Pharrell Wu began doing math at age one and was trading stocks at age three. Living in the Philippines, Wu became bored with the math curriculum at his school and started Googling for hard math problems on the one computer his parents owned at home. He came upon Brilliant.org, a recently launched online community that challenges and brings together technical minds to colve math and analytics problems, and started completing problems. Brilliant’s founder Sue Khim saw that Wu was crushing college students in some of the math exams and immediately matched the young boy with a mathematics professor from the University of Michigan for private tutoring sessions to study undergraduate level linear algebra. According to his now mentor, Wu is already at the level of an exceptional undergraduate math major, and is scoring better on tests than almost all of the professor’s college students.

There are brilliant technical minds like Wu across the world, and the internet is bringing these minds together, explains Khim. Brilliant.org is hoping to be the community where these individuals (both young and old) come together to challenge themselves, find like-minded talent, and find opportunities to use their skills.

Khim says the inspiration for Brilliant came in the realization that the current model to find technical talent who will become leaders in science, medicine and technology is broken. In many countries, high school students are encouraged to focus on studying for one national exam, which will determine where they go to college. In university, these students are measured on rote learning skills which are irrelevant to how they will be using skills to solve real problems. “There is a mismatch between nurturing intellectual skills in top students vs. what they actually have to spend time on to be successful in the system,” she says. But unfortunately, she explains, there is no way to get noticed if you don’t succeed in this system.

So Khim decided to create a place where these students can succeed and challenge themselves, and realize their true potential. She has enlisted a number of math professors, scientists and other technical minds to create difficult problems on the site. Brilliant features weekly olympiad-style challenges offer rigorous problem sets in math and physics. Users can not only solve problems but share your solutions and your process in solving the sets.

In March of this year, Khim presented Brilliant at the Launch Festival and caught the eye of investor and Social+Capital founder, Chamath Palihapitiya. Palihapitiya has been particularly focused on investing in some of the disruptions around education and saw huge potential in what Khim was trying to do.

Although the site only had a few thousand users at the time, Palihapitiya told Khim that he believed Brilliant could one day have millions. He, along with Kapor Capital, 500 Startups, Learn Capital, RTA Capital, and Hyde Park Angels; seeded Brilliant to help scale the site. After less than a year, Brilliant has 100,000 users from 135 countries and is doubling users every two months. Khim thinks that the site could hit one million users within a year. Users range from 13 years of age to the elderly.

When a student arrives on the site, he or she takes a brief diagnostic exam that will assign a level of mathematical or problem solving skill (1-5). Each week, the student will gain access to problem sets tailored to their abilities and designed to be more challenging and interesting than problems they would get in school. Students get three chances to arrive at the correct answer to each question in a problem set. When they solve problems, they receive points that can be traded in for academic opportunities and other prizes. If the student performs well in their current level for 2 weeks in a row, Brilliant will bump them to the next level.

As Khim explains, at first Brilliant started employing professional to develop challenging problems in physics and math, but not more and more content is being user-generated and professors and technical minds are actually enjoying creating the problems to see if anyone can solve them. For example, Brilliant is currently running competitions game theory technical programming called “The Hunger Games.” Users write an algorithm to fight to the death (online of course) against other algorithms.

In terms of the competition, there are many problem solving websites and competitions (Art of Problem Solving, Project Euler, TopCoder, Kaggle, IXL, Peking online judge and other online judge sites, etc.), but not a lot of very active problem solving communities. Reddit, Quora, Stack Overflow, and other forum-based sites all have math/science communities, but these sites are built for a different purpose.

Khim sees her closest analogues as offline math clubs, competitions, and science clubs.

While the site is still young, Khim and Palihapitiya already have their business model. Eventually Brilliant will connect these great technical minds with universities (as they are already doing with Wu) and with companies and organizations that need this talent. There has never been more of a demand for talent in math, science and engineering, explains Khim, and she believes they can build an audience around this. “This won’t be just another job board,” she says. “This will be the pipeline to opportunity.”

Khim is onto something. Beyond the story of Wu, there are already many more that are similar in that Brilliant is helping find and provide opportunity to brilliant minds who may have otherwise gone unnoticed. As she says, these are the minds that will be solving major problems in the areas of finance, science and medicine for our world.

As for Wu, it’s unclear what his journey would have been if he had not been noticed by Brilliant, Khim and her team. He’s now doing graduate-level mathematics work with the professor in weekly Google Hangouts and plans to come to the U.S. to attend college in a few years. He has ambitions of becoming an investment banker, but who knows which research institution or university or technology giant might beat Goldman Sachs to the punch.

The Internet is not a perfect meritocracy, where the best ideas naturally rise to the forefront of the national conversation. It is easy to game the popularity of some ideas by exploiting the fact that Internet users are overly optimistic sheep who blindly rate the value of stories positively if they first see that others already liked it. In a brand-new study, one of my favorite researchers, New York University’s Sinan Aral, found that he could experimentally boost the popularity of articles 32 percent on a news aggregator, like Reddit.com, by posting them with an initial few likes.

The first-of-its-kind study not only helps us determine why some ideas are more popular than others, but also alerts us to the ease at which important sites are gamed by nefarious groups.

The Study And Why It Works

Aral and his colleagues posted news stories to an unnamed aggregator over the course of several months, experimentally manipulating the initial number of likes and comments on each story. On balance, stories which were given an early boost ended up being more popular, compared to those that had no initial likes.

“Positive and negative social influence created asymmetric herding effects,” writes the research team. “The positive manipulation created a positive social influence bias that persisted over our five-month observation window.”

Indeed, Internet users are so systematically optimistic that they tended to reverse the articles with initial negative ratings. Thus, while the Internet tends to exaggerate positively valued stories, the same bias does not afflict negatively valued stories.

While Aral doesn’t speculate on the underlying psychology that fuels this bias, other researchers have found that users like to share positive stories. “When you share a story with your friends and peers, you care a lot more how they react. You don’t want them to think of you as a Debbie Downer,” said University of Pennsylvania social psychologist Jonah Berger.

It makes sense: sharing a story impacts our own reputation. No one wants to be the Internet’s sad sack.

Why Libertarians And Gay Rights Dominate

The study reveals why ideas with a rabid core of supporters will tend to dominate online discussions. A hyper-active minority exaggerate the popularity of an idea and trigger the Internet optimistic hype-machine. Indeed, while libertarian Ron Paul had minor national support as president, he dominated online discussions, receiving a greater share of positive social media chatter than the person who actually won the Republican primary, Mitt Romney.

The same goes for gay marriage. Up until a year ago, the public was largely split on the issue.

Yet, Internet users, which tend to be young and liberal, helped turn the web into a machine for viral pro-gay marriage content. Pro-gay marriage groups on Facebook had between 7 to 100 times more followers. Content, such as news of this rainbow-colored house across from the ant-gay Westboro Baptist Church, tends to get in front of our eyes.

This means that the preponderance of viral content will reflect the most hardcore users, not the general public

Gaming The System

Our sheep-like tendencies can also be exploited by nefarious partisans. Back when Digg.com was king of the news aggregator hill, a clandestine conservative contingent, Digg Patriots, banded together to vote up (and down) stories. It not only wreaked havoc on Digg’s reputation, but got the group’s ideas far more coverage than they otherwise would have had.

