Ben Casnocha

being an entrepreneur is a friggin' FEAR FACTORY, and a living nightmare every day of the week. this is nothing new. 4 out of 5 small businesses fail within the first few years, and the odds aren't that much different for startups. you are going to be embarrassed, ashamed, labeled as an idiot, shunned, ridiculed, and occasionally driven from the village with pitchforks. on average, YOU ARE GOING TO FAIL. MULTIPLE TIMES, in NEW & INTERESTING ways. - Ben Casnocha

So heed all that VC advice: find revenue, watch costs, don’t expect easy outs; but now is definitely the right time to be making the next great thing. Just do in a way that it makes money from the get go, and you’ll guarantee your success no matter what happens. - Ben Casnocha

o the dismay of airlines, the U.S. Department of Transportation said it would proceed with its plan to auction some slots at the three major New York City-area airports, according to a final rule released today. - Ben Casnocha

Geoffrey Heal, When Principles Pay:Corporate Social Responsibility and the Bottom Line. The main point is that socially responsible behavior is often profitable for business in the long run. - Ben Casnocha

David is one of the rare columnists today who wrestles with himself constantly, and who lets the public watch him change his mind. This makes him vulnerable, of course, to accusations that he is his own man. This, apparently, is a bad thing in Washington. So be it - Ben Casnocha

And so, politically, the G.O.P. is squeezed at both ends. The party is losing the working class by sins of omission — because it has not developed policies to address economic anxiety. It has lost the educated class by sins of commission — by telling members of that class to go away. - Ben Casnocha

excerpts from Sequoia "RIP Good Times" meeting - Ben Casnocha

Long piece that charts the rise of CEO of Broadcom and then his fall - accounting scandal, secret lair for prostitues, drug use, etc. - Ben Casnocha

"a trip through [her] past reveals that almost every step of her career can be understood as a reaction to elitist condescension—much of it in her own mind.""as Nixon demonstrated, the forces of class resentment can be all-consuming and elemental." - Ben Casnocha

George Packer on the middle class in Ohio - Ben Casnocha

crowdsource graphic design - Ben Casnocha

Jonathan Franzen, colleagues and students talk about the writer at a memorial service. - Ben Casnocha

On polygamy and gay marriage - Krauthammer comes out agnostic - Ben Casnocha

how gay marriage leads to polygamy argument - Ben Casnocha

"Do what you do" (on a Saturday afternoon) is better advice than "Find and do your passion." - Ben Casnocha

Adam Sarner, an analyst with market research firm Gartner, has projected that over 75 percent of Fortune 1000 companies with Web sites will have undertaken some kind of online social-networking initiative for marketing or customer relations purposes. But, he added in an interview with CNET News, 50 percent of those campaigns will be classified as failures. - Ben Casnocha

funny satire on government inspecting gender - Ben Casnocha

“I do take issue with some of the principle there with that redistribution of wealth principle that seems to be espoused by you.” And words do matter, after all: it matters that our Vice-Presidential candidate says, as she did to Gwen Ifill, that “nuclear weaponry, of course, would be the be-all-end-all of just too many people in too many parts of our planet.” - Ben Casnocha

Palin’s sentences quickly clot up with nouns, but you can wait a long time before you’ll hear a verb. Sometimes most of a paragraph can go by without one. Gerunds and participles abound—a tic she might have picked up when she was a sports newscaster - Ben Casnocha

Peter Shankman's startup Help a Reporter Out, which has a relatively small email list of just over 30,000 subscribers, is reportedly pulling in $3,150 a day -- or $800,000 a year -- just through selling ads in emails at between $650 and $1,250 a pop. Not at all bad, for a project which Shankman reckons uses up about 90 minutes per day of his time. - Ben Casnocha

The next speaker was Ben Casnocha. Man, talk about a guy to envy...The guy is 20 years old now, but him speaking there, you would never know, the guy is clearly very mature and has a presence that a lot of 20 year olds just do not have. He talked about having a lot of very old mentors when he was young like 40s, so he has always been around the mature clientele. Just crazy. He explained how entrepreneurship is not just about a business, but its more of an art. You get a canvas and you paint your own pictures, no rules, no guidelines - Ben Casnocha

I have added a few criteria to my check-list: * Initially sells to the enterprise for branding, credibility, awareness and early revenues * Can get to revenues within 6 months, tops * Is sold on the basis of ROI, e.g., helps generate revenues or reduce headcount/costs - Ben Casnocha

print these responses later - Ben Casnocha

Talking at the debate about how she would “positively affect the impacts” of the climate change for which she’s loath to acknowledge human culpability, she did a dizzying verbal loop-de-loop: “With the impacts of climate change, what we can do about that, as governor, I was the first governor to form a climate change subcabinet to start dealing with the impacts.” That was, miraculously, richer with content than an answer she gave Katie Couric: “You know, there are man’s activities that can be contributed to the issues that we’re dealing with now, with these impacts.” - Ben Casnocha

Odesk - competitor to elance - Ben Casnocha

To many ears, her accent, her colloquialisms and her constant invocations of the accoutrements of everyday life will seem cloying. But in the casual parts of the country, I suspect, it went down fine. In any case, that’s who Palin is. - Ben Casnocha