hberg

Just finished Ken Kocienda's "Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs".

It was interesting to read about the various decisions made along the way to the first iPhone launch and remember the real-time launch back then. Even though the first phone had limitations, they were able to do enough things "right" that you could feel the paradigm shift within a few minutes of using it. Coming from a mobile software company at the time (and having access to all the top phones of the time, various Blackerry devices, Moto Razr, etc) it was easy to see that Apple had really made something extraordinary with its software.

Thanks for sharing your work. I'm not sure I have a particular use for it at the moment, but it's well executed.

One point of (hopefully) constructive feedback is that it wasn't obvious from my first interaction with the temporary doc that I was able to create checklists and bullet points. Once I saw that those are possible, I quickly guessed the keystrokes, but it might be helpful to add some graphical guidance.

There are major cultural differences between these schools that the article doesn't touch upon. Having presented business/product ideas to classmates & colleagues at both schools, here's a gross simplification of responses I've experienced:

Me: I have an idea for "foo"

MIT reply: "Here's a list of 10 reasons why that won't work"

Stanford reply: "That's neat, and here's 10 reasons you should work on it"

One might see the Stanford response as unrealistic or patronizing, but one of these creates a culture of positive ideation (and hustle-culture startups) while the other leads to a lot of discouraged entrepreneurs.

You could always just use USPS.

We sell discounted postage with print-at-home labels at https://stampnik.com/

disclaimer: founder of Stampnik

I'm so glad some folks found this a worthwhile post and also thanks for sharing your story. It seems that these caterpillars just eat/grow/molt ceaselessly until it's time to spin a cocoon!

These single-subject, old school design websites make me nostalgic for the early web.

p.s. Coming across this site made me want to build an entire grade-school curriculum based on "silk". There's so many subjects to cover, including: Biology (worm lifecycle, climate) History (trade, Silk Road) Chemistry (why silk is so strong) Arts (what can be made of silk, production process)

The rest of the site is also pretty interesting and includes photos of various silkworm species at different stages of development.

This is very neat tech, and if you're interested, there's a startup further along on developing haptic technology for VR.

https://tacticalhaptics.com/

Interesting idea, but I've found that making my own custom static touchbar has been the most useful way to use this hardware. Followed this article: http://vas3k.com/blog/touchbar/

I personally have a mix of app launchers, brightness/volume controls and a play/pause button.

This is a great story about how company culture can get in the way of progress. Thank you "OldTubers" for getting this started!

.....and $FB is up 6% in after-hours trading

He's probably referring to a regular mouse that you move around your desk. As opposed to a touchpad or static mouse with a large sphere you spin around with your thumb.

This is the reason I created the startup checklist (https://github.com/leonar15/startup-checklist)... so founders could know step by step what needs to be done to set up their companies.

Since you'll eventually have to understand all the legal aspects of operating a business, you might as well start off that way.

There goes /r/The_Donald/

I like how this concept applies to decision-making outside of games in daily life. I've certainly been in various situations where a clear yes/no decision felt arbitrary or forced, yet waiting it out (a.k.a. not making a move) would simply bring clarity or eliminate the need for the decision altogether.

How about just having your company use a non-SVB credit card (or debit card) and just pay off the bill via the SVB account? Have you tried calling up SVB and resolving it with them directly?

My experience with InCorp was exactly as described earlier. They resigned and that was that.

One reason to incorporate as a C or S-corp is that it's easy to add 4-year vesting to founder shares. This protects you if your co-founder walks away after 6 months. It's much harder (if it's even possible) to vest "shares" in an LLC.

In your case of a 50/50 split, make sure your agreements also have a clause that deals with disagreements. IT's likely you'll come to a point in your business where you do not agree and 50/50 ownership can make your business stall. Codify how those disagreements are solved before you get there.

FWIW, you can easily open a business checking account at any bank and they usually have better online services than SVB. Often you can ask your personal bank to waive the fees on a business account if you've been with them for a while.

I'd love to see other guides pop up as well. Still shocked at the number of agencies, documents, forms, and faxes that are required just to set up a simple company.

HelloFax has been a great service in my incorporation process (and I listed it in the "Tools & Resources" part of the checklist!).

In my case, I used the InCorp service to file my DE docs since I needed an expedited service and they could walk the documents over on my behalf. In the past, I did that portion myself.

Thanks for building a great service and down with the fax machines!

You're right. If you plan to build a business and raise VC money for it, Delaware is the standard place to incorporate (which is the case for my company and checklist, btw).

California does add an extra layer of burden and compliance that I did not expect, but if you plan to have employees in California you must incorporate there as a foreign entity (also my case).

I've also heard from a fellow entrepreneur who has a distributed workforce that you need to incorporate in every state with an employee. This is certainly outside the scope of my checklist.

That'd be a great list! I guess this depends on multiple factors like how many employees you have, how many investors, etc.

I've heard that for pre-funded DE corporations you can basically ask your registered agent to formally "resign" as your agent and then the corporation is orphaned. The proper way involves filing paperwork to dissolve the entity along with paying some filing fees.

Checklist author here...

Thanks! Glad you liked it. This checklist is what I've been going through for the past many months with my startup. Creating the list was a cathartic process and my original audience was meant to be friends who are building their own businesses. Glad to see it's getting more attention now.

I'd be fine with it getting added elsewhere as a more usable checklist as long as there's a link back to the github repo. I plan to update the checklist as I learn about new requirements and/or get pull requests.

Yes, agreed. No need to incorporate just to get together and hack on a project. That said, I would certainly consider (at the very least) signing an agreement with your hacking buddy before launching anything that might generate revenue.

I've seen and heard multiple co-founder friendships fall apart once things started to get "real". Good luck!

The title of this post is misleading. A few paragraphs in he writes: "I quickly began to write Arduino code to simulate a failing BBU. I also wrote some code that acted as a DAC to take in the signals from the BBU."

Should really be titled "How I won a Facebook hardware hackathon"

Sorry, I don't buy the premise.

The future of UI (for the general public) is probably voice-based like "Hey Siri/Google/etc, I'd like a sandwich" and a sandwich is ordered and delivered to you. "Tweet 'Who's down for a sandwich party?'" and a tweet is tweeted.

Whenever I hear or read someone argue that "command line is the future" I think of my dad; barely able to make a bookmark in a browser and not really knowing how folders work. And he's been using a Mac for decades.

I half-expected a single word article with the word "no".

Let me answer a question you haven't asked but that is very relevant:

Q: How can I mitigate the risk of holding startup shares that are illiquid and whose value can drop to zero?

A: There are investment firms that will help you buy employee stock options and then split the proceeds with you. One of these is ESO Fund (esofund.com) and they are very nice people. They can help answer your other questions as well.

Just downloaded and tried the app. This is great for v1.0!

That being said, here's a bug report:

1) There's a typo in the "transfer details" card where it lists "adjustements"

2) Bitcoin payments don't show any info about the bitcoin transaction (or the fact that it's a bitcoin payment) in the payment details card.

3) The "payment details" card cuts off longer descriptions after about 30 characters

4) it would be nice to see logs via the app to track errors "on the go".

Thanks for re-hosting it :-) I'm a sucker for "do modern things on old hardware".

Just saw a great project at Maker Faire where some guys re-purposed old WWII radar tubes to make playable video games, one of which was flappy bird.

http://tubetime.us/ and http://www.labguysworld.com/Project_ESCRTs_001.htm