market. This is a classic part of the innovator’s dilemma . 
 It’s also pretty universally understood that geeks love their Sonos sound systems. These boxes of magic synchronize music playback across speakers…
With Aardvark’s sale to Google last week and StackOverflow’s
 announcement yesterday that they are going to raise VC funding, we close the
first chapter in the Great Q&A Wars of 2009-2014. 
 The major players are now Quora, StackOverflow, and
Hunch. Not to mention incumbents like Yahoo Answers, and likely a bunch of startups that haven't been started yet. Who…
Point and shoot cameras are being displaced by smartphone cameras, mainly because smartphones are more convenient. 
 But that isn't the whole story. In the coming years point and shoots will find themselves under attack from a different angle; software will be easier to write for smartphone cameras, enabling use cases that point and shoots will have to scramble to keep up with. 
 For…
I was having a conversation yesterday with my close friend and roommate Anson Tsai about websites that send user passwords in the clear. This only matters, in theory, if there's a man in the middle who can read your traffic. 
 So it was a huge coincidence that China was accused today of coordinating sophisticated cyberattacks in an attempt to access the GMail accounts of some Chinese human…
This post could also be called “Why it might become civil
disobedience to serve up random data.” 
 You’ll see why in a bit! Also, this
post requires a basic understanding of XOR and how a one-time pad works. 
 If I serve up Lady GaGa’s latest MP3, I’ll get a takedown
notice for copyright violation. 
 What if a friend and I served up bits that, when XOR’ed
together,…
Hello folks! This is the final part to the four part hiring series. Parts one, two, and three are here , here , and here . As the final part to this series, I want to close us out with a quick thought and links to other great startup hiring reading! 
 My closing thought is that there are different styles to everything, and your mileage may vary. There's more than one way to skin a cat.…
This is part three of my series on hiring. The first part covered finding great candidates. The second part covered interviewing. So once you've found someone you'd like to recruit, how do you pull them in? 
 Recruiting 
 This is where you switch from "we're hiring" to "we're recruiting" mode. There's no longer any doubt about whether you want the person or not. Your goal is to…
The guys behind the MIT Startup Bootcamp have finished posting all of the day's talks online. They were nice enough to invite me to share my experiences and lessons learned starting Xobni at this event. 
 Overall I thought the talk went pretty well. The first half was slower paced than I would have liked. My favorite part were the questions! Maybe next time I'll just build the whole thing…
I was at a conference last weekend with a lot of non-tech entrepreneurs. It can be refreshing to get outside the valley and into a pool with different kinds of fish. It was a lot of fun. 
 My favorite question to ask new people was: How did you get into your business? 
 Now, these guys do things like importing soy sauce and related goods from Asia, or designing and manufacturing green…
In part 1 of this series we talked about how to find people who might be rockstars. So how can you tell if someone is going to knock balls out of the park for you and your team? 
 Hard to say. :) 
 Here's the process we take a candidate through when hiring. Some of what I'm going to say is particular to interviewing developers, which is what I have the most experience with. Most…

 Nothing matters more to your success than the skill and determination of your team. So, how do you find and recruit these folks who will make you incredibly successful? 
 First, what experience have I had hiring and building teams? Moderate. I've directly hired about twenty folks and have been involved with but not responsible for hiring about ten or fifteen others. I've found…

 I was at MIT for a few days last week for the MIT Startup Bootcamp. One thing I love about MIT entrepreneurs is how scrappy and motivated they are. Compared to the iconic facebook chasing social media west coast entrepreneurs, these guys are Rocky Balboas. They stay in the game when others would have given up, and they tackle substantive problems. 
 MIT graduates still come out…
Now, I am no public speaker. In 2007 I got a chance to say some words at Startup School along with several other Y Combinator founders. My voice was cracking and I spoke at ten thousand words a second I was so nervous. Which is why I was excited to give a talk to eight hundred people at this last weekend’s MIT Startup Bootcamp . This was a chance to redeem myself. I’ve been taking acting classes…
I got an email yesterday about some MIT students from my fraternity creating a balloon for $150 with no custom electronics that took pictures from 80,000 ft in the air. Here's one of their photos. See their website for more. Technology can be so much fun!!!
