Improving Google’s “20% time” policy

Posted on April 22, 2011 | 2 comments

Google’s “20% time” program is not working as well as it should.  I love the idea of giving passionate engineers the opportunity to invent and build, but the policy needs tweaking.  Here is my recommendation:

  1. Engineers can submit projects to the Google management team.
  2. Managers can approve projects.
  3. Approved projects get resources, including engineering time, to achieve their vision.
  4. Google invests 20% of its engineers’ time to these projects.
  5. Managers’ approvals are tracked, plus bonuses for good records.

Why?  Lots of reasons.  Not every engineer should spend 20% of their time on side projects.   Some engineers should be spending 100% of their time on their side projects, others 0%.   Managers who demonstrate years of good decisions form the teams who lead Google into the future.

For Google to maximize the potential of its great teams and ideas, it needs to embrace a more flexible and competitive policy.  This plan turns Google managers into a sort of investment committee, the result will exploit competition and align incentives to optimize performance.

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Posted in Investment, Media, Stocks, Tech

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Black Holes and the Big Bang

Posted on April 11, 2011 | Leave a comment

I’ve been watching Science Channel shows about black holes lately. I know nobody knows the physics beyond the event horizon, including time and space… but doesn’t it seem like an elegant possibility would be that inside a black hole, everything collapses and explodes in a big bang that is entirely contained within the black hole. New time and space, and all the mass and energy in the black hole continue within the sphere of the event horizon. An explosion of the singularity at the center would look from the inside like a big bang, and the curvature of space time might even have edge effects that draw matter back toward the event horizon, causing the accelerating expansion we see in red shift.

It feels like the more we learn about the universe, the more we discover that we have yet to understand.

The scope of physics is so awesome.

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Posted in Just for fun, Personal, Science

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Bullish on POT

Posted on March 29, 2011 | Leave a comment

Potash Corp. of Saskatchewan, Inc. (Ticker:POT)

The run up in the market size for technology over the last 4 decades coincided with the dawn of an Information Age.  We are now in the dawn of a Biological Revolution and Potash is a valuable and constrained ingredient.

If you have 20 or more years to invest, the world economy will look different when you sell than it does today.  As agriculture demand expands to fit an emerging global population that doesn’t starve, production and productivity has to rise.  Potash is the constraining factor.  I expect demand to rise strongly for decades and, because supply is constrained (with what we know now), prices should rise.

With a profit margin at 30% and an operating margin at 38%, they achieve ROE of 28%.  Great numbers for a company with $6billion in revenues.  Their dividend isn’t much to look at, but with quarterly revenue growth of 68% since last year, reinvesting in growth is a good move on their part.

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Posted in Commodities, Economics, Investment, Stocks

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Tsunami dream

Posted on March 12, 2011 | Leave a comment

I finally got some sleep last night. A week of stress and conflict, topped off with a terrible earthquake and tsunami in Japan. In my dream I was in a meeting, talking to friends in a very tall glass tower. I was standing by the wall of windows and looking out over the seacoast skyline. In the distance a big wave forms like a lump in the sea. It is moving toward us. The shore recedes, rolling back into the ocean. My breath stops. My hands on the glass. The wave comes in fast and high. It climbs up, out the of sea and starts to form a crest. I feel like we’re hundreds of feet in the air, but the wave is breaking just beneath us. I don’t feel a thing. The building doesn’t move at all. I watch other buildings wiped away. A mess of lumber and cars and buildings and people floats along as the water continues to push through the city. Small fires ignite and send up little tufts of smoke that must be hundreds of feet across when you get close. I was still. The building was still. Nobody said anything. I woke up. Maybe if I go back to sleep it will be different.

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Posted in Personal, Psychology

Net Neutrality: No Compromise

Posted on January 22, 2011 | 3 comments

To begin talking about Net Neutrality, it helps to clarify what the internet is. It’s simply data sent via TCP/IP (the protocol for sending data through routers). Some people host web sites, others connect to their company e-mail, others do other things – it’s all the internet.

Understanding that the internet is just a connection using TCP/IP, then Net Neutrality is simple, too. Net Neutrality simply means that your ISP may not interfere with the internet. They may not censor your packets (the data that is sent via TCP/IP). This means they can’t censor your news, keep you off of Skype, restrict your sending and receiving, or otherwise interfere with your communications.

Any compromise on this is wrong for two reasons: 1) Your ISP should not have the right to interfere with your free speech, and 2) ISPs should not be able to tax the value creation of the media industry.

ISPs should not be able to interfere with consumer access to media companies, nor tax those companies for access to consumers. ISPs should not be able to interfere with our speech or block our access to the speech of others.

ISPs are in the business of providing internet access, but they don’t own the internet; any attempts to eliminate net neutrality would violate our consumer rights and hurt the economy.

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Posted in Economics, Law, Media, Public Policy, Rights, Tech, The Future

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