brothe2000

I am thrilled to see the term "Punctuated Equilibrium" used in regards to language evolution! Very interesting!

Excellent write up. What I find in a lot of these sort of Agile process stories is what comes before and after the process is almost more important.

Developers and companies in general are there to build new things and push out new features. But what I have found is that sometimes the backlog and feature requests cloud the ability to focus on changing the entire product or user experience.

There is a lot of "feature creep" in products these days where rather than refining the current product, more is added on to it to "enhance the user experience" or to provide "more productivity".

There should be at least one sprint per month or quarter that is devoted to removing backlog and feature / functionality from the product. Yes, removing features from the product.

Making this a normal process gets people used to the idea that it is ok to get rid of something and to be constantly looking at how to improve by removing things versus always adding.

If what you are building has a credibility and validity engine built into it (versus just crowdsourced upvoting), this could be a valuable tool for gamblers and fantasy sports fans.

What was interesting to me was that I thought this was where higher level players could share insights on the general sport strategy.

For example, I would love to know how football teams identify the "Mike" and how defenses and offenses are read for audibles.

I've heard people say pocket passers read defenses from the outside in and running quarterbacks read from the inside out.

If I was a defensive coordinator, it would be good to know what an expert does in each of those situations.

Its real tough to be a solo founder and you need somebody with different skill sets to augment your own and to keep you on track.

The various founder dating sites and events are a means to an end. A lot of it depends on your pitch and idea but it's good practice and networking never hurts.

I met one of my cofounders on Angellist.com and the other on CoFounderslab.com.

I had a decent wireframe of the site and how the database and interactions would work but the other cofounders helped to elevate the rough idea.

RoomPoll.com would not be possible without my cofounders.

Did you try Import.io?

mailbox had their signup that showed you where you were in line to get the app which was pretty cool because it ticked down every day and you could see the number of people behind you.

Gmail was pretty awesome too.

Leadpages is a great company and provides a ton of content and training on best practices.

Nice. Clean, staightforward, and will probably drive some money your way.

It will be a great lead into other services and requests from customers.

If their goal was brand awareness they achieved it as I had never heard of them until now.

That being said I want nothing to do with them.

Revenue is increasing but their cost of revenue is increasing while their earnings per share stays stagnant.

I actually like what Microsoft is doing to try to adapt to the new world but they are losing money on Xbox One (it appears Sony may win this round) and Surface is a great product but overpriced and costing Microsoft profit as well.

I wish they did more hardware as that division makes some really cool stuff but Microsoft is starting to fall on the Windows 8 debacle.

It's hard to buy a surface for $1000 when a comparable laptop is $300 (not as light or small but spec wise comparable)

In the case of the App Store, Apple is perhaps missing a lot of revenue opportunity due to the raise of the in app advertising platforms that have been built to generate revenue.

They take 30% on the sale through the store but if it's a free game with in-game advertisement, I don't think they get anything unless its the iAd platform, correct?

I think that each person is their own variance. So somebody might rate on a 1 - 10 scale at an average of 7 while others rate at an average of 9 so you have to apply context.

I wouldn't mediate between the two of them, I would simply display the facts and let those viewing the data make their own conclusions the same way that a 1 star rating on Amazon is viewed as less credible than a 2 or 3 star rating because it "seems" more realistic. People who say strong words like Hate and rate 1 star are probably rating a lot of things low.

Make sense?

McDonalds had to compete with coffee shops, places with Wifi, installed RedBox to get people to walk into the place, and the general move toward healthier foods and locally grown food. That's part of the reason they bought into Chipotle.

I think some times startups say "I know this is the law but it's outdated and let's see what happens..."

Sometimes it's bad: Aereo Sometimes it's controversial: Uber / Lyft

But for the most part I think people act and then find out after the fact they did something wrong or not in alignment with expectations.

For example, is Soylent worried about somebody dying? Probably but that didn't stop them from doing what they are doing.

True... I guess the point is that the claim that startups haven't disrupted corporations is true in bulk but when you pick each company it is easy to see an impact a startup has had in changing how they operate.

Flickr definitely contributed to Kodak failing as much as the market for digital cameras. Kodak actually had digital technology but failed to capitalize on it.

Borders may have bad management but so do startups that fail which maybe says startups need better management too? Seems like a common denominator versus differentiator?

Radio Shack closed a ton of stores and is still losing money. IBM stopped selling computers because Dell and others did it better and cheaper (Dell was a startup at one time...) and Microsoft keeps fighting for relevancy in software on all fronts.

But yeah, some of my comments weren't exactly on point. I just think that to say companies aren't disrupted is a broad paint stroke that the article didn't fully support.

I think the author of the article went looking for stats to support a title. Corporate America has been disrupted however I think this article was looking for financial failure versus adapting to the market pressures.

The corporations below have faced massive disruption:

Kodak, HP, GM, Ford, JC Penney, Sears, McDonalds, Radio Shack, Circuit City, Best Buy, Borders, Barnes&Noble, IBM, Microsoft, Xerox, and Target have all been disrupted.

But most of them have adapted as the market changed because they had the resources to do so.

A small company has fewer resources so when adversity hits (housing crash in 2008) or the market shifts (Digital music versus record stores), those business are less likely to be able to shift.

