Tor Nørretranders

A beautifully spare summation of Reboot by Trine-Marie Kristensen:

[from Jaiku]

Post reboot / / / people are streams (Tor) and connections are about flow (Stowe) and products are people too (Webb) .

Tor Nørretranders opening presentation was one of the standouts of Reboot, for me. The line “Sex is the origin of all that is noble” rang like a bell in my head for hours later, and since he kicked off in the main hall on Thursday, it was a perfect bookend for my presentation Friday first thing on the same stage. I am bad at note taking these days, but my friend Lars Plougmann created a mindmap of Tor’s presentation:

.

Stephanie Booth took some notes of my talk (although she disagrees with some of my arguments), here. I will try to create a longish post around my slides tomorrow. (Today it is sunny in Copenhagen, and I intend to go rambling.)

Lars Plougmann also did a mind map of my talk:

Like Trine-Marie, I also thought Matt Webb’s talk was great: we need to think about products — not just AI-inspired software, but all sorts of things in the world — like people if we want to design things better. The way we interact with them should be increasingly like a conversation, not just our fingers jabbing at buttons. His examples were inspired, as usual. And the perfect touch of not being too serious: he consulted the I Ching when he was stumped about how to complete the talk, a few days prior to the conference, so he included the guidance of the Oracle in his talk!

I also enjoyed Leisa Reichelt, Alexander Kjerulf, Stephanie Booth, Håkon Wium Lie, Robert Paterson, Kars Affrink, Marius Watz, and Marko Ahtisaari. The micro presentations were really fun, although the conversion from Powerpoint to Keynote screwed up my fonts. Still, people liked my “Entrepreneurialitis” micropresentation.

The life outside the talks is what makes Reboot so great, and I can’t even begin to try to characterize that, except the Dopplr Users meeting, which was a little more formal.

/Work: Entrepreneurialitis and Start-Up Fever

Working with a client recently, an executive said something along these lines:

We don’t need to do the right thing, because we can do the wrong thing really well.

This has got to be one of the most dangerous sorts of thinking in start-ups, which I believe are all psychological reactions to stress, leading to ‘entrepreneurialitis’. Here’s others that I worry about whenever I hear them:

1. We don’t need to do the right thing, because we can do the wrong thing really well. [means: we don’t have to adapt to the world, the world will have to adapt to us.]
2. Yes, that feature is important, but we’ll put it into a later release. [means: I don’t want to decide what’s important, so we will defer.]
3. We don’t need to test the business model: it’s obvious! [means: I don’t know how to test the business model.]
4. We don’t need to bring in outside experts, and we don’t have time to assimilate that many viewpoints, anyway. [We know everything, and who the hell are you, wise guy?]
5. People believe that building successful applications is hard, but it’s easy if you just [fill in pet obsession here]. [means: it better be simple, because that’s all I am prepared for.]
6. I know what to do: God told me. [This actually happened to me, I am not kidding.]

These range from the mildly out of touch to the paranoid and delusional, but they all are dangerous. Anything short of painful openness to the complexities and subtleties of building successful apps, any retreat from trying to learn from others successes and failures, can lead to complacency, insider thinking, convergent mindsets, and eventually doom for the company. I plan a long post on ‘start-up fever’ — where the team gets so infected with the ‘get it out the door meme’ that they lose all perspective about the other things that need to be done, so that anything that might slow release is branded as evil.

But can start small, with one baby step into nutty thinking, and then, a few months later, somehow your whole project drifted off the rails into la-la-land.