I shared this food with great friends and we had an epic feast of roast vegtables and chicken, pairing it with a Rose, then did a little comparison of Grenache from California versus French Riviera.   California won!

Mariquita Farm is a small family farm located near Watsonville, CA. They grow organic specialty vegetables, greens and herbs for their Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) members in Santa Cruz County, Silicon Valley, Monterey, the Peninsula, and San Francisco and for many Restaurants in San Francisco.

If only this was more then just anecdotal evidence! But I find the discussion interesting regardless. I actually predict that we are going to see a whole new generation of young female coders in the next decade. Girls that grew up online and hacking the Internet along with their friends and brothers.

 There is a lot of mundane shit in a start-up. How do you find alpha users that fit your target audience? If you have a start-up like Triggit, you search through Google, and Technorati, and blog directories, and any source for users. Then you have to find all their contact information, which is another pain in the ass. Here we sit, with all these really innovative ideas for development, and marketing, and design and we need to spend hours upon hours searching blog directories for users.

So what does a bright, ambitious, probably a little egotistical (we are after all entrepreneurs) company do to solve this problem? Obviously we find cheaper talent to do the shit work. We would not actually want to hire someone in the US, because that would require tax documents, or employment forms, or really just a lot more cash then our stingy and frugal lil start-up can deploy. We’ve got to keep the burn low! So we turn to Asia, and Outsourcing.

When I first started looking for outsourced talent, I was a true believer in the commoditization of a particular skill sets. I read all of the articles I could get my hands on about the subject, and they all endorsed the view that simple tasks could be simply outsourced. I scoured the various outsourcing sites: Rentacoder.com, getafreelancer, elance, odesk, freelancenow. I was thrilled! Look at all of this cheap talent! $3/hr, sweet!

Marcos lived in Corodoba, Argentina spoke great English, and only cost $6 and hr! We were stoked, he seemed to be able to code okay, so we set him up to do feed integration for us, a tedious task that is also profoundly precise. For a while we rationalized that his average work was worth the cheap price, but then users started to complain that the matching wasn’t great, clients begun to wonder what was taking us so long to get them into the system, and Marcos kept vanishing every couple of weeks to take vacations with his new fiancé. Marcos sure was cheap, but his price reflected his work.

We have since gone through a series of outsourcers for various projects. From lead generation to simple CSS alterations and basic pages. And the results have been uniformly the same. The talent is cheap, but the results are marginal at best, and reliability is non-existent. My favorite was when one of our better guys, Prem, wrote us an email saying “Sorry, Couldn’t work on your Project for the Past 2/3 days due to complete Power shutdown during Day time & also problems with Internet Connection.” Needless to say about half our projects fall flat on their face.

I no longer fear for the job security of quality engineers in the developed world anytime soon. The need for quality and reliability is a massively hard problem even when you have the talent sitting at the desk next to you. Outsourcers have little incentive to produce anything more then the minimum requirements as typically even the best individuals and firms are balancing multiple projects at once. Loyalty is almost impossible as each fights for better ‘feedback scores’ so they can obtain more, better paying work. But if you set your expectations low, and realize a lot of your projects might fail, outsourcing has the potential to be a great, if frustrating experience.

The subject of Women Entrepreneurs always fun to explore.This Exec article suggests that more women are becoming entrepreneurs and challenging traditional boundaries. Over the last couple of decades the percentage of small businesses owned by women has climbed past 25%. But these numbers are deceiving as one look around the tech landscape demonstrates that women aren’t entering every entrepreneurial space in equal numbers. This was especially obvious at the Google I/O event last week as I think women were outnumbered 20-1.Women simply are not around starting companies in certain industries, usually around the math and sciences and related to tech, engineering and finance. The few women that do appear in the space are most frequently in PR or marketing.

One major thesis on this drought is because girls have not historically entered the maths and sciences at the level of boys. The leaders of the tech industries today were the ham radio gurus and computer hackers of yesterday. We need to encourage our young girls to build things, write code, be geeky! As a kid everyone always referred to me as a ‘tomboy’, I just thought sports, and woodwork, and playing war with elaborate forts to construct were the cool things to do. Its neat to be called ‘steller talent’ even on a random international site, but the Exec article is a bit ahead of its time. Women aren’t quite sprinting to call themselves entrepreneurs quite yet.

Last week was brutal.   For four nights in a row I was rotten.   I would feel exhausted and fall asleep the moment my head hit the pillow, but there I was an hour or two later, wide awake, counting goats, rice kernals, anything! if only I could sleep!

After a few sleepless nights I finally gave in to this restlessness and popped my computer open at 2am. I worked until 6am and then passed out hard. I woke up actually feeling refreshed. Beat to shit, but refreshed.

During those 4 hours of late-night work, I did the one project I had been neglecting for the past week. The one that was just sitting staring at me with its sullen eyes. Daring me to forget, daring me to try to move on.

As an entrepreneur on a very small team there isn’t much direct transparency into my day-to-day activities. But there is always Queen Sleep. And she is always watching.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

It’s the moments that hours feel like minutes, when you miss a date because you were so immersed in an activity that everything around you seems inconsequential.  That is Flow.  In a fantastic book stemming from years of research and study, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi provides a convincing framework for identifying, and achieving moments of this optimal experience.   In evaluating how we structure of our lives, our daily activities, our upbringing, Csikszentmihalyi suggests that by keeping your mind attuned to the idea of Flow, this state of pure experiential happiness is obtainable as a end, not just an abstract.

We live in what I believe is one of the scariest, and most amazing times to ever be alive.   We’ve time, money, health, and resources to navigate our world in ways that have never been possible before. Yet so many people see discontent with their daily existence, and yet frustratingly fail to ever do anything about it.  I really enjoyed how this text explores the questions of what is happiness? What is optimal?  Its something I think about a lot as I attempt to confront all of today’s paradoxes and weave together a reality that will let me sit in my rocker on my centennial birthday and look back on life with a shit-eating grin my face, just giggling at how delightful it has all been.  Fantastic stuff.