The research shows men who spend even a few minutes in the company of an attractive woman perform less well in tests designed to measure brain function than those who chat to someone they do not find attractive.
Thank you science for confirming the obvious.
Thread was originally called Frintro (like “Friend” combined with “Intro) but decided to change its name in an arrangement that could set an unusual precedent for other start-ups. Thread.com was already taken, but they negotiated with the owner to lend it to them for two years. If they turned it in to a successful business, the original owner will take a share of the company. But if they don’t, the owner will get his address back.
Frinto raised $1.2MM from Sequoia and is in the current set of fbFund startups. This is a pretty ingenious arrangement, but as an entrepreneur it still pisses me off.
Success can raise the bar for a company until the pressure for big results kills all creativity. It's that kind of pressure that prevented J.D. Salinger from writing a follow-on to The Catcher in the Rye. It's also why Robert Pirsig took thirty years after Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance to write his second book. And it's why James Cameron is only now wrapping up his first real movie since Titanic made him the king of the world.
In a business culture that likes to talk up big innovations, we may be lacking appreciation for the beauty of the small idea. Outsized ambitions can set you up for failure in a big way when you spend most of your time rejecting your own thinking. No one bats a thousand at coming up with big, disruptive innovations, so you need to explore all your ideas to find the great ones. Not only that, most really big ideas often look small to start. In their book The Granularity of Growth, strategy theorists Patrick Viguerie, Sven Smit, and Mehrdad Baghai note that most billion-dollar business ideas look like $200 million ideas at the outset. Big growth happens when a lot of little things catch fire together.
The report says that there are 8,800 billionaires in Beijing and 7,000 in Shanghai. These are billionaires in Chinese dollars. A Chinese Yuan equals about $150 million U.S. dollars.
The typical rich family in China has a 43-year-old dad, 42-year-old mom and one 14-year-old child. The rich in Beijing need to spend at least about $12.7 million in U.S. dollars on property, cars and other luxury goods to be regarded as an aristocrat. The majority of their spending is on real estate, furnishings and fabrics, according to the report.
Oh, man, I can see it now -- Gossip Girl: Beijing Edition.
