Welcome to my personal blog.
I'm a father, a libertarian, an internet addict and am interested in high growth companies, emerging technology & web, turning 0 into 1, philosophy, science, economics, finance, marketing and media.
I like to spend my time in Sydney and San Francisco and work at an exciting startup BuzzNumbers.
Thursday, September 2, 2010
Posted by Nick HaC @ 10:11 PM
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Digg thisSunday, August 15, 2010
Just had a listen through the YCombinator AngelConf 2010 Video, some interesting points..
Watch live video from Y Combinator on Justin.tv
I recorded a bunch of them to MP3 for my blackberry, you can download them here
AngelConf by nickhac
- Great companies come from the right founders, in the right industry, at the right time
- Founders are more important than ideas or even markets (you can always change ideas/markets but its very hard to change founders)
- Look for "ThunderLizards" - startups that are going to move very quickly
- The market is small, don't advance yourself at someone else's expense, it will ultimately hurt you
- The best deals have significant competition, be sure to add value not just money
- Complex terms are a big turn off, Term sheet docs shouldn't be bigger than 1-2 pages
- Convertible notes increasingly used instead of equity
- Do the founders have a way of managing the departure of a team member so that your dont end up with a dead weight? (Ensure founders have vesting on their starting equity)
Watch live video from Y Combinator on Justin.tv
I recorded a bunch of them to MP3 for my blackberry, you can download them here
AngelConf by nickhac
Labels: business, internet, startups
Posted by Nick HaC @ 4:38 AM
Friday, August 6, 2010
I just found out i was featured in B&T's hot 30 under 30 this week. How cool!
A couple of my mates @Ben_Phillips and @nichodges were also featured in this sound congrats all around.
A couple of my mates @Ben_Phillips and @nichodges were also featured in this sound congrats all around.
Labels: business, media, nickhac, success
Posted by Nick HaC @ 9:09 PM
What, then, is law? It is the collective organization of the individual right to lawful defense.
Each of us has a natural right — from God — to defend his person, his liberty, and his property. These are the three basic requirements of life, and the preservation of any one of them is completely dependent upon the preservation of the other two. For what are our faculties but the extension of our individuality? And what is property but an extension of our faculties? If every person has the right to defend even by force — his person, his liberty, and his property, then it follows that a group of men have the right to organize and support a common force to protect these rights constantly. Thus the principle of collective right — its reason for existing, its lawfulness — is based on individual right. And the common force that protects this collective right cannot logically have any other purpose or any other mission than that for which it acts as a substitute. Thus, since an individual cannot lawfully use force against the person, liberty, or property of another individual, then the common force — for the same reason — cannot lawfully be used to destroy the person, liberty, or property of individuals or groups.\
Such a perversion of force would be, in both cases, contrary to our premise. Force has been given to us to defend our own individual rights. Who will dare to say that force has been given to us to destroy the equal rights of our brothers? Since no individual acting separately can lawfully use force to destroy the rights of others, does it not logically follow that the same principle also applies to the common force that is nothing more than the organized combination of the individual forces?
If this is true, then nothing can be more evident than this: The law is the organization of the natural right of lawful defense. It is the substitution of a common force for individual forces. And this common force is to do only what the individual forces have a natural and lawful right to do: to protect persons, liberties, and properties; to maintain the right of each, and to cause justice to reign over us all.
Labels: liberty, Philosophy
Posted by Nick HaC @ 9:05 PM
So i had the interesting opportunity to meet with Senator Stephen Conroy this week.
Stephen Conroy described himself as "the most hated man on the Australian internet", but despite the amount of stick i have given to him on twitter, to be fair he seemed really nice, was well spoken and had some interesting points to say.
His work on the NBN is clearly and genuinely focused on the best interests for the nation which was nice to see.
Im still completely confused as to why he is so passionately behind the NetFilter, which is almost universally declared as a bad idea from everyone in the internet industry. I guess i never really understood why people felt the moral right to try to dictate or regulate the behavior of others.
Stephen Conroy described himself as "the most hated man on the Australian internet", but despite the amount of stick i have given to him on twitter, to be fair he seemed really nice, was well spoken and had some interesting points to say.