“When small groups agree to vote an item up early on, it can inspire herding and accumulating positive votes. This creates an incentive for manipulation. If this process holds for articles, then the signals of quality on those articles can be biased and inaccurate,” Aral writes to me in an email.

Digg Patriots ultimately got caught, and news aggregators have attempted to design algorithms that identify and neutralize conspiratorial groups. Arals study proves that it’s still possible to game the system, but not whether it can be done on political issues or whether it’s enough to make stories go viral. A 32 percent boost in popularity is nice, but a true viral story will get between 100K to several million views.

Still, it does show that the Internet is not a perfect marketplace of ideas. Ultimately, the net will reflect humanity’s own psychological biases.

As the digitally connected world grapples with the dystopic reality that our overreaching governments are using technology tools ostensibly designed to increase our convenience to up their own — by peeking into our business, apparently regardless of whether they have probable cause to lift the lid — it’s worth taking a step back from current snowballing concerns about technology eroding privacy. That’s not to say there are no reasons to be concerned; there absolutely are. But there is reason for positivity too.

New technologies typically trigger moral panics. Whether it’s the invention of the printing press; the telephone or radio and TV; high speed travel; the electrification of homes — you name it, new inventions have been marshalling societal doomsday merchants for centuries. Probably forever (let’s not forget Socrates’ concerns that written words would degrade our ability to remember and intelligently interrogate knowledge).

Likewise the increasingly pervasive interconnectness afforded by the Internet and the proliferation of connected device types has led to plenty of concerned social commentary already — whether it’s fear that social networking is making us more narcissistic; or kids more vulnerable to bullying; or encouraging the rise of misogynistic or racist or extremist viewpoints. The scaremongering goes on.

And now we can apparently add mass government surveillance programs to the file ‘bad stuff technology is doing’. But like most of the things on that list, that’s a simplification which ignores the fact technology is merely a tool that supports multiple applications.

Now there’s no doubt that the traceability and stackability of digital communications and interactions has and is enabling mass surveillance of citizens — making it easier for governments (and of course companies like Facebook — which are now, in any case, effectively the outsourced, data-harvesting arms of government agencies like the NSA) to spy on the stuff we do online. Our digital traces can be captured and stored – apparently ad infinitum — because storage has become so cheap, and is only getting cheaper. Technology allows even the most apparently incidental/trivial data-points to be siphoned off and joined to all our other dots, to flesh out dynamic maps of our digital lives — just because it’s possible to do that.

You could even argue that technology’s recording abilities/capacity encourage a ‘just in case’ mind-set which says ‘store now, data-mine later if the need arises’. (Or, in the business context, ‘grab everything now, figure out what’s needed to monetise later’.) That of course skews the relationship between the state and the individual – apparently allowing for an individual to be held to account in perpetuity, regardless of whether they are justifiably under suspicion. We are all pre-emptively judged sinners if surveillance is systematic. Judgement Day has been digitally reimagined as an all-day recurring calendar event. How quaint — by comparison — appears the Biblical equivalent which only occurs once, as a final reckoning, at the very end of time.

But there’s something else to remember here too. Just as our digital interactions and online behaviour can be tracked, parsed and analysed for problematic patterns, pertinent keywords and suspicious connections, so too can the behaviour of governments. Technology is a double-edged sword – which means it’s also capable of lifting the lid on the machinery of power-holding institutions like never before. In the case of technology-enabled mass surveillance, the spy becomes the spied upon – as happened the moment Edward Snowden leaked data on the NSA’s surveillance programs.

Ok, so it required a human whistleblower to decide to step forward and shine a light on those dark goings on. And each such reveal is typically only a snapshot of extant processes  – i.e. which the whistleblower had access to up to the time the leak was made public. So it’s far more partial than the data which flows, blood-like, through the pipelines of the surveillance systems apparently monitoring us. But the point stands: the same infrastructure that allows government agencies to capture data on any digitally connected person, also allowed Snowden to comprehend the extent of  the NSA’s surveillance, and take away enough evidence to put that knowledge in the public domain. Technology allows for bigger, more significant data leaks; makes whistleblowing easier too.

Wikileaks is another (obvious) example of how technology-enabled data leaks can hold the powerful to account by making their actions and processes more transparent than they would otherwise be (whether Wikileaks has overreached its own power-debunking role is a whole other debate, however). Another smaller example would be the data leaked on UK MPs’ expenses in 2009 – data that was ultimately sold to journalists, who then made the story public. In that case journalists had previously tried to legally obtain MPs’ expenses information under the UK’s Freedom of Information Act and had their attempts rebuffed. The establishment closed off sanctioned avenues of journalistic investigation. Circumventing that required two things: a human whistleblower, and cheap and easy digital storage technology that allowed enough data to be taken out of a closed system to reveal systematic abuse of a taxpayer-funded expenses system.

The wider point is that if governments are (mis)using technology to spy on us, they can’t escape the countervailing reality: the omnipresent risk of that same technology-powered all-seeing eye being turned back on them – spilling their secrets for us to judge. And there’s the cause for hope. Technology can certainly allow governments (and companies) to overreach and infringe on our rights as citizens (or users) – it is a powerful tool, after all. But, in the right hands, this tool can also reveal in microscopic detail what governing institutions and powerful companies are up to. The NSA’s extensive apparatus of surveillance may thus ultimately reach so far it ends up checking its own advance by forcing a publicly shamed government to avoid democratic censure by policing itself.

In other words, so long as there are whistleblowers like Snowden — people of conscience — then surveillance systems will end up eating themselves. Or that’s the hope.

Snowden’s leaks have led directly to Obama publicly announcing a review of the NSA’s processes. The President can deny it all he wants — and of course he has – but there is no doubt these reforms have been announced as a direct result of the NSA’s processes being made public, which in turn has piled domestic and international pressure on the Obama Administration. And thrown a negative cloud of suspicion over U.S. technology companies — the collateral damage of a policy that lumps the rest of the world into a catch-all category labelled ‘potential terrorists’. Bad for business means bad for government — a situation that cranks up the pressure for a policy rethink.

Likewise, in the commercial context, the rise of ephemeral sharing and pro-privacy movements like do-not-track — powered by startups like Snapchat and free-thinkers like DuckDuckGo — puts disruptive business pressure on the overreaching excesses of data-harvesting giants like Facebook and Google that want to grab and store every little thing we do. Startups can and do play a role in checking inroads into our privacy by offering alternatives that don’t demand we give up so much — which in turn can help to amend the behaviour of dominant players.

So, while digital technologies can be press-ganged into the service of totalitarianism, and used to trample the rights of free societies, it only takes a few free-thinkers to apply technology’s reach and capacity in the opposite direction to fight the creep of Stasi-like systems. Snooping and leaking are really just flip sides of the same coin. Snowden is therefore much more than a patriot; right now he’s the better angel of America’s nature.

