betterlabs

Awesome - glad to see PicBackMan on the list. We are excited about our mission to end photo backup anxiety for everyone around the world!

I believe investors and startups that are / were looking for Facebook as an easy exit were not building a company / business anyway. Such a situation is better overall for everyone - only the teams that are focused on building a real business survive and create value for everyone involved.

Here is a blog post that describes the inspiration behind PicBackMan and how it works: http://www.picbackman.com/general/backup-photos-into-multipl.... Would love to hear your comments and feedback.

Just downloaded and tried it and it looks really good. It has the simplicity of Notepad which I keep going back to after trying a new app and I have tried "many". I only wish they were cloud based and had a web version to it so my lists are not stuck on my iPhone alone. Hope that is coming!

The right thing to do. However, their 2nd paragraph should have been the one starting with "We believe you should have control when it comes to sharing your personal information..."

The rest of it is a repeat of yesterday and is really not necessary.

I do want to know how I can backup by Path to a S3 or Dropbox account. Does anyone know if they support this?

This is insightful especially since we have thought about this problem and had not come up with a solution. I am assuming all the icons will be unique though, else it may lead to a lot of confusion. Also, I believe people choose icons that they best identify with and if it is not unique their association with the icon may not be as strong.

Another thing I have experimented with is if you can upload a picture and create a hand drawn painting / image like Chris Dixon's or Fred Wilson's image which I think are brilliant in creating a brand and identity.

Rapportive is best amongst the products that add social profiles so this is an awesome outcome. Congratulations to the team!

I always wondered how they could turn it into a business, though. Its useful but tough to say you'd pay for it and Google and others could add it easily, which they have done.

Great post and I couldn't agree more on how important retention is for web businesses. Our product, Nurture (http://www.nurturehq.com), addresses this need in a flexible fashion and is being used for exactly this requirement (User Lifecycle Marketing for improving engagement) by a few customers.

If Google+ is aimed to be a utility then yes, I agree with your point of view. But if they are looking to create a competing product to Facebook then, I am not sure that creating a free multi-way video conferencing solution is the going to help. And, I feel, users who signup to Google+ to use this free service, are not likely to adopt Google+ for their social networking needs just because they are using this free utility.

I agree that Google may acquire a few new users with this but this cannot help them compete with Facebook. They need to get the core (the critical mass, social sharing dynamics etc.) right where as, I feel, they are investing in building utilities to get users which they are not getting based on the basic social networking product.

This is what I meant when I said "I don't get it".

I don't get it. It just feels like they are trying to do too much too soon. I don't know any other than marketers who are building content on Google+ and I wonder what their engagement metrics look like.

Another thing is for conference calls, there are already several free and dead easy solutions out there, so its unclear who this is aimed at.

Nice work.

I love the way the new Path app looks / works but not a big fan of the fly out menu. It adds an additional click versus having a simple bar of the actions appear at the bottom of the screen. Does anyone else feel the same? Just curious.

They were my own :-)

Yep, I remember that line.

But I believe it doesn't speak about "giving up your life" to do the startup. There is a big difference, I feel, between "low intensity work" and "working hard and smart" and "working hard and smart and giving up everything else".

And that "giving up your life" has to be explained with examples: cancel your long due family vacation because the a sales VP wants you to go to a customer site without having a solid reason, camp at a customer location in the carribean until you get a PO because thet want you to make it happen (though you know camping there is going to do nothing). Postpone a surgery because your travel schedule doesn't allow it. A lot of these can be clearly unreasonable which is why it sucks to do a blanket statement.

And investors and business owners like smart work but I believe they eventually like hard work also - they just don't want you to work smart and not work more because you worked smart. They want you to work smart and work even more for the time you saved by working smart. I DO NOT want to generalize this but as people building businesses we are all (including myself) are too focused on growing and more of everything. And sometimes we and everyone with us loose a lot of what won't come back - youth, family time and more. I have been guilty of this myself as a founder and I remind myself to refrain from this as much as I can.

Eventually its a personal decision though. Do what you think is right for yourself and learn from your "own" experiences.

I was actually referring to PG's views on that issue that Arrington wrote about.

And the whole discussion definitely applies to founder and their startups too, imo. The issues are the same and so are the trade-offs. Would you give you your life for your startup but not for anyone else'?

I would love to hear PG's comment / viewpoint on this whole issue.

I have done 3 startups so far (1 VC funded, 2 bootstrapped) and I work very hard because I love it BUT I never ever work at the expense of the time with my kids and anyone saying you have to give up your life to find success in the startup world is just misleading in a big way. There are tons of examples of highly successful people across many industries who have made a fortune without giving up their lives. And its wise to look beyond such myths which are made to seem like the "norm" sometimes.

I ended up jumping straight to the 3 points and loved them. Having said that, I think negotiation is a skill that is cultivated over a long period of time through experiences (and making tons of mistakes) and just knowing the tactics doesn't make you good at negotiation. I think its important to understand your personal values / temperament / thought process, and come up with a way to negotiating that you can be good at and leveraging these and other points. Mark McCormack's "On Negotiating" is brilliant on this topic - http://www.amazon.com/Negotiating-Mark-H-McCormack/dp/078710...

Its unbelievable how business (school) buzzwords and tactics tend to overlook the most important aspects of a particular industry / problem / scenario that are non-financial in nature. There is an important strategic perspective(s) which cannot be accounted for in IRR, RONA or any of the other hundred such terms. Loved the quote from the founder of TSMC.

