I remarked to a friend that Mark Suster’s entrepreneurial roots show in his approach to being a VC – he’s come out of nowhere and in short order aggressively pushed himself into being one of the most relevant voices out there. He seems to be working a lot harder than the others guys, exactly as you’d expect an entrepreneur to be. Not exactly what you’d expect of a VC.

His blog is fantastic, and I quite often agree with his advice.

That’s why I found it odd that his The Best Entrepreneurs Are Hyper Competitive & Hate Losing struck such a dissonant chord with me.

Shuffling through the successful business people I know and trying to gauge whether they would be the type of people who are obsessed with winning, even in a family game of scrabble, I don’t come to a clear conclusion. I know hyper competitive people, but I also know plenty of people who are able to separate their business behavior from their personal behavior. And not obsess with beating the competition.

Maybe that’s what’s not sitting well with me – Mark’s definition of winning seems to be beating the competition.

Some of the best entrepreneurs I know don’t obsess with the competition. They obsess with their own behavior.

Here’s a contrived example – look at Apple. Do you see Jobs competing with the others in the industries he enters, or do you see him trying create the best possible product, distinctly separate from what his competitors are doing?

Frankly I have a hard time picturing a lot of these guys stressing out over scrabble or Guitar Hero.

Mark’s a very successful guy and his approach has certainly worked for him, but I disagree that you need to be obsessed with winning in the way that Mark describes it.

Look at this way: you could destroy all your competitors and still not win. You could also win without destroying any of your competitors.

First, pick the right game. Then, pay attention to playing that game as best it can be played. Competing may be an important tactical part of playing the game, but it’s probably not the part to obsess over.

django-mptt is a library for storing tree oriented data using the Django ORM. It allows you to place your model instances into a tree structure and efficiently query for ancestors and children.

Here’s a brief tutorial on how to use it:

After installing, you’ll need to modify your model to include a “parent” field, and register it with mptt:

class Person(models.Model):
    contact   = models.ForeignKey( Contact, db_index=True )
    role      = models.CharField(max_length=20, blank=True)
    parent    = models.ForeignKey('self', null=True, blank=True, related_name='children')

    def __unicode__(self):
        return "Person: <%s>" % (self.contact.email, )

mptt.register(Person)

mptt dynamically adds fields to your model, so you’ll need to syncdb after you’ve added the parent attribute and the mptt.register call to your model.

The basics are fairly easy to use:

To move a node to the root of the tree, use move_to with a targe of None:

person1.move_to(None)
person1.save()

To make a node the child of another, set its parent:

person2.parent = person1
person2.save()

To find the children of a node, use the children field:

>>>person1.children.all()
[<Person: Person: <test2@testing.com>>, <Person: Person: <test3@testing.com>>]

Here’s a little snippet of code to setup a 15 node tree where each node has two child nodes:

[UPDATE] The code in this snippet is not correct – you have to save each node as you update it, then look it up again. You can’t modify a node, save it, then use the reference you already have for it. I’ll update the code when I get a chance

contacts = []
people = []
for n in range(15):
    c = mod.Contact(email="test" + str(n) + "@testing.com")
    c.save()
    contacts.append(c)
    p = mod.Person(contact=c)
    p.save()
    people.append(p)

people[0].move_to(None)  # Root
people[0].save()
for n in range(1,15):
    people[n].parent = people[(n-1)/2]
    people[n].save()

Now let’s take a look around:

>>>people[7].parent
<Person: Person: <test3@testing.com>>

>>>people[3].children.all()
[<Person: Person: <test7@testing.com>>, <Person: Person: <test8@testing.com>>]

Now let’s move things around a bit; we’ll take person3, which is 2 levels down from the root, and make it a direct child of the root:

>>>people[3].parent = people[0]
>>>people[3].save()

>>>people[0].children.all()
[<Person: Person: <test1@testing.com>> <Person: Person: <test2@testing.com>>, <Person: Person: <test3@testing.com>>]

And we can look at the ancestors of a given node:

people[14].get_ancestors()

I’m a big fan of Fantastic Mr. Fox. We just watched it again and it was a hit with everyone from the 2 year old to grandma.

The dialog an voice acting are excellent, and the animation is really refreshing. The story is smart and is different enough from your typical Disney fare to be a welcome change.

I recommend it, go see it.

I was doing some log analysis this morning and was struck by the variety of user agents accessing Xpenser. Quite a bit of mobile access with quite a variety of different browsers, as well as some more exotic items (various tablet PCs I don’t recognize, etc).

Then there’s the API access that’s been picking up quite significantly – in fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if it overtakes regular web access in a little while.

For quite a while the web we had a fairly uniform set of entry points – IE and FireFox for the most part, with a smattering of others thrown in. There is so much more variety now, and the variety is significant – for example, the difference between a mobile device and a desktop browser is much more significant than between IE and FF.

I’m hoping other modes of access become commonplace as well – boxee, tablet PCs, etc.

It feels like we’re at a transition point from uniformity to diversity again. This will mean pain the short term as we adjust, but a richer and more encompassing experience once we make it to the other side.

I’m looking forward to it.

Here’s a little script for finding files modified more than 7 days ago and moving them to another directory:

find . -type f -mtime +7 -print > /tmp/old_files.txt
cat /tmp/old_files.txt | while read line; do mv "$line" ../old_files ; done