On Motivation and Good Data

On Motivation

I'm frustrated. I hate how people get so easily discouraged by startup failure statistics. I hate how people obsess over everything but personal side projects. For once, I'd like to have a friend who is passionate about a project for the sake of it being a cool project; Not for the sake of a grade; Not even for the sake of money.

On the Right Data

It's easy to make the point that data is a new form of currency in this day and age, but not all data are created equal. You could also say that there exists "data in the rough" where the data may exist, but exists in a medium that's useless.

Bernt Wahl had a good example from his prior experience with homegain. His example is neighborhood data for real estate use. Of course, all the data was available in the heads of the realtors, and there were county boundries and census data. But really, that data is only useful in the context of a neighborhood. So they did the grunt work and refined the existing data into a useful form.