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I struggle to find much worth a damn in this infographic put together by Ron Conway.

65% of >$500M exits (or “potential exits” as though that’s a reliable measure) were from founders < 30 years old. How about telling us what percentage of the 300 respondents were founders < 30 years old? If 75% of the people in the survey were young then the actual takeaway from the data is the opposite of what is displayed here.

How about average or median returns for age profiles? How about a spread of what the exits were as well as the percentage of crash-and-burn companies.

Or, God forbid, how about just a simple “If you had invested in each of these companies at their first round valuations, here is what your return would’ve been” broken down by the criteria?

Such smart people. Such bad use of data.

Well played.

Go and grab a software engineer. There’s plenty of them around, so it should be easy to find one. Tell her that she’ll have to design a social MMO for a brand new console. This should make her eyes light up, because, as a rule, engineers prefer new technology over stuff that actually works, since new technology is cool and sexy, and old technology makes money.

Click through and check out the whole article, which is actually about “the failure of second life“

Leo over at Zen Habits (which is a great and calming blog if you’ve never read it) put a post up recently celebrating the 38 lessons he’s learned in his 38 years of life.

I’m not a huge fan of all 38, but here were my favorite 5 that hopefully you can get something out of as well.

1. Always swallow your pride to say you’re sorry. Being too proud to apologize is never worth it — your relationship suffers for no good benefit.

3. Slow down. Rushing is rarely worth it. Life is better enjoyed at a leisurely pace.

15. Failures are the stepping stones to success. Without failure, we’ll never learn how to succeed. So try to fail, instead of trying to avoid failure through fear.

23. Competition is very rarely as useful as cooperation. Our society is geared toward competition — rip each other’s throats out, survival of the fittest, yada yada. But humans are meant to work together for the survival of the tribe, and cooperation pools our resources and allows everyone to contribute what they can. It requires a whole other set of people skills to work cooperatively, but it’s well worth the effort.

5. The moment is all there is. All our worries and plans about the future, all our replaying of things that happened in the past — it’s all in our heads, and it just distracts us from fully living right now. Let go of all that, and just focus on what you’re doing, right at this moment. In this way, any activity can be meditation.