When we were kids, we didn’t use online forums, message boards, or FAQs. Yet somehow, every single child knew that if your videogame wasn’t working, you just needed to blow in the cartridge. And it’s not like anybody documented Red Rover or Wall Ball or Groundies/Lava Monster. Kids just talked to each other and figured it out.

Three Cups of Tea is the most inspiring book I have ever read.

It is the true story following Greg Mortenson, a mountaineer who attempts to climb K2. On his way down, he stumbles into a tiny village in Pakistan and vows to return one day to build a school for the children there. He is successful, and is urged by others to continue building schools for underprivileged children across Pakistan. His story is remarkable, and the amount of impact he has managed to bring as one man with audacious goals is astounding.

I felt a personal connection when he told of his experiences in Peshawar. Samasource works with a group of women in Peshawar who have collectively formed the Women’s Digital league, and they are now earning income through the internet. They were previously unable to do meaningful work outside of the home for cultural reasons, but now say that they are earning as much as the men, if not more. I dare not compare my work to Mortenson’s, but it felt great to learn that our goals are very similar.

This book reaffirmed my desire to do good, and I encourage you to find a copy.

I recently experienced two of the most informative and useful meetings of my life. Lloyd Taylor, the former VP of Technical Operations at LinkedIn, and Olana Khan, the former COO of Kiva, graciously donated their time to speak to us about how to organize our technology goals. We had been in the process of formalizing our thoughts for an upcoming board meeting, but their expert feedback allowed us to cement in some much-needed structure. In addition, we also were given invaluable advice about how to lead an effective technology team in general.

Preface – Agile Development

First, I should set the stage by describing our new development process. Because Samasource is a tiny organization with no shortage of exciting new ventures to pursue, we adopted an agile development framework. This idea has gotten a lot of traction, and Eric lead us through the implementation. He actually wrote up a monster post about it on his blog, but I’ll briefly summarize here.

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I recently saw Gogol Bordello perform live for the second time. The first was a year (two years?) ago in San Francisco, and it was the wildest, most exhilarating event I have ever attended. Many concerts have “that one song,” that brings the entire audience together in a fever of enthusiasm to focus entirely on the music and the performance. Gogol Bordello managed to maintain this state for the entire 2 hour show. The rush of being in a huge crowd of people screaming in unison and immersed in the moment, led by the gods of gypsy punk, was indescribable. But enough about last year.

The Oakland show was pretty good. The guys brought us a show as wild and passionate as ever before, so I think the crowd was the missing factor. There was nothing wrong with it per se – A few too many sweaty, angry men in the mosh pit for my tastes but that’s almost unavoidable – so I’m willing to bet that the San Francisco crowd that night was just too good to follow. Everybody in that theater was there to see the band, and loved – lusted, even – the music they performed. That just doesn’t happen every day, and it has earned Gogol Bordello a permanent place in my heart.

Originally posted on the fbFund blog

While a Stanford undergrad, I began my online career with gleeful audacity. The Monday after Facebook Platform launched, my friend and I released Facebook’s original Graffiti application. We were unexperienced and had no viral component, so we soon lost the battle to Mark Kantor et al.’s version. But Graffiti gave us excitement and hunger. The following fall we enrolled in Stanford’s course on Facebook applications, using the opportunity to develop Send Hotness. This time, we nailed the virality. A few advertising payouts later, we were the proud owners of two companies. Doped up on adrenaline, we loved every minute. I stepped down eventually once I remembered that I had schoolwork to do, but I felt sure that this was my path.

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I was pointed to Paul Graham’s post about programmers running on a separate schedule than other people. Programmers run on the “maker’s schedule” and prefer to work in large chunks of time, with units of at least half a day. Others, particularly their bosses, operate on the “manager’s schedule” and have things defined into hour-long chunks. Interactions between the two typically cause friction:

I find one meeting can sometimes affect a whole day. A meeting commonly blows at least half a day, by breaking up a morning or afternoon. But in addition there’s sometimes a cascading effect. If I know the afternoon is going to be broken up, I’m slightly less likely to start something ambitious in the morning. I know this may sound oversensitive, but if you’re a maker, think of your own case. Don’t your spirits rise at the thought of having an entire day free to work, with no appointments at all? Well, that means your spirits are correspondingly depressed when you don’t. And ambitious projects are by definition close to the limits of your capacity. A small decrease in morale is enough to kill them off.

This is bullshit.

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Profoundly moving

By Muriel Barbery, this novel is the story of two hyper-intelligent individuals living among Paris’ high society: Renée Michel, the concierge of the apartment building, and Paloma Josse, the shockingly perceptive 12-year-old. They seem to embody everything that the privileged elite should be but isn’t; the juxtaposition of their wisdom and class against the frivolous and shallow natures of those around them constantly lashes out at the empty finicking of the bourgeois lifestyles.

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Amazingly imaginative

This is the story of Oskar Schell, a young boy who is on a quest around New York City, attempting to solve a mystery left in the wake of his father’s death in the 9/11 attacks. The story is told in the form of narratives, letters, and journal entries from the perspective of three individuals, and their interwoven stories are revealed expertly in parallel. The book works as a scrapbook, with the reader discovering elements from the story appearing on the pages, as though they had been pasted in.

The best part of this book is the people you meet, and the stories they tell. Oskar meets a great number of people around the city, and each offers a delightful kernel of his or her life. Alongside these quick glimpses are stories and asides presented by the major characters, not necessarily relevant but always illuminating. Every anecdote is a gem that begs to be savored, and I often found myself setting down the book so I could digest.

This, I believe, is my absolute favorite book. I recommend it to everybody. Written by Jonathan Safran Foer, I believe it to be far superior to Everything is Illuminated.

Hooray! Along with 18 companies and one other non-profit, Samasource was chosen to participate in fbFund’s incubator program this summer. Check out the full list of winners on VentureBeat or InsideFacebook.

What this means is that we’ll have Palo Alto office space, lots of media attention, an official Facebook seal of approval, and possibly free lunches /crossfingers. The catch?

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Today I ate dinner alone. I think there is nothing wrong with that, but you just don’t see people alone in restaurants all that often (Aren’t you going to be bored? Do you want a magazine or something?). Eating meals, in most cultures everywhere, is regarded as a social activity. I would like to explore why, and have a few hypotheses.

Everybody has to do it. Three times a day, nearly everybody will eat food at roughly the same time. People share this activity, and so it makes sense for that time to be designated for social interaction. If everybody had tea at 3, or went to the gym at 4, then those would just as strongly be considered a social activity.

We are forced to sit down. In our busy lives, we are either doing something or are on our way elsewhere to do something. We need to eat though, and eating takes a few minutes, so we take a break and sit down. Meals become social times because they are the only times when social interaction is reliably possible.

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