Since I’m clearly not that great at blogging, maybe microblogging will work better. Baby steps!
Ben’s Guide to Amazon
This one’s been a long time coming. I’ve gotten quite a few requests for a “Ben’s Guide to Deals” [particularly after The Great Seaweed Arbitrage of 2011], where I kindly inform my close friends and family about all the great deals I find…and while that hasn’t quite reached fruition yet, here’s a handy guide to how to best exploit Amazon to get all of the random crap you may or may not need for the lowest price possible.
And at the end, you’ll get to see a real screencast of me out on the field itself, skillfully employing my tactics to carefully maneuver around all the price discriminatory strategies and hidden margins Amazon has meticulously set in place to maximize the possibility that you sub-optimally expend your hard earned cash. This is not an exercise in abstraction. This is real life. Srs bsns. Let’s get started.
Install the CamelCamelCamel.com (yes, they need a new name) extension (Chrome link) (Firefox link) for price tracking.
Get Amazon Prime.
Sign up for an Amazon VISA Rewards card.
Create another account, and sign up for the Amazon Affiliates program.
Buy the Amazon Kindle with Special Offers.
Install Invisible Hand.
Sign up for Pricemash. This is, of course, the most important step.
Alright, now that we’ve loaded our heavy weapons, it’s time to go to war.
Posted in Uncategorized
On Productivity
So it’s my first day doing this and I’m already behind schedule by more than half my allotted time – I’ve set aside an hour on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday from 2-3 PM to regularly update this blog, and right now it’s already 2:40…and today’s topic is productivity. Great.
Over the past few weeks I’ve been experimenting with a lot of different strategies for keeping focused on the end in sight, and a number of things have struck me as especially potent.
Actually, since I’m running short on time, just one thing.
1. Be held accountable by as many forces as possible.
This is pretty much all-encompassing, and starts with being accountable to myself – I have a quantifiable set of daily tasks I want to get done, an impending list of ultimate goals for this month, next month, this quarter, a broad commitment to a structured day (sleep at 12, wake at 9 [yes, I need 9 hours of sleep], gym at 9:30, meetings from 2-4, et so on), and a chess clock that counts down to the second exactly how much time I spend being productive and how much time I spend peeing and eating beef jerky [thanks David].
The second aspect is to be accountable to everyone else – everything from telling people what you’re going to do, having people constantly check up on you, working with people who have a stake in what you’re doing…pretty much anything that makes it very clear that you have to get done what you say you will. And what you say must be explicit – vague aims yield vague results, astonishingly enough.
There is one downside to this – it’s impossible to account for everything that’ll benefit you in some way down the line in a structured day — one of the reasons I’m behind schedule today is I spent a little too much time reading up on Bayes’ Theorem and email filtering this morning. It was fascinating, and I’m sure the information will be pertinent and applicable at some point in my life – where exactly, I have no idea. So any thoughts on accounting for the unaccountable, I’d love to hear them.
/3:01 PM
Picture is of our new penthouse workspace, fully furnished with standing desks overlooking city hall. It’s a pretty great deal.
Posted in Uncategorized
Skydiving and Lasers
Too much going on to write something presently, so here’s a picture of my 1,150 milliwatt 445 nm blue laser instead. Also did my first four skydiving jumps, steeped in AFF training. And just recovered from two weeks of the worst poison oak my rash specialist doc had seen in over two years. Lots of fun stories. But we’ll save those for later, too much exciting business right now.
Posted in Adventure, Pure Awesomeness
Life Update
Believe it or not, I actually had two very substantial blog posts penned since moving out to the Bay. So I haven’t actually been neglecting blogging, so much as I’ve been neglecting posting my bloggings.
Here was the beginning of the first:
Adventures in Transportation: X-Men Edition
“Laura, seriously? Mountain View? I’m looking at Google Maps, and it’s literally going to take me two and a half hours each way to get there.”
“Right.”
“…Did you hear me right? I said two and a half hours each way. Generally, as a person must both arrive at a destination and return from it, that means it will take me about five hours just to get to the movie. Then two hours to see the movie. That means I’m going to be spending seven hours just to see this damn new X-Men movie.”
“And?”
“Fuck it. I’m in.”
