I heard an interesting problem yesterday evening:

“A thoroughly honest game-show host has placed a car behind one of three doors. There is a goat behind each of the other doors. You have no prior knowledge that allows you to distinguish among the doors. ‘First you point toward a door,’ he says. ‘Then I’ll open one of the other doors to reveal a goat. After I’ve shown you the goat, you make your final choice whether to stick with your initial choice of doors, or to switch to the remaining door. You win whatever is behind the door.’ You begin by pointing to door number 1. The host shows you that door number 3 has a goat.” (Mueser and Granberg 1999)

Should you switch doors? What is the probabilty of winning if you do switch? What is it if you don’t switch? Does the switch matter?

(solution)

I have decided to do an experiment over the next few months, an alteration of my habbits habits. I haven’t told anybody what the change is. I wonder who will be the first to a) notice and b) realize it’s a change.

Three, but not four.  This will be the year that I break my streak of returns.  The realities of grad school preclude a trip.  To all those who will be going: have fun!

At some point in my life, with any luck sooner rather than later, I will be a self-sustaining entrepreneur. What better place to learn than Silicon Valley?

SDForum, a Bay-area tech entrepreneurship organization, put on a panel discussion last week about venture finance.  Since the event was nearby in the Palo Alto offices of DLA Piper, I had no reason not to attend.

The three panelists were all entrepreneurs, investors, or both: Jeff Clavier, SoftTech VC; Touraj Parang, Jaxtr; and Bill Reichert, Garage Technology Ventures. Sachin Maheshwari of Opus Capital served as moderator.

I was surprised by the demographics of the audience: it was far older than I expected, maybe 40 years on average. I think I was the youngest person in attendance. One thing that didn’t surprise me was the overwhelming maleness of the 50-70 entrepreneur attendees.

It was a good discussion.  They touched on numerous venture finance topics, from dilution to investor accredidation and everything in between.  However, the strongest point was also the simplest: the best time to seek outside investment money is never.  It’s not a new idea (one example), but it makes all kind of sense, especially for a capital-light venture like a web startup.  Bootstrapping, FTW!

One of the classes that I will be taking this quarter is MSE472: Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Seminar.  The speaker list is impressive: the founders of Tesla Motors, TechCrunch, and BitTorrent are all on the docket.  Best of all, the presentations are available for free as podcasts.  The past ones were very good, so I have high hopes for those scheduled this quarter.

I just got back from my first bike ride near Stanford, and I can conclude two things:

1. I’m really out of shape.
2. It’s beautiful here!

My route was fairly short and relatively flat, but it did have a few fun parts. I was feeling pretty low after the main climb, but a multi-mile descent at speed put a smile back on my face. The weather was clear, so the views were nice, and the route had light traffic and few traffic-control devices.

The challenge now is to make myself hit the road more often.