David Feldt

Jewish Proverbs


If the rich could hire other people to die for them, the poor could make a wonderful living. 
Yiddish Proverb

The wise man, even when he holds his tongue, says more than the fool when he speaks .. 
Yiddish Proverb

What you don’t see with your eyes, don’t invent with your mouth. 
Yiddish proverb 

A hero is someone who can keep his mouth shut when he is right. 
Yiddish Proverb

One old friend is better than two new ones. 
Yiddish Proverb

A wise man hears one word and understands two.
Yiddish Proverb

“Don’t be so humble - you are not that great.” 
Golda Meir (1898-1978) to a visiting diplomat

Pessimism is a luxury that a Jew can never allow himself. 
Golda Meir 

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex.
It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction. 
Albert Einstein

Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving. 
Albert Einstein

Intellectuals solve problems; geniuses prevent them. 
Albert Einstein

You can’t control the wind, but you can adjust your sails. 
Yiddish proverb

I don’t want to become immortal through my work. I want to becomeImmortal through not dying. 
Woody Allen

Imagination is more important than knowledge.
Sign hanging in Einstein’s office at Princeton .

We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.
Albert Einstein

Glorious Insults

These glorious insults are from an era before the English language got boiled down to 4-letter words.

• “I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play; bring a friend, if you have one.” - George Bernard Shaw to Winston Churchill. ”Cannot possibly attend first night, will attend second … if there is one.” -  Winston Churchill, in response. 
• A member of Parliament to Disraeli: “Sir, you will either die on the gallows or of some unspeakable disease.”  “That depends, Sir,” said Disraeli, “whether I embrace your policies or your mistress.”  
• “He had delusions of adequacy.” - Walter Kerr 
• “He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.” - Winston Churchill 
• “I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure.”  Clarence Darrow  
• “He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.” - William Faulkner (about Ernest Hemingway). 
• “Thank you for sending me a copy of your book; I’ll waste no time reading it.” - Moses Hadas 
• “I didn’t attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.” - Mark Twain 
• “He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends..”     - Oscar Wilde 
• “I feel so miserable without you; it’s almost like having you here.” - Stephen Bishop 
• “He is a self-made man and worships his creator.” - John Bright 
• “I’ve just learned about his illness. Let’s hope it’s nothing trivial.”     - Irvin S. Cobb 
• “He is not only dull himself; he is the cause of dullness in others.”     - Samuel Johnson 
• “He is simply a shiver looking for a spine to run up.” - Paul Keating 
• “In order to avoid being called a flirt, she always yielded easily.” - Charles, Count Talleyrand 
• “He loves nature in spite of what it did to him.” - Forrest Tucker 
• “Why do you sit there looking like an envelope without anyaddress on it?” - Mark Twain 
• “His mother should have thrown him away and kept the stork.”     - Mae West 
• “Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go.”    -Oscar Wilde 
• “He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts… for support rather than illumination.” - Andrew Lang (1844-1912) 
• “He has Van Gogh’s ear for music.” - Billy Wilder 
• “I’ve had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn’t it.”  Groucho Marx

Letter from Mark Zuckerberg

Extract from Facebook’s S1 SEC Filing Document:

Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected.

We think it’s important that everyone who invests in Facebook understands what this mission means to us, how we make decisions and why we do the things we do. I will try to outline our approach in this letter.

At Facebook, we’re inspired by technologies that have revolutionized how people spread and consume information. We often talk about inventions like the printing press and the television — by simply making communication more efficient, they led to a complete transformation of many important parts of society. They gave more people a voice. They encouraged progress. They changed the way society was organized. They brought us closer together.

Today, our society has reached another tipping point. We live at a moment when the majority of people in the world have access to the internet or mobile phones — the raw tools necessary to start sharing what they’re thinking, feeling and doing with whomever they want. Facebook aspires to build the services that give people the power to share and help them once again transform many of our core institutions and industries.

