| “ | Every startup has one key challenge to overcome first. Focus 100% on that challenge, hack/ignore everything else | |||
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“Over the past 10 years, technological advances dramatically lowered the financial bar for starting a new company, but the courage bar for building a great company remains as high as it has ever been.” — Ben Horowitz
| “ | Every startup has one key challenge to overcome first. Focus 100% on that challenge, hack/ignore everything else | |||
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| “ | @vacanti What was @yipit’s? | |||
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| “ | @gregory @yipit’s first key risk was that people wouldn’t open/click on emails. We hacked/ignored every other risk | |||
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| “ | @vacanti Nice. What was your most clever hack? | |||
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| “ | @gregory not building a crawler, just waking up at 3am to copy and paste | |||
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| “ | @vacanti Love it! | |||
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| “ | @vacanti That’s awesome | |||
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| “ | @fromedome yeah, waking up at 3am sucked. | |||
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 | All the Best Daily Deals, Coupons & Discounts | Yipit Get all the best daily deals from Groupon, LivingSocial, Tippr in just ONE email that’s filtered for the stuff you want. |
“They were called nerds. But I could never have built the business without them” — Mayor Bloomberg (via entrepreneurwisdom)
“Any time you stand in line at the D.M.V. and look around, you’re like, Oh, my God, I wish all these people were replaced by computer drivers.” — Marc Andreessen
“Standing next to Clarence was like standing next to the baddest ass on the planet. You were proud, you were strong, you were excited and laughing with what might happen, with what together, you might be able to do. You felt like no matter what the day or the night brought, nothing was going to touch you. Clarence could be fragile but he also emanated power and safety, and in some funny way we became each other’s protectors; I think perhaps I protected “C” from a world where it still wasn’t so easy to be big and black. Racism was ever present and over the years together, we saw it. Clarence’s celebrity and size did not make him immune. I think perhaps “C” protected me from a world where it wasn’t always so easy to be an insecure, weird and skinny white boy either. But, standing together we were badass, on any given night, on our turf, some of the baddest asses on the planet. We were united, we were strong, we were righteous, we were unmovable, we were funny, we were corny as hell and as serious as death itself.” — Bruce Springsteen
| “ | Congrats to @JJMalina on being the 1,000th person to like Muck Rack on Facebook http://www.facebook.com/muckrack Someone send him a toaster. | |||
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| “ | @muckrack well, you’re down to 999 again. I’m jumping on the opp. Somebody send me a toaster. #opportunity_knocks #toast_it | |||
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 | UNBELIEVABLE. @muckrack team sent me a toaster! Now I hafta be the 300th like on some page to win some bread. #toast_it http://yfrog.com/gyzufmcj | ||
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| “ | Not sure how today could possibly be better than yesterday, considering I received a toaster at my desk yesterday. cc: @muckrack | |||
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This is a list of the email clients people use to read Muck Rack Daily, our daily summary of what journalists’ are tweeting about. It’s shocking the iPhone’s at nearly 50%.
I was having dinner yesterday at a sidewalk table at a restaurant in the far West Village enjoying the delightful New York spring weather. I propped up my iPad at a near 90 degree angle using its case so I could read on Instapaper while eating my meal.
All the sudden my iPad disappears and its formerly magnetically attached case goes flying. I look up and see three guys, one of whom snatched the iPad, running away.
I immediately give chase, running after them yelling “hey, they took my iPad”. It quickly started to sink in how hopeless my cause was since they had a pretty good lead. After a block we turned a corner and I yelled again. One guy on that street who was closer to them heard me and started chasing them and yelling too. As they turned the next corner, another two guys who heard our shouts and was in front of the thieves stopped them and got the iPad back. The iPad snatchers then ran away.
Amazingly the iPad was completely undamaged — not even a scratch. More importantly no one was hurt. The only victim was my shirt that got a little tomato sauce on it. Did I mention I was at an Italian restaurant?
I thanked the guy who helped chase them and the guys who stopped them. I shook their hands and asked if I could buy them dinner or do anything else to thank them. One of the guys just told me he’d just ordered an iPad himself, and with that they were all off on their separate ways. I went back to the restaurant and was congratulated by most patrons and lectured by one old lady about how I shouldn’t have chased them for fear they’d have a gun. Maybe she was right. Did I mention it’s an iPad 2?
While the incident was startling, I left the restaurant feeling even better about New York City than when I started. All it took was asking for help and my fellow New Yorkers sprang into action. What more can you want from a city?
Eat your heart out Punxsutawney, NYC’s where it’s at on Groundhog Day!
