Monthly Archives: May 2005

CTO Breakfast

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This morning I went to Phil Windley’s CTO Breakfast. Phil Windley is a BYU computer science professor and former CTO for the State of Utah, and every month he holds an “informal gathering of technologists”. Today’s attendees included two other BYU professors, a state representative, and several other programmers and technologists young and old. This was the second CTO Breakfast I’ve attended, and like last time, the conversation just flowed from one topic to the next without much structure as we sat around a conference table. Here are some of the interesting points:

  • We talked about education in the U.S. — that incentives for excelling in school are poor, school isn’t “cool”, and the country generally doesn’t choose role models because of their brains, hard work, or excellence in school. Related to education, someone mentioned a study in which one group of students ate beans and toast for breakfast and performed much better in school than the other group which had sweetened cereal and other sugary foods for breakfast. The same study was also mentioned in a New Scientist article I saw yesterday. Very interesting.
  • We talked a lot about computer languages. There are hundreds of computer languages. Programmers often choose the language they know best or the tool that will get the job done the fastest or easiest, even if it’s not the “best” language. Phil programs in Scheme because he thinks it’s one of the “best” languages. There are lots of similarities between computer programming languages and human languages: some have lots of characters, are harder to learn, and can say a lot with not a lot of writing (Chinese and APL) while other languages have fewer characters, are easier to learn, and require more writing to say the same thing (English and C++).
  • We live in an increasingly complex world — no matter how you abstract it, complexity is always complex. There’s no shortcut to abstracting complexity.
  • The incentive system for our teachers is poor. Someone mentioned having a high school teacher that made math fun, which caused him to take interest in math, enjoy math, excel in math, and go on to a degree and a career in engineering and computers. That teacher was excellent, but perhaps not the norm. Teachers are paid based on degrees and years of experience rather than performance, which is a shame both for the bad teachers and the good teachers. It causes bad teachers to feel complacent and causes good teachers to burn out.
  • Someone mentioned, and a few agreed, that grades in college don’t matter “above a B” — coming from a room full of academics (professors, grad students, etc.) What a different mindset from mine: grades in college don’t matter, period. OK, let me qualify that a little bit — grades do matter for grad school, I suppose, and they matter if you want to get a job with a prestigious consulting firm. But for most jobs, grades don’t matter at all, and they especially don’t matter if you want to be entrepreneurial. They might even hurt. I recently listened to the audio version of The Millionaire Mind. It mentioned that a lot of millionaire businessmen don’t fit the mold of school and perform poorly. Also, some students that do poorly in school are forced to take the “harder” jobs in sales and are forced to develop people skills and managerial skils because they can’t ride on their grades. Those differences cause them to excel at entrepreneurship and in business.
  • And the joke from today’s CTO breakfast: Phil said, half-jokingly, “If the questions you search for on Google don’t return any answers, you may be on the cutting edge of technology!” Someone laughed that, yes, if Google doesn’t return any answers to your questions, you’re definitely on one extreme of the bell curve or the other.

a few comments on what I had for lunch today

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Today I went into Jamba Juice, hoping that a citrus smoothie with “immunity boster” would help me kick the cold I’ve had since I returned from Brazil. I was deciding between Peenya Kowlada and Peach Pleasure and noticed a new drink: Acai Supercharger. What a surprise! Açaí was a drink I had multiple times while in Brazil. Açaí is a small berry that is served in a cold, smoothie-like drink usually mixed with guaraná berries. Sometimes it was served with granola, other times with sliced bananas. The Portuguese spelling is “açaí”, pronounced “ah-sigh-EE”. The girl at Jamba Juice pronounced it correctly.

It was actually in it’s own category — “Acai Energy Smoothie” — because it was more expensive at every size than all the other drinks in the store — $3.55 small, $4.35 medium, and $5.15 large. But wow, it was worth it. It tasted a lot like the drink I had in Brazil. Here’s what the menu said:

Acai Supercharger — A positively charged mix of acai berry juice infused with guarana, soy milk, raspberry sherbet, strawberries, blueberries, ice.

I don’t know how long Jamba Juice will have this drink, but I definitely recommend it to anyone. If you try it, I’d be curious to know what you think about it.

The Wikipedia article on açaí is also helpful: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acai. It says açaí is “one of the most nutritious fruits of the Amazon”.