There is a huge need and a huge opportunity to get everyone in the world connected, to give everyone a voice and to help transform society for the future. The scale of the technology and infrastructure that must be built is unprecedented, and we believe this is the most important problem we can focus on.

We hope to strengthen how people relate to each other.

Even if our mission sounds big, it starts small — with the relationship between two people.

Personal relationships are the fundamental unit of our society. Relationships are how we discover new ideas, understand our world and ultimately derive long-term happiness.

At Facebook, we build tools to help people connect with the people they want and share what they want, and by doing this we are extending people’s capacity to build and maintain relationships.

People sharing more — even if just with their close friends or families — creates a more open culture and leads to a better understanding of the lives and perspectives of others. We believe that this creates a greater number of stronger relationships between people, and that it helps people get exposed to a greater number of diverse perspectives.

By helping people form these connections, we hope to rewire the way people spread and consume information. We think the world’s information infrastructure should resemble the social graph — a network built from the bottom up or peer-to-peer, rather than the monolithic, top-down structure that has existed to date. We also believe that giving people control over what they share is a fundamental principle of this rewiring.

We have already helped more than 800 million people map out more than 100 billion connections so far, and our goal is to help this rewiring accelerate.

We hope to improve how people connect to businesses and the economy.

We think a more open and connected world will help create a stronger economy with more authentic businesses that build better products and services.

As people share more, they have access to more opinions from the people they trust about the products and services they use. This makes it easier to discover the best products and improve the quality and efficiency of their lives.

One result of making it easier to find better products is that businesses will be rewarded for building better products — ones that are personalized and designed around people. We have found that products that are “social by design” tend to be more engaging than their traditional counterparts, and we look forward to seeing more of the world’s products move in this direction.

Our developer platform has already enabled hundreds of thousands of businesses to build higher-quality and more social products. We have seen disruptive new approaches in industries like games, music and news, and we expect to see similar disruption in more industries by new approaches that are social by design.

In addition to building better products, a more open world will also encourage businesses to engage with their customers directly and authentically. More than four million businesses have Pages on Facebook that they use to have a dialogue with their customers. We expect this trend to grow as well.

We hope to change how people relate to their governments and social institutions.

We believe building tools to help people share can bring a more honest and transparent dialogue around government that could lead to more direct empowerment of people, more accountability for officials and better solutions to some of the biggest problems of our time.

By giving people the power to share, we are starting to see people make their voices heard on a different scale from what has historically been possible. These voices will increase in number and volume. They cannot be ignored. Over time, we expect governments will become more responsive to issues and concerns raised directly by all their people rather than through intermediaries controlled by a select few.

Through this process, we believe that leaders will emerge across all countries who are pro-internet and fight for the rights of their people, including the right to share what they want and the right to access all information that people want to share with them.

Finally, as more of the economy moves towards higher-quality products that are personalized, we also expect to see the emergence of new services that are social by design to address the large worldwide problems we face in job creation, education and health care. We look forward to doing what we can to help this progress.

Our Mission and Our Business

As I said above, Facebook was not originally founded to be a company. We’ve always cared primarily about our social mission, the services we’re building and the people who use them. This is a different approach for a public company to take, so I want to explain why I think it works.

I started off by writing the first version of Facebook myself because it was something I wanted to exist. Since then, most of the ideas and code that have gone into Facebook have come from the great people we’ve attracted to our team.

Most great people care primarily about building and being a part of great things, but they also want to make money. Through the process of building a team — and also building a developer community, advertising market and investor base — I’ve developed a deep appreciation for how building a strong company with a strong economic engine and strong growth can be the best way to align many people to solve important problems.

Simply put: we don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services.

And we think this is a good way to build something. These days I think more and more people want to use services from companies that believe in something beyond simply maximizing profits.