His work on the NBN is clearly and genuinely focused on the best interests for the nation which was nice to see.
Im still completely confused as to why he is so passionately behind the NetFilter, which is almost universally declared as a bad idea from everyone in the internet industry. I guess i never really understood why people felt the moral right to try to dictate or regulate the behavior of others.
"Ah, you miserable creatures! You who think that you are so great! You who judge humanity to be so small! You who wish to reform everything! Why don't you reform yourselves? That task would be sufficient enough". - Frederic Bastiat, The Law, 1950Anyways, In summary Stephen Conroy was a nice enough bloke, in retrospect i wish i had more of a succinct argument to put to him about the Netfilter.
Posted by Nick HaC @ 9:00 PM
Been watching a really enjoyable documentaries series, i wanted to share this
Human, All Too Human is a three-part 1999 documentary television series produced by the BBC. It follows the lives of three prominent philosophers; Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Paul Sartre. The theme of this documentary revolves heavily around the school of philosophical thought known as existentialism, although the term had not been coined at the time of Nietzsche's writing, and Heidegger declaimed the label.
Human all too human - Martin Heidegger
Human, All Too Human - Nietzsche
Human all too human - Sartre
Labels: Philosophy
Posted by Nick HaC @ 8:28 PM
The Will to Truth, which is to tempt us to many a hazardous enterprise, the famous Truthfulness of which all philosophers have hitherto spoken with respect, what questions has this Will to Truth not laid before us! What strange, perplexing, questionable questions! It is already a long story; yet it seems as if it were hardly commenced. Is it any wonder if we at last grow distrustful, lose patience, and turn impatiently away? That this Sphinx teaches us at last to ask questions ourselves? WHO is it really that puts questions to us here? WHAT really is this "Will to Truth" in us? In fact we made a long halt at the question as to the origin of this Will--until at last we came to an absolute standstill before a yet more fundamental question. We inquired about the VALUE of this Will. Granted that we want the truth: WHY NOT RATHER untruth? And uncertainty? Even ignorance? The problem of the value of truth presented itself before us--or was it we who presented ourselves before the problem?
Beyond good and evil
Beyond good and evil
Posted by Nick HaC @ 8:23 PM
Posted by Nick HaC @ 6:52 AM
Posted by Nick HaC @ 6:45 AM
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
Ran back into this video that my mate @datrigub sent me last i was in SF, just checked it just hit 1millions views... sweet
Labels: entrepreneurship, internet, nerds, programming
Posted by Nick HaC @ 10:32 PM
Monday, July 26, 2010
So most of my friends would know that i am a fairly solid subscriber to the philosophical ideals of objectivism as proposed by Nietzsche and Rand. To this end ive blogged several times about The Virtue of Selfishness, a book on Objectivist ethics.
Today by coincisdence i came across an essay titled "The Vice of Selfishness", which provides a reasonable concise and in my opinion, a very "opinion heavy" response to Rands thinking. It was intersing to explore the counter argument. Ill post a few excepts here.
Read the full essay, The Vice of Selfishness
Today by coincisdence i came across an essay titled "The Vice of Selfishness", which provides a reasonable concise and in my opinion, a very "opinion heavy" response to Rands thinking. It was intersing to explore the counter argument. Ill post a few excepts here.
Animals have it easy. The family dog never wrestles with his conscience over the need to leave some Alpo in his bowl for the poor and hungry strays. Bulls don't apportion the cows to ensure the joys of family life for all concerned. And, once an amoeba splits, the two halves feel no need to keep in touch.
People, however, do not have such an easy time of it. The enlightened, modern person usually measures the progress of civilization by discerning how well its members look after their comrades. While some limited altruism has been documented in nature, conscious altruism can fairly be described as an invention of human beings. Whether it is the Christian axiom to "love thy neighbor as thyself" or the socialist dictum requiring "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need," altruism is widely considered the progressive, humane stance.
Read the full essay, The Vice of Selfishness
Labels: economy, ideas, liberty, Philosophy
Posted by Nick HaC @ 3:40 PM
Sunday, July 25, 2010
So ive been working pretty hard nights and weekend on a hobby project, BuzzElection.com
Look forward to your thoughts or feedback!
