I’m looking out my window at the glowing buildings of New York City, my home for the summer. I will call this the first step of the rest of my life…

You can’t second-guess your decisions. You gather information, you think hard, you make a gut call, then you walk into the future with serenity.

This is profound – not in the business world, but in life. What is done is done. Take things one day at a time. Make your choices, stick with them, don’t look back.

No, not for me (I wish!), but this is an inspirational example of the attention to detail that Apple takes in everything it does. Someone spent a lot of time crafting this small bit of copy and one can only imagine how much it has influenced employee happiness and productivity over the years.

Engagement

2,000 M Likes per day
1,000 M Comments posted per day
901 M Monthly active users
526 M Daily Active users

Ownership after IPO

23.550% Mark Zuckerberg

Ok, so Facebook’s numbers are quite staggering. Couple this with the recent purchase of Instagram, and you have the whole tech world up in arms. It took the clever math of Brandon Watson to uncover how this billion dollar purchase makes complete sense. This will make more sense if you read the full post, but here’s a synopsis:

So Zuck uses some stock to increase the likelihood that the price lands at the top end of the range. Doing some quick math reveals that the $1B price was really only worth about $0.37 per share of Facebook stock (based on the pricing range). Remember, this money he’s getting from other people when the stock prices. So Zuck spent $0.37 per share to protect his personal downside. $0.37 per share to maximize the likelihood that the price of the offering lands at $35 and not $28. It’s a very smart move.

In the case of a pricing of $28 versus $35, Zuck would lose $211M on the shares he is offering, and $3.5B of post offering share value.

(Based on the S1 capitalization table, the valuation implied by this price range is between $75B and $94B.)

Is the $1B payment for Instagram starting to make a bit more sense?

I like to think that Zuckerberg knows what he got into with the Instagram deal. The $1b valuation took everyone by surprise, but he paid what he thought it would be worth to Facebook, and that’s all that matters.

Today I found this great response from Garrett Murray who basically vocalized what I imagine most of the internet community wanted to tell Paul:

If you feel you have a problem with using the internet too much, use the internet less. Nothing is gained by making it ten times harder to order a pizza on a Friday night or find a homeopathic cure for a rash. If you feel like you’re not being creative, do something creative. Turning off Wi-Fi isn’t suddenly going to make you a different person. You’re going to have all the same problems you had before, only now they’re going to be even more annoying to other people. Paul doesn’t need to quit the internet for a year, Paul needs to control himself and reduce his use to reasonable limits, get some creative hobbies, and spend more time with his friends.

The internet isn’t the problem with our society, the problem with our society is impulse control.

Emphasis added on that last line.

Here’s what I came up with:

This new tweak is simple. Every evening at 6PM (for every user’s own time zone), the site switches to a nighttime theme. At 6AM the next day, the site wakes up with the daytime theme.

Does this add any functionality to the site? No. But that’s not the point. It’s a way for me to build the site I want. To give the site personality and life. I’m excited to come up with new backgrounds to test. Maybe someday everyone will see a completely different website based on their location, the time of day, or even their music tastes.