By focusing on our mission and building great services, we believe we will create the most value for our shareholders and partners over the long term — and this in turn will enable us to keep attracting the best people and building more great services. We don’t wake up in the morning with the primary goal of making money, but we understand that the best way to achieve our mission is to build a strong and valuable company.

This is how we think about our IPO as well. We’re going public for our employees and our investors. We made a commitment to them when we gave them equity that we’d work hard to make it worth a lot and make it liquid, and this IPO is fulfilling our commitment. As we become a public company, we’re making a similar commitment to our new investors and we will work just as hard to fulfill it.

The Hacker Way

As part of building a strong company, we work hard at making Facebook the best place for great people to have a big impact on the world and learn from other great people. We have cultivated a unique culture and management approach that we call the Hacker Way.

The word “hacker” has an unfairly negative connotation from being portrayed in the media as people who break into computers. In reality, hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done. Like most things, it can be used for good or bad, but the vast majority of hackers I’ve met tend to be idealistic people who want to have a positive impact on the world.

The Hacker Way is an approach to building that involves continuous improvement and iteration. Hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete. They just have to go fix it — often in the face of people who say it’s impossible or are content with the status quo.

Hackers try to build the best services over the long term by quickly releasing and learning from smaller iterations rather than trying to get everything right all at once. To support this, we have built a testing framework that at any given time can try out thousands of versions of Facebook. We have the words “Done is better than perfect” painted on our walls to remind ourselves to always keep shipping.

Hacking is also an inherently hands-on and active discipline. Instead of debating for days whether a new idea is possible or what the best way to build something is, hackers would rather just prototype something and see what works. There’s a hacker mantra that you’ll hear a lot around Facebook offices: “Code wins arguments.”

Hacker culture is also extremely open and meritocratic. Hackers believe that the best idea and implementation should always win — not the person who is best at lobbying for an idea or the person who manages the most people.

To encourage this approach, every few months we have a hackathon, where everyone builds prototypes for new ideas they have. At the end, the whole team gets together and looks at everything that has been built. Many of our most successful products came out of hackathons, including Timeline, chat, video, our mobile development framework and some of our most important infrastructure like the HipHop compiler.

To make sure all our engineers share this approach, we require all new engineers — even managers whose primary job will not be to write code — to go through a program called Bootcamp where they learn our codebase, our tools and our approach. There are a lot of folks in the industry who manage engineers and don’t want to code themselves, but the type of hands-on people we’re looking for are willing and able to go through Bootcamp.

The examples above all relate to engineering, but we have distilled these principles into five core values for how we run Facebook:

Focus on Impact

If we want to have the biggest impact, the best way to do this is to make sure we always focus on solving the most important problems. It sounds simple, but we think most companies do this poorly and waste a lot of time. We expect everyone at Facebook to be good at finding the biggest problems to work on.

Move Fast

Moving fast enables us to build more things and learn faster. However, as most companies grow, they slow down too much because they’re more afraid of making mistakes than they are of losing opportunities by moving too slowly. We have a saying: “Move fast and break things.” The idea is that if you never break anything, you’re probably not moving fast enough.

Be Bold

Building great things means taking risks. This can be scary and prevents most companies from doing the bold things they should. However, in a world that’s changing so quickly, you’re guaranteed to fail if you don’t take any risks. We have another saying: “The riskiest thing is to take no risks.” We encourage everyone to make bold decisions, even if that means being wrong some of the time.

Be Open

We believe that a more open world is a better world because people with more information can make better decisions and have a greater impact. That goes for running our company as well. We work hard to make sure everyone at Facebook has access to as much information as possible about every part of the company so they can make the best decisions and have the greatest impact.

Build Social Value

Once again, Facebook exists to make the world more open and connected, and not just to build a company. We expect everyone at Facebook to focus every day on how to build real value for the world in everything they do.

Thanks for taking the time to read this letter. We believe that we have an opportunity to have an important impact on the world and build a lasting company in the process. I look forward to building something great together.

