I started programming on a computer when I was about 10 years old. The Apple //e had just come out and I wanted one very badly. They had Apple //+ ‘s in my school and I was lucky enough that my parents bought me an Apple //e for Christmas. I couldn’t believe they actually got me one and it changed my life forever. I started playing games, making my own games, buying books on programming and thought about what it would be like to work at Apple. I added RAM to it, ending up with 128k and had two disk drives for copying games from floppy disk to floppy disk.

When I was in high school they came out with the color Macs and I got the first one, which was something like a Mac IIx. I studied computer science and ended up working for Apple, first as an intern for two summers and then full time as an engineer.

When I came to Apple, Steve Jobs had just come back. His impact was immediate and powerful. He did many great things (including upgrading the sushi chef at the company cafeteria) but one of the things that stands out the most was his “Think Different” campaign.

Even as an intern it was clear that Apple was having trouble. Windows dominated the marketplace and had a natural monopoly because most people (95%+) had windows, therefore most software was designed for Windows, therefore more people bought Windows computers. It was a virtuous cycle for Microsoft and a vicious one for everyone else. Apple went though a succession of CEOs. John Sculley, Michael Spindler, then Gil Amelio. Gil did one brilliant thing which was to buy NeXT and bring Steve Back. It took Steve little time to move Gil aside and take the helm as the CEO.

Morale at Apple was poor at this point. Think of Yahoo today and its inability to live up to its promise and constant leadership changes. Steve recognized this and using TBWA Chiat/Day came up with the Think Different campaigns. They were simple, beautiful and powerful. The campaign consisted of large black and white photos and short video clips of some of the most iconoclastic figures in modern history – Gandhi, Mohamed Ali, Jim Henson, The Dali Lama, John Lennon, Thomas Edison, Miles Davis. People who changed the world. That’s how Steve inspired the company.

Think Different from gchavezpooley on Vimeo.

He hung these giant posters on every building at the Infinite Loop where Apple is headquartered. I worked in the second building, IL2. Every day every employee that walked in the door saw a beautiful looming picture of someone great greeting them…

…someone who changed the world. It was pretty inspirational. You could feel a different energy at Apple. And the company never looked back. I went on to start companies and help others start companies but you never forget your first love. Steve, thanks for everything.

A lot of investors have become gold bugs recently. This is understandable given the instability in global financial markets and with the risk of inflation as the US and other G20 countries take on massive debt. Smart friends of mine are buying gold as a hedge against inflation while the US prints money. The US national debt is about 13 trillion dollars, more info here.

After the housing meltdown and recent stock market volatility it’s natural for capital to go to safe places like gold and treasuries. However, there are some cogent counter points to this strategy that I feel aren’t being voiced enough by the media nor by people who manage money.

Some reasons not to buy gold: Gold will hedge against inflation but won’t pay a premium to it. It will track inflation, but won’t give you a premium over it. Gold is a shiny metal with limited industrial uses. Its value is based on history, civilizations have valued it for millennia based on a primitive attraction to the material itself. Gold is atomic, and you know what it is, but therein lies the rub: Gold doesn’t represent any kind of innovation, it doesn’t represent imagination, it doesn’t help health, nor productivity, nor innovation. It’s bad for the environment. Mercury, arsenic, acid water, and deforestation are some by-products of mining for gold. I flew over the Amazon rainforest in Peru recently and looked at the destruction from large scale gold mining and even artisanal mines that dot the landscape.

Take a look at all the innovation happening today — Tesla has produced a beautiful 100% electric car. The cost of mapping the human genome has gone from $3 billion ten years ago to thousands today. Moore’s Law continues unabated and the rate of innovation in smart phones is staggering. The computer has moved from the desktop to the pocket, this trend alone reminds me of the World Wide Web in 1994. Social networking is in its infancy, and Twitter and Facebook are growing explosively. IP traffic is growing so fast that it has stunned the pioneering people who helped create it.

Ray Kurzweil maps out an optimistic view of the future with a tremendous amount of data supporting his main thesis — that the rate of innovation is increasing on a geometric scale. This means that innovation is happening faster every day. So yes, there are macro-level concerns about the economy, but there is also a staggering amount of data that supports the case for being an optimist. The data supports the fact that we’ll see more innovation in the next ten years than we’ve seen in the last one hundred years.

