Quora Answers — 2010
1,699 answers written on Quora between 2010 and 2014, during the peak of the Ribbonfarm era. Questions from others; answers entirely by Venkat. 109 substantive answers are indexed here. For a specific answer, use Search or ask vgr_zirp.
- Should the TV Show "The Office" be taught in universities?
Well.... first, thanks :) Second, I admit I myself am a bit of a skeptic here. Most of the people who have resonated strongly with the GP series have liked it because it helped them make sense of the…
- Should a startup be concerned about building its business on an API?
I am not sure 'API' is relevant. This is a business partnering (supply partnerships, channel partnerships for distribution software platform choice etc.) question, and the logic is the same as the que…
- What are some ways to increase the coherence of a collective?
My cynical answer is: find a definition of good vs. bad that most of them believe in, and that key outsiders DON'T believe in, radicalize it a bit, and frame every important objective in terms of that…
- Is there such a thing as "Paternalistic Libertarianism" or is the phrase a contradiction in terms?
I think it is a contradiction in terms. I think the Thaler/Sunstein behavioral economics model in "nudge," which made the idea popular, is deeply flawed. It has all the problems of centralized plannin…
- What's your dream kitchen?
I go back and forth between nomadic minimalism (just a good knife and a frying pan in a backpack) and settled minimalism. Realistically though, a settled-minimalist kitchen, but not in a backpack, is…
- What is the best way to get Borders and Barnes and Noble to carry a self-published book?
The big retail chains are a terrible channel for self-publishers. Simply not worth the marketing effort to even get on the shelves. You should instead optimize for Amazon. Try Aaron Shepherd's "Aiming…
- What, if any, is the golden amount of traffic to on a website to start - #1 bring a profit, #2 seeing ROI?
I think this question is badly mis-framed. You need to just think in terms of revenue generators for your site, put them in, keep experimenting and tweaking, and at some point, if there is value and y…
- Are any startups hiring non-technical business positions anymore, or is everyone just going to build products and hope a business happens?
My interpretation is different. The demand for good business people is actually higher than engineers, but the reason you don't see it in the explicitly-defined job market is that truly good business …
- What stops Washington, DC from becoming a startup hub?
I've been in the area 2 years, and of the reasons people have mentioned, I'd say that the two biggest reasons are low spatial density and lack of an anchor institution (generalizing from 'company'). …
- How can iStrategyLabs build a better DC and world?
I have to disagree with Zvi (and therefore with what you guys might actually do, Peter). It is time to acknowledge that the Y-combinator model has become a victim of its own success by spreading reso…
- Is the "idea vs execution" paradigm being challenged by all these incubators?
Marc Andreessen explains it best in this article+video: http://trailmeme.com/walk/The_Ul... To paraphrase, he says that what is important is evidence of ability to think things through. Investors as…
- Can an entrepreneur create his own destiny or is it the VC who draws the path for him?
John Greathouse has provided the idealist answer, which is great for keeping yourself motivated. It also helps to maintain a much more pragmatic view alive in parallel: it is entirely a situational s…
- What are the best ways to prioritize a list of product features?
I'll add one note here: good people with a bad process will outperform bad people with a good process every time. While the processes and heuristics people have offered are all good (and I've used mo…
- How much of the aggregate technological progress of mankind has been achieved during the last century?
I think you mean Kenya and Tanzania, not Ethiopia, but never mind that. Your question has a hidden assumption that technology is an objective kind of "progress" in the sense of evolving in a specific…
- If I want to be an entrepreneur later, should I now work for a large company or a startup?
I think it doesn't matter where you are/how you start. I learned by having my first job at a startup (on a 1 year CPT stint btw, so yeah, you can weave things into the path to green cards/citizenship)…
- How do you gauge communication skills in an interview?
I find it far more useful to think in terms of thinking skills rather than comm. skills, but there are things to look out for that suggest a sophisticated communicator (which always arises from sophis…
- What are effective interview questions to ask candidates for a research role?
All interviewing in research roles tends to be based on a) a 1 hour seminar given by the candidate b) current people talking to the person 1:1 in conversations that usually sound more like peer-to-pee…
- In the United States, are the rich paying enough taxes?