[Image by pheezy via Flickr]

Prior Knowledge made it to the finals last year at TechCrunch Disrupt SF. They did not “wow” the judges, but their predictive database technology for developers certainly turned attention to what they do.

Three months later, Salesforce.com acquired Prior Knowledge for an undisclosed price. And then Prior Knowledge shut itself down — permanently. They killed their flagship API, erased all the user data, shut down the website and erased all traces of their work on GitHub.

The decision to shut down the service and go into super secret mode came as Salesforce began to put the pieces together for its marketing cloud and the reinforcement of its developer platform. But they lacked a crucial piece — the ability to do sophisticated predictive analytics in a way that made it easier for customers to see connections and make decisions.

Enter Prior Knowledge, which had developed what it called the  Veritable API, a service that Co-Founder Eric Jonas had said gives developers super powers to build powerful applications with predictive analytics baked in. Salesforce.com does provide analytics to drill down on sales and social media data. It does not, though, have the capability to build a graph in the shape and form of a service like LinkedIn, which I wrote about last month:

Since its start 10 years ago, LinkedIn has become the place for people to network. In recent years, though, it has started pooling the data, becoming one of the early adopters of open-source data technologies, such as Hadoop and Lucene/Solr for search. It has one of the most-recognized teams of data scientists who have learned to shape the data to create what CEO Jeff Weiner calls a global economic graph. It’s through the understanding of its users’ interactions that LinekdIn is establishing a platform that could put it in a position to emerge as an enterprise services provider and a player in the CRM market.

A year later, Jonas is keeping quiet about the work he and his team are now doing at Salesforce. Jonas, who is now chief predictive scientist at the company, declined an interview for this story, only hinting at some news to come for the work his team is doing. Here’s what he said in an email about his new role: “I work on discovering applications for our technology, work on research prototypes, and scientifically guide the team that works on predictive analytics and machine learning.”

Jonas was working on his doctorate in neurobiology at MIT when he took a leave of absence to work on Prior Knowledge. He and his team of statisticians, engineers and mathematicians received $1.4 million in funding from The Founders Fund to develop a service that basically modeled the knowledge of the team into the technology itself. It is reminiscent of Wise.io, the machine learning as a service that harnessed the knowledge of a team of astrophysicists from the University of California at Berkeley. Co-Founder Joshua Bloom said at their launch that he and his colleagues at Berkeley would often manage data that was well beyond what conventional tools could offer. They had to invent the technology themselves. Now all that knowledge is getting packaged to offer as a service.

A Few Clues

There are clues scattered about that tell a story about the direction Salesforce is taking. Beau Cronin was a co-founder at Prior Knowledge. He is now a senior manager of predictive products at Salesforce and contributor to O’Reilly Radar. In a post last April he wrote about the need for robust analytics and essentially the importance of Prior Knowledge:

I find the database analogy useful here: developers with only a foggy notion of database implementation routinely benefit from the expertise of the programmers who do understand these systems — i.e., the “professionals.” How? Well, decades of experience — and lots of trial and error — have yielded good abstractions in this area. As a result, we can meaningfully talk about the database “layer” in our overall “stack.” Of course, these abstractions are leaky, like all others, and there are plenty of sharp edges remaining (and, some might argue, more being created every day with the explosion of NoSQL solutions).

Making the point how the database has become abstracted sums up what the Prior Knowledge team set out to do. And that’s simplifying the complexity of adding deep analytics into apps. That’s  a daunting task for most developers these days. Salesforce has an aggressive mobile strategy. Much of their work has historically focused on making it a bit easier to develop apps. The latest update of its mobile platform points to this effort. Making analytics easier to implement would dovetail with Salesforce strategy.

Furthermore, Salesforce has made some substantial investments in its marketing cloud. Predictive analytics for mobile marketing is a gold mine that Salesforce is surely seeking to tap.

The secrecy I encountered points to the value that the Prior Knowledge technology has to Salesforce, which has invested heavily in building platforms for app development but has left predictive analytics pretty much out of the equation. The Salesforce Data.com platform has a degree of analytics but it is primarily marketed as a sales lead database. The lacking predictive analytics capability is a missing piece, pointing to a weakness in the company’s overall product strategy that the Prior Knowledge technology should help shore up. But even more so it is the people from the team who can direct the scientific path for Salesforce to follow so they might find that data gold mine.

Oh, and for your reference, here is Jonas presentation at last year’s event. Not exactly the most compelling of presentations but certainly enough to get attention for the power the technology offers.

Fame. Riches. A colossal mountain of pizza. A room full of coders who have 24 hours to build the most mind-blowing thing they can.

Sound like your kind of night? Come to the Disrupt SF 2013 Hackathon. We’ve just released another batch of tickets. (The last batch sold out so fast that I thought something technical had gone wrong — it hadn’t. So don’t delay.)

If you’ve never been to one of our hackathons (we tend to throw one on the weekend before each of our biggest conferences), it’s hard to adequately explain what you’re missing. We’ve seen projects of all shapes and sizes, from smart door locks to angry, knife-wielding robots. We’ve had impromptu, 50-person NERF battles break out at 2 a.m. We’ve had projects spin out of the hackathon and go on to be sold for millions.

Plus, everyone who gets on stage and presents a finished project gets into the main Disrupt conference for free! That’s a $2000 ticket, on top of the chance to win some massive prizes. If you’ve got something you’ve been dying to build, you’d be crazy not to build it here.

Here’s what you need to know:

• As long as you’re building something, participating in the Hackathon is free. Interested sponsors, give us a shout.
• After 24 hours of building, hackers present their projects to their peers and a panel of all-star judges (we’ll announce those judges in an upcoming post).
• Every hacker who finishes their project and presents on stage gets a free pass to the entire conference, normally valued at around $2,000. Why? Because you’re awesome and we love you.
• The team behind the best hack of the day takes home a cool $5,000, and the top three teams all get to present their projects to the Disrupt audience. There will also be a bunch of prizes awarded by the Hackathon sponsors — more news on those in a few days.

The Disrupt SF 2013 Hackathon runs September 7 and 8, and we’ve just released the very first batch of tickets. What are you waiting for?

Our sponsors help make Disrupt happen. If you are interested in learning more about sponsorship opportunities, please contact our sponsorship team here [email protected].

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Senator Saxby Chambliss is either a blind war hawk or is deliberately misleading the public. Last week, after the National Security Agency had intercepted an al-Qaida conference call plotting attacks against U.S. embassies, Chambliss claimed it was proof that mass surveillance programs were effective. But the AP reports that the NSA’s controversial phone and Internet monitoring programs “played no part in detecting the initial tip.”

The press should have known — and reported on — the fact that Chambliss had a history of hawkish interpretations of intelligence reports after he voted for the Iraq War in 2002. Indeed, the most ardent defenders of the NSA are exactly those members of Congress who wrongly believed we needed to invade Iraq after believing that there was an imminent threat from Saddam Hussein’s Weapons of Mass Destruction.

Since the public can’t scrutinize classified documents, we have to trust that elected representatives are capable of critically evaluating intelligence reports. Anyone who voted for the Iraq War has lost the public’s trust and shouldn’t be allowed to comment on the NSA — without getting hammered by the press and party leaders.