In defiance of California state law, when I hear a new jam on my car radio I pull out my IPhone, launch Shazam, and use it to "tag" the song. Then I scroll down, press "Share This Tag," type in my email address, and return my eyes to the road. Any number of days/weeks later, I download the mp3 and have it added to my collection. This ain't bad, really. Five years ago I had to remember a lyric or…
A friend recently wrote and asked for opinions about a web site idea he had. The idea was "yelp meets international backpackers" - reviews for restaurants, places to stay, etc. The tripadvisor for post college travelers. I thought I'd share my reactions, just for fun. Guessing and dreaming is always a kick! Howdy, 
 Rock on dude! I've always been curious about the backpacker traveling industry…
Lucky moms have offspring with computer skillz. These gifted kids often grow up to become adults. When they do grow up they often use tools like VNC, copilot.com, or logmein.com to remote control their parent's PC when they get the distress calls about, as Joel Spolsky says , half grey screens. It seems mistaken that remote PC support tools are used almost exclusively by either (a) IT help desks…
The other day I submitted my recent blog post, Steve Ballmer, International Security, and Us Little Folk , to Hacker News. It got one upvote and one comment: I found absolutely no point in the article. Confused. Ouch! ...but actually true. So I added a preamble to the post: "Just a snip of consciousness.." and learned that a stream of consciousness might work on Twitter but not on a blog. Indeed,…
Polish is often the difference between success and failure when getting stuff done. Literally, this is one of the top ten reasons ideas fail. Products Polish is why PostScript lost to Adobe PDF. Postscript had an eleven year head start on PDF, not to mention it's free and open source. Try to use it, though, and you'll end up on the command line and downloading extra programs that are GUI wrappers.…
I was thinking this morning about blogs and the pictures adorn their home pages. They must reflect what's important to the authors, I suspected. 
 I started going through them in my head.... 
 Me: I climb in trees and enjoy nature. (truth: I do enjoy nature but not often enough!) 
 Fred Wilson: I enjoy my family. 
 Jeff Atwood: This is a silly blog!
It was the first week of my first semester at MIT. At the time every class was full of excitement from the pass/fail grading, new friends, and fresh love interests. I went to my political science class, American Foreign Policy, and this one was no different. I spotted the cute girl from my dorm and took a seat. 
 The brilliant aprofessor, Stephen Van Evera, started talking about political…
Pop quiz time! Sharpen your pencils and put on those reading glasses. 
 1. Would you rather have... A. A company that has 1.5 million active users B. A company that has 110 million active C. Two million dollars 
 Smells like a trick question, doesn't it? 
 In this case (A) is Salesforce, a company with 1.5 million users, all of whom are paying about $60 per month. They're a public…
Good products make a philosophically positive difference. 
 Good products mean, by definition, giving people what they want. 
 For example: Now you can talk to your grandparents, who are a hundred miles away, IN REAL TIME! Now you can see a picture to help you relive the moment with your niece was born. And so on. 
 Should you care about giving people what they want?…
Hi, I'm Adam Smith, a computer hacker, entrepreneur, and the author of this blog. 
 I'm the founder of a great startup called Xobni . Xobni is the word 'inbox' spelled backwards. We make email software that makes it easier for people to manage relationships and find information in their email. Our product has received a lot of attention from the tech community, including people like Bill…
(This blog entry is based on a long comment I posted recently on Hacker News.) 
 Last week Xobni announced that we’ve added the Blackberry Fund to our series B financing. 
 We also released a new version of our software alongside that announcement. The release got less attention because there aren’t any user visible features. 
 Truth be told, though, we invested about a…
Host software services. This is a pretty big deal for entrepreneurs looking for business opportunities. Let’s look at some examples. 
 LogMeIn, which filed to go public in 2008 is basically VNC with a web only client side and central servers that will facilitate NAT traversal across firewalls. Various VNC developers had written software to do this but nobody was willing to maintain the…