When startups have to do a hip-hop video to try and differentiate themselves pitching VCs, you might think it’s gone way too far.
When A BLOODY VC responds with ANOTHER HIP-HOP SEQUENCE, it’s quite clear that, no matter if a neon sign or a hip-hop scene, getting attention is all that matters.
Now all we need is an impromptu for the due diligence meeting…
Brilliant, but somewhat of a reassuring that Startupland is, by all means, a nerdy Hollywood.
I’ve often thought about the amount of information I produce verses the amount I consume. There always seems to be more and more interesting stuff out there to consume. One area of this that depresses me more than anything else is that there are more books that I want to read than I physically ever could during my lifetime, let alone the countless Youtube videos of cats riding roombas.
It’s easy to be paralised by it all. To escape this malaise it’s becoming quite trendy for people to make bucket lists, if you’re not familiar with that term then 30 things to do before I die type lists. These lists are woefully unoriginal and have things like swimming with dolphins or seeing the pyramids.
Just more consumption. I didn’t realise it until now, but the satisfaction in doing something, far outweighs any of the above. Sounds silly but I’ve never really done something as epic as this before which a very high chance of failing.
My personal ratio between consuming and producing has been massively unbalanced in consumption’s favor. This is something I’ve felt uneasy about but not enough to break the habit. If I had to guess, my personal ratio would be 5 hours consuming for every 1 producing. That’s including the time I spend working, despite doing a creative job, because even then, a lot of it is spent understanding people problems and researching previous solutions.
Inadvertently I flipped the ratios of production and consumption in November. Thanks to NaNoWriMo, I wrote a crappy but 50,000 word long novel, that’s almost 300 pages of paperback. A respectable sized book.
This has a profound effect on every waking moment during the month. I only remember once, a Sunday evening when my friend came over, she forced me to take a break and introduced me to the wonderful world of the Big Lebowski, when I wasn’t thinking about the book.
Every other day I woke up, worked, took a break in the middle of the day to write, then went back to work for a few hours then wrote until the small hours of the evening.
I was totally anti-social, I ate quick and easy junk food, I didn’t go out much, watched virtually no TV or browsed the internet. It was liberating. We don’t need this crap to survive. Your life isn’t suddenly going to fall apart because you’re not up to date with the latest articles on hackernews.
Life after NaNoWriMo hasn’t gone back to the same ratio as before, I’m writing a lot more code for toy projects and some serious ones. Something I created was actually in Techcrunch just a few days ago! Could I go back to the 5 to 1 ratio? No, I don’t think I could, it feels like I’ve liberated many hours in my day from these time-sinks. Time that I can direct to creative projects that I really want to do.
The thing that prompted me to write this post was reading this article:
