PAUSD Has $35K Per Student — A Number Most Districts Would Kill For. Why Doesn’t It Feel Like It? Most school districts in America would do backflips for $35,000 per student. Palo Alto gets that — and then some. In comparison, Los Altos spends about $28K, San Jose around $18K, and the national average is about $18K. A decade ago, PAUSD was at roughly $18K — about $23K adjusted for inflation. Yet …

tl;dr: If it took you twenty seconds to generate, don’t expect me to spend twenty minutes reading it. I’m seeing a massive influx of AI-generated documents: deep-research reports, meeting notes, PRDs, and strategy decks. They look professional. They follow a clean structure. But when I push for the “why” behind a specific recommendation, the logic usually collapses. Writing forces understanding: …

Comparing PAUSD with Harker: Harker doubles your top-50 odds (though there is selection bias), UCs are the most common outcome for PAUSD, and Foothill is smarter than it sounds. I wanted to get some clarity on what the actual data looks like - especially comparing public school in Palo Alto with other private schools in the bay area. Fortunately, PAUSD publishes detailed matriculation data for …

AI is making building software cheap and accessible. This is unlocking massive productivity for everyone, but is also commoditizing software engineering. We are at the end of the software gold rush, and software engineering is going from elite to skilled trade, available to everyone. AI is fixing the supply side of software engineering. Software Engineers are currently a luxury. Only well-funded …

I had subscribed to Indian programming on Dish Network, mainly to get the latest updates on bollywood movies and music. YouTube always had all the content, but never had a good way to discover it in a easy way. This is fixed now. I am super-excited to announce Video Mirchi. You can access it at http://www.videomirchi.com. Video Mirchi looks up the top charts every day and creates a continuously …

I just received my Lytro camera on Friday. I played with it for 2 days, carrying it almost everywhere I went. There were a lot of 'pro' reviews on the camera, but very few consumer ones, so I thought I will write down my thoughts on it. Quick summary on Lytro as a camera: What I liked: It is a very well built camera. It feels great in the hands, and its construction is high quality. Its fast. …

Having observed the whole ‘connected tv’ phenomenon first hand since my early days at YouTube, contributing to XBMC since its inception and being really interested in this space personally, I am very upset with the direction where Smart TV is going. I think that the future should not include 'Apps on TV', 'Browser on TV', and its also not 'Read Facebook or Check Email on the TV'. They are …

I love Email. It just works. It works because it is flexible, open, and anyone can use it. It works very well in heterogeneous environments as the email standard is well documented, accepted and implemented. I have looked at a ton of ‘solutions’ that try to replace emails, but nothing really works as seamlessly as good-old email. The goal of email is to enable communication and think that it can …

Since the launch of iPhone, everyone has been trying to replicate the App Store model that Apple created. Every operator, OEM and even independent companies are trying to create their own app stores and native app platforms. The app store/native app model is inherently a walled garden model. This is analogous to AOL in the early days of the internet. AOL was the first one to truly bring internet …

Next week, I completed 2 years of leaving my amazing job at YouTube to enter the world of startups. Looking back, there is a ton of things that happened in these 2 years, including starting 2 companies, having a baby, traveling, fundraising, investing, advising, volunteering, etc. There is a lot that I have learned from this rollercoaster ride, and its now time to reflect on some of the key …