Wonderful video about Pixar’s hiring strategy and how you should hire “Interested” but not necessarily “Interesting” people. I really agree. The candidates you want should be fidgeting in their chair with how excited they are about their ideas, and proven that they have the focus to master something, anything, with the required level of discipline:
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Here’s an interview I did with LuckyStartups.com today. Thanks the guys at Lucky Startups and Aronado for the interview!
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Loving the soundtrack from Slumdog Millionaire recently… I am a big fan of film soundtracks. I think soundtracks contribute in a larger way to films than people generally seem to understand.
Here’s a couple of my favorite tracks from the film:
The above song is called “Aaj Ki Raat” by Sonu Nigam
The above song is called “Jai Ho” composed by the Composer for most of the film’s soundtrack, AR Rahman.
So far the film is really raking up awards, you really should see it. Danny Boyle has done a terrific job.
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The purpose of this blog is to share some of my experiences, advice and philosophies with other entrepreneurs, friends, and the curious who find it useful or interesting – particularly stemming from my experience starting Apture.
I’ll also share personal thoughts and experiences from time to time, varying between anything from existential philosophy, entrepreneurship, the semantic web, digital media, new findings in research psychology, to interesting music, dance and art. I am naturally an integrator. I love taking ideas from different fields and finding the common, emergent patterns weaved consistently through our day to day experience that seem to resemble truths… it’s very meta 
so bear with me. For those of you who know me, you’ll also know that I dash between different ideas a lot, like a seemingly odd ADD kid, but when I do, it will be with purpose and reason.
I have a hard time separating my professional life from my personal life, so this blog will encompass a mixture of both. This is because for me, work is a very personal thing. l talk a lot more about this in the coming posts, but as Steve Jobs once said, “the only way to do your best work is to absolutely love what you do.” And in Silicon Valley, you need to be producing your best work to succeed, which means you better as hell love what you do. Needing to love what you do inevitably makes your work a very personal thing, and I take pride in the deep emotional attachment I have to my work. I also think our personal lives, inadequacies, strengths and friend and family relationships possess a tremendously underestimated influence over our work. Supposedly, Max Levchin (CEO and Founder of Slide) is obsessed with success to compensate for the fact that he never learned how to ride a bike. Others because they have something to prove to their mom and dad. I would bet that most entrepreneurs in general have something to prove, and it’s most often personal. I will happily share my thoughts about the personal life/work life interplay too.
In Silicon Valley, taking a company from seed of an idea to a large successful business is incomprehensibly hard work to most people who haven’t tried it. There are thousands of things to learn and you’re drinking from a firehouse all at once. There are many things I wish I knew before I started. From learning how to manage teams, delegation of work, technical decisions, the value of relationships and networks, people, persuasion, hiring and firing, creating legal frameworks, the typography of a logo and a brand, and even mundane things like how the spatial arrangement of office furniture affects the internal culture of a company – in this blog, I’ll do my best to share what I’ve learned along the way, and welcome any comments you have as well.
One of the best things about blogging is the ability to involve other people. Until now the only way people could participate on blogs was by commenting.
As an experiment, I’m going to try something completely new: I’m going to let other people use Apture to annotate my blog.
This is a first. That means that anyone who has access can expand on my ideas, link up words on the page, or even link up the existing Apture windows that I’ve linked to additional content. If you email me and promise not to annotate my blog with inappropriate content, I’ll add you to the list of Apture Site Editors for my blog. This is a first in the history of web annotation tools, since my blog is not collaborative like a wiki, but this lets me safely spell out and preserve my voice, while letting you layer over your take. I’m looking forward to see what happens.
Tristan
January 26, 2009
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Tristan is the 25-year-old CEO and Co-Founder of Apture, a company unlocking the potential of digital media and empowering anyone to create a rich, cinematic experience for their web site.
Along with Jay Rosen (Chair / NYU Dept. of Journalism) and Matt Thompson (Newsless.org), I'll be presenting a SXSW panel exploring how the need for context is becoming a driving force in journalism, publishing and other aspects of the media. More information on the panel will be posted here soon!
