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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.