Last word on Venn Diagrams

I thought I was all done with Venn Diagrams (after my last post), especially about nerds and geeks, but here is the last word, from XKCD:

 

Here is the last word on bikes:

And this really is the last word:

Venn Diagrams of the World, Union!

After my posting What about Dweebs, which neatly shows a Venn Diagram taxonomy of Dweebs, Geeks, Dorks and Nerds, I let my obsessive side loose looking for other Venn Diagrams relevant to the various parts of my VC:VC world. In case you want to refer to it as I make wry comments later, I reproduce the picture here. It turns out there are a bunch of us obsessing about Venn Diagrams right now (some googling will confirm that).





As a Brit, I liked this one, explaining the whole “United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland” thing. 

And now, to prove I am a nerd, and a British one at that, a Venn Diagram Pun:

The VC:VC construct itself is a Venn Diagram of some of my life interests … where my venture capital world, my cycling, and my community interests coincide (or overlap).





Here’s another Venn Diagram I first saw on the walls of Techstars Boston, originally posted by Bud Cadell on his blog under the title How to be Happy in Business. This is a non-trivial commentary on building and running a business (geeks and nerds in particular need no further prompting to study this closely). I found another variation (see right) on this theme on Flowing Data (which also links back to Bud’s graphic as well). Both make important points… but, if only business was so easy.

Stan Nowak, Founder and CEO of Silverlink Communications, a Sigma portfolio company on whose board I sit, talks about the importance of seeking out markets with scale, urgency and willingness to pay. With a tip of the hat to Stan, here is it is as a Venn Diagram.


How about a diagram describing something technical… well, I previously shared my sketch of Dennis Devlin suggestion about information systems security, noting that a system is secure when it does exactly what it is supposed to do, and nothing more! (It strikes me this is a good definition of quality as well as security.) 

For fun, check out this interactive TwitterVenn website that uses a Venn Diagram to show overlap between terms you can find in the tweets over a the last day. You can use your own search terms … these are “chocolate, milk, hot”.

Over in the non-profit world, check out the questions Sasha Dichter asks with “The Simplest non-profit Venn Diagram ever”.

How much overlap do think there is between the circles?

 



And finally, my own comment on how too few charities and too many startups are in the wrong place…

Techstars Boston Pitch Night 2010: Beware HIPPOs

Last night, Techstars Boston had its second annual pitch night, where the graduates of the 2010 session each got eight minutes to wow the crowd of angels, VCs and other local tech luminaries.

I was a mentor to some of the teams again this year, and was thrilled to see how far they had each progressed during the program. Kudos most of all to Shawn Broderick, who runs the Boston program, but also to Bill Warner, Brad Feld, David Cohen and all the other mentors, as well as the teams themselves.

Xconomy has a great writeup of the event and the companies – so check that out here.

My favorite quote of the night was about the danger of HIPPOs, and the use of data to overcome that danger. Daniel Sullivan, CEO of Appswell, noted the problem of the HIPPO, the “Highest Paid Person with an Opinion”. Absent strong data (about whatever it is), the HIPPO will always get to make the decision (right or wrong). This is similar in some ways to the Peter Principle, that “in a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence”.

Even if the Peter Principle is in operation, HIPPOs do not want to look stupid, and will be swayed by compelling data. If your organization suffers from HIPPOs making decisions purely on whim, then make sure you have good data to present, so that you get to shape those opinions.

Eureqa!

I got to listen to the Radio Lab program on my way home from a meeting last night on my local NPR station, WBUR. The final segment discussed the limits of human knowledge in science, and in particular the possibility that humans might reach limits of insight especially when scientific discovery is computer-aided.

As reported, a computer program called Eureqa was able to independently discover Newton’s law F=ma just by watching a double pendulum for a day. With input from a completely different field, it then discovered some rules by which simple cellular mechanisms work. These rules seem to be correct, because they accurately predict what will happen in the cell. However, as scientists look at those rules, they are at loss to understand them. They have no insight as to why the rules are correct.

You can listen to the segment and see the comments here.

At 8:05 into the segment, the hosts say that the scientists are “in this awkward position where they’ve got the answer, but they don’t have [pause] the insight.” And in that pause, all I could think was they would finish the sentence with “the question” … as in “they’ve got the answer, but they don’t have the question”. And why would I think that? Because of Deep Thought, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and the answer to the meaning of life, the universe and everything. Douglas Adams fans (like me) know what I am talking about, and others can read about it here. I was gratified to see the comments on the Radio Lab website went exactly to the same thoughts.