Look forward to your thoughts or feedback!
Posted by Nick HaC @ 6:30 PM
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
1. You are financing your customers.
Most SaaS businesses are subscription-based (there’s usually no big upfront payment when you signup a customer). As a result, sales and marketing costs are front-loaded, but revenue comes in over time. This can create cash-flow issues. The higher your sales growth, the larger the gap in cash-flows. This is why SaaS companies often raise large amounts of capital.
2 Retaining customers is critical.
In the old enterprise software days, a common model was to have some sort of upfront license fee — and then some ongoing maintenance revenue (15–20%) which covered things like support and upgrades. Sure, the recurring revenue was important (because it added up) but much of the mojo was in those big upfront fees.
In the SaaS world, everything is usually some sort of recurring revenue. This, in the long-term is a mostly good thing. But, in the short-term, it means you really need to keep those customers that you sell or things are going to get really painful, very quickly.In SaaS, things are simple by design — and contracts are shorter. The net result is that it is easier for customers to leave.
3 It’s Software — But There Are Hard Costs.
In the enterprise-installed software business, you shipped disks/CDs/DVDs (or made the software available to download). There were very few infrastructure costs. To deliver software as a service, you need to invest in infrastructure — including people to keep things running.
4 It Pays To Know Your Funnel.
One of the central drivers in the business will be understanding the shape of your marketing/sales funnel. What channels are driving prospects into your funnel? What’s the conversion rate of a random web visitor to trial? Trial to purchase? Purchase to delighted customer? The better you know your funnel the better decisions you will make as to where to invest your limited resources. If you have a “top of the funnel” problem (i.e. your website is only getting 10 visitors a week), then creating the world’s best landing page and trying to optimize your conversions is unlikely to move the dial much. On the other hand, if only 1 in 10,000 people that visit your website ultimately convert to a lead (or user), growing your web traffic to 100,000 visitors is not going to move the dial either. Understand your funnel, so you can optimize it. The bottleneck is always somewhere. Find it, and optimize it — until the bottleneck moves somewhere else. It’s a lot like optimzing your software product. Grab the low-hanging fruit first.
5 You Need Knobs and Dials In The Business.
One of the great things about the SaaS business is you have lots of aspects of the business you can tweak (examples include pricing, packaging/features and trial duration). It’s often tempting to tweak and optimize the business too early. In the early days, the key is to install the knobs and dials and build gauges to measure as much as you can (without driving yourself crazy).As you grow, you should be spending a fair amount of your time understanding the metrics in your business and how those metrics are moving over time.
6 Visibility and Brakes Let You Go Faster.
One of the big benefits of SaaS businesses is that they often operate on a shorter cycle. You’re dealing in days/weeks/months not in quarters/years. What this means is that when bad things start to happen (as many experienced during the start of the economic downturn), you’ll notice it sooner. This is a very good thing.
7 User Interface and Experience Counts:
In the SaaS world, design matters much more than the old world where users were forced to use bad enterprise software because they had to. Success in SaaS is not just about selling customers, it’s also about retaining them. If your user experience makes people want to pull their hair out and run out of the room screaming, there’s a decent chance that your cancellation rate is going to be higher than you want. High cancellation rates kill SaaS startups. Start recruiting great design and user experience talent now. They’re in-demand and hard to find, so it might take a while.
Source: 7 Simple Lessons from Inside HubSpot
Most SaaS businesses are subscription-based (there’s usually no big upfront payment when you signup a customer). As a result, sales and marketing costs are front-loaded, but revenue comes in over time. This can create cash-flow issues. The higher your sales growth, the larger the gap in cash-flows. This is why SaaS companies often raise large amounts of capital.
2 Retaining customers is critical.
In the old enterprise software days, a common model was to have some sort of upfront license fee — and then some ongoing maintenance revenue (15–20%) which covered things like support and upgrades. Sure, the recurring revenue was important (because it added up) but much of the mojo was in those big upfront fees.
In the SaaS world, everything is usually some sort of recurring revenue. This, in the long-term is a mostly good thing. But, in the short-term, it means you really need to keep those customers that you sell or things are going to get really painful, very quickly.In SaaS, things are simple by design — and contracts are shorter. The net result is that it is easier for customers to leave.
