What Good Roomates Are For - 1 comment
Wednesday the 3rd of May, 2006 | Humor | Personal |
It's a bad time to start a company - no comments
Monday the 3rd of April, 2006 | Business | Humor | Must Read | Posima |
Caterina Fake, the co-founder of the wildly popular photo sharing webapp Flickr says that it’s a terrible time to start a web company. Here are her reasons:
Everybody else is starting a company. It’s crazy. Every single person who leaves a tech company isn’t going to Microsoft or Google or Apple or whatever, they’re going to a startup. Trying to operate in this environment is crazy. I’m getting late-onset ADD from trying to keep track of them all, and it’s impossible to get attention for your product amidst all the buzz (er, noise).
Your competition just got funded too. You’ve got $5 million in the bank, and they do too. Their VCs want them to succeed every bit as much as your VCs want you to succeed. This gets you into a horse race, which no one wants: it’s exhausting and expensive.
Talent is scarce again. Hell, I want to find someone to write a little bit of PHP for Wench.com and I can’t find anyone (Hey if you are a PHP webapp builder and have some spare cycles, email me at caterina-at-gmail). Everyone’s gainfully employed, and fielding several offers.
You can’t operate in obscurity anymore. We started our company in 2002 when nothing was getting funded anywhere and everyone was still licking their wounds from the big bubble bang. Nobody cared about us except us. We were in Vancouver fer crissakes. But we were able to focus on finding and connecting with the people who mattered most: the customers, the users, the community. You get more done when no one’s looking over your shoulder.
Web 2.0 isn’t all that. Hello? I don’t think there’s a rising tide lifting all boats here. I don’t think Web 2.0 is the magic bullet some people seem to think it is either. It ain’t the features, it’s that AND the business. Tagging was a great feature, no doubt. But Flickr was at break even—about to tip into the black—when we were acquired.
There’s too much going on. Every night there’s a Mashup get together, or a TechCrunch party, or it’s Tag Tuesday, or SuperHappyDevHouse or SXSW or this conference or that conference. And this stuff is fun. It’s a real community. But all of these things are great by themselves, but terrible in combination. I see some entrepreneurs in photos from *every single event*. Who’s talking to the users, writing the code, tweaking and retweaking the UI? It ain’t the Chief Party Officer.
Damn, I guess I’d better close up shop then and write off the last 16 months of my life as a loss. I think what Caterina is forgetting is that if you provide a valuable product or service that people are willing to pay for, you’re already halfway to success. The only other part of the equation is running the business properly, i.e. produce more than you consume.
Kids and Their New Technology - no comments
Wednesday the 22nd of March, 2006 | Business | Humor | Tech |
In the latest Wired magazine there is a compilation of quotes from the past few hundred years about the impact of new technologies on our youth. Here are some amusing quotes about new technologies corrupting our youth.
Novels
"The free access which many young people have to romances, novels, and plays has poisoned the mind and corrupted the morals of many a promising youth; and prevented others from improving their minds in useful knowledge. Parents take care to feed their children with wholesome diet; and yet how unconcerned about the provision for the mind, whether they are furnished with salutary food, or with trash, chaff, or poison?”
- Reverend Enos Hitchcock, Memoirs of the Bloomsgrove Family, 1790
The Waltz
"The indecent foreign dance called the Waltz was introduced ... at the English Court on Friday last ... It is quite sufficient to cast one’s eyes on the voluptuous inter twining of the limbs, and close com pressure of the bodies ... to see that it is far indeed removed from the modest reserve which has hitherto been considered distinctive of English females. So long as this obscene display was con fined to prostitutes and adulteresses, we did not think it deserving of notice; but now that it is ... forced on the respectable classes of society by the evil example of their superiors, we feel it a duty to warn every parent against exposing his daughter to so fatal a contagion.”
- The Times of London, 1816
Movies
"This new form of entertainment has gone far to blast maidenhood ... Depraved adults with candies and pennies beguile children with the inevitable result. The Society has prosecuted many for leading girls astray through these picture shows, but GOD alone knows how many are leading dissolute lives begun at the ‘moving pictures.’”
- The Annual Report of the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, 1909
The Telephone
"Does the telephone make men more active or more lazy? Does [it] break up home life and the old practice of visiting friends?”
- Survey conducted by the Knights of Columbus Adult Education Committee, San Francisco Bay Area, 1926
Comic Books
"Many adults think that the crimes described in comic books are so far removed from the child’s life that for children they are merely something imaginative or fantastic. But we have found this to be a great error. Comic books and life are connected. A bank robbery is easily translated into the rifling of a candy store. Delinquencies formerly restricted to adults are increasingly committed by young people and children ... All child drug addicts, and all children drawn into the narcotics traffic as messengers, with whom we have had contact, were inveterate comic-book readers This kind of thing is not good mental nourishment for children!”
- Fredric Wertham, Seduction of the Innocent, 1954
Rock and Roll
"The effect of rock and roll on young people, is to turn them into devil worshippers; to stimulate self-expression through sex; to provoke lawlessness; impair nervous stability and destroy the sanctity of marriage. It is an evil influence on the youth of our country.”
- Minister Albert Carter, 1956
Videogames
"The disturbing material in Grand Theft Auto and other games like it is stealing the innocence of our children and it’s making the difficult job of being a parent even harder ... I believe that the ability of our children to access pornographic and outrageously violent material on video games rated for adults is spiraling out of control.”
- US senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, 2005
The Bottom Line
The interesting thing is, studies are now showing that videogames are educational. They are helping kids multitask more efficiently as well as helping them learn how to work together and interact in virtual commerce with large role-playing games such as World of Warcraft. I think it’s time we begin embracing videogames as interactive tools to help us learn rather than let the current group of “moral crusaders” stunt its potential positive impact on our youth.
Employees Come First - 1 comment
Friday the 10th of February, 2006 | Business | Humor | Ideas |
Too many companies feel that in order to run a successful business they should be taking care of the customers first. I have a theory that if you put your employees first and make sure they’re happy, they will do the same for your customers. I believe my theory has been proven with this photo I found on the net today. Some food for thought…
