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  • Ashton Kutcher Or Kevin Rose, Whose Tweets Are Worth More ...
    Kutcher’s link resulted in 5,888 signups, more than Rose’s 4,356 (but not much more). But Rose’s links resulted in more orders and higher revenues. More of Rose’s followers passed the link along, and they also ordered more. On the first day of the promotion, Kutcher’s followers placed 45 orders, compared to 30 for Rose’s followers. But daily orders from Kutcher’s followers peaked at 75, whereas Rose’s peaked at 158 a week later
    (tags: twitter)

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links for 2011-07-28

  • The Five Qualities of the Consummate Innovator
    1. Associating: “innovative thinkers connect fields, problems, or ideas that others find unrelated.” 2. Questioning: ”We found that innovators consistently demonstrate a high Q/A ratio, where questions (Q) not only outnumber answers (A) in a typical conversation, but are valued at least as highly as good answers.” 3. Observing: ”Innovators… carefully watch the world around them—including customers, products, services, technologies, and companies—and the observations help them gain insights into and ideas for new ways of doing things.” 4. Networking: ”Innovators… actively search for new ideas by talking to people who may offer a radically different view of things.” 5. Experimenting: ”Innovators are constantly trying out new experiences and piloting new ideas. Experimenters unceasingly explore the world intellectually and experientially, holding convictions at bay and testing hypotheses along the way.”
    (tags: innovation quotes)

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  • Duke Basketball Coach Mike Krzyzewski on How to Connect ...
    Shane Battier, who had played a supporting role, was going to have to become our star: there was one problem: Shane had never imagined himself as a star.

    "Shane," I said, "this morning, did you look in the mirror and imagine that you were looking at next year's conference player of the year?"

    The next day I called again. "Shane, it's Coach. When you were on your way to work this morning, did you imagine scoring 30 points in a game this season?"

    "I won't hang up on you if you won't hang up on you,"

    Shane needed to imagine these sorts of things in order to become the player that he could be.

    He had all of the tools to become a great player, but he fully realized his potential only when he allowed himself to imagine great things.

    For motivating Shane, the crucial word to communicate was "imagination." For others, it may be "enthusiasm" or "self-confidence" or "poise." But undefined words are meaningless - meaning is understood by seeing a word in action.


    (tags: quotes basketball)


  • Getting Real: Epicenter Design (by 37signals)

    Getting Real: Epicenter Design (by 37signals) July 18, 2011 at 04:10PM

    (tags: via_ifttt)

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links for 2011-06-29

  • Inside Google+ — How the Search Giant Plans to Go Social | Epicenter | Wired.com
    Google+ is more than a social product, it’s an extension of Google itself. Hence, Google+.

    “We believe online sharing is broken, even awkward,”

    Bradley Horowitz opened Google Image Search and typed “Emerald Sea”. The first result, a depiction of an 1878 painting created by German immigrant artist Albert Bierstadt, so impressed Horowitz that he commissioned a pair of art students to copy it on the wall facing the fourth floor elevators.

    This mother-of-all-streams would be the equivalent of an intravenous feed of information, with inclusion of all the vital content from our social graph and the world at large (Google calls this the “interest graph”). It would scroll forever, and everything would be relevant. If Google’s original goal was to expeditiously dispatch us elsewhere, with this near-clairvoyant stream, Google could turn us into search potatoes who never leave.


    (tags: wired google socialnetworking)


  • We know very little about self-development

    But we do know one thing: People in general, and knowledge workers in particular, grow according to the demands they make on themselves. They grow according to what they consider to be achievement and attainment. If they demand little of themselves, they will remain stunted. If they demand a good deal of themselves, they will grow to giant stature—without any more effort than is expended by the nonachievers.

    (tags: quotes career)


  • Alex Payne — Obligation

    There are several obvious problems with obligation as it relates to work:

    1. Some people don’t feel obligated to do much of anything or they don’t like to feel obligated to do something, even if it’s the optimal thing for them to do. We like choice, or at least the illusion of choice.
    2. If what you’re doing isn’t making you happy, you probably won’t do a good job at it.

    At the end of the day, the best thing you can do is to figure out what makes you happy and then do the hell out of that thing.

    Problem is, it’s really really hard to figure out what makes you happy. It’s way easier to guilt yourself into a sense of obligation which you then use to rationalize the decision to do something you don’t actually enjoy.

    This advice is so completely and utterly not new, but it’s repeated over and over again because so few of us actually seem to remember it. Trying to do what you love as a guiding principle makes a helluva lot more sense then acting out of a sense of obligation.


    (tags: quotes career)

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  • Polaroid's SX-70: The Art and Science of the Nearly Impossible
    There’s a rule they don’t teach at Harvard. If anything is worth doing, it’s worth doing to excess.

