J. Apo Bordin

Everything is beautiful in its time

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 09:51:13 -0700

Like everybody, I’ve had too many childhood dreams at night of being a big star or a hero, to wake up and realize it was a fickle dream. And I would wake up to a new day as just a child, no longer a hero, but could now romp and skip with neighbor kids, and with my brothers and my sister in the woods. Enjoy time in the spotlight, enjoy watching it pass away - that’s what dreams are for. “Everything is beautiful in its time,” and we realize this when we don’t cling, don’t possess. We then know the blooming of a flower is no less beautiful than its wilting, its bowing to the ground, releasing seeds for another spring, another generation. Okay, I’m getting maybe too romantic here. Life sucks too. But the suckiness of life is part of the fun, too, when savored, like delicious hot burning peppers in Mexican food, and makes for the best stories to tell grand kids.

-via Suelo

SXSW 2012 - Quote

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 14:32:42 -0700

Opportunity can be manufactured. -Biz Stone

Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 10:30:47 -0700

3. Replace Universities

People are all over this idea lately, and I think they’re onto something. I’m reluctant to suggest that an institution that’s been around for a millennium is finished just because of some mistakes they made in the last few decades, but certainly in the last few decades US universities seem to have been headed down the wrong path. One could do a lot better for a lot less money. I don’t think universities will disappear. They won’t be replaced wholesale. They’ll just lose the de facto monopoly on certain types of learning that they once had. There will be many different ways to learn different things, and some may look quite different from universities. Y Combinator itself is arguably one of them. Learning is such a big problem that changing the way people do it will have a wave of secondary effects. For example, the name of the university one went to is treated by a lot of people (correctly or not) as a credential in its own right. If learning breaks up into many little pieces, credentialling may separate from it. There may even need to be replacements for campus social life (and oddly enough, YC even has aspects of that). You could replace high schools too, but there you face bureaucratic obstacles that would slow down a startup. Universities seem the place to start.

-via Paul Graham

Old Films

Sat, 10 Mar 2012 18:41:00 -0800

View on Flickr

TCK's Home

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 17:34:10 -0800

*TCK = A Third Culture Kid (TCK) is a person who has spent a significant part of their developmental years outside the parents’ culture.

I am starting to think that home is less about where you live and more about nodes on a personal life journey, the same way I and my fellow TCK’s view our passports as interesting travel documents and less as signifiers of our cultural identity.

As I travel around the world I keep in touch with many people, see and do many things in many places, collect memories, some decidedly analog (I obsessively buy vinyl music wherever I go, for example) some virtual (nothing beats Instagram for romanticizing places and memories, making them instantly vintage and nostalgic) and assemble my own aggregate collage of home-ness. This sounds unbelievably corny, but I am starting to think that I am carrying home around with me, in my brain, on my back and on my laptop, and that ultimately home is a process that belongs inside me.

Having a house is not, for me, a home; having a happy life is.

- Excerpt from Paul Bennett’s “Curious About… Home”

Ideas as Neurons

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 10:12:00 -0800

Tom Robbins says you can’t manufacture creativity or wonderment, but you can pull yourself out of context so dramatically that you gawk in amazement at the ubiquitous everyday wonders you’re culturally conditioned to ignore. I think this is key: To get new ideas we need to see the world with new eyes–we need to evoke a novel way of seeing things. For me that involves throwing myself into new situations. Some of the thinkers I respect the most have credited travel, walks in the park, and marijuana as creativity catalysts. Really, its anything that triggers free association and the right conceptual collision. We need disruption of the profane so that we can engage with the sacred and creative.

- Jason Silva

Companies I'd like to work at: Amazon

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 13:46:44 -0800

More than any other corporation of the Internet age, Amazon embodies the emerging culture of business strategy. It is the General Electric of our times, and Bezos is the Jack Welch. When the definitive book on corporate strategy for the early Internet era is written, Amazon will be the main example, not Google, Apple, Microsoft or Facebook. Those are great companies too, but their greatness lies in other departments. As far as corporate strategy goes, they are mediocre players, not grandmasters. -Venkatesh Rao

-read full article

Sillycon

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 15:06:52 -0800

The best of us who work on the internet thrive on being alert to the next idea. We are harsh critics, and our lust to improve and iterate on everything we know is insatiable. From time to time, when the conditions are right, we’ll take a chance and see if we can make it happen. But how? And why? And for whom? On any day you can look at how our industry presents itself, and in its media, and all you’ll see is an egotocracy of who-knows-who, and disproportionately localized financial investment. It can seem that unless you’re trying to win the FA Cup, you’re not worthy of any attention. -Ben Ward

- read full post

Companies I'd like to work at: facebook

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 11:56:47 -0800

The Hacker Way is an approach to building that involves continuous improvement and iteration. Hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete. They just have to go fix it — often in the face of people who say it’s impossible or are content with the status quo. -M.Z., Letter to Investors

Image via Glassdoor

The Guardian - Three Little Pigs

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 20:47:00 -0800

This advert for the Guardian’s open journalism, screened for the first time on 29 February 2012, imagines how we might cover the story of the Three Little Pigs in print and online. -via The Guardian

"To fail sucks. To get back up rocks. To keep going rules."