It is also surprising to see that most Asian conglomerates ( in India, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, China etc.) seem to have strong vertically integrated businesses where are they continuing to build and expand expertise in the core areas, while letting the west become their marketing managers.

Sorry but IMHO, this is the classic "product looking for a problem" example. There are several things I believe make products like this tough to succeed, most important of which is this: for a transaction-based model to work there needs to be buyers and sellers who go to a marketplace to buy or sell. Without this focused ecosystem, its really tough to make it work. I understand that one could argue that sellers can broadcast across all channels (twitter, facebook etc.) and create a buyer ecosystem in a distributed fashion. But I feel it is merely good theory and cannot work at scale in practice (barring few examples of flash sales, deals etc which have short shelf life and apt for viral / social spread).

Yelp is an awesome service, but I am surprised to see that they are still not profitable. Considering an annual revenue run rate of approx. $70m, I am wondering what costs them $70m a year to run the site - with most online businesses salaries and marketing are the biggest expenses and considering Yelp's amazing organic rankings, I doubt they are buying a lot of traffic. Any idea what the other big costs are? Sales teams, perhaps?

The hardest thing is to take this learning (and the concept of deliberate practice) and hack it to your startup founder role and your chaotic day. Its easy to say that this concept it not applicable there but I believe it is. I have tried to apply it by splitting my day for new sales calls, existing account management, product dev management and operational issues and it does work well on the days that I can be disciplined enough to not get distracted. There is also a tremendous sense of achievement when it works. So that is my take away from this article - take the core concept and make an attempt to apply it to whatever it is that you are doing - so you can do it better, faster and cheaper ( in terms of energy spent!).

You articulated my point better than I could have.

I too guessed and have always believed vertical listings are "more natural" way of consuming information than the grid listings. Grids are too overwhelming to digest any of the information and make a decision. They are probably good to browse sometimes.

I also wanted to say that a common perception that prettier is better is rarely true. Google is a great example and so was Plentyoffish. Utility and usability pretty much make the biggest difference and can make up for lack of pretty design. Infact sometimes pretty design is often not the most usable design.

I already discover most new content via Facebook and the only missing piece is search. If Facebook builds a search engine and integrates within its core experience sooner than Google takes to get G+ to work and scale, it would be a good indication of who might eventually win. From the social perspective, Facebook already has the mental association at a massive scale that may be tough for G+ to get to, especially considering Google is perceived to be "more utility than fun" across its user base.

I couldn't agree more. Even if we assume there is a justifiable reason or perhaps its happening only to employees who have not performed (which I doubt can be the case considering those employees could not have lasted this long any way), this probably has done irreparable damage to their reputation in the eyes of current and prospective employees. I hope all this bad PR makes them reconsider it, if not anything else.

I am not sure what is new about this. There are multiple alternatives (similar) and ways of using other services like Dropbox to do this. Its a "marketing" and "user experience" game and will need a lot of luck too, in order to make it big. Having said that, I really like the UX of Kicksend and hope that they do well.

Great idea and I am looking forward to the eBook. I have always used and created designs based on what I have liked / what has inspired me and it would be awesome to have a high level structure to go by, that comes from a professional designer. It would be helpful to have a "Checklist" of the most important aspects to ensure which would help validate / update past designs.

Couldn't agree more. Having said that I feel these are taken way too seriously/emotionally and it is important to understand that you can build your own startup to product/market fit, revenue and profitability whether or not you get into YCombinator or other incubators. YC and other incubators are a great help, but should not be considered a ticket to (possible) success.

You are right on the numbers and logic for a specific scenario but you are overlooking the fact that there are hundreds of development teams who primarily work on non-Mac platforms and are getting on to iOS and most of these teams have one Mac that they use to test their iOS apps and they cannot afford to move all their teams to Macs (the cost of a desktop is 1/4th as compared to the Mac in India, for example). All such teams and small / mid sized companies would love this sort of a service and would be willing to pay for it. The pricing needs to be simplified IMO but the service is spot on, for certain market segments. And I believe these segments can make up a big market.

I am not sure if VC firms doing seed investing have done it in such large numbers and if not (which I think is the case), are they setup to manage 100 startups a year versus 15.

Also I am wondering if this approach will have to be the new approach or the one that Khosla, Benchmark, Sequoia (I understand they are indirectly in YC companies) and similar ones have had for long, of identifying big trends, finding the right company and going big behind it, is still better. I have seen the latter fail as well as succeed. I think we have very little data on the former but there is bound to be a limited set of companies that a VC partnership can optimally support / manage and this new approach may put a strain on it. I guess we have to wait and see. Thanks much for replying, pg.

This is awesome for YC / YC startups as well as AH as they get to be in the YC companies at the very early stage. However, I am not able to understand why VC firms would go so broad and fund such a large number of startups with amounts that are insignificant for their fund sizes. Would it not be distracting? Would it not leave them with too broad a portfolio to be able to truly make significant contributions to the company's success? Does it not feel like a spray and pray approach? I totally understand this from a deal flow perspective but I'd love for VC firms to focus on deals they believe in and focus on building massive game changing businesses. And for this, I am sure they have to invest in 10 to find 1 that works, but investing in 200 feels not so right - and lacking conviction.

Great post and something that is necessary to make sure that the "lean movement" is not perceived as something brand new that was not known to any of us earlier. Eric and Steve have done a stellar stellar job of "teaching lean" and making it easy to understand. But lean has existed in product development, engineering, operations and other functional areas for a long time and the successful people have done these exact things for a long time. But it was never before as well defined and given a name - which Steve and Eric done so brilliantly.