There are more actual facts here than the polarized left/right leaning answers suggest. Look at this excellent 2002 piece by Krugman in the NYT. http://bit.ly/dS7gEt Short answer: yes, they pay too …
- You're a product manager and product is set to launch on Tuesday. On Monday a competitor launches a better product at lower price. How do you respond?
Fascinating question. And I have to admit I mostly disagree with Cindy's answer. I have been in this situation once, and we ended up delaying by several months. As Jason and Tao Tao note, it depends …
- Startups in 2011: What will be the next big thing after Facebook and Twitter?
The people who are offering the Zen-like answer ("the big thing that can be predicted is not the real big thing, it does not have true buddha-nature") are being a little too skeptical. Historically, t…
- Can a man's destiny have varying degrees of entropy (number of ways something can arrange itself)?
The idea of entropy absolutely can apply to human lives and destinies. You've got it backwards though: entropy increases through a human life. A simple and visible example is facial wrinkles. Young pe…
- What is the foundational story of Western civilization?
The basic universalist Grand Narrative (GN) of course, goes something like this: 1. In the beginning there were Greece and Rome which raised humans above the barbarism of the decadent near eastern "p…
- Is the following/follower model the new standard of social connection?
Symmetrical and asymmetrical models derive from fundamentally different parts of very basic human psychology. Symmetric is primarily about trust, cooperation, socialization and belonging. Asymmetric i…
- How can academics increase the visibility of their research?
The big problem in research is that the main"visibility" tactics only really work after you've already established some visibility. Chicken and egg. So you can divide tactics into "consolidate your …
- Which company or companies are in need of a rebrand/shake up the most? How and why?
People are conflating rebranding, repositioning and strategic business model changes (the big brother of "pivot" for startups). Lots of healthy, but growth-limited companies could benefit from a rebr…
- Why does U.S. society cling to the suburban model despite its inefficiency, unsustainability, and many social ills?
Why on earth do you think people want to do efficient, sustainable, social-good things? Most people don't make life choices based on those variables. They are at best garnishes applied later, to creat…
- What percentage of the book industry is dominated by eBooks (Kindle, iPad editions, etc.) as opposed to the share of printed?
This may help http://www.teleread.com/paul-bib... In addition to the excellent answers by Chris Jensen and Julito Varela, I'll add a couple of points: Amazon is only one channel, but it is definite…
- Am I an elitist to think that most people are stupid? I worked to put myself through school, became an entrepreneur, and I’m happily married, fit, and healthy. I tell people my “secret” is commitment and hard work, but they just want shortcuts.
I am going to bet that not as many people ask you "what's your secret?" as you would like. A few probably do. But more do not. Especially people you wish would ask you. You are puzzled. Your life lo…
- Is social responsibility on the way to becoming fashionable in the general Western population?
Difficult question. I think it always has been fashionable, but you see more socially responsible behavior as you present people with clearer feedback on the social/moral consequences of their actio…
- Is it troubling that skin lightening products are becoming fashionable among Indian women?
"Are becoming"? The only thing new in the last decade is that foreign manufacturers are jumping into the market, and that more people now have the means and avenues for upward mobility, and increased …
- Who should Google hire as its "Head of Social" and what would/should they do exactly?
I think the job description shows that Google has still not truly understood the "social" challenge. Though I respect some of the candidate names that have been thrown up, this is actually a job for…
- Assuming the 2-person company is angel funded and the product hasn't launched, how many hours should a co-founder be working a day?
If you are both techies, doing development, I don't know what to say. If you are both biz guys, can I come over and look at the strange pink giraffes? :) If you are the biz guy, and he's the tech gu…
- How do you decide whether or not to go forward on a business idea?
Never evaluate a business idea in isolation. Always use 5-8 other ideas, even if you only intend to pursue 1. Your own, not benchmarks. Objectivity is not helpful in the exercise I am going to suggest…
- Why don't big companies innovate more?
Big topic. Huge topic. Shelves-loads of books. In general, you are right. Big companies cannot innovate well in the way you are implying ("disruptive"), though there are important exceptions (they can…
- What's the best way to manage MVP user expectations and why?
