I recommend looking into Privacy as Contextual Integrity. Privacy is not about control. It's about appropriateness of information flows, not about private and public spaces.
If you're interested please read Nissenbaum's book on Privacy in Context.
I think the advice to slow down, take a break, refocus is key to figuring things out, however, not everyone can afford to do so. It's a risk, and there is always a trade off. So I wouldn't frame the article as a guide, because it's different for everyone.
So start saving. This was actually my biggest takeaway from the article. The couple had more than 6 months of living costs stashed away, which I think is a very good idea.
Hi Michael, is it a good idea to apply to YC to find quality co-founders? or in other words what is the right way for a single founder to apply? thanks.
Follow up: What would be the fastest, most efficient way for someone highly technically proficient to learn just enough business operations/basic 101 stuff to be functional?
Speaking as a solo technical founder: I think at this early a stage the most important non-tech thing is to understand your users, and optimizing your funnel so as to get as many users as possible in the fastest, most optimal rate.
Your #1 risk is you have a definite product in mind and will try to find the market for it instead the other way around. This is likely to kill your startup. If you avoid this, the operational biz stuff you can pick up along the way.
Feel free to email me (see profile) if you'd like to go in depth re this.
The judge, Henry Morgan: "hacking is much more prevalent now than it was even nine years ago. Now, it seems unreasonable to think that a computer connected to the Web is immune from invasion."
Vernor Vinge envisioned such future in his science fiction (for now) novel Rainbows End :)
"The UCSD Library conflict actually grows directly out of the other aspect of the book of interest to e-book fans: the digitization of the contents of the library. In the timeframe of the book (sometime in the 2020s, apparently), physical books’ intrinsic value has declined to the point where the books themselves are considered much less valuable than their contents.
So, to get at the contents, a company is destroying the books themselves—feeding them through a shredder then blowing the shreds through a tunnel lined with high-resolution cameras. The cameras capture images of the shreds, then batteries of computers stitch them together into reconstructions of the pages, like jigsaw puzzles. The idea is to gather and collate all the world’s knowledge, to unlock synergies that had been prevented by it all being so inaccessible before." -- Review by teleread http://www.teleread.com/chris-meadows/review-rainbows-end/
Vinge's description of that project seems to be rather directly inspired by Google's book scanning project -- in which universities were involved (including Vinge citing, as the motivation for the fictional project, a paraphrase of Google's corporate mission statement.)
This is really great, I think. At least, I admire the motivation behind it as it was outlined by Sam.
However, it seems, YC Research started by bringing in accomplished and well-known academics in the field. I wonder whether it would've been more appropriate to focus on providing PhD Scholarship and postdoc fellowship. Though, I understand and somewhat appreciate the motivation behind bring the "top-guns" of research into this, I wonder whether bringing passionate and hungry for knowledge early career researchers could've been a better bet. I am bias on this, but overall think it would be great to diversify the group and level the field -- let the randomness of ideas play its role :) Just my 5c.
If you're interested please read Nissenbaum's book on Privacy in Context.
https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=8862
There is also an active community you can follow: https://twitter.com/privaci_way