    “Don’t undertake a project,” an oft-quoted Land maxim goes, “unless it is manifestly important and nearly impossible.”

    1947: Instand photography introduced by Land
    1950's: Company thrived, introduced new, improved models
    1960's: Company thrived, introduced new, improved models
    1972: SX-70 launched
    1979: Land forced out of Polaroid

    “The A-bomb of photography…revolutionary, spectacular, and amazing.”

    dream all along: “absolute one-step photography.”

    Land’s Polaroid, by Peter C. Wensberg Longtime Polaroid executive

    Insisting on the Impossible Victor K. McElheny’s excellent 1998 biography of Land


    (tags: quotes business history photography apple)


  • Jimmy Kimmel: Father's Day on the cheap - Grantland

    Jimmy Kimmel: Father's Day on the cheap - Grantland June 17, 2011 at 04:09PM

    (tags: via_ifttt)

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links for 2011-06-16

  • Build your business around an idea — Warpspire
    What bothers me is the lack of imagination most startup founders have.

    Filling holes is mediocre and boring. Dare to build something incredible – something unique, something lasting, something special.

    Ideas are lasting, products are not. The easiest way to build something incredible is to base your business around an idea. Products are just the manifestation of the idea.

    "We make it easier to collaborate with others and share your projects with the universe."

    If I look into the future, I know that the idea of collaboration is lasting — but Git? That’s a hard bet to make.

    it’s okay to focus on a product at first. But as soon as you find your strengths as a company, abstract it out into an idea and focus on that.


    (tags: business startups howto)

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links for 2011-06-14

  • What Was Day 1 Like?
    What Was Day 1 Like? June 14, 2011 at 01:42AM
    (tags: via_ifttt)
  • The mindset revolution
    The skills I look for in recruits now are often completely different to the ones I looked for only a decade ago. But I do know exactly what kind of people I will want to hire in ten years' time.

    1. Honesty, Trustworthiness
    2. Adaptability, Flexibility
    3. Commitment, Accountability

    Good: Seeing and approaching the world in a way that truly benefits those around you.

    Global: openness to new experiences and new ideas, as well as the ability to make new connections and to create new combinations.

    Grit: It spurs you on when others give up and gives you the grip you need to forge ahead.


    (tags: business career)


  • Everlater

    We talked about how Nate and Natty learned to program. When they came up with the idea for Everlater, they were both young finance geeks on wall street. Nate was a math major; Natty was a econ major, but neither had a clue how to build a web app. They decided that rather than find a “developer” to team up with, they would learn how to program.

    I regularly get asked questions (via email, face to face, and this blog) by non-technical entrepreneurs how they should get started if they don’t have a technical co-founder. There are a variety of answers – one is “learn to program.” In Nate and Natty’s case it’s worked out great and their story is an instructive one. So we’ve decided to work on a series of blog posts together about their story of how they learned to program, the resources they used, decisions they made, struggles they had.


    (tags: howto programming startups)


  • Chuck Klosterman: Why the DVR robs sports of all of their drama - Grantland

    Chuck Klosterman: Why the DVR robs sports of all of their drama - Grantland June 13, 2011 at 03:36PM

    (tags: via_ifttt)


  • Startups Are Hard : jazzychad's blog

    Startups Are Hard : jazzychad's blog June 13, 2011 at 03:36PM

    (tags: via_ifttt)

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links for 2011-06-10

  • Chris Dixon's notes on raising seed financing
    Best thing is to either never need to raise money or to raise money after you have a product, users, or customers.

    The most common question they hear from investors is not about the founders or the product, but “who else is investing?”

    Get involved in your local tech community. Meet every entrepreneur and investor you can. Entrepreneurs tend to be more accessible & sympathetic and can often make warm intros to investors.

    What you should really be focused on when pitching your early stage startup is pitching yourself and your team. When you do this, remember that a startup is primarily about building something. Hence the most important aspect of your backgrounds is not the names of the schools you attended or companies you worked at – it’s what you’ve built.


    (tags: startups howto quotes dixon)

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  • Wireframing for web apps | The Contrast Blog
    1. The goal of preparing wireframes is to solve design challenges regarding layout and priority. 2. When wireframing, Everything means something, whether you intended to or not. 3. Sketching defaults to same color and font everywhere. Use a limited color set (3-5 grays), 2 fonts, default HTML components, and little else. 3a. Starting with black text, means you can only get bigger and bolder, Starting with gray text, allows you to go darker and lighter. 4. The purpose of low fidelity design, is not to polish and refine, but to explore the solution space. If you can’t produce concepts quickly, then you’re working at the wrong fidelity. 5. Use Real copy and Real data. 6. Know your technology: know HTML/CSS/JS 7. the goal is great delivery, not great deliverables.
    (tags: howto design)

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links for 2011-06-06

  • Alex Payne — All We Will Ever Have
    "“Whatever we are, whatever we make of ourselves, is all we will ever have."
    (tags: quotes al3x)
  • Behind the Project: Pic A Fight — PaulStamatiou.com
    the making of a simple web app, complete with list of languages used, etc...