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 20:39:19 -0800

“To fail sucks. To get back up rocks. To keep going rules.”

Companies I'd like to work at: Foursquare

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 20:34:00 -0800

People, like brands, evolve.

Like in every kind of society, especially in a fast-evolving one like ours, the ones fast to adapt and evolve are the ones who lead.

If brands could once sit on their taglines, products, and promises, they now have to constantly be observing culture, foreseeing, adapting, and evolving to changes. These changes are mainly driven by the technium, which of course alters human behavior, therefore our needs, aspirations, and motivations.

Many are the examples of brands who lost share or went out of business for a lack of response to such changes; and many others are the example of brands thriving and succeeding by continuously innovating in order to stay relevant.

After my brief experience at a startup, one thing is very clear: whatever the first idea is, it is very unlikely it will stay the same. From the moment you propose a product or service to people, they will be the one stirring its path, as it should be. Twitter was not born with the idea of becoming a tool for journalists, celebrities, or brands. Flickr was not born to be a site where you can upload, organize, and tag photos.

It is always more exciting to see small and big companies reinventing them selves in order to serve our current behaviors; the companies who are able to do that, are companies I would love to be part of, to learn from, and to help evolve.

Foursquare is a clear example of a brand that stays relevant by doing [not saying] relevant things at relevant times.

“To me, the most beautiful aspect of their execution has been in rolling out features at the precise moment when their user-base is primed for them, constantly reinventing their product and the space as a whole.” [excerpt from ‘Almost Three: A Brief History Of Foursquare Time (And A Look At Its Future)’, TechCrunch]

My new sounds:

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 16:33:15 -0800

My new sounds:

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 14:48:53 -0800

My new sounds:

Red Bull Stratos - A Brand That Does

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 20:55:47 -0800

PIPA/SOPA

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 08:05:51 -0800

PIPA/SOPA

My 2011 in pictures

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 11:07:00 -0800

Parts of 2011 found in my Pictures folder:

MOMA NY - My mom and the stroller she used to take me around with

SF - Walking around the Bay with my mom

SF - The one and only La Rouge leaving for NY

SF - Kevin Kelly at Web 2.0 Expo

SF - Haight Ashbury Neighborhood

SF - Roland Young says Art Direction is the Wrong Direction

SF - 4/20, 4:20pm at the Golden Gate Park

SF - TASIS Reunion

SF - Maxx Cabello Jr. at the Lou’s Blues Pier 47

Infineon Raceway - On track with Mathias and Noah

60 Federal - Independent Studies with Cameron

Jesper - The result of the Independent Studies

Various locations in SF - Hindsight in Retrospect, a video collaboration with Casey and Juan

Portland, OR - 4th of July with Clara and Catherine

Oregon - 4th of July at the beach

Regency Ballroom - Bloody Beetroots with the Trooper

60 Federal - Innovation class with guest speaker Heather LeFevre from Amsterdam

SF - Erlina

60 Federal - Innovation class with Barbarians Frank and Rolio

Stanyan Street - Casey on my DIY standing desk

SF - Airbnb party with MC Hammer, Sophia, Evgenia, and Christian

Stanyan Street - Luca and Gianna in SF

Monterey - Tripping demo day at MIIS

NY - Hogs & Heifers

NY - Kat and my brother

NY - Sandrita!!

Big Sur - Tripping Team Retreat at Riverside Campground

Las Vegas - Edo with the Legend

Lake Tahoe - Road trip with the boys

NY - With the sweetest British

Marrakech, Morocco - NYE with the Ragers [picture by Samantha]

Marrakech - with Olly

NYE 2012 - Marrakech Ragers

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 17:27:05 -0800

Formula 1 Aerodynamics

Wed, 23 Nov 2011 11:43:00 -0800

Until 2005, I wanted to be an Aerodynamic Engineer.

Tahoe, CA/NV 11.11

Sat, 19 Nov 2011 18:59:00 -0800