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Hello, Internet :)

Blue Bamboo is hiring, and if you have what it takes, OMG, do we want to talk you.

But first, let’s show you why you should care.

Blue Bamboo is a product consultancy. We thrive on building useful, easy, pretty software,  and we’d like to think we’re pretty damn good at it.

Yeah, that’s sort of what we do. We help anyone who’s serious about their work create great internet businesses.

Our work is super diverse. One month, we might be helping Answers.com shape their mobile strategy. Another month, we might launch a promising startup, like http://wavedeck.com, which just launched and already has 10,000 users. 

Ok, sounds interesting. What else?

Our work environment is built for humans, not cogs in a machine.

You get to use our office whenever you feel like it. We really care about what gets done, and not in the slightest about where it gets done. 

We don’t really have management - at least, not one that gets in your way. We just work together to build great products.

We decline projects all the time. Because really, who wants to work on boring software?

Nice! So what d’ya need?

Like us, you probably have passion for your craft, rock solid integrity, attention to detail where it matters, never ending resourcefulness, a love for “getting things done”, and you’re just plain fun to hang around.

Sure, we also expect you be a great developer, or a great designer, but do you know anyone with these qualities that isn’t great at what they do? We don’t.

I like what I’m hearing. What now?

Email us at team@bluebamboo.co.il

Here’s an interesting study.

You take a large group of people (say, students), and ask them two questions:

(1) How good have you been feeling lately?

(2) How many dates have you gone on in the last three months?

And it turns out that there’s absolutely no correlation between the answers. The number of dates one goes on, it seems, is not a considerable factor in our well being at all.

However, if you reverse the order of the questions - first, you ask how many dates someone has gone on, then how they’ve been feeling, a striking correlation appears. A correlation of .66. This is quite remarkable. The more dates someone goes on, the more well being they then tend to report.  

This is what psychologists call the Focusing Illusion. Once someone thinks about dating, they focus on that aspect of their lives, judge how good it is, and then, without knowing it, give (striking) disproportionate attention to it’s importance when thinking about happiness. 

Another common candidate for the Focusing Illusion is the weather. There’s been some interesting research that tracks people who move from cold climates to warm climates, with the hope of getting happier. Well, they do not get happier. The weather, like the number of dates someone goes on, seems to not play an important role in well being. However, these people will tend to think they’re happier! When they reflect on their move, they will think about weather, and attribute disproportionate weight to it.

So, what does it all mean?

For one thing, that it’s very hard to think of our own well being. The things we attend to when thinking about our well being, are often not the things which actually affect our well being. This shouldn’t be too much of a shock, our intuitive grasp of ourselves and the world can be remarkably accurate, but it can also be remarkably mistaken. This seems to be one of those cases. 

There’s two types of attitude towards innovation. 

One, is that the world is more or less as it should be. Markets are pretty saturated. Demand is more or less fulfilled. In this view, questions like: “if that’s such a good idea, how come no one has already done it?” make sense. 

The other, is that most things are somewhat broken. Demand is never fulfilled. Markets are always open for disruption, and the only question that remains is “can it be improved radically enough for anyone to bother with the new solution?”. 

The movers of our world have this second view. Look around you. Everything you see was created (recently!) by someone who thought things could be better than they were, and then made them better. 

No matter who you are and what you have, some goals will always be out of reach. There will always be things for which you don’t have enough money, or skill, or time, or connections. 

Creativity is not dreaming up ideas, it’s working with what you have. It’s taking the resources that you do have access to, and turning them into something valuable. 

Some people go through life telling themselves that they’d do something great, if they only had more of resource x. Don’t be one of those people. 

I never met Steve, but I still loved him. It’s amazing how technology makes that possible. 

Without Steve, who will show me that anything can be done? 

Here’s to our world. A world where knowledge and inspiration is always at our fingertips. A world where the work of a few can touch millions. A world where distance is no obstacle.

Steve, you made it all possible.

Why can it feel rewarding to gossip? I tried to answer the question on Quora. Here’s an excerpt:

…knowledge of social relationships helps you survive and reproduce. Brains are wired to reward behavior which helps you survive and reproduce, which is why just about everyone enjoys learning about important events in the lives of people they care about.

You can find my full attempt at an answer here

I was never stressed about confidentiality, and because of it I tend to stay away from people who are. 

If the success of your business really depends on your idea not getting out, you might not be in the right business. For one thing, it’s too risky - your idea could leak or other people could independently discover it. 

But the bigger point here is something else. If you want to do well, you should leverage everything you got - your market insight, your clarity of vision, your ability to pick the right people, your design chops, your engineering chops, your leadership chops, your instinct for what risks are worth taking… anything you can bring to the table. Contrast that with a project where a founder is only bringing an idea to the table. Who would you put your money on?

And that’s why I get uneasy around people who stress out about confidentiality and NDAs. Maybe I’m jumping to conclusions, but I get the immediate feeling that I’m dealing with someone with low skill. If they had skill, would they not be confident in their unique position to pull off the project? Would they not welcome feedback instead of constantly looking over their shoulder?  

It’s not rhetorical. I’m honestly asking.

Tell me what you think on twitter.

When you set out to do something, hold yourself accountable to some obvious result.

An obvious result is something that doesn’t need to be explained or put in context. It’s in the real world, not in your head. It’s something you can point at, something you’ve produced, made, measurably achieved. 

An obvious result is your compass. Without it, how will you know if you’re doing things right? How will you resist the temptation to always consider your work a success?

When you start off with a non-obvious goal, it’s easy to later conclude that whatever you’ve done was what you set out to do. Without obvious accountability, you’re at risk of becoming the kind of person who feels they always meet their goals whilst largely staying in place. 

Measure yourself against obvious results. If you don’t fail occasionally, you’re doing something wrong.

Once in a while I get hit by a sense of utter bewilderment. Are we really building robots that roam other planets and send back images? Did we really make humans immune to polio? Are we really implanting artificial organs in people? Did we really learn how life came to be? Can we really peer back into a universe billions of years older? Can we really talk to and see someone on the other side of the planet with the push of a button? Is the world’s information really at our fingertips?

I rub my eyes, but nothing goes away. We’re pushing further against the boundaries of nature. Monkeys now control robotic arms with their brains. We interact with computers just by moving and touching. We’re reprogramming cells and building synthetic life. We’re developing cloaking systems which come close to making an object invisible. Not a month goes by without news of further incredible undertakings. Things which would have seemed like sheer magic only a few decades ago are coming within our reach.

It’s hard to believe that our beginnings were so humble, and hard to believe just how far we’ve come. 

Let’s not forget what got us to where we are. The rational dissection of nature. The drive to figure out how things really work, and the drive to use that knowledge to improve our lives. Science and Engineering. Where would we be without them?