Capital, public good, and the real economy

Every once in awhile, I get this strange feeling that the entire economy is a sham, my optimism in capitalism and entrepreneurship a farce, my own path much more manufactured by a system than carved out on my own. Luckily, these moments are fleeting, so I am able to go on with my life, pursuing my goals confident that the end result will be substantial public good, and even a personal gain.

One of these moments happened recently when I watched the documentary An Inside Job. Though the facts presented by this excellently-shot film were not new to me — I had heard the same facts in the writing of Matt Taibbi, the Giant Pool of Money special on NPR, the terribly underrated film The New American Ruling Class, and on blogs such as Naked Capitalism and 13 Bankers — no other single source of information has so connected the dots between the political, academic, private and public problems which culminated in the financial crisis we witnessed in 2008.

Joseph Stiglitz recently wrote an article about the richest 1% of Americans, and their increasingly better relative wealth and income over the last 30 years. His points are well-argued (and again, nothing new for those well-versed in history of economics of neoliberalism). But, perhaps most interesting is Stiglitz’s recognition of the shrine of finance.

To give just one example, far too many of our most talented young people, seeing the astronomical rewards, have gone into finance rather than into fields that would lead to a more productive and healthy economy.

John Maynard Keynes also had something to say on the subject:

For my part I think that capitalism, wisely managed, can probably be made more efficient for attaining economic ends than any alternative system yet in sight. But, capitalism in itself is in many ways extremely objectionable. [… As for] Economics, it is a very dangerous science.

When I swirl that together with my vantage point in 2011, looking back on the crisis of 2008, I find it very hard to not wish we were doing a rethink of the system altogether.

It is not enough that the conditions of labour are concentrated in a mass, in the shape of capital, at the one pole of society, while at the other are grouped masses of men, who have nothing to sell but their labour-power. Neither is it enough that they are compelled to sell it voluntarily. The advance of capitalist production develops a working class, which by education, tradition, habit, looks upon the conditions of that mode of production as self-evident laws of Nature.

The organisation of the capitalist process of production, once fully developed, breaks down all resistance. The constant generation of a relative surplus-population keeps the law of supply and demand of labour, and therefore keeps wages in a rut that corresponds with the wants of capital. The dull compulsion of economic relations completes the subjection of the labourer to the capitalist.

Direct force, outside economic conditions, is, of course, still used [at times], but only exceptionally. In the ordinary run of things, the labourer can be left to the “natural laws of production,” i.e., to his dependence on capital, a dependence springing from, and guaranteed in perpetuity by, the conditions of production themselves.

But, then I snap out of it. Of course, I don’t have to tell you who wrote that quote and what that thinking led toward in history.

Groovy, the Python of Java

I was a bona fide Java programmer for 5 years before I started working on Aleph Point and Parse.ly. I truly believe that Python and JavaScript are fundamentally better languages than Java for a variety of reasons born out of experience with each of them. (Note: Before this gets marked as flamebait, please notice that not only was I Java programmer for more than 5 years, but I was also a Java open source contributor!) I have enormous respect for the Java open source community, which has produced some of the highest quality modules available anywhere.

Now, don’t get me wrong — Python also has batteries included, and usually, when I think that I’m missing a great module I used to use in Java, it already exists in a much more powerful form in Python’s Standard Library or the wealth of modules on PyPI, GitHub, and Bitbucket. However, I believe in not reinventing the wheel, and so if a great open source tool exists in Java, I will want to interact with it.

One of these modules which we use extensively at Parse.ly is Apache Solr, and its surrounding Lucene project modules. Lucene is an extremely mature framework for document indexing, and Solr is a powerful server-ization of that technology that fits well into complex, mixed language distributed systems. I know there are efforts — like Whoosh — to build fast search engines atop the Python language. And I applaud these efforts — more projects means more competition, and more competition means better products. However, I still believe that you go with the best of breed tools available for production software, and you try not to let religious arguments about programming language get in the way.

Lately, I have come across more and more Java open source projects that have no equivalent in Python, and which I would like to access. Knowing that I wanted to feel comfortable incorporating Java open source projects — beyond Solr, which was already nicely wrapped as a web service — I, at first, thought that I’d be forced to still live among the weeds of complex class and interface definitions, cumbersome Java IDEs, XML configuration files, and (IMO) time-wasting rabbit holes like dependency injection, configuration management, and classpath hell. And then I found Groovy.

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Startups: Not for the faint of heart

Early on during this startup adventure, a person I trust told me, “Watch out — startups aren’t for the faint of heart.” Looking back on my personal net income graph from 2009 to present, I can see what he meant.

May 2009 is when I entered Dreamit Ventures to begin working on what would become Parse.ly. That’s when I plunged my “savings buffer” into the company. The few months after that had me frantically trying to recover from the realization that startup progress is measured in months and years, not days and weeks.

Sachin and I switched gears from targeting consumers with a free product to targeting large online content properties with a paid product, and bootstrapped the company with side consulting gigs. We didn’t tell anyone we did the side consulting work (unless they specifically asked). We watched other entrepreneurs go into credit card debt and borrow money from trusting friends and relatives. We didn’t believe in that, so we took the hard road of “earning our survival”.

However, our costs were going up, not down, as we pursued a more ambitious product with more demanding clients. Also, my expenses skyrocketed as COBRA disappeared for my health insurance and I had to pay for horribly overpriced sole proprietorship plans. (Fact: America’s broken healthcare system is harmful to entrepreneurs.) I knew I needed to do something to “stop the bleeding” on my financial situation — so, I took on more consulting gigs…

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