John's Music Blog

I once visited a very successful technology integrator just outside of Boston.  Every Wednesday, the mother of the founder, who was Italian, would cook for the entire company.  At the time, they had more than one hundred employees.  What a feast!

If you want to launch a startup, and you want to recruit and retain high-quality, highly-motivated members for your team, it’s imperative that you take care of them.  Cash conservation is important, but food, really good food, can go a long way to keeping a team motivated.  After all, it can’t all be about the distant and potentially huge payoff.  Employees can’t eat options.  There’s got to be something it in for them today.  Which brings me to today’s post.  A friend directed me to their son’s blog: One Food Guy.  There are enough restaurant and recipe suggestions to keep an entire team of entrepreneurs motivated.   Check out the Andalusian crepes.  Hmm.  Is that my stomache growling?

I’m a couple of hundred pages into The Black Swan, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.  In Taleb’s world view, The Black Swan can be the highly-improbable good event or the highly-improbable bad event, either of which has the ability to change the course of history.  He makes a good case for his statement that highly-improbable events have more impact on the world’s future than probable events.  I’m sorry, if that seems irrational.  But my recommendation is that you slug through the first 200 pages, as I did, and see if you reach a similar understanding.  (more…)