It’s not just Republicans who voted for the Iraq War. “Please know that it is equally frustrating to me, as it is to you, that I cannot provide more detail on the value these programs provide,” said Dianne Feinstein, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee and one of the NSA’s most ardent supporters. Feinstein argues that NSA surveillance prevented the Najibullah Zazi 2009 New York subway bombing, but public documents reveal that it was local law enforcement that got the first tip during the course of searching his co-conspirators’ computers. Feinstein was wrong about the impending threat of Saddam Hussein in 2002, so why should we believe her now?

Feinstein’s Senate Intelligence Committee colleague, Ron Wyden, who voted against the Iraq War, has seen the exact same intelligence reports on the NSA and concluded there is no evidence mass surveillance was critical to stopping attacks. “I’ve seen zero evidence it is needed,” he tweeted.

I will continue to work to see bulk collection under Sec. 215 of Patriot Act ended. I’ve seen zero evidence it is needed.

—
Ron Wyden (@RonWyden) August 09, 2013

In a public statement, Wyden further argued, “Saying that ‘these programs’ have disrupted ‘dozens of potential terrorist plots’ is misleading if the bulk phone records collection program is actually providing little or no unique value.”

Perhaps we  should heed Wyden’s advice. Back in 2002, during the ramp-up to the Iraq War, he wrote:

“First, I am not convinced, regarding a clear and present threat, Saddam Hussein currently imposes a clear and present threat to the domestic security of the Nation. While my service on the Senate Intelligence Committee has left me convinced of Iraq’s support of terrorism, suspicious of its ties to al-Qaida, I have seen no evidence, acts, or involvement in the planning or execution of the vicious attacks of 9/11.”

Voting for or against the Iraq war should have permanent consequences for each member’s reputation, and the press needs to qualify the statements of our elected officials every time they speak on intelligence issues.

Yet, a member’s vote on the Iraq War isn’t completely sufficient for us to trust them, either.  Representatives can be influenced as much by personal convictions as the political calculations of re-election.

As a result, two former judges of the court charged with approving NSA requests, The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), have proposed a “public advocate” — a lawyer specially appointed to defend civil liberties. This independent advocate would be free of both the military hierarchy and the political machinations of Congress. We hope Congress will let this advocate speak to the American people and voice his own confidence in the value of our intelligence systems.

If both an advocate of the people and a critic of the Iraq War saw evidence that the NSA had, indeed, foiled attacks, citizens would have all the confidence they needed to make a more informed choice.

Until then, Feinstein and Chambliss need to step out of the limelight and let someone with credibility talk. And if they dare to keep on talking, the press shouldn’t let them get away with it.

Editor’s Note: Semil Shah is a contributor to TechCrunch. You can follow him on Twitter at @semil.

It’s summer here in Silicon Valley, and for my column this month, I’ll try to finally polish and publish some of the old posts that have been collecting dust in my “drafts” folder. Usually, I try to make the column timely, but not this time. Almost two years ago now, my wife and I visited a museum in San Francisco to an exhibit called “Art of Magic,” honoring Harry Houdini. I dragged my wife to the museum to see this because I had been watching “Pawn Stars” (favorite show!) on the History Channel and was obsessed with the program. In one episode, a customer came in with original handcuffs and a straightjacket used by Houdini. The show’s characters all marveled at the legend of Houdini, the nostalgia, the myths. While all this information is available on Wikipedia, the art exhibit highlighted an interesting theme: Houdini’s masterful command of new mediums and platforms to manipulate and leverage his audience’s deepest hopes and fears.

Reflecting on that experience, and as it’s the annual time for Defcon, where the art of lock-picking is a time-honored tradition, I wanted to cast Houdini in a different light and showcase how some of his techniques could, in fact, be leveraged by modern-day entrepreneurs. It may be a stretch, but please bear with me.

The common thread weaved through most of Houdini’s famous tricks seemed rooted in the juxtaposition of his audience’s fear of death versus their hope for liberation. The part of Houdini’s history that impresses me most is how and why some of his tricks became iconic signature moves. For instance, he rose to fame as the “Handcuff King,” setting up elaborate schemes to unchain himself from all sorts of iron shackles, but he didn’t just adopt handcuffs as some ruse — it turns out that, as a young boy growing up poor, he took a job as an apprentice with a local locksmith to earn extra money for his struggling family.

Houdini also became famous by taking himself handcuffed and dipping into water, invoking a fear of drowning — he had studied old waterboarding-like contraptions used to torture people in the middle ages, and knew the audience would be captivated by the sight. Or, randomly, Houdini visited a psych ward early in his career and happened to see a few patients violently trying to free themselves from their straightjackets, and after practicing escaping from a similar jacket for nearly a decade, he finally unveiled his new trick, usually in public squares, hanging upside down, his head dangling above the crowds, freeing himself and stretching out his hands in victory.

I am still processing why Houdini is so fascinating to me. Pictures like these, where a crowd fixates on him with their undivided attention, are truly incredible. I think Houdini interests me because, as a performer, he captivated his audience and was so precise with his choreography, enabling him to tap into very deep parts of the human psyche with a scalpel’s precision. In a way, this is what the great entrepreneurs do. They are deeply motivated and practice for years. They are in tune with their customers hopes and fears. And, there’s a bit of magic in all of the myths they create. It’s why pictures of a young Steve Jobs sitting on a wood floor with one light stand and some books still continue to fly around the web and evoke both nostalgia and disbelief.

The reason I originally drafted this post is because, almost two years ago, after visiting this exhibit, I was hanging out with an investor and former founder/operator in the Valley who used to go to Defcon as a teenager and pick locks all the time. I told him about Houdini, and he shared stories about how lock-picking was one of the first types of hacks he did as he began to fiddle with computers over two decades ago. We traded a few emails that week and, in one exchange, he asked me what entrepreneurs and investors could learn about Houdini’s background, his rise, his creativity, and his stage presence. Because, in a way, to the crowd, great entrepreneurship looks like magic, a mix of light-bending and mirror tricks that together form a new reality. In this way, magic and making are more alike than they are different.

Here was my email response to the question:

1. The Power of Cumulative Effects: Houdini’s lock-picking as a boy, his experience in the psych ward and seeing the straightjackets, and his research around the magic and fear of drowning all led him to craft a product (his “act”) that combined all three to prey upon primal fears and hypnotize his audience. In retrospect, Houdini’s signature acts now seem obvious, but one has to wonder if he could have brought all the elements together without having those strong experiences earlier in his life.

2. Developing Expertise Through Focus: Houdini was a student of magic, amassing over 4,000 books on the subject, the largest ever collection of that genre in the world. It reminds me of when DJ Shadow was becoming famous, how he would scoop up and buy vinyl record collections and build a stockpile years ahead of his competition.

3. Idle Hands Are The Devil’s Play Things: Even as a child, Houdini could’ve futzed around, but given his family’s financial troubles, he remained active and enterprising, eventually landing an apprenticeship in a profession (locksmithing) that would lay the foundation for his signature moves. He kept moving, kept occupied, and kept in motion.