Instructions for Life by The Dalai Lama

The “Oh Shit” Moment

Posted on December 19, 2011 by Josh Linkner

You probably know it well. That sinking feeling in your gut where you feel like you just got punched by Tyson. Heart-pounding, head-throbbing, room-spinning agony. We’ve all been there. Perhaps it was losing a huge client, a key team member jumping ship, or a major technology glitch. Or maybe it was a sharp scolding from a boss, an unexpected job loss, or that big setback you’ve been dreading.

Oh shit.

These are the moments we fear; the ones that nightmares are made of. The times when we feel powerless, overwhelmed, and are left spinning with hopelessness and despair. You’re not alone…Every great leader, hero, and champion has had them too.

The real question isn’t whether or not you’ll experience this acute terror. Assuming you are pursuing anything worth doing, you will. The question becomes, how will you react?

Some of us cave to the pressure. We roll on our backs like helpless dogs exposing their vulnerable bellies. We allow ourselves to become victimized by the event, and relinquish our power to the callous circumstances. We let things happen to us.

Luckily, you need not suffer this hapless fate. Instead, you can regain your power and use the setback as a “teachable moment.” Rather than judging it, you can look at it as information that is helping you grow as a person or organization.

Throughout my own career building startups for the last 21 years, I’ve had my fair share of these moments. But now looking back, each of these painful setbacks turned out to be a blessing. In fact, many of my biggest breakthroughs came just after events that appeared to be devastating losses.

Often our biggest moments of growth come from our darkest moments of adversity. Life has a funny way of teaching us and sometimes those painful wake-up calls can be just the jolt we need to effectuate change. In these moments, you have a choice. You can cower in the corner like a guilty child, or you can use the sting as an opportunity to strengthen your resolve. You can own it, take personal responsibility, and leap into action with unwavering commitment. Even when it’s tough and you want to hide.

The most successful people have bad days too. We all stumble, but the champions don’t let speed bumps derail their journey. Instead, they look straight into the abyss and extract every valuable lesson that can be gained. And you can too.

That dreaded “oh shit” moment will likely crop up when you least expect it. The next time it does, don’t run from it. Seize it. It’s simply an opportunity for you to shine and grow.

Five New Management Metrics You Need To Know

(via Forbes)

This is a guest post from James Slavet of venture firm Greylock Partners. Slavet’s investments include Coupons.com, Groupon, One Kings Lane and Redfin. Greylock Partners has invested in Facebook, LinkedIn and Pandora..

After years of leading teams and then, at Greylock, watching some of the best startup CEOs in the world, I’ve learned that the most important metrics are often ones you never read about on the income statement or in the financial press.

“If you can measure it, you can manage it” is a business saying that goes way back. Maybe it was Henry Ford who said that, or Peter Drucker? Regardless, most managers only measure outputs, not inputs, which is like telling a Little League team to score more runs, rather than actually explaining how to swing a bat and make contact with the ball. Similarly, most companies measure traffic, revenue or earnings, without considering how to improve the company at an atomic level: how to make a meeting better, or an engineer more productive.

Here are five metrics that great teams should measure:

Metric 1: Flow State Percentage

Jobs that require a lot of brainpower—software programming for instance—also demand deep concentration. You know that feeling when you’re “in the zone,” cranking on something. That is flow, a term coined by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. 

Unfortunately, most of us are constantly interrupted during the day with meetings, emails, texts, or colleagues who want to talk about stuff. These interruptions that move us out of “flow state” increase R&D cycle times and costs dramatically. Studies have shown that each time flow state is disrupted it takes fifteen minutes to get back into flow, if you can get back at all. And programmers who work in the top quartile of proper (ie uninterrupted) work environments are several times more productive than those who don’t.