If you are an investor or entrepreneur, this is the best time in history to make a fortune and create a better world. There are more opportunities now than there have ever been. Information and data are being democratized in a way that present opportunities for anyone with a computer and an internet connection. Markets are global. You can reach the world with your blog. You can influence politics, voice your opinion. You can even email people like Steve Jobs directly.

There is no time in history like now. So if you’ve run out of ideas, buy gold. But I argue this is the best time to find innovators and invest in the future. Fortune favors the bold.

Growing as an entrepreneur is a function of how you grow as a person. It’s a process that mostly consists of making decisions, living with the results, and trying to incorporate those results into future decision making. We’re all bound to this process, but some of us are much better at it than others. Being right is of course important, but being wrong is more important. Being wrong lets you adjust your aim and improve. Without it you are lost. So get good at it. Admit mistakes, don’t be afraid of them, and try to understand what happened. Step outside of yourself and see how open you are to seeing things clearly, not emotionally.

If you can’t admit you are wrong emotionally, if you are basically too immature to do that, then you won’t grow. This is a process that is more emotional and having to do with your character than it is intellectual. It’s pretty rare these days for people to admit they got something wrong. Politicians don’t do it. Companies don’t do it (lawsuits certainly don’t help). Doctors don’t do it (lawsuits again). But great leaders can and should acknowledge when they got something wrong and focus on how to get better.

When I was managing, I tried to be pretty honest about what was at stake, what I didn’t know (you mostly have limited data to make decisions), and how I made a decision. When I got something wrong, which was often, I tried to admit it. First to myself, then to the folks working for me. If you can do this, you’ll grow faster, you’ll gain the respect of your employees, and you will build a more cohesive team. When you don’t, and I often didn’t, things get harder.

Keep growing. Surround yourself with people who will be honest with you. And treat them well when they are honest with you, so they keep being honest. This is a healthy cycle you’ll find in management at great companies.

When companies are good, or great, they find a way to get things right. And when they’re broken, they can’t seem to get anything right. This fundamentally comes from leadership at the company. So I guess it shouldn’t be surprising that when I tried to call B of A the other day to get information on my multi-million dollar mortgage, I couldn’t get a human being on the line. I waited 20 minutes, and because I didn’t have my mortgage number handy, I was stuck in an automated loop. I had to eventually give up. It was frustrating and pretty pathetic given that I pay six digits of interest ever year to them.

Shortly after, I was flying in to LAX. It was about 11:00 at night, and I was starving because the airplane food is inedible. So when I landed, I decided to call In-N-Out Burger to see if they were still open. There is an In-N-Out close to LAX. I Googled the number from my iPhone and dialed them up. A guy picked up on the second ring. I asked if the one near LAX was open this late. He knew the answer immediately (of course they were) and was very polite.

How is it that a company that I have a multi-million dollar business relationship with can’t get a human being to pick up the phone when I call? Yet a company like In-N-Out where the margin must be $1 / meal gets everything right?

Is it really any surprise that Bank of America and the rest of the lot are in so much trouble?

This is my first blog post on this site (I left the “Hello world!” title because it’s apt). Blogging is something that I always wanted to do and never had the time for. I’m going to dedicate this blog mostly to technology, building companies, investing, advice for entrepreneurs, and observations on life in general. Please feel free to comment and tell me what you think. I hope it’s helpful and insightful to at least a few people.

A friend of mine recently told me that the ancient Romans viewed man’s journey through time as one facing backwards. It makes sense, the only thing you can really see with any kind of acuity is history. Thus, we face backwards even though we are moving forward in time. The farther events are in the past, the farther they are in our vision and thus less clear. The analogy works, though we’d really like to think that we can model the future with some ability. And we can. The past informs the future. I’m going to try to share stories and observations from my past as an entrepreneur and computer scientist that will hopefully help those who are starting businesses now. I’ve certainly made a lot of mistakes, and can point out land mines to avoid. There should be some good guest posts as well.