3 It’s Software — But There Are Hard Costs.
In the enterprise-installed software business, you shipped disks/CDs/DVDs (or made the software available to download). There were very few infrastructure costs. To deliver software as a service, you need to invest in infrastructure — including people to keep things running.
4 It Pays To Know Your Funnel.
One of the central drivers in the business will be understanding the shape of your marketing/sales funnel. What channels are driving prospects into your funnel? What’s the conversion rate of a random web visitor to trial? Trial to purchase? Purchase to delighted customer? The better you know your funnel the better decisions you will make as to where to invest your limited resources. If you have a “top of the funnel” problem (i.e. your website is only getting 10 visitors a week), then creating the world’s best landing page and trying to optimize your conversions is unlikely to move the dial much. On the other hand, if only 1 in 10,000 people that visit your website ultimately convert to a lead (or user), growing your web traffic to 100,000 visitors is not going to move the dial either. Understand your funnel, so you can optimize it. The bottleneck is always somewhere. Find it, and optimize it — until the bottleneck moves somewhere else. It’s a lot like optimzing your software product. Grab the low-hanging fruit first.
5 You Need Knobs and Dials In The Business.
One of the great things about the SaaS business is you have lots of aspects of the business you can tweak (examples include pricing, packaging/features and trial duration). It’s often tempting to tweak and optimize the business too early. In the early days, the key is to install the knobs and dials and build gauges to measure as much as you can (without driving yourself crazy).As you grow, you should be spending a fair amount of your time understanding the metrics in your business and how those metrics are moving over time.
6 Visibility and Brakes Let You Go Faster.
One of the big benefits of SaaS businesses is that they often operate on a shorter cycle. You’re dealing in days/weeks/months not in quarters/years. What this means is that when bad things start to happen (as many experienced during the start of the economic downturn), you’ll notice it sooner. This is a very good thing.
7 User Interface and Experience Counts:
In the SaaS world, design matters much more than the old world where users were forced to use bad enterprise software because they had to. Success in SaaS is not just about selling customers, it’s also about retaining them. If your user experience makes people want to pull their hair out and run out of the room screaming, there’s a decent chance that your cancellation rate is going to be higher than you want. High cancellation rates kill SaaS startups. Start recruiting great design and user experience talent now. They’re in-demand and hard to find, so it might take a while.
Source: 7 Simple Lessons from Inside HubSpot
Labels: startups
Posted by Nick HaC @ 4:14 AM
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
Labels: anthropology, cats, culture, entrepreneurship, futurism, internet, learning
Posted by Nick HaC @ 5:26 AM
Not all failures are created equal. When it comes to brainstorms and proposals, fail all you want, Seth Godin advises. By the time you get to board meetings or mockups, the failures should be only occasional. But failing to keep a promise to a customer? That's never acceptable under the Godin hierarchy of failure
A hierarchy of failure worth following
Not all failures are the same. Here are five kinds, from frequency = good all the way to please-don't!
FAIL OFTEN: Ideas that challenge the status quo. Proposals. Brainstorms. Concepts that open doors.
FAIL FREQUENTLY: Prototypes. Spreadsheets. Sample ads and copy.
FAIL OCCASIONALLY: Working mockups. Playtesting sessions. Board meetings.
FAIL RARELY: Interactions with small groups of actual users and customers.
FAIL NEVER: Keeping promises to your constituents.
The thing is, in their rush to play it safe and then their urgency to salvage everything in the face of an emergency, most organizations do precisely the opposite. They throw their customers or their people under the bus ("we had no choice") but rarely take the pro-active steps necessary to fail quietly, and often, in private, in advance, when there's still time to make things better.
Better to have a difficult conversation now than a failed customer interaction later.
Labels: seth godin
Posted by Nick HaC @ 4:56 AM
Sunday, July 11, 2010
Ok so ive been super excited for the last few weeks gearing up for the launch of a new product from BuzzNumbers. Ive been practically unable to talk or think about anything else (apologies to @edwina)
Introducing - BuzzVoices: Australian Forum Insights
Check it out, any feedback you have i would be pleased to hear it!