Ideally programmers and other knowledge workers can spend 30% – 50% of their day in uninterrupted concentration. Most office environments don’t even come close. To get started, ask your engineers to track for a few days their personal flow state percentages: how many hours each day are they in flow, divided by the number of total hours they’re at the office. And then brainstorm ways that the team can move this number up. For example, perhaps there’s a little paper sign at each person’s desk that says “Go Away, I’m Cranking.” Or maybe you have a day where no meetings are allowed. Tom Demarco has written insightfully on the topic of flow.

Metric 2: The Anxiety-Boredom Continuum

Years ago, back when I was younger and cooler, I took a salsa class with my wife-to-be where the instructor said something that really stuck with me. He said that his goal was to keep all of his students in the pocket between boredom and anxiety – but closer to anxiety. In other words, we shouldn’t be so overwhelmed that we break down and give up, but we also shouldn’t be coasting either. He kept the rhythm fast enough so that we were challenged, but not so difficult that we lost the steps completely. And he kept tuning the difficulty level of the class to stretch but not break us.

This same anxiety-to-boredom continuum also applies to managing people. Star performers can get bored easily, and often function best when they’re expected to rise to great challenges. You want expectations to be high, but not completely overwhelming. With this in mind, check in with your employees periodically about where they are on this continuum, while also keeping an eye out for signs of where they stand. If they have low energy, or are showing up late and leaving early, they may be bored. If they’re responding to small setbacks with anger or frustration, or getting sick a lot, they may be pushing too hard.

Metric 3: Meeting Promoter Score

Most meetings suck. And they’re expensive: a one-hour meeting of six software engineers costs $1,000 at least. People who don’t have the authority to buy paperclips are allowed to call meetings every day that cost far more than that. Nobody tracks whether meetings are useful, or how they could get better. And all you have to do is ask.

In the last minute of a meeting, ask the participants to each rate from 1 to 10 how effective the meeting was, with one suggestion for making the meeting better. It can be on a scrap of paper, or a simple web form. Verne Harnish has some good ideas about running better meetings.

Metric 4: Compound Weekly Learning Rate

My three year old son just asked me what the word “expert” means. When I answered, he nodded and asked “so am I an expert about superheroes yet?” The best leaders hold on to this relentless curiosity. Joi Ito wrote recently about “neotony”, the retention of childlike attributes in adulthood. This ability to learn is like the compounding interest on an investment: after two or three years, a relentless learner stands head and shoulders above his peers. Jeff Weiner, the CEO of LinkedIn, referred me to Joi’s posting. Jeff is one of the most relentless learners I know, and this quality is an essential element of his success and the success of his teams. So try asking your team this question: how did you get 1% better this week? Did you learn something valuable from our customers, or make a change to our product that drove better results? As your team gets into a learning rhythm, you can review this as a group. 1% per week adds up.

Metric 5: Positive Feedback Ratio

You can learn as much from John Gottman as you can from John F. Kennedy about being a great communicator. Gottman, a psychologist, is the author of “Why Marriages Succeed or Fail”.

In his research, he found that marriages that succeed tend to have five times as many positive interactions as negative ones. And when a couple falls below that ratio, their relationship falls down too.

The same is true at the office, where you’re often connected for years in relationships with people who can either become wary of your criticisms or eager to give you their best effort. Catch people doing good things. Never miss a chance to say something nice, even if you feel a little silly. Then when you have feedback on areas to improve, they‘ll really listen. It may be hard to manage to the 5:1 ratio at the office, but you should be mindful of the balance.

So, there you have it, 5 metrics that will never show up in the best companies’ financial statements or a Wall Street Journal article, but are the kinds of reasons those companies succeed. Tracking these five metrics isn’t glamorous. But it’s something everyone can do. And it really works.

The Highest High

There’s nothing higher than finding truth on your own.

All worlds were made, all barriers put in place, every veil over G‑dliness hung, and the soul plummeted from its pristine height into the confusion of this harsh world—

—all for this one thing alone: That you should uncover truth on your own.

(Based on letters and talks of the Rebbe, Rabbi M. M. Schneerson)