If you can only show them something in 4-6 months, what exactly have you gotten out the door as an MVP? Is it one of those landing page+email sign up MVPs? In that case, just send ONE email to the sig…
- What goes into a product mission statement?
I agree 75% with Jake Holman. A positioning statement is exactly that, and is the more practical importance of the two. In lean startup terms, it is your basic PMF hypothesis. It is a very practical,…
- Are Design Thinking and Six Sigma mutually exclusive?
Six Sigma led to Lean Six Sigma, which lead to Design for Lean Six Sigma (DfLSS). There is an exploratory component to DfLSS called DMEDI, that perhaps comes closest to open-ended, creative design thi…
- Why is there such a short supply of designers in Silicon Valley?
I am surprised people haven't really separated out "design" into better defined subcategories. The scarcity is not evenly spread across all of them. I distinguish 3 levels in the design stack. The sc…
- How should I structure a doctoral thesis on business strategy?
"Structure follows strategy" -- Alfred Chandler This is easily the most famous quote in the history of strategy. So you are asking a self-referential question :). There are no good definitions of "st…
- How viable is the academic peer review system today?
The main problem is that it is just too damn slow and archaic. The arXiv model in physics is kinda the jury-rigged version of what it should be. Of the 5 journal papers I published before giving …
- Is China to blame for America's economic woes?
It's an embrace of mutually-assured destruction (MAD) in an economic sense (the term MAD was first used for the cold war, with ref to nukes). Others have outlined the elements of the MAD scheme (trea…
- How should one deal with a coworker who consistently waits until the last minute to ask for things?
This is not enough information to answer the question. The necessary tactics are very different depending on lots of missing situational details. 1. WHY does he wait? The Friday pattern suggests a sp…
- How do you know what you don't know you don't know?
Let's call 'em UU's (unknown-unknowns). Here's a breakdown: 1. Continuous UUs: things you find if you get to the boundary of your current knowledge. A literal example is spatial knowledge. As you wan…
- Which movies feature exceptional character development?
Juno has some of the best character development I've seen in recent times. The character arcs of Jason Reitman and Jennifer Garner are exceptionally well done. The movie has you believing initially th…
- What makes it hard to give and get honest feedback in many organizations?
The conflict of interest created by the cooperation/competition structure of a corporation (or any organization) is the reason. That's one reason you can be surprisingly open with a random stranger yo…
- How will the rise of print-on-demand services affect our opinions of books that are self-published, particularly in academia?
Academic book publishing has been in deep trouble for longer than regular book publishing, since it was always a game of very small volumes. So paradoxically, it actually has much less to fear, and a …
- What is it that directs the attention?
The question can be answered at a prosaic neuroscientific level that skirts the question of consciousness (i.e. attention as an executive function in the neocortex), and at a philosophy of mind level.…
- Does the difference between "alpha" and "beta" behavior depend on gender? Why do we speak of alpha/beta males/females instead of just people?
I am not 100% sure, but I think there are both matriarchies and patriarchies among anthropoid species. Beyond apes, you definitely have both. Elephant society is matriarchal. So too, I believe, is cam…
- How do you teach a non-designer to effectively critique a design?
I haven't used it myself yet, but I really like the concept behind "collage" techniques. Give users pen/paper to draw what they want, or take the existing elements of your design and make 'em cut out …
- I'm about to quit my job to learn to program. What should I do?
Wow! 25 and 100k. Impressive, if you earned it. For starters, take 3 months off, wander around, drift, go to Jakarta, etc. Re: programming: you don't know if you are going to like it enough to put …
- Is there a business model which will support intelligent investigative journalism, or will the future just be about leaks from government like Wikileaks?
This is a huge topic in journalism today. It's almost the only topic. A special feature of the decline of old media has been that it is this "core" activity that got hollowed out first. The only viabl…
- What are some examples of tech startups that cleverly solved the chicken and egg problem?
Pretty much EVERY startup that is not solving an obvious problem with a customer already signed-on, is solving a chicken and egg problem. The chicken is the customer, the egg is the product. 1. Build…
- How do web startups solve the chicken and egg problem of having initial content before a public launch, if the web app is based entirely on user generated content?