4. “Win The Crowd” – Houdini’s genius was in combining all the elements, physical and psychological, to put his audience into a trance, to fixate all of their attention on him. That is what the greats do, their work draws in all of our attention, and we stand in awe watching instead of doing. It is what separates the few greats from everyone else. Houdini was a master at winning the crowd over. It reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from a movie. In Gladiator, Proximus says to Maximus, “I was not the best because I killed quickly. I was the best because the crowd loved me. Win the crowd, and you will win your freedom.”

Photo Credit: tmolini / Creative Commons Flickr

Editor’s note: Scott Weiss is a partner at Andreessen Horowitz and the former co-founder and CEO of IronPort Systems, which was acquired by Cisco in 2007. He works with companies like Lyft, Dwolla, Platfora, App.net and Quirky. Follow him on his blog or on Twitter @W_ScottWeiss. 

There is a perfect storm of three distinct disruptive forces that has the potential to topple nearly every major enterprise software incumbent. And the traditional approach of dealing with technology shifts — through acquisition — looks like it’s headed toward failure. As such, there is an unprecedented opportunity to create many new multi-billion-dollar enterprise franchises that are on the right side of these forces and are willing to go the distance in the face of ridiculously high acquisition offers.

Let’s examine these forces individually.

Software as a service (SaaS): Seemingly a little long in the tooth as a disruptor, SaaS has finally gone mainstream in the Global 2000. The primary disruptive force of this technology is the speed of innovation. The feedback loop is especially powerful: As opposed to using focus groups and surveys to figure out how users are interacting with the product, SaaS companies can see what their customers are doing real-time by capturing and analyzing every click. They quickly extend their products through a “cell division” that continuously builds out and A/B tests the features that are getting the most engagement. On-premise and client (PC) software-based product cycles can’t possibly compete here as new releases are typically pushed 10 times faster at 45-60 days vs. 18-24 months.

There’s always one version/code base so it’s much easier to support, patch bugs, and roll out new features to all customers at once. The old joke of “How did God create the world in seven days? He didn’t have an installed base!” certainly applies – but SaaS also demands entirely new skills sets associated with running a 24×7 services business. Dev/Ops, customer care centers, network operations and delivering uptime via failover, mirroring and hot backups are all new and essential. It’s easy to see how the early SaaS pioneers gained so much ground with this innovation but even they are unprepared and poorly architected to take advantage of the additional disruptors that have hit more recently…

Cloud infrastructure: As I detailed in a prior post, “The Building is the New Server,” the humongous Internet powers, Facebook and Google, are literally breaking new ground in re-imagining the design, components and cost of running a hyper-scale data center. The cloud infrastructure they are pioneering has the primary disruptive force of massively driving down cost. Facebook, for instance, is experimenting on the bleeding edge of solving the new cost bottlenecks of power and cooling. I recently read that it actually rained inside one of their datacenters.

The cloud service providers (CSPs) are following their lead using commodity components, open source software, data center design and testing software defined storage and networking products to enjoy the same, devastating cost curve. The corporate datacenters (aka “private clouds”) will slowly disappear as Global 2000 companies migrate to these irresistible new cost curves. Don’t be fooled that security and reliability concerns will keep large enterprises away — as the CEO of IronPort, I watched in horror as large enterprises started pointing their treasured Mail Exchange (MX) records to cloud services like Postini – a much superior and vastly cheaper cloud based architecture versus our perimeter appliances. And email is the most sensitive and mission critical of applications…

Mobile: About two years ago, all of our consumer companies went through an “Oh shit!” moment with mobile. One year mobile was 10 percent of traffic and the next year, when everyone was expecting ~20 percent, it was 30 percent on its way to 50 percent. Facebook, for instance, famously bought Instagram for $1 billion and then continued their pursuit of talent to redesign for mobile. The new mobile operating systems and devices are proliferating an entirely new interaction and design paradigm that has the primary disruptive force of a reimagined user interface.

The innovative use of touch/gestures (e.g. pull down, swipe, pinch etc.) pioneered by the consumer applications will become de rigor for enterprise, as well. Although it’s still early, the mobile sensors (e.g. GPS, accelerometer, video etc.) will also become integral and spawn new innovations in the enterprise as they have enabled new consumer franchises like Lyft and Instagram.

The No. 1 problem facing so many of the startups I talk to is hiring the design talent (e.g. mobile app, front-end engineering and user interface) to take advantage of this trend. In addition to being in ridiculously high demand, most of these people are “arteests” who eschew just cash and stock as incentives because they want to work for a purpose and in an environment where design is an overarching priority/core competency – not something that is grafted on afterwards. These environments are hard to find.

So exactly why won’t these big incumbents make it to the other side? There are just too many things changing at once. Beyond the technology changes, there are structural impediments as well. The incumbent sales forces have become farmers instead of hunters. They still sell on relationships (e.g. A round of golf, anyone?) and bundling/discounting instead of product attributes. They sell to the CIO instead of the line of business buyer who is making the decision. The quotas and incentives are too different. The accounting systems don’t speak recurring billing and revenue. Ugh – it’s just too much change.

A handful of exits have been priced based on a NTM revenue average of 11X vs. around 4X for the rest of SaaS companies. Examples include Workday, Splunk, ServiceNow, Marketo and Tableau. Not to mention the SuccessFactors deal (done at 11X) has officially kicked off the next wave of consolidation. On the private side, companies like New Relic, AppDynamics and ZenDesk have seen private transaction multiples of between 9X and 11X.

There is outright panic going on right now at the large incumbents as they pay ridiculous premiums for the early SaaS companies. And so why won’t these acquisitions pan out? Most of the early SaaS companies weren’t architected to take advantage of the cloud infrastructure cost advantages and most completely missed the boat on mobile. It’s hard enough for new, cool enterprise startups to hire the necessary design talent, but the large incumbents really have no hope.

Next Up

As I’ve said, there is a perfect storm of three distinct disruptive forces brewing which has the potential to erupt into a new multi-billion-dollar wave of enterprise franchises. In particular, there will be at least 30 new enterprise franchises that will go the distance and resist high acquisition offers, as they either supply or ride this trio of disruptors to dominance.

Among others, the new suppliers are companies like Cumulus Networks, Okta, New Relic and Nimble Storage. The “riders” are awesome trifecta companies like Box, Evernote, Base, Expensify and Tidemark.

Where will these 30 New Franchises come from? A double investment cycle in SaaS, as the large incumbents buy the early SaaS pioneers and fumble them, will pave the way. Like Lenny from “Of Mice and Men,” they will smother these companies with too much negative attention, mismatched sales forces and misunderstood business models. Following a short vesting period, the product and management talent — who are used to working at a completely different pace — will ultimately leave the incumbent, resulting in a bevy of entrepreneurs that roll out to start even more of these franchises.

I can’t wait to meet them!

Two or three years ago, e-cigarattes were exotic. These strange sticks, their ends LED-lit and their owners expelling odorless smoke – “It’s vapor!” – would look as futuristic as a Replicant’s food injector. They gave the smoker nebulous powers, namely the ability to smoke on a plane, and they were expensive and hard to find.

