The piece starts with the knocking of a woodblock which creates a kind of rhythmic gauntlet through which the orchestra has to pass. — John Adams

IN 1986, Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony commissioned an orchestral work from John Adams for the Great Woods Festival.¹ The resultant fanfare has become one of Adams’² most popular pieces. In 2015, Adams’ work seems like a fitting anthem for the SF/SV startup scene, where many a hopeful donkey straps a horn to its nose and hopes for a myopic venture capitalist to mistake it for an undiscovered unicorn.³, ⁴

This piece came to mind a few Monday’s back, when the startup I was working for, Jut underwent a massive reorganization.⁵ A startup pivoting in San Francisco is fairly unremarkable (unless you work for it and the pivot involves laying off around 80% of the staff). On the other hand, when you were the last hire, 80% of the company is gone, and it was Day 11 for you, the event is a bit more noteworthy, and “Short Ride” takes on an entirely new meaning.⁶

Waiting in line for the Fast Machine

I applied to Jut as a result of a bad Google search. I was looking for a library to make plotting real-time data easier from an Arduino I had streaming JSONs from a sensor. I came across Jut.io, which had nice graphs from streaming data, but required a backend not appropriate for ...

more ...