1. Those of you who have started a company know what I am talking about — the constant, daily upheaval of emotions. There are days when you don’t want to get out of bed, when you whimper without tears and then shake it all off because deep down you know you would rather be doing this than something else. Founders live to capture lightning in the bottle: sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but we still keep trying. And that is the part the non-builders don’t get.
     
  2. As a firm, we are investors, not statesmen or policy makers,” the Cerberus statement said. “It is not our role to take positions, or attempt to shape or influence the gun control policy debate. That is the job of our federal and state legislators.
    — Ugly abdication of responsibility by Cerberus. Investors, and particularly private equity investors, are in a position of significant influence and this isn’t simply a government issue.
     
  3. “Two turkeys do not make an eagle”

    Amazing that in February 2011, the guy in charge of “social” for the most well-known and innovative company on the internet, Vic Gundotra, still thought this way:

    I tweeted a tweet about two companies that went viral, went very very viral and made a lot of headline news. And honestly, I didn’t anticipate that my comments would be interpreted in the way they were interpreted.

    I thought I was speaking to a relatively small number of people who followed me, a developer-oriented group, and instead it went mainstream. And so, uhm, I’ve curtailed my usage since then.

    This is the tweet Gundotra referenced, which itself was a reference to Nokia and Microsoft’s just-announced smartphone partnership:

    He sent four more tweets before his last in July 2011, when apparently Larry Page asked Gundotra to stop using twitter.

     
  4. To other young people who constantly wonder if the grass might be greener on the other side of the occupational fence, I offer this advice: Passion is not something you follow. It’s something that will follow you as you put in the hard work to become valuable to the world.
    — Cal Newport in The New York Times
     
  5. Tax avoidance on Romney’s scale undermines belief in the system’s fundamental fairness, and thus weakens the bonds that hold a society together.
    — Thoughtful writing by Joe Stiglitz
     
  6. More like this, please.

     
  7. Burying the Lede

    The last paragraph from the WSJ article “Apple Winds Up Patent Case”:

    As the arguments wind down, Apple and Samsung will be handing the case over to jurors who may have difficulty understanding the intricacies of the issues, and who at times have had trouble staying awake during more technical discussions.

     
  8. We do make things. We make a lot of things—but we do it with a lot less manpower than we used to. We produce the same tons of steel we did in 1960, but we do it with one-eighth of the manpower. So, the real complaint is, “There aren’t the jobs that there used to be.” The only counter to that is if you ask the people who work in steel mills if they want their kids to work in steel mills they say, “I want them to be a doctor or lawyer or something else.
     
  9. A New York City donor a few cars back, who also would not give her name, said Romney needed to do a better job connecting. “I don’t think the common person is getting it,” she said from the passenger seat of a Range Rover stamped with East Hampton beach permits. “Nobody understands why Obama is hurting them.

    “We’ve got the message,” she added. “But my college kid, the baby sitters, the nails ladies — everybody who’s got the right to vote — they don’t understand what’s going on. I just think if you’re lower income — one, you’re not as educated, two, they don’t understand how it works, they don’t understand how the systems work, they don’t understand the impact.”

     
  10. Telling people you’re worried about raising €19bn in the market is idiotic,” said one senior financier in Madrid. “Basically it’s saying: ‘We’re going to need a €400bn bailout from the IMF’.
    — Straight talk in an article at FT.com