Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

The short version, 'cause it's sleepy and I'm getting late and not sure how coherent am I I am ...

Okay, life (and my friends) continue to surprise me. After I posted about not being able to afford to go to ConCertino, I got help from The ConCertino Fairy ... I'm still blinking and re-checking to make sure I'm not hallucinating. So, uh, I'm now looking for a ride up to ConCertino from Baltimore this weekend. The more cargo space for instruments the better. I can help with the driving, whether stick or automatic.

Paul Graham wrote in "Beating the Averages"

The average big company grows at about ten percent a year. So if you're running a big company and you do everything the way the average big company does it, you can expect to do as well as the average big company-- that is, to grow about ten percent a year.
 
The same thing will happen if you're running a startup, of course. If you do everything the way the average startup does it, you should expect average performance. The problem here is, average performance means that you'll go out of business. The survival rate for startups is way less than fifty percent. So if you're running a startup, you had better be doing something odd. If not, you're in trouble.

Also, in Hackers and Painters, he wrote:

Big companies want to decrease the standard deviation of design outcomes because they want to avoid disasters. But when you damp oscillations, you lose the high points as well as the low. This is not a problem for big companies, because they don't win by making great products. Big companies win by sucking less than other big companies.

(It's Paul Graham week in my Quote-of-the-Day file.)