Success image from Demetri Martin’s “This is a Book” For some reason, Founders are very open about all of the things they did “wrong”. Whether or not things worked out in the end, everyone has a narrative about how they bucked the […]
PEOPLE ALWAYS SAY THEY WANT TO START A COMPANY. Nobody ever spends years wishing they could run a company, or track key performance indicators over several quarters for a company. I don’t think I’ve ever even heard someone say that their dream is to lead a company. People are […]
Last week marked the 30th anniversary of Macintosh, the adorable little machine that coined the phrase “Please insert Disk 1. Please insert Disk 2. Please insert Disk 1.” While they didn’t always have the cachet and widespread adoption of today’s Macs, these […]
“You are making a major mistake,” said the prominent startup exec who was trying to convince us to give up on Context Optional and be “acqui-hired” by his well funded and highly praised startup. To be fair, it was something that we approached them with, when we were basically […]
If you ask most founders why they wanted to start a company, you’ll likely find that a big part of it had to do with building a team. The notion of creating a place where people can have fun, build a career, […]
Ah, the “pivot”. It’s not a failure if it’s merely a complete change in what you’re doing. You’ve heard about lots of high profile pivots, like Groupon (originally for charity fundraising), Flickr (originally a game), and PayPal (originally a type of stone […]
In a number of recent conversations with startup founders, I’ve preceded any advice I might offer with this disclaimer: “We did things in a very nontraditional way.” Sure, every startup takes a different path. Some focus on building a killer product before […]
When we write proposals for Facebook applications, we typically include definitions for the Facebook-specific terms we use, like wall, mini-feed, and notification. Facebook doesn’t provide much in the way of official definitions for these features, and new users are often confused by […]
Working creatively with APIs is one of the things that makes software development fun. APIs exist mainly to allow third parties to add functionality to software that the original authors don’t have the time, interest, or creativity to do on their own. […]