Introducing - BuzzVoices: Australian Forum Insights
Check it out, any feedback you have i would be pleased to hear it!
Labels: business, entrepreneurship, interestingness, internet, marketing, nickhac, startups
Posted by Nick HaC @ 6:30 AM
Saturday, July 10, 2010
What do entrepreneurs look like? Are they born or made? This is a hard question. I think the root cause of that difficulty is that we tend to conflate two different questions into one. First, what causes someone to attempt entrepreneurship instead of a more traditional career path? And second, what attributes make someone likely to be a successful entrepreneur?
The difficulty lies in this paradox: many of the attributes that increase the likelihood of becoming an entrepreneur actually impede startup success.
Let’s start with the startup personality attributes. The academic research here is extraordinary. Here are the personality traits that are positively correlated with likelihood to pursue entrepreneurship: extraversion, skepticism, need for achievement, risk taking, desire for independence, locus of control, self efficacy, overconfidence, representativeness (the tendency to over-generalize from small samples), and intuition.
Read the full article at StartupLessonsLearned
The difficulty lies in this paradox: many of the attributes that increase the likelihood of becoming an entrepreneur actually impede startup success.
Let’s start with the startup personality attributes. The academic research here is extraordinary. Here are the personality traits that are positively correlated with likelihood to pursue entrepreneurship: extraversion, skepticism, need for achievement, risk taking, desire for independence, locus of control, self efficacy, overconfidence, representativeness (the tendency to over-generalize from small samples), and intuition.
Read the full article at StartupLessonsLearned
Labels: entrepreneurship
Posted by Nick HaC @ 5:27 PM
Friday, July 9, 2010
Ive been working so much i have been mostly relying on DI.FM for music streaming at work, usually the progressive and minimal techno channels, which seem to be the most productive for software development environments.
That said one of my colleagues @brehtt put me in contact with a friend of his who makes some interesting mixups. I really liked this mixup, reminded me of some of the time i spent in east london (hackney/shoreditch/leyton) and the local radio...
Have a listen!
Dub Spectrum by Gilsun
http://soundcloud.com/gilsun
That said one of my colleagues @brehtt put me in contact with a friend of his who makes some interesting mixups. I really liked this mixup, reminded me of some of the time i spent in east london (hackney/shoreditch/leyton) and the local radio...
Have a listen!
Dub Spectrum by Gilsun
http://soundcloud.com/gilsun
Labels: music
Posted by Nick HaC @ 6:19 PM
Thursday, July 8, 2010
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
Video: Why you cant work at work
My feeling is that the modern workplace is structured completely wrong. It’s really optimized for interruptions. And interruptions are the enemy of work. They are the enemy of productivity, they are the enemy of creativity, they are the enemy of everything. But that’s what the modern workplace is all about, it’s interruptions. Everyone’s calling meetings all the time, everyone’s screaming people’s names across the thing, there’s phones ringing all the time. People are walking around. It’s all about interruptions. And people go to work today, and then they end up doing most of their real work after work, or on the weekends. So, people are working longer hours, people are tired – I’m working 50-60 hours this week. It’s not that there’s 50 or 60 hours worth of work to do, it’s because you don’t work at work anymore. You go to work to get interrupted.
My feeling is that the modern workplace is structured completely wrong. It’s really optimized for interruptions. And interruptions are the enemy of work. They are the enemy of productivity, they are the enemy of creativity, they are the enemy of everything. But that’s what the modern workplace is all about, it’s interruptions. Everyone’s calling meetings all the time, everyone’s screaming people’s names across the thing, there’s phones ringing all the time. People are walking around. It’s all about interruptions. And people go to work today, and then they end up doing most of their real work after work, or on the weekends. So, people are working longer hours, people are tired – I’m working 50-60 hours this week. It’s not that there’s 50 or 60 hours worth of work to do, it’s because you don’t work at work anymore. You go to work to get interrupted.
Labels: business, entrepreneurship, hacker, interestingness, internet, learning, programming
Posted by Nick HaC @ 4:24 AM
Labels: Philosophy
Posted by Nick HaC @ 4:18 AM
Thursday, July 1, 2010
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