Stated Goals

While I don't like most self-help books, I think many of them have some kernels of knowledge. One of the recurring themes found in these books is to list out ones goals. The thought being, if you state your goals out loud your chances of reaching them increases. I buy that. If for no other reason than you have put effort into thinking about whats important to you, and have it at the forefront of your thoughts.

I'm thinking a 5 year, stated goal plan is a bit more reasonable than to just list out absolutely everything. The chances of significant change over the course of the next 5 years is small. This plan is only for my financial health and does not include any goals related to other aspects of my life. Here goes....

1. Contribute a minimum of 30k each year to my bottom line
   
2. Purchase a property for my dad in Scottsdale.
3. Purchase a main residence for me in San Francisco
4. Increase my salary (including bonus) by 20% each year
5. Max out my Roth each year
6. Contribute at least 6% of my pre-tax income to my 401k
7. Contribute at least 10% of my post-tax income to my brokerage account
8. Remain car-less

I'm pretty sure I will think of more.

Personal Finance

So, this year I thought I would focus on some personal finance stuff. In order to keep track of where my money is going, I have made a complete budget:

Monthly Expenses
Rent	1200
Student Loans	137
Entertainment	200
Breakfast	120
Lunch	210
Dinner	270
Utilities	25
Cable/internet/phone	50
24 Hour Fitness	45
Burn Rate	2257

That burn rate is pretty high.... Mostly due to the astronomical rent I pay to live in San Francisco. I have been reading quite a bit about goals, and how those who do not write their goals down are less likely to reach them. I think a future post will be the enumeration of all my goals, probably based on a time frame - 1 year, 5 years, 10 years etc....

VentureLab 1/17/06

I came across this great monthly event at Stanford called the MIT/Stanford Venture Lab. Basically it worked like this: The CEO of a new venture "demos" his new product, in this case Odeo CEO Evan Williams, to the audience and a panel of Venture Capital/industry analysts for a question/answer session. The panelists consisted of Gary Stein, Senior Analyst from Jupiter research, Jim Barton, CTO of Tivo and David Hornik, Partner at August Capital. The moderator was Randy Haykin, Founder and managing director of Outlook Ventures.

David Hornick is the author of the VentureBlog, which if you are not familiar with it, is one of the better blogs on VC that I have come across.

The topic of the evening: User-Generated Content and the Future of Media. Odeo was a great candidate to demonstrate the advances that "Web 2.0" has brought to users. I've been using Odeo for a couple of months at work, not so much for its podcasting abilities or its ability to generate audio files, but simply to listen to content using its built-in player. There happens to be a good amount of content related to security, VC and entrepreneurship that I find interesting and can stream straight from the page without having to toss it on the ipod or download first.

To some extent the dialogue focused on "the long tail" coined by Chris Anderson from a 2004 wired article - there are many opportunites to market unique or custom products catered to individuals, simply because the aggregate consumption of these singular products, albeit on an individually small scale, in total, equals quite a large volume. This can really only be accompolished when storage or unit costs are extremely small, as is the case with Odeo.

In summary, I was quite excited with this event and will look to do some volunteering for them in the future. If you happen to make it out to one of these look for me!

Perfect Ratio

Why call a blog the "Perfect Ratio"? I don't know, maybe I'm talking about The golden ratio of Leornardo Da Vinci fame, or maybe it's a perfect drink recipe; two parts grapefruit juice, one part Vodka. My definition seeks to look at topics that interest me, this is a broad group mind you. Adam Smith would be quite upset with me as I seek to broaden my horizons by avoiding specialization. Blame it on attention deficit disorder, an overactive mind or simply a lack of focus, the topics covered here will seek to satisfy the reductionist in me and cover areas I am interested in. Computer Security, Economics, Entrepreneurship and a whole host of other areas that I have yet to find....

While this site is mainly for my own reflection, please feel free to comment and make suggestions or recommend something that I may find interesting.

Thank you, and enjoy!

The Genome War

This book caught my eye while I was reading Jurvetson's blog. It's a totally fascinating read. This story for those unaware is a battle between Venter's company Celera and the NIH for who could sequence the Genome first. The cast of characters were all new to me, and a quick google for some of the big players returned big results. Gene Myers, a computational biologist originally from the University of Arizona, and now at Berkeley, played a huge role in the design of the algorithms responsible for the "whole genome shotgun technique." This was Celera's competitve advantage against the NIH's slow and steady yet supposedly accurate. Celeras technique could be compared to dumping an entire puzzle on the ground and then immediately assembling the pieces(genes) back into the puzzle. The NIH, used a slower piecemeal approach - comparing each part of the puzzle to all the pieces until a match was found. This technique, while accurate, was impossibly slow to compete with the Celera model. Heated debate ensued as the NIH scientists dismissed the whole genome shotgun approach as "not real science." Too bad for them, it panned out. I find Gene to be the most interesting of the group, probably because my interest lie more in the technology than the science, but also because I really feel like none of the fame bestowed upon Venter would have happened without him.

Some important definitions gleaned from the book here, with some help from Wikipedia:

cDNA or complimentary DNA, this is synthesized from mature mRNA.
mRNA is RNA that encodes and carries information from DNA to sites of protein synthesis
SNP or single nucleotide polymorphism is a DNA sequence variation, occurring when a single nucleotide: adenine (A), thymine (T), cytosine (C) or guanine (G) - in the genome is altered