The simplest answer is to pay dedicated content creators to prime the pump. So long as you are transparent about it (via an 'editor' type handle). You COULD do the shyster version (paying 1-2 freelanc…
- In what circumstances or contexts is debate useful?
Kinda tangential, but Stefan King made a nice trail covering this. http://trailmeme.com/trails/How_... See the debating related items near the top right. Complicated topic, but one of the simplest/…
- How important is it for a prototype used to pitch investors be fully functional versus a page-to-page HTML click-through simulating functionality?
For first-timers, I suspect the answer is always "prototype" and I think the reason is a very subtle one: a team can "gel" only through repeated full-cycle product iterations (concept, development, de…
- How do I discern a great technical co-founder from an average one for a web 2.0 project?
Let me tell you a story from when I was first employee at a startup long ago. The founders were a husband and wife couple, and the husband had gradually built up the site over 2 years of evening/weeke…
- Is leading a company towards innovation the same as betting on paradigm shifts?
It will take me some effort to first clean up your rather muddled question before I can answer. I wouldn't have bothered except that one part of your question is very interestingly phrased. You said "…
- Which is the best book for Indian history?
A good, dull and basic starting point to get oriented is "An Advanced History of India" by Majumdar, Raychaudhari and Datta. Historigraphy on the subcontinent is generally very weak, so external sour…
- What are good laymen physics books to read after A Brief History of Time?
The Superstring theory debates are very interesting to catch up on. http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2007/0... Penrose's "Road to Reality" is a magisterial and very fat book at a layman++ level that I hope…
- Are memory and intelligence correlated?
Absolutely. You can't even separate the two in the architecture of the human brain, since the way memories are processed from sensory to short-term to long-term is actually integral to how we think. J…
- What, if any, is the correlation between depression and intelligence?
Quite strong, and well-studied. It's called the "depressive realism" effect: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dep... By this theory, you perceive reality more realistically when depressed, and that make…
- If someone were to want to build a successful competitor to Facebook, what are all the most essential ingredients?
I disagree pretty much completely with the answers so far. Facebook is entrenched, and owns the market position outright, whatever its deficiencies. How many "improved" keyboards have attempted to di…
- Have corporate owned cities or countries existed?
This probably should count as having already happened, and increasingly LESS likely to happen, not more. In the past, there were far fewer controls on corporations and they could officially run armies…
- Why did the roman empire decline?
The answers so far mostly cover the phenomenology of the fall (and I am talking here about Rome proper, not Byzantium). This is rather like noting that at 8:15 PM the patient's liver failed and that a…
- How does classifying oneself as an existential atheist manifest itself on a daily basis?
Existentialism appeals to highly individualist people ("irreducible subjective") who believe that the core of their existence cannot be shared with the collective (hence "existential aloneness"). In …
- Will there ever be a day where new startup ideas are hard to come by due to existing and lasting ideas or will there always be room for more?
The number of ideas need never go down in principle. Human creativity is inexhaustible. But the yield rate may start to go down (i.e. success percentage), with the numbe of viable markets going down. …
- Being a founder of a tech startup , what skills or qualities should I have?
First, non-technical people need to get clear that they ARE in fact non-technical. I was kidding myself on being a "technical" guy simply because I am an engineer (PhD in aerospace engineering) and ha…
- Which industries most depend on things being complicated?
I am going to interpret this as "needlessly complex" as in, there's no physics-level minimum threshold of complexity. So 'rocket science' actually doesn't qualify. There really is no way you can make …
- What does it feel like to be unattractive and desired by none?
The short, impressionistic version of my answer is to refer you to the Thai folktale about a handsome young Buddhist monk who deliberately gained weight to become ugly enough to be allowed to go-monk…
- How come my cleaning lady isn't in better shape?
1. The fat cleaning lady may be the stereotype, but I've met several who were very fit and slim 2. But... as a member of the generally poor class, the answer is probably the same as for the question …
- Which is harder, being poor in America or being middle class in the developing world?
Definitely being poor in America. Especially poor and black. Definitions/metrics may vary but the broad conclusion is the same no matter how you slice and dice. It depends partly on which corner of …
- What does it mean to create value?
I have an incredibly simple necessary and sufficient test for value-addition. If and only if you feel transformed, there has been value addition. Any act of creative-destruction will transform you p…
- What is a good replacement for the “del.icio.us” bookmarks service?
