Uncategorized

“Service as a Software”

2 Comments

As an investor, I’ve run across a species of startup — and sometimes even more than startup — that acts as if it were a technology-powered platform of one sort or another, but is in fact a group of staffers frantically updating, tweaking, massaging, typing in commands, etc. behind the scenes.

I’ve started calling this kind of a company “service as a software”.

There’s some reason to do so.  SaaS companies are famous for having revenue leverage; once you’ve signed up subscribers (and provided they don’t churn) your revenues from them recur without any new cost or effort on your part.

Service-as-a-software companies are just the opposite: you never get out of the customer-acquisition cost, because keeping customers going requires labor power every step of the way.  Instead of recurring revenue, these businesses have “recurring CAC”.

Write in with your favorite examples of “service-as-software”…

Lifehacking

Thinking about Zeal

I read an article in WSJ this morning using Facebook data to show that gym attendance drops off 10% at the beginning of February.  “Oh, yeah”, you say to yourself, “New Years’ resolutions gone sour.”

But what’s going on here?

I’ve been coasting through January on my fitness goals — 185 lbs, 120/80 blood pressure, and 22% body fat — effortlessly (well, more or less) doing my diet stuff and my exercise stuff.

Is that “will power”?  I don’t think so.  I think it’s zeal.

I’ve been through this a lot over the years: some behavior change, either starting up a good habit or ending a bad one, is unbelievably difficult, day after day, year after year, attempt after attempt.  Until, suddenly, one day, I’m… ready.  And once I’m ready, the change is easy.

What’s changed?  Something happens.  In the case of smoking (which I quit years and years ago), it was the birth of my son.  Not my first child.  And I had struggled to quit after my first was born, without success.  But suddenly, I had reached some tipping point, and it was easy.  I did the same things I had done before — the Nicorette, the rewards, the toleration of overeating, the whole bag of tricks — but now it was effortless.  I would (probably!) have done the same thing if I were living with a smoker.  My zeal had kicked in.

A few questions:

What is zeal?  No idea.  Some kind of limbic-system switch flips to the other position.  Kind of like falling asleep.  or maybe falling in love.

Can you command it?  No idea.  Maybe.  My best guess today is you’ve got to keep trying and simply recognize when the zeal has come.  If you keep trying, your bag of tricks will be ready when the zeal is ready for you.  But maybe there are things you can do to hasten or enhance the probability of getting zeal.

Lifehacking

OK, well, New Years 2015

New Years resolutions have about the same status in the circles I move in as chiropractic: “Yeah, that stuff doesn’t work.”

But I love them.  For the same reason I like self-improvement and the 7 Habits and everything else: there’s wisdom in there.

I have an essay I’ve never finished about why intellectuals hate self-help… Some New Years I’ll finish it.

In any case, I’ve gotten pretty good mileage out of resolutions at the beginning of January and assessment at the end of December.

And so here I am in 2015, re-beginning blogging (part of a couple of resolutions) and, in January, trying to cobble together a new fitness regime.

I’m a big fan of “Younger Next Year” and what Chris Crowley, the main author, has come to call the “Younger Next Year” books.  I read the latest, “Thinner This Year”, over the holidays.  And it contained, to my surprise and pleasure, a better routine for warm-ups and strength exercises.

Chris C. has my number: his new routine is aimed at strength training done wrong.  He claims — and it makes some sense — that doing the right exercises wrong makes you worse, that form (and the mother of all form, posture) is quite important to fitness.

So I’m trying, first the warm-ups, and then the strength moves themselves, over the month of January.

I’ll keep you posted.

Uncategorized

My Talk at MakerCon

I’m giving a talk at MakerCon on 5/13.

Tech-savvy DIY Enthusiasts Innovative Projects and Ideas

The topic is “A Strategy for Getting QS Apps to Interoperate”.

Ok.  It’s not the best title.  It used to be even worse: “Disruptive Standards as a tool to facilitate data interoperability in the quantified self app ecosystem”.  Longer than the 20 minutes of the talk…

But it’s an interesting idea, or at least I think so.

It drafts off a thought I blogged about in this post some years ago.  Gist of the argument is that a certain kind of standard — which I call “disruptive”, after Clay Christensen’s “disruptive technologies” meme — actually aid in ecosystem coalescence.  The standards need to be not-too-strict, but strict-enough.

I’m a big Quantified Self junkie, and it seems like an ecosystem in need of assistance coalescing, so I wanted to workshop my ideas with (hopefully) sympatico minds in the room.

Room 202/203, 3:30 PM PDT

If you’re around and so minded, please join me.

CrummyCook, Uncategorized

Cauliflower, Swiss Chard, and Chicken Soup

I’ve shared my conclusions about dieting, right?  I can benefit from diets, but only by picking a new diet gimmick every six months or so.

It makes sense: the motor of a diet is your zeal, and zeal, let’s face it, wears out over time.  Nothing to re-hone that zeal like a new gimmick: “the 3 don’ts”, “the seven heavenly foods,” whatever.

Latest gimmick: Happy Body diet and workout, the brainchild of a Silicon Valley couple.  Props to an old friend Kem Smith for letting me know about it.

