Almost by definition, popular ideas are sort of boring. If we want something new and better, we must start with what’s currently out of fashion.

This site is called “Unpopular Ideas” because 1) I have noticed that many of my opinions have long been what you you might call non-mainstream and 2) the UnpopularIdeas.com domain was available. You many not agree with these essays. After all, they are unpopular ideas. But I hope you find them interesting and worth discussing.

If this site has any unifying theme, it is probably a libertarian orientation. Humanity has accomplished some incredible things in the last few thousand years, but cooperation and benign government are not among them. On most issues, my instinct is that fewer laws and less government intervention usually works best. We humans are a social species, but human intellect often needs to be a solitary pursuit. Individual initiative can outperform even the most august committee.

I hope you won’t take offense. I am sometimes trying to shock and am usually looking for a fresh perspective. And I don’t claim that these ideas are always correct or even that I believe in all of them 100% myself. Ultimately I am searching for truth, though usually from a new viewpoint. I just find that unpopular truths are often more interesting than conventional wisdom.

I’m a software entrepreneur, which really means I’m primarily a computer programmer (or maybe it’s a “software engineer”). I’ve founded four companies, mostly successful though not always very large. The current one, Triscape Inc., publishes FxFoto, photo organization, editing and layout software that we hope pushes the capability envelope in easy-to-use package. My first company, which I co-founded with three others, was NMS Communications, which we originally called “Natural Microsystems”. It developed some of the first PC-based voice mail systems. NMS eventually went public and was briefly a billion dollar enterprise before the tech bubble burst, though that was long after my involvement there. You can read more in my resume.