18 May
2010
Hacker News | I am a junior angel in Silicon Valley. AMA
We're always creating the preconditions of our own future. At some times more deliberately than others.
Great, great thread with Joshua Schachter, founder of delicious and one of my personal start-up heroes. I feel a kindred connection with him, since he and I both worked for investment banks on Wall St., though he was a quant and I was a code monkey.
20 Apr
2010
How Tech Start-ups Like Foursquare and Meetup Are Trying to Overthrow Old Media and Build a Better New York
Sure, everyone wants to be a millionaire, but to be a millionaire while also saying that you fundamentally changed the way people interact and engage with one another is, if you take their word for it, perhaps an even bigger badge of honor.
via nymag.com
19 Nov
2009
10 Questions with Jeffrey Kalmikoff, Chief Creative Officer of skinnyCorp/Threadless
Question: As an entrepreneur, what keeps you up at night?
Answer: We have this ethos at skinnyCorp: “Your project is not good enough.” We’re constantly striving to make all our projects as great as they can be - constantly evolving, constantly refining, etc. I never go to sleep satisfied that what we’ve been working on is done. It’s never done—it’s just “as far as you can take it today”. That—mixed in with thinking about new projects, new ideas, new everything—keeps me up at night. My three cats aren’t any help either.
26 Oct
2009
Paul Graham - What Startups Are Really Like
http://www.paulgraham.com/really.html"Build the absolute smallest thing that can be considered a complete application and ship it.""Don't worry what people will say. If your first version is so impressive that trolls don't make fun of it, you waited too long to launch." "When you let customers tell you what they're after, they will often reveal amazing details about what they find valuable as well what they're willing to pay for.""Fast iteration is the key to success." "Now I don't laugh at ideas anymore, because I realized how terrible I was at knowing if they were good or not.""Companies that seemed like competitors and threats at first glance usually never were when you really looked at it. Even if they were operating in the same area, they had a different goal." "All the scares induced by seeing a new competitor pop up are forgotten weeks later. It always comes down to your own product and approach to the market."