Now, they’re everywhere. Even Leonardo DiCaprio was caught sucking on one on set. But are they safe? And what will they really do for the hard-core smoker?

Today the e-cigarette industry is worth around $3 billion globally, outpacing the entire stop-smoking industry including patches, gum, and other addiction killers.

Yet unlike smoking cessation products, which are sold over the counter in pharmacies, e-cigarette companies will never, ever make a claim that e-cigs will treat smoking addiction. In fact, these companies claim the opposite in their marketing materials, citing that they are not intended “to treat, prevent or cure any disease or condition.” This is the same language that appears on other dubious health concoctions

Even though it seems obvious that e-cigarettes are meant to help people tame their addiction to analog cigarettes — and there is even anecdotal evidence suggesting they are more effective than smoking cessation therapies — the claims made by these companies will partially determine the fate of the entire industry.

But before we get into the regulation of tomorrow, let’s look at the history of the tobacco industry.

A Brief History

In 1906, the Food and Drug Administration was created under President Theodore Roosevelt. In 1938, the FDA passed the Food, Drug, and Cosmetics Act, giving the federal government jurisdiction over products like foods, medicines, and other substances that could harm the public health.

For years, that didn’t include tobacco products. It was only in 2009, under President Barack Obama, that the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act (FSPTCA) was put into place, giving the FDA the power to regulate the Tobacco Industry.

Before this, big tobacco was allowed to experiment with new products and market their wares however they pleased, with regulation coming from state governments. In the 1950s, the realities of smoking were just beginning to show their ugly head. We began to realize there was a clear connection between smoking cigarettes and developing cancer and other fatal illnesses.

So what did the industry do? They created something called “harm reduction products”, which were meant to be “safer” than your usual cigarette. In the beginning, this simply meant adding a filter. By the 80′s, companies were taking it a step further.

RJ Reynolds introduced a type of smokeless cigarette called Premier, which seemed to disgust everyone and eventually went off the market, only to resurface itself as the Eclipse. The American Cancer Society claimed that the Eclipse line, which went on sale in 2000, was not as safe as the marketing campaign suggested, as it still delivered carcinogens and other harmful substances.

In other words, harm reduction has long been a strategy for Big Tobacco to keep sales up in the face of… well, cancer. Keeping that in mind, it’s not too much of a surprise that harm reduction products have never really taken off. Until now.

E-Cigarettes and Harm Reduction

In public perception, smoking cessation products are the good guys. These are the products like Nicoderm CQ and Nicorette that are sold by pharmacies only, used for a temporary period, and regulated as treatment and/or therapy. I quit smoking for a while with the help of the patch, and got more congratulations during that period then I did graduating from NYU, winning State Championships in volleyball, or landing a job at TechCrunch.

Harm reduction products, on the other hand, seem like ploys. Many people hear “safer” and “cigarette” in the same sentence and assume it’s yet another trick to increase sales.

But e-cigarettes are different. The movement wasn’t led by Big Tobacco. The e-cigarette industry began to boom in 2007 led by hundreds of smaller companies. Eventually, Big Tobacco took notice. Unlike the patch, or the gums, e-cigarettes actually made a dent (a small, but noticeable one) in cigarette sales.

Rather than fight it, major tobacco companies are now investing in e-cigarette offerings. Lorillard, the maker of Newport, Maverick and Old Gold cigarettes acquired Blu eCigs for $135 million in April 2012. Reynolds American, which makes Camel, Pall Mall, Kool and others, is now selling its own Vuse e-cigarettes in select cities as a trial run. And Altria (formerly Phillip Morris), seller of Marlboros, now sells an e-cigarette line named MarkTen.

This has pushed distribution of e-cigarettes far beyond what small, independent companies could ever manage.

However, Big Tobacco’s involvement is a double-edged sword. While distribution is greatly increased, pushing these devices into the far reaches of the country, big tobacco also gives off the perception that these devices, like the products they’ve sold for centuries, will probably kill you.

“What are these products?” asks Dr. Michael Siegel, Professor at Boston University’s Public School of Health and supporter of e-cigs. “Are they harm reduction or are they smoking cessation? It’s a tough situation because, on the one hand, you have what it does and on the other you have the claims are that are allowable under the law. It’s a strange situation where they are being regulated as tobacco products. But they are not tobacco products. There’s no tobacco in them.”

Safety

To be clear, any product that delivers nicotine into the human body is automatically considered “unsafe.” That’s the nature of nicotine itself. It’s not meant to be in our bodies.

That said, smoking cessation products like Nicoderm and Nicorette are automatically forgiven. Their purpose is to wean you off the nicotine addiction, and then be discarded. No one quits smoking and says, I’m going to use the patch for the rest of my life. That’s not how it works. In fact, doctors who prescribe smoking cessation therapies have strict limits on how long they can continue to provide the patch, gums, etc.

E-cigarettes are different. These companies don’t want you to quit smoking entirely; they simply want you to switch from smoking to vaping. In fact, the business model is built around your return. The idea is that you pay a larger sum up-front, for the device and a first set of cartridges, making an investment in it, and then return to buy refills.

In this way, e-cigarettes are simply a cigarette alternative, and not a therapy to help you quit.

But even though e-cigarettes deliver nicotine into the body, and for an extended period of time, many experts agree that they are much, much safer than combusting cigarettes.

Right now, however, clear cut information on their safety is limited. To start, there have been no finished clinical trials to measure the difference, and holding a clinical trial that is effective becomes difficult knowing that subjects would be exposed to a known carcinogen.

Moreover, the lack of regulation here allows e-cigarette companies to be lazy or negligent. The nicotine dosage may vary from one product to the next, or perhaps they’re using something other than propylene glycol (the standard liquid found in e-cigarettes). They might even have a shoddy battery or wiring that exhausts burning plastic along with the nicotine.

Many e-cigarettes are manufactured in Asia, sold at gas stations, and the consumer is none the wiser that these products haven’t been checked out by any governing body. In short, there is no oversight.

Thankfully, according to Dr. Siegel, e-cigarettes are “orders of magnitude safer” than combusting cigarettes.

“Even if e-cigarettes only cause a five to ten percent reduction in cigarette consumption, you have to understand that from a public health perspective, that is an enormously positive impact,” said Dr. Siegel.

On the other hand, it’s the lack of regulation that makes e-cigarettes potentially dangerous. So what can be done?

Regulation

This is where things get tricky.

The FDA is set to regulate the e-cigarette industry over the next year, at the latest. How they will regulate them is anyone’s guess.

There are three possible scenarios:

The first is that e-cigarettes will be regulated just like traditional cigarettes, with rules on how they can be marketed. This would still allow for distribution, letting e-cigs be sold anywhere traditional cigarettes are sold, but it would limit these companies’ ability to market themselves as a cigarette alternative, or at all.

The second option is that these products will be regulated in the same way as smoking cessation therapies. They would be sold only in pharmacies, over the counter. This would limit visibility and distribution enormously.

The third option is that the FDA will create brand new regulation for e-cigarettes, which would covers things like dosage, materials used, quality control testing, etc. but would still allow for broad distribution and marketing.

