HN user
Ex-Apple Xoogler Founder
You’re 30, you have your whole life ahead of you and you greatest achievements are likely going to come from work you haven’t even thought of yet.
Identify what you truly enjoy, people you like to be with and set goals you want to aspire to. Make sure you spend your next 10 years focused on those things.
Pretty poor analysis of today's events.
1. Misunderstands the 1st rule of breakthrough consumer internet companies. The challenge is always getting users and almost never monetizing a loyal user base. This happened with Yahoo, Amazon, Google, Facebook...strange that people still bring up this argument.
With a flip of a switch the Instagram team could put a banner ad and make >$10M/year but they decided to pursue a more native business model that will take time.
2. Myspace didn't fail because of some inherent problem with their model, they failed because their team was unable to compete with Facebook.
It's true that Instagram could suffer a Myspace fate but the data so far suggests they're more like the Facebook of their space then the Myspace.
3. This is the worst point. Every startup has a random success multiplier but Instagram was big enough that the high order bit was their hardwork (persistence) and talent.
I highly encourage you to matriculate to Uchicago, you will learn and grow more in your 1st year at college than coming to Silicon Valley straight out of high school. There's no rush.
With that said, it might be a great experience to come out to SV this summer before you start college.
Wow, great call by YC and patience by the founders.
Sam, did you guys raise any additional money besides what's listed in Crunchbase? It says you guys were backed by Maverick capital as well?
Congrats on the sale!
You don't have to use Windows. The best way to protest is by using another product.
Claiming that you have the moral authority to pirate it is just wrong, doing so re-enforces the need for MSFT to have even stricter anti-piracy measures.
As soon as you start doing calculations like this to determine how many co-founders you should have it's almost a guaranteed you're not going to be successful.
Build something people want with people you love to work with. The rest will work itself out.
Nice, my first credit on hacker news :)
Google's goal: 1 Query => 1 visit
Facebook's goal: 1 visit => 1000 page views
This statistic is meaningless when put in context of the function of the two sites.
I doubt Justin.TV sees this as a solution, it's piracy.
This break the economic model for books. It works with libraries because of limited quantity.
This could work if we had a fixed number of digital library books per a zip code.
5mbps, encoded at 720p, with a decent h264 decoder will far exceed DVD quality with audio and video. Apple TV is a good example of this.
10mbps will approach blu-ray.
I intern'd at Apple and I would say that Apple's engineering talent is a level below Microsoft and Google. Apple combines good (but not incredible) engineering with the best product management (manager maybe...) on the planet. Microsoft and Google have much strong engineering teams but their much weaker on the PM side.
No, the answer is not both.
Google has organic results and ad results, they are clearly distinguished in the UI and are generated by two distinct systems.
oh man. I love the idea of iteration but I think there are times in which it's time to move on to a new idea.
Loopt needs to look to be acquired or abandon the idea of a mobile only social network and focus on leveraging services like Facebook connect. Although there level of funding might make it difficult, I also think they're a great target for Facebook.
In any case, this will be a large space and there is room for multiple players.
Joel, why didn't you beat Google's offer? Seems like it's worth it based on your article.
Being profitable doesn't mean you not should raise money. If anything it's an opportunity to raise money on favorable terms as you don't need VCs.
"Those VP jobs just don’t exist at startups, and the few VPs they have are the founders and a key early hire or two. Not you."
That's probably not fair. Successful startups are looking for talent, not pedigree - it's a question of whether the candidate can add significant value as a VP.
I think this blog post get's distracted from it's original point - if you're a software developer looking for a software developer position then emphasize software development skills. This applies to small companies and even big companies (like Google). The skill set to be a good developer is consistent no matter what the size of your company.
This doesn't mean that startups don't need business, product, or technical leadership because all the best ones have shown they attracted all these very early.
Let's be glad you're not head of product development at Apple.
Interestingly, Kevin Rose recommends keeping your job. He also recommends outsourcing development though :/
Yes, Scribd has had great success and everyone in the HN community should be happy for them. However, there's a legitimate criticism to the direction Scribd is taking - it's arguably bad for the web.
What is the mission? All documents are created offline, uploaded to Scribd and displayed via iPaper? I think we already have a great framework for distributing text information - HTML (Although Scrib's traffic may indicate otherwise). It's flexible, it's fast, and it can be viewed on any device, it can be indexed easily, etc... Think about how much better nytimes.com is then the New York Times newspaper.
Instead of creating new standards, the industry should be trying to help people create HTML formats as first class objects. With that said, it would be really cool to bring all the books/magazines from the past to the internet (books.google.com).
Do people find the iPhone/iPod touch inadequate for browsing the web?
I can see he value of a large form iPod for digital book reading, but for basic web consumption the netbook is the iPhone/Android (For me at least).
I interned at Apple Summer of 2006. I got great reviews and they even asked me to work part-time during the school year, I agreed and mentioned that we can figure out the whole full time thing later (i.e. what group I would work in - I really wanted to work on Apple TV, iTunes, etc...).
Then, one day, I was asked to come into my manager's office. She said "Congratulations, here's your full time offer!" I saw the deadline of 9/11 (2 weeks) and asked if I could have an extension. She quickly said that everyone was expecting that I would sign today and there is no way she can extend it. The recruiter also told me that she couldn't extend it and that she "didn't care about my school's rules." I went to my career counselor to see if he could make something happen (The offer was ok but all my friends got offered at least 10% more - and the recruiter said the don't negotiate).
Then I get a call from my manager, she asks me to come to the office. I walk in, she says "We're going to have to rescind the offer and ask that you stop working part time." It was pretty traumatic, couldn't even check-in my latest work - just had to pack my things and leave - I was actually fired!
Next spring applied to Y-combinator, got rejected...I now work for a search engine in Mountain View, CA where they not only gave me my best offer but gave me a 20% raise within my first year. Still, I wish I had a chance to work full-time at the mothership in Cupertino.
This makes sense to me. Detroit has failed and there is no data that shows they can innovate.
America doesn't need to bail out the big three, it needs to ensure that the next generation of automobiles are built here and competitive in the global market.
I see no reason why the government should not consider investing the entire industry as opposed to 3 failed companies.
I don't think Microsoft even agrees with your statements.
Did they really get 21 million users in May! That's crazy - it's competitive with Digg.
Compete shows them in the low millions though...
I work at Google and this article has a few statements that make it clear the author's sources aren't credible (At least on this issue).
I wouldn't take this too seriously and I'm surprised that the Times:
1. Thought Google's daycare policy was worthy of the front page
2. Couldn't find a credible source who actual understands how and why the decision was made.
You should ask your VC's.
Few (if any) people on this board have taken a company public.