There aren’t very many rules I live by. But there is one rule I do live by almost religiously, and it has served me well over the years. It is the following simple rule:

If you can’t make a decision, choose whichever option means more change.

Whenever I asked myself, should I stay or should I go, the answer was go, simply by following that rule.

When I need to make a decision, I consider the pros and cons of each option. Often, a winner emerges, and the choice is simple. It’s when there is no clear winner that I begin to ask myself, should I choose option A or option B? Should I stay or should I go? That’s when I follow the rule - because I have already considered the pros and cons of each option, and there wasn’t a clear winner.

This simple rule keeps me going, changing, in flow.

I recently learned that one of the hiring questions at Optimizely is “on a scale of 1-10, how lucky are you?”

CEO Dan Siroker writes “Warren Buffett likes to say he won the ovarian lottery. If he had been born into another era he might have been some animal’s lunch.”

This is a great question, even outside of a hiring interview. Almost all of us are incredibly lucky, and when I put my life in the context of the entire breadth of possible human experiences, I cannot give anything but a 10 as an answer to the above stated question.

There’s the luck of having been born in the first place. Richard Dawkins put it best in his timeless and now famous opening lines to his book Unweaving The Rainbow:

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but...

I first heard about AirBnB a few years ago. I remember thinking two things at that moment. The first was that the website was beautiful. The second was that I thought it was a strange idea - couchsurfing was already doing the exact same thing, for free. Indeed, my wife and I had used couchsurfing while traveling, and some of our best friends in the bay area are friends we met while couchsurfing. I didn’t think AirBnB would fly.

If you are competing against an existing product or service, you either need to offer something that is a substantial value add, or you need to offer it at a lower price. From my own experience, I think it’s quite true that if you compete with an existing product, even at the same price, it has to be at least 10x better. The friction of abandoning a familiar product and using a new, unknown product is just too high. And I doubt the average AirBnB experience was...

A few months ago, I decided to leave academia to pursue a startup idea I’ve had been thinking about for too long not to try it.

This is the logbook of my journey. It’s a way for me to be able to remember this time in the future, and to share some insights with others.

As Paul Graham would say, anything that is not a good idea for a startup is a bad idea for a startup, and the only good ideas while building a startup are building a product, talking to users, and staying healthy (both physically and mentally). So I am going to file this under staying mentally healthy.