Ramkumar's Log

I am constantly torn between the heroes of the east — who are heroes for their ability to see things as they really are — and the heroes of the west — who are heroes for their ability to see things that are not but that should be, and then to build them. One is mainly about accepting, the other is mainly about rejecting and creating. Being from the U.S., it is natural for me to have the second kind of heroes, even as I see the wisdom of the first. But whenever I try to behave like an eastern hero, it always feels like posing, wasting time, or giving up.

It’s incredible how many people have proposed to me that I do all the work and get as much as 20% of the company. I enjoy listening to these business types as they tell me about their business plan and how the website should work (because they’re masters of UI design). If I could somehow turn each of these pitches into $0.01 I would already be a millionaire. I enjoy it when people ask me to utilize a skill I spent 10 years perfecting, that I earn a top 10% income at, for free. I love it when they offer me 5-20% of the company I’ll end up building.

That guy has too much spare time” is one of the most odious, intellectually dishonest, dismissive things a person can say. It disguises a vicious ad-hominem attack as a lighthearted verbal shrug. The subtext of the remark is that the subject’s passions — this remark is almost always directed at someone engaged in some labor of love — are so meritless that their specific shortcomings don’t even warrant discussion.

Google likes to take jabs at Apple’s closed iPhone system, as Google exec Vic Gundotra did at Google’s I/O developer conference this spring. But that’s just a rhetorical sideshow. Mobile openness is the tool of the outsider, not the incumbent. Google is now registering some 200,000 Android handsets every day. Phone-to-phone, Android is now outselling the iPhone. Google doesn’t need openness anymore.