My son passed the time today on the Chunnel crafting a logic puzzle. He has graciously offered it to me as blog content...
Alice, Bob, Charlie, Diana and Ed live in 5 one-garage homes on a street, each numbered 1 through 5 (but not necessarily in that order). They drive a Ford, Honda, Nissan, Toyota and Mercedes – also not necessarily in that order. Based on the following clues, who drives which car?
The women drive only Japanese cars.
The Honda is not in Garage 2.
Edward and Alice have adjacent garages.
Even-numbered homes contain only Japanese cars.
Ed and Bob live next door to each other, and Diana’s address is higher than theirs.
Charlie doesn’t like Japanese cars.
The addresses of the Toyota, Ford and Honda are prime numbers.
Alice’s address is more than twice Charlie’s.
The Ford and Nissan belong to next door neighbors.
Having shared logic puzzles before, I know the following disclaimer is necessary: this is a logic puzzle, and not a social or economic statement relating to what women drive or the quality of Japanese cars, so don't bother commenting on off-topic elements. (For the sake of this puzzle, Nissan, Toyota and Honda are the Japanese car manufacturers.)
Enjoy, and try to be the first to submit the right answer!
Update: evan submitted the first right answer. Hemang Gadhia, Boomer, judic and Harit also submitted correct answers before I published any correct answers in the comments section. Don't read the comments if you wish to still solve this yourself.
This is a "reprint" of a post I originally authored for TechCrunch.
Over the years I’ve heard many legitimate gripes from entrepreneurs about the way venture capital firms treat them while fundraising. I must confess an imperfect record of courtesy myself, though I do try to be respectful, and to incorporate feedback. For example, I once resolved never to keep entrepreneurs waiting long for me in our lobby, and I think I live up to that.
But I often hear one particular gripe from those who simply fail to think through the issue practically: For their first pitch to a large venture capital firm, entrepreneurs are often invited to speak or meet with someone other than a partner of the firm. Some interpret this as an insult, a waste of time, and a lack of substantive interest in their startups. And they are partially right.
They are right that in any first meeting or conversation, the VC is less interested than the entrepreneur. Not zero interest, but less. This is true for every pitch meeting that has ever taken place in history. In the second meeting there is more interest, and by the time a venture investor wires the money, the firm is just as excited as the founders.
They are wrong, though, about the insult. And the numbers prove incontrovertibly that it is not a waste of time.
The experienced partner you want as a lead investor probably has a lot of board seats. He or she spends most of the day at company meetings (board and otherwise), in interviews, and with the limited partners who actually provide the capital. I, for one, always try to reserve time in my week for hearing pitches, but it is scarce, and so if I took every first meeting myself, I’d be much less likely to actually meet the entrepreneur whose startup I wish to fund.
Also, as a seasoned VC I’m a lot dumber now about new markets than 15 years ago when I had fewer obligations. Researching all thewild tangents and nuances of cloud infrastructure, cyber security, social commerce, scalable data processing, etc., is a full time job. Who Has Time For This? Not I, but I can hire people smarter than me who do!
So if you’re an entrepreneur interested in partnering with a smart, successful, well capitalized venture investor, you have many aspects of character, competency and chemistry to consider. Is the audience’s seniority at your first pitch really the most important?
Think it through before you snub a meeting with that associate, analyst, principal or vice-president. That’s who’s most likely to get what you’re doing, and to be your champion through the process. (Indeed, the last five investments I made arose from first meetings that the founders had with James Cham, Trevor Oelschig or Ethan Kurzweil.) Consider it an opportunity to scope out the firm and to polish your pitch before you meet the partners.
And please understand that the intention is most definitely not an insult. Anyone in our orbit knows that many VCs fully appreciate the talent, courage, energy and genius of the entrepreneurs we meet. It is only because we wish to meet more of you that we have the process and organization that we do.
Now I’ve got to get going——the two engineers whom Sunil met on Thursday just showed up in my lobby.
German security researcher Ralph Langner was the first to decode and publish the inner workings of Stuxnet, a Windows-based computer worm that successfully targeted Iran's nuclear enrichment facility, setting back their nuclear weapons program by three years (according to the public statements of several authoritative sources). Although no one has claimed credit for creating Stuxnet, it has been widely attributed to a collaboration between Israeli and US intelligence agencies.