    Pic A Fight was built on:
    -Ruby 1.9.2 with RVM and Rails 3
    -hosted on several Amazon EC2 micro instances (we spun up 5 during load)
    -with an Amazon elastic load balancer instance
    -using Amazon RDS (it's like a database instance) for our MySQL store and with images hosted via Instagram's Amazon S3.


    (tags: howto design)

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  • Y Combinator Numbers (to date - 2011)
    staggering results from YC (and they're only getting better): Of the startups they'd funded, 94% were able to raise more money after YC.

    Getting funded is not success. It's just something that makes success more likely.

    $4.7 billion / 210 = $22.4 million, so the average value of startups we've funded is about $22.4 million.

    The real lesson here though is how long it takes to measure performance in this business. We're 6 years in, and we could easily be off by 3x in either direction. Startup outcomes are unpredictable, and the outcomes of their investors doubly so, because it's hard to say whether the big successes are repeatable, or if the investors just got lucky. Even 6 years in, all we can say is that the numbers look encouraging so far.


    (tags: startups quotes business)


  • Evan Williams | evhead: The Future of Identity Belongs to Apple and Google

    Evan Williams | evhead: The Future of Identity Belongs to Apple and Google June 01, 2011 at 03:57PM

    (tags: via_ifttt)

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links for 2011-05-25

  • Designing for distribution with Eric+Eric (YC 2011, Mochi Media) | Andrew Chen (@andrewchen)
    Re: the tendency to “bolt on” virality at the end- if you have a viral loop that doesn’t actually cohesively fit into your product, you end up with a really disjointed experience. Instead, the thinking has to start at the beginning- pick something where the sharing/invites are embedded into the idea in the first place.  It’s not always about tightening the viral loop, it's about making it as smooth as possible. It's smooth when it makes sense
    (tags: quotes startups)
  • Y Combinator’s Paul Graham: We’re Looking For People Like Us
    When people come to Paul Graham and say they’ve got a great idea, his first response is, “Tell me about your cofounders”.

    “There are some people who just get what they want in the world. If you want to start a startup you have to be one of those people. You can’t be passive and wishy-washy,” Graham says.

    YC looks for mental flexibility

    “Startups often have to do slightly devious things,” Graham says. “You can tell if people have a gleam in their eye. You don’t want people who would be obedient employees… we’re not looking for people who did what they were told in life.”

    Sam Altman was actually initially rejected, but he “pushed back like a 40-year old” and told Graham that he would be joining the program.

    Angel rounds end and VC begins at a million dollars

    Y Combinator keeps track of the successful companies that they initially rejected.

    The total value of YC companies is now around $3 billion — YC has invested a total of around $5 million.


    (tags: startups interviews graham yc)

2011.05.25 | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

links for 2011-05-24

  • You Need to Win the Battle for Share of Mind
    Twitter and Facebook are truly transformative at a societal level

    many startups in the consumer world are now truly hits driven like video games or movies. We compare user numbers like box office receipts.

    To win you must truly provide value that changes the way that end-consumers do something in their lives that will persist.

    When pressed, not enough of these entrepreneurs can answer questions about why users would still be using this product in 5 years, about why their product is going to solve a consumer or business problem that isn’t being solved today. They pitch me features, not value...but value is what you need

    When you solve a real problem you’ll win the true battle. The battle for share of mind.


    (tags: trends startups vc)

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  • Is Microsoft trying to end the reign of mobile carriers? (MSFT+Skype+Nokia) « fox @ fury
    Is Microsoft trying to end the reign of mobile carriers? (MSFT+Skype+Nokia) « fox @ fury May 17, 2011 at 11:33PM
    (tags: via_ifttt)
  • The Curve of Talent
    “The more that you manage people in your career, the more you’ll find that it is very hard to find people who can execute well on what they are asked to do. The bar of performance wasn’t innovation, but simply competently executing the expected job.

    Most people in the business world don’t have a particularly clear idea on how to do their job well.

    It is very easy for a C player to seem moderately successful when progress is largely based on inertia.

    A players don't want to be at large companies because, more often than not, corporate bureaucracy and process not only fail to reward, but actually punish A players.

    By contrast, startups have no inertia and need to create momentum from nothing.

    Most startups need a core team of A players; folks who can “write the book and not just read it.”

    One way these candidates can be identified is when they actually teach the interviewer something about how the company can win.


    (tags: career quotes management startups)

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