There are two things in this world that take no skill: 1. Spending other people’s money and 2. Dismissing an idea.

Dismissing an idea is so easy because it doesn’t involve any work. You can scoff at it. You can ignore it. You can puff some smoke at it. That’s easy. The hard thing to do is protect it, think about it, let it marinate, explore it, riff on it, and try it. The right idea could start out life as the wrong idea.

A must read...

The last spinoff from my dot.com days at the now defunct incubator, 12 Entrepreneuring, will be shutting down soon. Over the years I've received shareholder notices, typically when looking to restructure stock for new investors. But today I've just received the dead fish wrapped in the paper of the "NOTICE AND REQUEST FOR WRITTEN CONSENT" sent to the stockholders. Even though I never expected to make any money from what little equity I may have had, the letter was very clear: "...under any reasonable scenario, no amounts will be available for distribution to the Company's Stockholders..."

Here is a little time capsule from sfgate.com

Another grave is being dug in the cemetery of Internet incubators, this one for San Francisco's 12 Entrepreneuring.

12 Entrepreneuring was launched at the height of the tech bubble by two marquee dot-com entrepreneurs, Cnet founder Halsey Minor and Eric Greenberg, who started Web consulting firms Scient and Viant.

The duo raised a total of $130 million and at one point valued their company, which was designed to finance startups, at $750 million. Last week, under investor pressure, Minor told employees that 12 Entrepreneuring would shut its doors after funding only three startups, one of which has already failed.

The problem with HTC is not that the industrial design of their phones isn’t new enough. It’s that their phones aren’t good enough. What Apple shows is that if a phone is actually great, it will sell for years.

Adobe has never been a platform company, yet it felt a need to power forward with Flash. I’m sure that early on there was a serious vision of dominating content delivery over the web, but sometime after 2005 — just as HTML5 technologies were emerging, and ironically right around the time of the Macromedia acquisition — it became a burden. Between the money it paid and the money it had since spent, Adobe’s management seemed unable to just let go. MBAs often call this “escalation of commitment”. It’s now 2011, and only the delusional can pretend that things haven’t changed. After today, everyone at Adobe can exhale and right the ship.

Steve and I were talking about children one time, and he said the problem with children is that they carry your heart with them. The exact phrase was, “It’s your heart running around outside your body.” That’s a Steve Jobs quote. He had a level of perception about feelings and emotions that was far beyond anything I’ve met in my entire life. His legacy will last for many years, through people he’s trained and people he’s influenced. But what death means is you can’t call—you can’t call him. It’s a loss. I’ll miss talking to him.

— As told to Jim Aley and Brad Wieners    

iPhone 4S Pre-Orders Top One Million in First 24 Hours

CUPERTINO, California—October 10, 2011—Apple® today announced pre-orders of its iPhone® 4S have topped one million in a single day, surpassing the previous single day pre-order record of 600,000 held by iPhone 4.

But even if the amount of time that each process took was exactly the same, the small batch production approach still would be superior, and for even more counterintuitive reasons. For example, imagine that the letters didn’t fit in the envelopes. With the large- batch approach, we wouldn’t find that out until nearly the end. With small batches, we’d know almost immediately.

The fact of the matter is that too many people think that projects can be run through the interface of stories and feature lists without paying attention to the quality of the software underneath. And, when you don't pay attention to it, it suffers. This, really, is _Joel's Law of Leaky Abstractions_ applied to process. Business wants to see features, and if that abstraction is their only view of the project, they will be blindsided by creeping quality issues. It's nearly inevitable.