There is a raging debate right now over these options, or more pointedly, the time it will take to get to these options. Those that are pro-e-cigs want to ensure that the regulation is fair, and are willing to wait as long as they’re waiting for something close to option three.

Others believe that the e-cigarette companies are purposefully stalling, asking the FDA to wait for more hard evidence on the effects of e-cigarettes (especially compared to traditional cigarettes) in order to grow marketshare in an unregulated field. They see this as a huge risk considering that the e-cig industry is growing rapidly, and these unregulated products are in the hands of more and more unknowing consumers every day.

Bloomberg is even working to essentially ban e-cigarettes in New York.

Big Tobacco’s involvement in the matter only muddles things further. The industry doesn’t have a great track record when it comes to reducing public harm (or even admitting their products cause it in the first place), so in a way, Big Tobacco’s investment in the industry almost discredits e-cigarettes as just another marketing ploy.

On the other hand, Big Tobacco has the brawn to lobby the FDA in a way that these small manufacturers wouldn’t be able to do. Thanks to Big Tobacco, e-cigarette companies now have a voice in the pending regulation of their products.

The future of the industry is surely in question, but one thing is quite certain: this isn’t the last you’ll hear about e-cigarettes and the debate is heating (not burning) up.

Editor’s note: Dan Shapiro served as the CEO of Google Comparison Inc., Sparkbuy, and Ontela. He’s the author of a forthcoming O’Reilly book on startup CEOs and a lucky dad. Follow him on Twitter @danshapiro.

StartupEquality.org has a simple mission, which is to get same-sex couples the same rights to invest in startup companies as heterosexual couples.

My dad received his PhD from Yale for a number of reasons. One of those reasons was that, just a few years before he enrolled, the university removed its Jewish quota. In subsequent years, both of my parents saw the even more egregious restrictions on African-Americans begin to slowly, painfully unravel. Their generation saw a wave sweep from buses to schools to wedding chapels as our nation desegregated.

I never thought I would see anything like this in my lifetime. Seeing America start to untangle, over the course of a few decades, a giant hairball of laws and prejudices and assumptions that have plagued the lives of gay and lesbians has been a singularly amazing experience. States have begun to recognize loving couples. The Supreme Court overturned the Defense of Marriage Act. And I have been watching friends and family I have loved and respected all my life come out to share with me and the world who they really are and who they really love.

Over the last decade particularly, I’ve taken a measure of pride that my community of entrepreneurs and startup investors has been relatively immune to this discrimination. I’ve always believed that the world of technology startups has never erected artificial barriers to those who want to pursue the American dream.

But we’ve got a bug in the code, and it was two lawyers who found it.

My friends Joe Wallin and William Carleton sent me an email out of the blue one day. They told me that they found something amiss with the SEC rules about who is eligible to invest in startups. We all read the rules, and the problem doesn’t look deliberate. It’s just an artifact of changing times and changing rules. But it’s a bad artifact, and we’ve got to set it right.

SEC rules describe something called “accredited investor” status. If you’re not an accredited investor, you are effectively blocked from startup investments. (Under the JOBS Act, small investments may be possible without accreditation, but larger investments — the angels who enable ideas to take wing — will still be restricted.) As a result, these rules around accreditation define who is, and who is not, a part of the startup angel community.

To take an excerpt from these SEC rules: “‘Accredited investor’ shall mean . . .  Any natural person whose individual net worth, or joint net worth with that person’s spouse, exceeds $1,000,000.”

These gay and lesbian investors can’t use their partners’ assets or income to qualify as angels. Instead, they must qualify alone, under significantly more restrictive standards.

But we live in strange times. Couples who love each other, who’ve pledged their lives together, who’ve decided to join their resources together for an eternity, do so under more than one name: “marriage”; “civil union”; and “domestic partnership.” By only referring to spouses — which is defined to mean only married couples — the SEC disqualifies couples in civil unions or domestic partnerships in 15 states across the country. That means these gay and lesbian investors can’t use their partners’ assets or income to qualify as angels. Instead, they must qualify alone, under significantly more restrictive standards.

In the future I hope that, as a country, we set a single standard for what it means for couples to love each other, pledge their lives together, and join their resources. I hope that’s called marriage. But until we get there, the SEC needs to fix angel investing.

Startups are not just my industry but my passion. I’m proud of how startups have made this country better. Now it’s time for our country to make startups better. Please join me at StartupEquality.org in calling on the SEC to set this right. Let’s unlock dollars for small companies. Let’s welcome people of all backgrounds to the table. And let’s make startup investing available equally to all couples across America.

[Image via Shutterstock]

It’s about time for a new iPhone, and with the rumors about an iPhone 5S and maybe even a cheaper version getting stronger, AllThingsD now reports that the next iPhone will launch on September 10. Apple introduced the iPhone 5 on September 12, 2012, so there is a good chance AllThingsD’s sources are correct, though we haven’t heard anything from our usual sources yet (and earlier rumors of a June launch definitely didn’t pan out).

Last time around, Apple started taking pre-orders two days after the launch event and the phone went on sale two-and-a-half weeks later.

As far as the iPhone 5S rumors go, most point to an incremental update with the usual speed improvements, thanks to a faster chip, a better camera with a dual LED flash and enhanced battery life. The only really exciting rumor so far is that Apple will introduce a built-in fingerprint reader for unlocking your phone. There are also persistent rumors of a cheaper iPhone 5 — maybe with a plastic back.

Otherwise, iOS 7 will likely be the most controversial feature of the new iPhone, given its radically new design. Unless Apple still has a few aces up its sleeve, iOS 7 isn’t likely to introduce any major new services besides iTunes Radio. While the first betas of iOS 7 were almost unusable, the latest versions are very stable and feel like they are almost ready for prime time.

Apple, of course, is also about to launch OS X Mavericks, but it would be unusual for the company to announce this during an iPhone launch keynote.

Welcome to a new episode of CrunchWeek, the show that brings a few of us TechCrunch writers together to talk about the most interesting tech news stories from the past week.

This week, Colleen Taylor, our star intern Stephanie Yang and I kicked off with the news of The Washington Post’s sale to Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos for $250 million. It should be interesting to see what Bezos has up is sleeve for turning around the journalistic institution that was owned by the Graham family. Next up was the debut of Glow, the fertility tracking iOS app co-founded by Max Levchin, in the app store this week. And lastly, don’t forget to tune into our new series FailWeek, (not to be confused with Sharkweek of course).

Don’t call it a smart watch. The Casio GB line appeared in 2011 with little fanfare – it was up against devices like the Pebble in the public imagination and so an underpowered smartwatch was of little interest. However, Casio has updated their Bluetooth line with the GB-6900B And GB-X6900B, improved versions of their iconic G-Shock watches that allow you to control your phone from your watch and, more important, control your watch from your phone.

For example, you can do the standard remote control actions on the watch including turning phone audio up and down and seeing snippets of text messages and emails. However, the new Casio Engine 2 movement also allows you to set watch features via an interface on the phone including alarms, stopwatch activation, and the like. Most interesting are the phone sensing features that allows you to find your phone if it is near the watch and to tap the watch to turn off an incoming call.

