parker

You can check out my response on my blog for the clarification. I suppose it was a bit awkwardly worded at first.

I'd guess around 12-14 hours of actual thinking and working time. At a normal startup as an employee, I'm guessing you'd average around 10 hours, but more around crunch time

Yeah, the 18 hour days reference was simply to imply that starting a startup is a full-time, front-of-mind undertaking.

I think it's safe to say that this guy took it a bit out of context.

Does every company need to make a smartphone in order to survive in the new marketplace? I hear Quaker Oats has a really sweet handset in the works...

I believe this is none other than news.YC's ojbyrne, am I correct :)?

Guy, check the stats.

According to compete, Friendster is doing 400 Million page views per month and growing.

Revenue for WebVan in the 2000 fiscal year was $259.7 Million: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0EIN/is_2001_Jan_25/a...

Sorry dude, but you must not remember them vividly, because the majority of these sites did actually have a user base and did actually make revenue. In some cases (WebVan for instance), they actually made quite a bit of revenue.

They were simply prey to illogical economics. They had all created machines that were too large for the revenues to support.

As for Friendster, I know it's been fun to say that they've failed for the last 3 years, but as far as I can tell their story isn't even close to being over. They have billions of pageviews and a growing userbase. I'm guessing you'd probably switch places with them right now.

It's simple user psychology. So much of traffic on social networking sites is lurking around on other people's pages, especially those that you're 'interested' in. I'd rather not let other people know that I've been looking at their page, especially when I've been looking at their page a lot. If I know that they know, it dis-incentivizes me from surfing around at all, killing page views.

In other words, social networks need to do everything they can to nurture their creepers.

Yeah, I'm not sure what the hell he's talking about either. The fact that specific funds exist for both iPhone and Facebook applications kind of obliterates his point.

This dissertation on how not to feel like a worthless gnat because of simple turns of phrase makes me think of another mantra I use to feel better about myself:

Get serious.

I think the idea is that early adopters can evangelize your product and create its foothold, but it's the late adopters who play mass market kingmakers.

I got the inspiration for this post after talking to some non-tech people about how they find and use new software. You realize that they live in a different world, without all the chatter.

I'm not implying that what we're doing is going to shake the foundations of the planet, because it won't -- simply relaying what I'm thinking about as we work.

Yeah this list is pretty old -- it doesn't have 'social media consultants'.

That may be the best quote I've read in awhile. I've convinced that profit is a function of creating happiness, both with your customers and within your company.

Thanks for sharing that.

You're exactly right. They paid the third founder $700,000 to go away after their Series A. Smart, but I actually didn't respect him leaving his friends out to dry and forcing them into awkward conversations with their investors. I guess that lesson is make sure your founding team is committed before you dole out the stock certificates :).

What about IPOs, or a leveraged management buyout? Just because acquisitions are the 'en vogue' liquidity event doesn't mean it's the only kind.

Their 'additional scrutiny' concluded that I was a student even though I had massive amounts of documentation pointing to the exact opposite conclusion. It is their job to investigate extra-ordinary situations. Suggesting that I needed a student visa was just plain wrong.

You are 100% right about the unpleasantness of the entire ordeal. They did do the fingerprint, mugshot deal... but until I realized that he was going to refuse entry, I was being optimistic for some reason.

I did go easy on them in this article... perhaps as a reflection of my own paranoia about getting back in when I need to... I had mental images of 5 idle border officials googling my name as I sat in the waiting room.

I wouldn't worry too much about it -- most every foreign-national other than me has had no problems getting in for the program. I think I just ran into a couple bad border officials. Perhaps I was even over-transparent the first time. By having so much documentation prepared, maybe I made myself look suspicious.

"If you are a Web 2.0 company in today's Web you really need to ask yourselves, 'Are we solving a problem that everybody has or are we building a product for Robert Scoble?'"

Couldn't have said that better. There is a market for niche products online, to be sure. I think the problem is niche products pretending to be widely useful.

I guess this post could be summarized as:

The Restaurant: your website is the final destination

The Taxi: your website is the means of getting there

There are thousands of restaurants, but not many taxi companies. The more lucrative business is the taxi company.

Yeah, even though you can set up redirects, the dilution on the brand you've spent so much time building is quite substantial. I went through this on a site I was managing, and it wasn't only a huge distraction, it took the brand in a direction I didn't necessarily agree with.

I'd guess that sticking with a decent name is better than changing to a marginally better one, as your experience suggests...

I apologize in advance if anyone here owns eatbabies.com -- I didn't mean to insult you.

I think early adoption is a fairly immutable aspect of product marketing, especially in the technology industry.

Courting these early adopters will never stop being an integral part of any product launch. Of course facebook is past the point of early adoption, because that was about 59 million users ago.

But any new tech product will have to face the same arduous task of finding people to use its wares, tell their friends, and move their product along its life cycle...

Dude, for people outside the US about to test the immigration waters, this article was pure gold.

So then, if Bill Gates has ever complimented his dog for bringing him the morning paper...... is his dog the next Google?

Hot. Scoop.

I know that you could make a decent argument that some of these companies make no revenues, but he's way off base on some of them. Betfair, for instance, had 2007 revenue of ~$300 Million. And Kayak has a great revenue stream.

I'm an admitted skeptic sometimes, but seriously, do some research before spouting hyperbole.

> Subsistence farming - grow your own crops and eat them.

So how did you buy your land again? Or is the Soviet Government still encouraging settlement in Siberia ... ?

I think supposing that you need money to stay alive in our society is a fairly air-tight theory.

I remember in the Masters Tournament a few years ago when Mickelson won it all, he birdied the final hole to win.

His approach shot on 18 landed in almost the exact same spot as his playing partner's. The guy he was playing with gamely took his putt first, allowing Phil to see how the putt would roll (which direction it would take, how hard to hit it, etc).

After having seen this guy try almost the exact same shot, and miss, Phil was able to learn from his partner's mistakes, and hole his putt.

My point is that there's something to be said for watching someone else make the initial blunders and capitalize with a better product. There are plenty of market share leaders that weren't first to market, but perhaps came slightly afterwards...

Hey, it did actually catch in the database, it just didn't register your user number. I've put your user number on the entry now, so it's live. I think there was one page in the site that didn't carry over the session variables, but that bug has now been fixed.

Thanks for submitting, I liked your article!