seigenblues

I like him much better after this interview.

That last paragraph seems far more damning of the author than of Mason -- they're so disappointed that he doesn't have any obvious status symbols and he's riding off on a moped.

Good for him, and shame on them, for equating consumption with success.

(he should really wear a helmet, though!)

seconded! I think i changed the wind variable.

I remember printing out the whole listing on our dot-matrix printer and unfolding it across the living room. I might've been 9 or 10.

No problem :) I think you're catching enough flak for your over-50 comments below, so I didn't mention that one ;)

BTW, shallow thought wasn't meant as a derogative. It's what we monkeys do best, after all. It'll result in a different profile of swings, hits, & misses than other approaches, that's all.

(also, the irony that the new yorker article also suggests how we're really good at seeing the faults in others thought processes but not in our own is hi-larious)

Best of luck!

You're completely right. Too funny -- i had written a comment about how there was probably some bullshit MBA phrase for the process of "correctly valuing passionate customers", but deleted it as overly cynical and offensive to the up and coming masters-of-the-universe on HN. Can't win! :)

I think it's still worthwhile to think about systems of people in terms of their aggregate actions as well as in terms of each being an individual.

This is dead on. It's a mistake to read this and take away some homey homily about how "every customer is a snowflake!" -- the point is that you should correctly value the passionate customer. Your marketing and outreach and customer service departments should understand the relative values of "bought it, loved it!" and "bought it, so?" Those relative values will vary from product to product/industry to industry

The comment below at this time ('survivorship bias') is also correct, but only if it's interpreted as a touching anecdote rather than as crucial customer-behavior information for his market segment. Understanding the dynamics of how your customers make their purchasing decisions seems like a better lesson to take from this.

(Not the same for every product, either! E.g., my being passionate about Cheerios does nothing for General Mills, really...)

yikes. These are impressive (and terrifying). I particularly like the "see if you use my return value and dynamically change my behavior" trick, I bet debugging a library that used that would be fuuuun.

I think it could probably be called "outbox" instead -- it might make a bit more sense?

is that it? I thought it was about thinking you were going to build something Awesome and World Changing, and ending up ...being a bolted on web-layer on legacy Access databases, and not really liking that.

I totally agree. He even admits as such that this is the purpose of the question:

  "Instead the question ... taps something deeper and more
  closely held.  ... If I know what matters to them, I can
  right away tell if the same things matter to ...
  the organization at large."

In other words: "expose something tender and honest, so that we can exploit it as directly as possible."

Yep, sounds about right. At the risk of pointing out the obvious, 1% of the US is still ~3,000,000 people!