ABlogTowatch has a full rundown of features and notes that many of these are things you might actually use. While it doesn’t sense your heartbeat, blood pressure, and pants size it does do a few important things well and, more important, connects to your phone via low power Bluetooth profile 4.0. This makes it easier to justify connecting the watch to your phone simply because the battery will wear slower than traditional Bluetooth devices.

Again, the G-Shock isn’t for everybody. However, if you’re looking to geek out you could do worse for $200. The watches should be available here in a few months.

The Pirate Bay (TPB), the torrent site that really doesn’t need an introduction anymore, celebrates its 10th birthday today. To mark the day, TPB launched PirateBrowser, “a bundle package of the Tor client (Vidalia), Firefox Portable browser (with foxyproxy addon).”

The package, the group says, includes “some custom configs that allows you to circumvent censorship that certain countries such as Iran, North Korea, United Kingdom, The Netherlands, Belgium, Finland, Denmark, Italy and Ireland impose onto their citizens.”

If you’ve ever tried the Tor Browser Bundle from the Tor project, you’ll feel right at home with the PirateBrowser. It’s essentially the same package, but with the latest version of Firefox and a number of torrent sites pre-bookmarked for you.

Given that it is basically the Tor Browser Bundle, you could use it to access Silkroad and other hidden onion sites as well, but overall, it looks as if the PirateBrowser won’t offer the same kind of protections that the Tor projects bundle offers (and as we saw last week, that doesn’t always work, either). From what I can see, it won’t use the Tor network to access non-torrent sites that aren’t in its proxy settings, for example, so it’s not a replacement for a regular Tor setup.

TPB says as much on its download page, too (but it’s so far down the page, chances are most people will miss it): “While it uses Tor network, which is designed for anonymous surfing, this browser is intended just to circumvent censorship — to remove limits on accessing websites your government doesn’t want you to know about.”

Editor’s note: Suneel Gupta, who served as Groupon’s first VP of Product, built products at Mozilla, blogged for MTV, developed television concepts for Sony Pictures, and wrote speeches in President Clinton’s West Wing. He’s working on a new startup in the mobile health space. Follow him on Twitter at @suneel.

There’s a classic scene in the 80s movie The Karate Kid when Daniel LaRusso discovers that he’s actually learned how to fight. Here’s how it goes down: Miyagi agrees to train Daniel-san after learning that he’s been taking daily beatings from Johnny and the cobra-kais. To Daniel’s surprise, Miyagi has him sanding floors, painting fences and waxing cars. Daniel gets frustrated that the old man is wasting his time and is about to quit when something important happens. Miyagi starts to throw punches, and Daniel realizes that he can actually defend himself. As it turns out, “sand the floor” is a killer way to block a punch. Daniel-san had been learning all along.

I’m willing to bet you’ve experienced a similar breakthrough – a moment of surprise when you realize that your effort has actually paid off. Maybe you were asked a tough question during an investor pitch and were surprised when you delivered a clear, cogent answer. Maybe you ran a race and were surprised when you actually accelerated during the final stretch. Maybe you asked someone out on a date and were surprised when you stayed composed despite the awkwardness. We tend to walk away from these moments believing that we just “got lucky” when in reality it was the byproduct of hard work and experience that finally “clicks” into place in a given moment. Prior to that moment, however, it’s easy to believe that our time and effort is being wasted.

Here’s the problem: We expect learning to be linear. When we invest 10 hours of effort into learning a new programming language, we expect to feel 10 hours smarter. In reality, we could actually feel less smart than before we started. Why? Because by starting — not conquering – a new challenge, we’re positioning ourselves somewhere in the uncertain middle of a learning curve. Not a predictable line, but an unpredictable curve. You’re not advanced enough to be an expert and not remedial enough to be a novice. You’re just out there at your own specific point between mediocrity and excellence.

During that sometimes lonely climb, it’s the Miyagi moments that pull us through. The moments of breakthrough and epiphany when we realize we’ve actually learned something. So how do we experience more of those moments?

Teach It Out

Writing out your thoughts is a common way to crystallize your thinking and arrive on insights, but teaching those thoughts to someone else, even if they’re half-baked, is even more effective. The only reason I ever passed the California Bar Exam is because Leena Rao is an incredibly patient wife (then fiancée). Every day, she’d have me spend an hour teaching her what I learned. It was mind-numbingly boring material, and I can’t even imagine how she feigned interest, but those sessions forced me to convert a massive amount of unorganized information into a presentable construct.

My former boss, (and current Greylock partner) John Lilly, once told me that he’d learned more by teaching computer science at Stanford than from actually taking the classes. During my first day at Mozilla, he spent a couple of hours whiteboarding ideas. I took copious notes and said very little, which is why I was surprised when he concluded with: “Thanks. I learned a lot.”

When you’re on a steep learning curve, find a way to teach out your learnings. If you’re a novice, then find someone who doesn’t care whether you’ve mastered the material. If you can get them to
understand something new, then you’re getting closer to a Miyagi moment.

Learn the Art Of The Question

I’ve been fortunate enough to observe lots of strong leaders and would argue that the ability to ask good questions is the most under-appreciated craft of effective leadership. Without being able to ask good questions, your learning is handicapped by false assumptions and a narrow view of the overall problem you’re trying to solve. Steve Case (AOL Co-Founder) calls this craft the “listening gene,” but the good news is that it can actually be learned. Yet if you search Amazon for “how to speak effectively,” you’ll find about 10 times as many results than if you search for “how to ask good questions.”

When you learn to ask good questions, everybody becomes your teacher — even candidates that are clearly not the right fit for your team and investors that are clearly not interested in investing in your idea. If you want to learn how to ask good questions, observe people who rely on that art for their career — trial lawyers, journalists, socratic-style professors, etc. Spend an hour watching Charlie Rose, and pay attention to how intently he listens. He’s constantly using what he learns to unlock new stories, and even make bad-asses like Shane Smith cry.

Be Mindful

Whether you realize it or not, you are learning something new every day. Taking time away from the firehose can help you appreciate and process what you’ve learned. Much like athletic training, the learning sets in between the training sessions during recovery. Schedule breaks during the day, during the week, and annually (vacation). Take up hobbies that get you away from the office. Put them on your calendar. My friend and advisor, serial tech entrepreneur Michael Wolfe, has helped me transition into fatherhood and entrepreneurship, and posted this masterful article on Quora on how to bake exercise into a busy schedule.

Whatever you do, spend some of your recovery time alone and all of it away from new information. Give yourself the whitespace you need to organize what you’ve already learned. I’ve been using the “concentrate” app to effectively shut down all sources of new information for 20 minutes each day. It’s fantastically effective.

Charlie Chaplin once said that “life is a tragedy when seen as a closeup, but a comedy in long-shot.” In the tech world, we love the idea of conquering a steep learning curve, but that journey can be frustrating and often lonely. Zoom out from time to time and realize that you’re actually better off than you were before you started the journey, if only because you’re closer to reaching your next Miyagi moment.

Note: Suneel Gupta is married to TechCrunch Senior Editor Leena Rao.

[Image via]