I’m loving this artwork @YiyingLu made for the art show we’re hosting for her on Feb 2. I first met Yiying two years ago when she won the #Design Shorty Award in our first year, which was also her first trip to the US. She recently called me and I told her the day we’re hosting her happens to be Groundhog Day. Being an Australian, Yiying had never heard of the day but she said she always wanted to draw a groundhog.
I hope all my Tumblr peeps can join us.
Have you been nominated yet? Microblog of the Year on Tumblr - The Shorty Awards
I emailed this holiday card to my friends last year (apologies if I missed you!):
Prior to 2009 I sent printed holiday cards simply because digital cards cost next to nothing to send and therefore have little meaning. (Thanks for putting no marginal effort into wishing me a happy holiday!)
In December, 2009 it occurred to me its ridiculous to give money to the greeting card industry and USPS just to show my friends I care. Why support an “army of men in wool pants running through the neighborhood handing out pottery catalogs, door to door,” as a wise postmaster general once said?
The solution to ecards’ triviality is to make it cost a nontrivial amount of money to send each card. But why give that money to a service provider when it can go to charity?
Now I’m wondering how attaching a donation to an ecard can be taken to the next level. One of the more innovative ecards platforms like PaperlessPost, Jib Jab or Someecards could allow users to attach a verified small donation to each card sent. Charity platforms like Causes, Pinkdingo or DonorsChoose could add an ecard feature, even allowing the recipient of the card to choose where the donation goes. Or perhaps it’s an opportunity for a new startup.
The term for a mob boss “godfather” was invented by Mario Puzo for his book of that same name. After Francis Ford Coppola turned The Godfather into a hit movie, the mafia actually adopted that term for their bosses.
Sometimes it pays for life to imitate art (what is good art if not one step ahead of real life?). There are two movie phrases from the last year that every startup should adopt.
“Wired in”
In The Social Network, whenever someone tries to talk to a programmer working with headphones on, Sean Parker (as played by Justin Timberlake) discourages disturbing the person by yelling “He’s wired in!”.
As any technical or creative professional knows, there’s work to be done that requires complete focus. Even a short interruption can cause a major setback. Yet in the open offices of most startups, it’s very tempting just to go over to a programmer and start asking her questions as they arise. How’s one to know if someone’s in the middle of working on complex code or just reading Hacker News?
Programmers are placed in an awful position. If they’re interrupted from programming they either have to be rude and say “Don’t talk to me now, I’m in the middle of something” or lose a disproportionate amount of productivity.
For all its inaccuracies, The Social Network highlights an elegant solution used by many programmers — putting on headphones — and coins a perfect term for it — “wired in”. A good programmer is wired in in more ways than one while working.
“Inception”
I thought Inception was a pretty good film but I absolutely love the premise behind it. In the movie a group of criminal specialists have figured out how to literally get into people’s dreams and steal secrets from them, but no one has yet planted a new idea in someone else’s mind. Inception is the ultimate challenge, and the protagonist played by Leonardo DiCaprio spends most of the movie trying to do it.
An entrepreneur must perform inception on dozens, or sometimes millions, of people. We currently call this “pitching,” which implies that your goal is to effectively communicate your idea. But no one wants to work on, fund or buy something because it’s someone else’s idea that they should do so. A pitch meeting really exists to cause the other person to have the idea they should do something.
Inception is often needed on a wider scale too. Twitter caused millions of people to have the idea that they should post short public status messages. Steve Jobs gave millions of people the idea that they needed a device that put design ahead of features to play music on the go.
We need our vocabulary to evolve and flourish along with our technology. If we all spent more time wired in rather than being interrupted, and more time performing inception rather than pitching, we could be much more effective.
The private meeting was pronounced dead last night, approximately 7:39pm est. The autopsy report showed some signs of struggle. There are several suspects, but none have been apprehended yet.
It all began when Michael Arrington wrote an entertaining post about a meeting he wasn’t invited to of about a dozen unnamed early stage investors. Allegedly these well known angels are colluding to set terms for future deals with startups.
This accusation unsurprisingly set off a wave of controversy over what the topic of the meeting was, but what I’ve found most interesting is the ability to piece together who’s at a private meeting using social media. A thread started on Quora that now lists everyone who’s thought to have been there along with sources. Business Insider pointed out that one of the angels tweeted he was there and then deleted his tweet “to try to cover his tracks”.
This story really uncovers that it will be almost impossible to have a meeting that only invitees know about in the future. Someone will unintentionally spill the beans using Twitter, fourSquare, Tungle.Me or Plancast. And even if they don’t, they may be tagged by any friend they run into on the way using Facebook Places.
Last December I predicted the end of lying. I’m adding private meetings to my list of things that the next generation will never experience.