Regarding the comments in the article on Entrepreneurs:

I think the article is using too much of the 2000's data to make a correlation to today. 2001 - 2010 was the dot com bubble, 9/11, unemployment at 9%, and the housing / financial crisis. Banks weren't lending money and people had little capital to borrow.

Compared to today: Banks are lending again, unemployment is 6.2%, people are spending and earning more, and everywhere you read about startups and entrepreneurs.

One last thing: I find it humorous when articles say that government regulations, licensure, or taxes prevent innovation and entrepreneurial activity. I have never heard somebody say "I'd totally build X but the tax incentives just aren't high enough".

We have a 2 month old and it's not. It takes discipline to focus on what you NEED to get done versus what you WANT to do.

I would recommend a checklist of things (like mowing the lawn and cleaning) and figuring out how long those things take and then start to schedule when you can do them. Apply project management to your home.

The good thing is that you can buy yourself time. For example, pay a neighbor kid to mow the lawn. 1 hour of time saved for $20 - $30. Pick up dinner versus making it.

If cleaning the dishes is a hassle, switch to paper plates for a week to buy yourself some time to get other tasks done.

Established schedules and routines will give you some structure to get that time back.

Keep in mind that if the house is a mess, the lawn isn't mowed, and the dishes are piling up, it will add to the anxiety of life getting away from you so try to take an extra minute to complete a task (get the mail, sort it, and put bills in an area to pay later all in one motion versus piling it up to go through later).

The good thing is that you have a spouse to help share in the duties.

I can't imagine how tough it is for a single parent.

Execution is hard if you focus on the big end result of the idea. Break the big idea into small concepts or components.

By breaking it down to all the individual steps you do two things: 1. Create a feeling of progress as each step is completed 2. Give yourself opportunity to change as you go since you are working on small pieces of the bigger project.

The most important part is just starting something. If you have an idea, figure out the smallest part of it that you can actually start to create today and then do it.

Let's say you have an idea for an mobile app. Start to draw the pages on paper. Get a small notebook and have each page represent a screen. You now have a small "working" prototype.

From there you can use tools like UI Stencils ProtoSketch to make those pictures interactive https://protosketch.uistencils.com/

You can get a long way without a product or user base. Look at Kickstarter for examples of ideas that generate money. I'm not saying they are good examples but they are examples.

The real question is what are you looking to create and how much money do you need to get started? Using some of the Lean Startup methodology to gauge the market would be a good idea but don't think you can throw an idea out there and get millions.

If you want to know how much it costs to start a company, the answer is very little. I gave a presentation on how to get from Idea to Beta a while ago, you can view the slides here: http://www.dstrb.com/blog/minnebar-presentation

One thing that I always find with the "rating" sort of systems is that negatives can always sink a site or reputation so instead of allowing negative postings, perhaps allowing people to post the deliveries and then rate them up if they were exceptionally great.

This avoids the negative impact but allows the view to total deliveries and those that were "positive".

In addition, each user has their own opinion so you may need to add variance for the rating.

Any startup takes time to get traction, regardless of whether it is unique or a different way to do what other sites are doing.

Google AirBnB 1000 days and you will see that what is perceived as overnight success is in all reality years of hard work and struggle for people to "get it".

Unless you have taken on venture capital or mortgaged yourself into bankruptcy, keep working on it and improving what people click on and get rid of what people don't click on.

Overnight success takes years.

Read a ton of different sites and then mentally filter for hype.

Also, depends on what you are looking for. If you want to work at a "hot" startup, by the time you heard of them you are probably out of the really good equity opportunity.

If you just want to know what's is up and coming then I would focus on developer user groups and code sites where people will share examples of their work. A lot of startups start out as "hey, I built this this cool little thing..." and then grow based on word of mouth and social use.

If you are interested in Surveys based at a location, I'd like to recommend my company: www.RoomPoll.com

It's free as well!

I'd recommend Weebly.com.

It's fast and easy.

Forgot to add that the site is free to use and if we did charge it would be a flat monthly subscription like $10.

Chief Innovation Officer always struck me as odd. Sort of says 1 person heads up innovation. Chief Techie

Startup titles should be jobs, not titles. Sales, Marketing, Development, QA.

Depends on how you define rich. It's all about income and expenses. The millionaire next door typically doesn't live in a massive house with extravagant cars.

Salary plus commissions can get you $250,000 a year as a sales person with little experience if you are willing to work hard and can handle rejection.

If money isn't an object, I would post the problem you are looking to solve and put a bounty on it.

$1 million dollars for the team that solves X.

Worked for Netflix...

Got it. I started out as a salesperson on Salesforce and become an admin and then branched into development from there.

The user groups are incredible and if you are in the bay area you should attend dreamforce and the ISV groups to learn about how things work and what costs are to do ISV.

I've spent some time building apps on force.com and I have liked the process.

There is a lot of resources out there for you to learn and they seem to be pretty open to how things work.

You'll need to keep in mind governing limits and batch processes as they need to protect the platform but it's a pretty easy to use platform and with over 120,000 clients using the system, if you go ISV you can gain access to all those potential customers.

I would check out a local user group to learn more: http://events.developerforce.com/dugs?title=page/Force.com_U...

Also sign up for a free developer account at developer.force.com