I had come into his TED Talk with high expectations, but I was disappointed -- not by the science but by Ralph's political commentary. What started as an interesting (though simplified) explanation of a ground-breaking cyber weapon devolved into a naive, self righteous rant against the US that appealed to TED's liberal audience. (I normally share that liberal viewpoint, but I overcame my bias with actual knowledge, having connected with my hacker friends at the last DEFcon, and having just read two well documented books on cyber warfare by Jeff Carr and Richard Clarke.)
Langner's first pot shot was his characterization of the US as the only superpower in cyberspace. Apparently Langner is not familiar with Russia and China's far more developed and extensive cyber militaries, which they supplement with privately contracted cyber gangs. Furthermore, Russian and China have far more experience than the US in waging cyber warfare, as evidenced by repeated, successful, multi-day attacks on the government and civilian electronic infrastructures of South Korea, Chechnya and Georgia during the last decade.
Langner's second, more damning accusation was aimed at the US for unleashing Stuxnet on the world, since it can now be repurposed as a weapon against anyone, including our own computer networks. The implication was that just as we did in 1945, the US is once again developing non-conventional weapons that threaten global stability.
But Stuxnet is not what exposes our digital infrastructure to attack. No, we opened that door long ago when we put the computers in charge. Is Langner -- or anyone -- really so naive as to think that without Stuxnet we wouldn't have to defend our networks from cyber attack?
What really irked me, though, was that at no point did Ralph question the wisdom of sharing all his findings publicly (which certainly aids and abets anyone who might wish to repurpose Stuxnet). Nor did he express any hesitation in reaching out to the Iranians to help them overcome this nasty infection. Was I the only person in the audience who thought, "Wait a minute, shouldn't we be thanking the creators of Stuxnet, instead of the guy who stopped it?"
If ever there was a time when US aggression was called for, this was surely it. Ahmadinejad has stated very clearly that Iran supports Jihad on the United States, and that he fully intends for Iran to destroy "the Zionist State" at his earliest convenience. The dictator of Iran holds the Presidential title despite having lost the election, and having brutally crushed the political dissidents who protested. Now who among you really think that stopping the nuclear ambitions of a raving, rogue, belligerent madman is a poor use of our tax dollars?
International pressure has not worked. Economic sanctions have not worked. Sure, we could have used conventional missiles to disable this dictator's Jihad machine, but that would have killed Iranians, possibly spread radiation, jeopardized the lives of our soldiers, cost hundreds of millions, provoked military reprisals, and it may not have even worked. If indeed our intelligence community helped develop and launch Stuxent, then I for one am grateful.
On the final day of the conference, one TEDster was so fired up by Langner that he got up on stage to denounce the people behind Stuxnet for their evil ways, demanding that the US bring them to justice for their illegal aggression and for exposing our country's infrastructure to Stuxnet variants. The audience applauded loudly.
Except that cyber warfare is NOT illegal. (Though unlike Russia and China, the US does prohibit citizens from computer hacking.) Cyber warfare is, however, fast, effective, precise, virtually free, stealthy and usable without loss of life. If we can't altogether rid the world of conflict, our species is surely better off fighting cyber wars than conventional ones.
In one of the best TED Talks ever, Slate columnist Kathryn Schulz exposes human nature. It doesn’t feel good to be wrong, and so we naturally inflate the confidence we have in our convictions. (My personal theory is that we grow addicted to the endorphnis our brains produce when we’re right, in order to drive the back error propogation fine tuning our neural networks.) A 60% likely belief swells to 90% in our minds. This simple observation that we try to avoid the feeling of ignorance explains a lot of screwy things in the world.
Medical ethicist Harvey Fineberg shows us three paths forward for the ever-evolving human species: to stop evolving completely, to evolve naturally -- or to control the next steps of human evolution, using genetic modification, to make ourselves smarter, faster, better. Neo-evolution is within our grasp.
The women drive only Japanese cars.
Score: 5 balloons
Score: 8 balloons