I spent the next ~1,400 words in that post describing my journey down to Mountain View, which included stowing away on Caltrain, running the last ~4 miles to the movie theater, almost fracturing my foot, losing all hope of gaining transportation back to SF, thoroughly placing all blame on Harvard’s email system (very deservedly so; they stopped forwarding my email for about five days before I noticed without any warning; missed about 50 important emails, including my CityCarShare acceptance email, hence why I had to take public transportation), staying the night at Blackbox, being shunned by Caltrain for hours the next day, et so on.
It was pretty great, but I’m going to use my better judgement and refrain from posting the entry in its entirety, as every other word is pretty much a profanity.
—————————————————————————————————-
So what’s been going on since we’ve gotten down to San Fran?
Well, it’s too late to describe it all now. Should have asked ten days ago, when I still would have had the energy and motivation to describe every last detail. Long story short, I’m living in quite possibly the most amazing luxury high-rise apartment – in the heart of downtown SF, on the intersection of Market and 10th. Pristine, sparkling new looking flat with a giant patio, an enormous lounge that no one uses, massive roof access, in unit laundry, trash chute, full kitchen, giant free gym that also no one uses one floor below us, free 24/7 concierge…all for $1,300 for two people (Ryan and myself). It’s like I died and went to heaven, except I didn’t die and apparently this isn’t even paradise yet, because it only gets better from here.
So how’s the project going?
Remarkably well. We’re polishing up the first stage of our prototype, which we’re hoping to initially validate in the coming few weeks. We’re also beginning our developer/possible-cofounder hunt hardcore…which, I do believe, merits its own post right now.
Posted in Life
Thanks for the Press
I’ve been pretty negligent on keeping up with the media with the massive attention I’ve been pouring into the startup as well as StartingBloc and moving to the Bay, but a few reporters were great enough to hunt me down regardless. Thanks people!
Huffington Post – Peter Thiel Awards $100,000 To Entrepreneurs Under 20
Harvard Political Review – Interview with Ben Yu: Harvard Dropout and Thiel Fellow
NextGen Journal – People Profile: Ben Yu
Harvard Crimson – Gap Years: A Chance To Explore The World
The Moral Liberal - Thiel Foundation Gives $100k Awards to Under-20 Dropouts
New York Times – Finding the Next Mark Zuckerberg
BusinessWire – Peter Thiel Announces Inaugural Class of 20 Under 20 Thiel Fellows
Posted in Entrepreneurship, News
Return from Caving, Alive and Mostly Well
As it turns out, a cave is generally as you would imagine it to be. Deep, dark, small, and otherwise not generally the most comfortable place for a human being to be. I had the idea to go tackle Mammoth Cave (longest cave system in the world at over 400 miles) sometime last year, when I passed it on I-65 on the way down to the Everglades. Timing never quite worked out until now however, so I had to postpone this small dream of mine while I crawled through school instead.
But this Sunday, the slightly improbable finally happened, and I found myself driving down to Kentucky from the extraordinarily-dull-suburbs-of-Illinois-from-which-all-dreams-of-greater-things-are-born on a moderately distanced seven and a half hour trek. The really incredible and much more improbable aspect of this journey was that I was not in fact alone, as by any reasonable standard I should have been on this semi-ridiculous and fully spontaneous trip, but rather I was accompanied by my very good friend Laura who I hadn’t spoken in depth to in about a year. I still regard this as very likely my greatest accomplishment in all my nineteen years of life.
“Hey, Laura, so I’m leaving Plainfield in a week and I’m never coming back.”
“Oh. Okay.”
“So that means I’ll never see you again.”
“Oh. Okay.”
“So…I figured maybe we should go on an adventure so you can say goodbye to me in a proper, meaningful way.”
“Oh. Okay.
…
“Wait. What kind of adventure?”
“Well…I had a few things in mind. There’s this one thing that I’ve been wanting to do for a while now, and this would really be perfect for you, because you’re, uh, small, and skinny, and mostly because you have a car we can use…”
“…”
“Wait. Hang on. I have to take a flight to New York for a conference; I’ll finish writing up this story later.”
To be prolonged.
Posted in Adventure, Pure Awesomeness