Late to the party here, but if you want a power-tool upgrade, go with http://trailmeme.com ... it's a service offered by Xerox. I started the project and run it, so I am biased, but it really is the b…
- When trying to generate critical mass for a website, which approach is better? Go for a global audience upfront or target a small niche first, generate hype, then expand?
I think the evidence seems to be in favor of narrow niche first. But there are ambiguities. eBay (possibly apocryphal): Pez dispensersAmazon: books backlistNetflix: the canonical 'long tail' example …
- Is there a difference between a thinker and a pundit?
In the original Indian sense of the word, "pundit" (which is spelled pandit in India these days) refers to a priest specializing in religious rituals, who is typically hired for everything from corona…
- Why does Venkatesh Rao
As Hang commented, I run a mailing list called "Be Slightly Evil" (http://beslightlyevil.com ), so the tag-line is a bit of personal branding and advertising. But that's effect, not cause. I guess I…
- What connections can be drawn between systems thinking and Eastern thought?
I wouldn't say the connection is with Eastern thought. The popular idea that Western thought is reductionist while Eastern thought is holistic is a fairly dumb and self-serving one championed by a few…
- How do you communicate your design solutions to developers and convince them that it might be the right solution?
It is almost structurally impossible for this to happen in a team that follows an agile model like scrum, since the whole system is designed around user stories, wireframes/mockups created by UX peopl…
- Does Trailmeme feel like a startup?
Only to the extent that we've consciously tried to adopt a startup culture. So maybe 50-70%. Blind adoption/championing of startup ideas is a recipe for being (justifiably) ignored and sidelined as a…
- What does it feel like to be poor?
Lucretia is probably right that the true third-world poor never get close to a computer. But their lives may not be as unstable as her speculation suggests. "Portfolios of the Poor" provides a pretty…
- What consumer technologies started in the military?
Microwave ovens came out of radio researchGPS as Ryan already mentionedJet engines (and therefore most modern air travel)Arguably, all of computing (Turing and his team cracking the Enigma code, targe…
- What is a day in the life of a Product Manager like?
Scott's answer is excellent and covers the functional aspects. Let me try and translate that into a richer description of a "typical day" and important kinds of "non typical" days. The substance is ba…
- What’s wrong with OpenID? Why hasn’t it taken over the world?
Yishan has a pretty extreme indictment. Several valid issues there, but I don't agree on 2 fronts: that there isn't a real problem, and that OpenID is valueless. First front. There IS a problem. I do…
- How does Pearltrees compare to Trailmeme?
Francois is mistaken. We had been internally testing Trailmeme for months before we first heard of Pearltrees. The project launched in Xerox in December 2007, and actually started life as a WordPress …
- What are some good examples of emotional intelligence?
My favorite symptom is a controlled sense of humor. Both people who turn everything into a joke and people who never laugh are seriously low on EI. This includes comedians in their non-performance par…
- How do people transition away from an attitude of personal powerlessness and defeatism?
Read the literature on the concept of "learned helplessness" ... there is some self-help lit on the idea too, but most of the formal results have to do with animal behavior. But humans basically exhib…
- What are some contemporary status symbols in the Western world?
I'll stick to status symbols of the product variety. Services are too complex to analyze and segue into lifestyles and therefore into a discussion of "status" proper, rather than the symbols thereof. …
- How do you manage distributed teams? What methodologies do you use? What tools?
This is a huge topic, and hundreds of people weigh in every day with thoughts ranging from book-length to tweet-sized. I have read far too much of it. For a long time I took the topic seriously and l…
- Why do so many young adults live with their parents these days in the United States?
I believe it is the last 30 years that has been anomalous, not the current trend. Home ownership has not been as universal at any other time or place in history. For the privileged few in the rest of …
- Is it defensible for Yelp to construct a review filtering algorithm upon the assumption that reviews written by more prolific reviewers are more reliable? To the degree that reviews written by one-time reviewers may be suppressed.
So this would be an open invitation to people to game the system by simply writing a lot of reviews? (this is the sort of pattern that would get quickly spotted and shared). Seems like if I had an age…
- Why do self-help books sell so well, if they mostly don't work?