The diet part of it calls for two big meals and three small snacks a day, spaced out at three-hour intervals.  All are supposed to be “balanced” and “wholesome” (although, perversely, Clif bars are considered a balanced and wholesome snack, and perhaps they are).  The meals feature protein and vegetables for satiety, minimizing cereal-style carbs and certainly “refined” carbs.

All a long preamble to last night’s Crummy Sortie, a soup made with cubed chicken breast, cauliflower, and chard.

Sorry, no picture.

Very simple, kind of tasty, Happy Body Adherent.

Criticism/Self-Criticism

None.  It came out fine, but mainly due to few moving parts.

Oh, and I was the only eater.  Debbie out of town again.

CrummyCook, Uncategorized

Trying Out Something New on CrummyCook

I’m working with a startup who is trying to enable tipping on blogs as a monetary way of saying “thank you” for content that you’ve enjoyed.

I’ve put a sample TipJar on my site, which will appear (once you have signed up) next to each post.  If you like what you’ve read, just hit the TipJar button and you will be encouraged to leave a small token of your esteem.

Nothing will appear for a little bit while I test to make sure it kinda works, and then I’ll put out instructions about how to do it.

We could be changing Internet history (in a modest way!) together.

CrummyCook, Uncategorized

Corn Custard with Chorizo and Mushrooms

With Debbie late coming home from work and probably stressed, I sat and watched the chicken chorizo sausages I had had her leave out of the fridge that morning, and wondered what the h**l I would do with them.  Talk about having to eat your words.

We had had a week of chili, sausage and pasta, and other sausage and bean vehicles, but it seemed as if all the chorizo recipes involved either pasta or legumes.  Sigh.

Then I found this one.  In Epicurious, of course.  And, as it happened, we had mushrooms.  And Debbie loves corn.

Corn Custard with Chorizo and Mushrooms recipe

Above is their picture of it.

Sadly, I didn’t have quite enough mushrooms (and I could believe the quantities they were asking for).  And the chorizo didn’t get quite crispy enough, and didn’t seem to fill the baking dish.

We had a tasty dinner, but not spectacular.  Too corny, if you know what I mean.  Or too custardy.  Not enough savory oomph.

20140123_202401

Here’s mine.  You can just see the yellow-ness of the filling, as opposed to the savory darkness of theirs.

Anyhow, a noble pitching-in.  Reasonably tasty.

Criticism/Self-Criticism:

Follow the recipe the first time

Respect the proportions.

CrummyCook, Uncategorized

Osso Buco (again)

Had the yen to slow cook something on Saturday, and Debbie signed up to eat Osso Buco if I made it.

(It turns out that a lot of those slow-cooking things squeam her out.  Like oxtail stew, or even lamb shanks.  I was surprised.  I guess you can know someone for a long time and still find out things about them.)

Debbie loves Marcella Hazan, so I found this recipe for osso buco online.

Only thing is it calls for 2 hours cooking, and I wanted to put it in the slow cooker for like 6 hours.  After some dithering and fretting, I did just that.

It turned out fine.  The meat was tender and falling off the bone.  The marrow was satisfactory (and, because of squeam, I got Debbie’s marrow as well).

Criticism/Self-Criticism: I was afraid to brown the shanks too long and burn the pot/use up the oil.  You can’t brown stuff too long.

Uncategorized

“Pharaoh’s Magicians” and the Business Case Presentation

My last entry was about a character you run across in the business-case pitch setting: Dr. No.

“Pharaoh’s Magicians” are another beast in the menagerie.

Most of us know the story of the Exodus, where Moses led the Hebrew slaves to freedom in the Promised Land.  Great story.

But when Moses first pitched liberation to Pharaoh, he tried to impress Pharaoh with his technology.  He threw down his staff and his staff turned into a snake.

Pharaoh turned to his house magicians, and they said, “Oh, that’s nothing.  We can do that.  In fact we already have.”  And they threw down their staves, which also turned into snakes.

That’s the enemy: an in-house group who not only can do what you can, but have done it already or could do so in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.

What Pharaoh in our business world wants to entrust a new project to an untested outsider when the in-house crew, whose warts, after all, one knows, says they can do the same thing?

That is the basic pitch of Pharaoh’s Magicians: better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.

Unfortunately, it might not be true.  The devil you know may well be worse than the devil you don’t, particularly if the situation calls for agility, nimbleness, or speed.  The in-house magic shop absorbs quite a bit of resources and has a long latency.  Just think of the application backlog in your IT organization.

The Bible tells us the proper response to Pharaoh’s Magicians: Moses’ snake ate the magicians’ snakes.

Best thing: a key benefit that the business organization needs which can only be delivered by your stuff.

CrummyCook, Uncategorized

Glazed Sea Scallops with Wilted Napa Cabbage Slaw

The genesis of this one: one old(er) head of Napa Cabbage languishing in the hydrator drawer + a lamb recipe that required overnight marination.

Solution: get some fish from Black Salt and do something quick with the Napa Cabbage.

The result?  Asian-oid scallops on top of a Napa Cabbage-based slaw from recipe here.

20131114_201323

You can make out the scallops on the slaw here, although I apologize for the shoddy production values.  Some day I’ll learn how to shoot Food Porn.  Definitely on the Bucket List.

I liked it pretty well; I think Debbie was working and didn’t even taste it much.

Oh well.

Benefit from my 35 years of tech industry experience