Of course, three more things popped up every week and the project slipped by months. I spent the entire project feeling guilty. Then one friday it dawned on me that there was a world of un-finished requirements that had never been captured. I had never done anything "manager-y" so I went to Borders, bought Rapid Development by Steve McConnell, and read it over the weekend.

When I showed up that Monday, instead of getting to work on the "last remaining three things," I hid out in an abandoned office and started specing and estimating the remaining parts of the project. Then I went to my managers with a full re-estimation that was months out. Of course, they weren't happy with the projection, but having data gave me the back-bone to stick with it.

Until that point I had thought my career was entirely dependent on being smarter, on developing programming chops like the gurus that I read about on Slashdot. Afterward I thought of it as being extremely dependent on what I consider "personality traits" but which seem to be trainable. For example, the initiative to fix something that's broken rather than just complaining about the status quo, or the calmness to stick to my guns without taking it personally that the people around me were wrong.

Thank you for the honest feedback.

I do go technical sometimes, but I actually write my pieces so that everyone can understand. I will remember this comment though and try to do a better job of bringing new insights to my writing.

- Ben

This turnaround does not surprise me. BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos took their sweet time getting to 10%+ - and in doing so they were very sure not to overfit [2] the data (making their solution a much more generic and viable solution to the dataset). It's my guess that The Ensemble rushed quickly to 10%+ and overfit their data like mad (which yielded high numbers on the public dataset, but evidently does not translate to a generic solution).

I'm looking forward to seeing the final papers published by BellKor, et. al. - they're going to be a fascinating read, regardless.

1: http://www.netflixprize.com/leaderboard 2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overfitting

I'd use Occam to narrow that statement down even further: "What keeps people from starting startups is fear".

I think Paul might have a bit of a selection bias because of Y Combinator. He spends a lot of time with founders that are weighed down with all the responsibility of running the company. And, after you start, that's a big problem, but you don't realize how big of a problem the sense of responsibility is until you've already jumped off the cliff of founding a startup.

I spend a lot of time at Hackers and Founders meetups, talking with people who are very nervous about jumping off the corporate bandwagon and founding a startup. One of the biggest reasons that they don't is fear. Fear of being irresponsible. Fear of seeming irresponsible to people around you. Fear of going broke. Fear of failure. Fear of being inadequate to the task. Fear of not having the support of your spouse (which is generally the spouses version of fear of being broke, I suppose).

But, in all our Hackers and Founders meetups, I've never heard anyone say, "I want to start a startup, but I'm scared of having so much responsibility".

We're arguing a very small point of the essay at large. Over all, it was a great piece of work. Keep em coming, Paul.

Getting the site to this point took about two years, so I would counsel patience and perserverance. It also helps to really care about the project, even if you don't spend much time on it.

And it especially helps when your business partners are relentless insects who spread very efficiently and feast on the blood of people's sleeping children.

For anyone who cares, the reason both concepts have the same name is that they share the property that you have to be able to respond to someone. The difference is that in the first case you're responding to people who are judging or depending on your choice (e.g. your parents, friends, or dependents) and in the second to people you've undertaken to do something for (e.g. customers, employees, or investors).

Which VC firm are you referring to?

My files has been sitting in a cabinet of a government official build over 8 years and no one just care.

The interesting part was I had to pay the government for keeping my files. I just left 8 years ago and i thought i would not need my files anymore (not looking for a job anymore in china , at least a government job ) so i just stopped paying them.

http://www.geocities.com/phoffman3/desolation/