Instant gratification, ability to forget concerns for a while, feel pumped up, feel good about yourself and the people you are with. That's what alcohol and drugs do for you. Sorry. I meant self-hel…
- What are the most important mathematical theorems?
My top dozen candidates that are relatively easy for non-mathematicians to understand (this would probably change if I thought about it more... and this is in no particular order): The Central Limit …
- What are the most common misconceptions about marketing?
The word is nothing BUT misconceptions and I almost think it should be retired. It is a bloated and far-too-big umbrella term covering too much territory. On one border, it looks indistinguishable f…
- How is the word curator being used or abused to describe the aggregation of content in social networks?
There are two source metaphors to think about: museum curators and grounds curators (people who maintain paths and trails, or gardens). In both cases, somebody is putting a lot of intelligence into …
- I'm an enterprising new college graduate. Should I move to China? Is that where the action is going to be in my lifetime?
According to Kaplan's "Monsoon," (excellent read; just finished), Asia as a whole has Africa (East Africa in particular) as its equivalent to the American West in the 1800s. If you want the Wild West …
- How can a designer work around corporate brand standards?
There are a few ways to do this. Almost none of them is something a "designer" should take on. All of them require skill and understanding of marketing, not design, so if you want to do this, make sur…
- Why do I still turn to books to learn something in the age of the Internet?
I think Aaron and Sam may have misunderstood the question. I don't believe this is about format (physical manifestation), but form (the kind of content). Real answer: the medium is the message. Bo…
- Why do people share?
For a narrower, but revealing look at the current surge in sharing 2.0 ideas, try the recent book on collaborative consumption, "What's Mine is Yours" http://www.collaborativeconsumpt... This relate…
- I am in the midst of starting a digital media agency. How do I find new clients?
Proactively do free work for people who need it, by way of introduction. I have had readers on my blog who have been so annoyed by my bad design they've gone out of their way to send me free designs f…
- Why do people who haven't started their own company call themselves entrepreneurs?
The skeptics are right. About 80% of those who use the term are not entrepreneurial at all, but looking for the cachet. It is now another resume-builder buzz-word like "systems thinker" and "goal-orie…
- Stovetop espresso makers - to clean or not?
I've been using a Bialetti for years now, and I only rinse. But I am rather sloppy about it, usually not emptying the grounds and rinsing until the next time I make coffee, which means grounds often s…
- Why are tech-bloggers so bent on discrediting Google Buzz, while overlooking bigger social flops like Apple's Ping?
The criticism is completely justified, and the comparison with things like Ping is meaningless. One simple reason: "social" is central to the future of Google according to its own visions, and Buzz w…
- What are the linkages between the ways humans construct narrative and the structure (physical and/or cognitive) of the human brain?
Our memory processes appear to be narrative-based at a basic level. See Medina's "Brain Rules." But beyond that, you'll have better luck looking for a connection at a cognitive science level than a n…
- Are Bollywood movies intentionally campy?
Your overall question is too complex to answer on Quora, but I'll respond to the example of the "Golimaar" video. In that case, the camp factor is unintended. Believe it. Any evident humor is just ord…
- Is it possible to create a general system simulator, if so how?
As others have pointed out, at one level this question is about Universal Turing machines. So that answer is probably unsatisfying. Can you do something a little narrower that is not a UTM? Since you…
- Is the layout of sections in a bookstore random or is there a method for deciding which sections go where?
Heck no, it is very far from random. The approach is a special application of general retail layout practices, which you can learn about in Paco Underhill's classic "Why We Buy." I highly recommend re…
- What is an easy step by step process for creating a brand voice?
I kinda disagree strongly with the current trend towards "authenticity" and "be yourself." I think it is a meaningless fad that doesn't really work except for truly personal brands, like a blog or a o…
- When will publishers decide to stop printing books?
The right cutoff point is when printed books become collectors' fads, like LPs today. The fad market will likely be less than 1% of the size of the current market. I think this will happen by approxi…
- Is it detrimental to admit you're an atheist? Why?
Yes. But not for the reasons you might be thinking of. It is not the risk of offending strongly religious people that matters. They go around offending each other all the time anyway, way more than a…