Last, I was still hungry for something substantial so I went through the drive-thru of Arctic Circle to try their limited-time $1.25 double cheeseburger. As a college student, I’m fairly aware of all the cheap hamburgers in the area. Wendy’s had the most famous of the cheap burgers — the Junior Bacon Cheeseburger for $.99. However, they recently raised its price to $1.29. Though I’ve eaten at Wendy’s dozens and dozens of times while in college (probably over 100 times — and I’m not the type to be sensational or to exaggerate,) sometimes twice a day, I haven’t eaten there on my own even once since they raised the price on the JBC.

It’s highly likely that Wendy’s JBC was a loss-leader meant to draw people into the restaurant (which it did) but you can’t make any money when college boys order 2 or 3 of them and nothing else. I’d love to see the demand curve for the Junior Bacon Cheeseburger. My guess is that the demand was extremely elastic and that sales on the JBC have dropped sharply since they raised the price. It was a good $.99 burger, but it’s not worth much more than that. Arctic Circle’s $1.25 double cheeseburger, on the other hand, is an excellent burger.

Rio de Janeiro Tonight

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Brazil blog #3

The last few days we have been in Cabo Frio, Brazil (state of Rio de Janeiro). We were going to spend these days in Vitoria, but some friends in Belo Horizonte said that Cabo Frio and the neighboring city Buzios were much better than Vitoria, so we came here instead. It’s also much closer to the city of Rio de Janeiro where we’re going tonight.

Cabo Frio and Buzios have been great. They’re small cities and during this season of the year there aren’t many tourists here, but we’ve had fun. Our hotel is in Cabo Frio. Cabo Frio has beautiful beaches and an inlet (canal) where there’s a boardwalk and lots of nice restaurants. We’ve also gone to Buzios three times (it’s an hour away by bus since the bus stops at every little point along the way to pick up more people.) Yesterday in Buzios we paid R$30 to take a boat trip around the beaches of the area. It’s kind of a lot of money (relatively speaking) but in the end it was definitely worth it. We saw beautiful beaches and they also stopped a couple of times for us to jump off the boat and swim. On the boat there were lots of Argentines, a couple Americans besides us, a couple French guys, and a few other nationalities. There was definitely a disproportionate amount of Brazilians (not very many) but there were a few. We met a blond-haired, blue-eyed girl from Rosario, Argentina, where my father served a mission for the Church.

A predominant though as I’ve been here has been that Brazil is a country of entrepreneurs. By that, I mean that even though there aren’t a lot of new ideas or business models coming out of Brazil, there is a disproportionately high number of people that get into business for themselves.

There is a stratum of people here that are a lot like Americans — they get college educations, work in good jobs (often for big companies), have cars, have cell phones, and have plenty of disposable income to spend on entertainment and travel and non-essential items. The larger stratum of Brazilians have much less to spend on cell phones, entertainment, etc., and these Brazilians are much more likely to start their own neighborhood bar or sell ice cream on the street. Again, these are necessarily glamorous jobs, but many poor Brazilians turn to entrepreneurship when they don’t have other options.

The family we stayed with in Sao Paulo is a good example of this. Neither the father or the mother, as far as I know, received a college education. The father has his own bar in front of the house, and the mother sells yogurt drinks (Yakult) in the streets. They have a nice house with several rooms and new furniture, a TV, a stereo, a computer with dial-up Internet access, cell phones, and other niceties. The parents have done an excellent job of providing for their children, who are going to have even more opportunities (for college education, for example) than they had.

The distribution infrastructure for this kind of “entrepreneurship” is incredible. So many people have bars — almost on every street — that many neighborhoods have wholesale alcohol stores. I imagine the beer companies of Brazil must have an enormous network of delivery trucks and infrastructure to get product to these neighborhood wholesalers. The same goes for the other products like ice cream and Coca-Cola products.

A couple other observations on entrepreneurship in Brazil:

  • Because transportation is expensive and not everyone has their own car, bars and bakeries and other stores can capture a market of one neighborhood or one street and survive just fine. Customers don’t travel outside their neighborhoods for products.
  • Bakeries, snack shops, bars, etc. don’t distinguish themselves from others. All these items, bought in the neighborhood stores, are commodity items with low prices, serving a geographically limited and immobile clientele.