My grandma started practicing zen meditation in the 1950s, when it first was introduced to the US. She taught my mom, who's now a teacher, and introduced me to the practice when I was sixteen.
Meditation, I find, confers a number of benefits. It's energizing and relaxing. It improves my sleep. It hones my listening and observation skills. It makes me more aware of the thoughts in my head -- which can be deafening at times -- and will help me quiet them.
I find that the time and effort I spend meditating is tremendously valuable and enriching.
SF is a great place to build a startup, but a lousy place to live. I never felt like I could really be myself there (despite meeting hundreds of supposedly like-minded people).
Bostonians are far less friendly on the surface, but man, you can really get to know them. People are nerdy, intellectual, informed (and not just about tech), opinionated, and largely quite sane.
The pace of the city is slower, too, in a way that I appreciate. When I go to a tech event here, I'll often meet someone and spend an hour locked in conversation with them. That kind of deep, engaged conversation never happened in SF, where people are perpetually on the go, and cutting from one thing to the next.
Outside of work, Boston (and by this I specifically mean Cambridge and Somerville -- or "Camberville" as we call it) is the best place in the country to be a nerd. The place is filled with swing dancers, LARPers, grad students, cult movie screenings, comic book and game shops, and quite possibly more CTY alumni than any other city.
Simultaneously, we've got a lot of general culture, too -- lectures, theater, good food, and so on.
Stuffy and introverted? Sure, a bit. But you can get past that quickly, and discover a wonderful place to live.
You're absolutely right. This was one of our biggest failing points from the time we started. We built a cool, graceful, elegant solution... that ultimately solved little.
4) Yes, you're right. Naysayers do abound. I refer to the world's "collective" opinion because, yes, it's all too easy to find a token naysayer who's eager to shoot you down.
That said, once you have a beta out, or some kind of working concept, the world becomes your sounding board -- where else, after all, will you get your users and customers? While it's important at some point to ignore what people think, it's just as important to keep at least half an ear open to their thoughts and opinions. I believe that you can learn more by listening deeply and attentively to people than by ignoring them.
5) As I said in the post, teams work for a number of people. They're one of the most common structures for getting companies off the ground. In the case of companies with strong technical needs, they can be particularly helpful, as different people can bring different skill sets and perspectives that may prove to be instrumental.
That said, I challenge the widely-held assumption that a founding team is necessary, vital, or inherently "better" than starting a company by yourself, and bringing people on later.
I hold that a single person, charged with focus and determination, can launch a concept with speed and single-mindedness that's difficult to replicate in a team environment. A team, despite the benefits it confers, adds added complexity to decision-making, and can dilute an idea as easily as it can rally behind it.
You're right -- "founder" is a tough measurement. A lot of times -- as in the case of my own company, RFOP -- one person starts a company, sees a bit of success, then quickly brings on a small group of peers who join with the "co-founder" moniker.
As a company grows, it quickly evolves from a solo effort to (some variation of) a team effort. This can mean bringing on employees, or people who join as "co-founder." At PayPal, for instance, more than a half-dozen of the first employees were accorded "co-founder" status, which is why the company appears to have so many.
Further complicating the matter, many companies change their story after they reach success, presenting a company as a joint effort or team project, rife with co-founders and collaborators, when the truth is closer to one visionary bringing an idea to life, and assembling a team thereafter.
For instance, Digg. I was at a dinner a few years ago and had the pleasure of sitting next to Owen Byrne, one of the people mentioned above. Owen wrote the original code for Digg. He told me that Kevin Rose found him off of ELance. Until then, he was a fairly unknown Canadian programmer. His success has surely increased since taking on what started as a $2,000 contract gig, but I hesitate to call him a "co-founder."
99 times out of 100, companies build teams in order reach success. However, in many of those circumstances, that kernel of success starts not with a small team reaching consensus, but a single visionary with a single vision.
I disagree with your assessment of sociology as a discipline "filled to the brim with Humanities-Style-Thinking."
Sociology uses rigorous, analytical, and quantitative methods to shine insight on the modern condition. It allows one to better understand the condition of the world, and by extension, one's place within it. And it has contributed significantly to my intellectual growth.
When I've felt a lack of community in my life, for instance, Robert Putnam showed me that civic and social participation in America have systematically declined for the last six decades.
When I've aspired to get into a good school or ahem a prestigious startup incubator, Robert Frank explains how concerns of status and position have a salient effect on my decision making.
When I express a preference for a particular kind of music or type of food, Bordieu shows that preferences that I take for granted are in fact strongly correlated with my culture, socioeconomic background, gender, and profession.
When I pay money to send a virtual gift to a friend, Baudrillard shows that I'm motivated by "sign value" rather than "use value" -- that what an object represents matters more than what it actually does.
And that's just the beginning.
Sociology gets a lot of criticism, perhaps because it's such a broad field. However, it has done more to shape my understanding of the world than any single other discipline, and I'm far from speaking alone.
Josh Porter (a social design expert and author of the blog Bokardo) told an interesting story about Amazon. He was doing some user testing for a competing e-commerce site, and the tester he was interviewing asked if they could go to Amazon.
"Sure. Is it to compare the prices?" he asked.
"No," replied the tester. "It's so I can check the customer reviews."
I'm impressed by the extent to which Amazon has cultivated trust. They tell you what customers like you think about virtually every product on their site; they help you find products you might like more than the one you're browsing; they give you the chance to buy a cheaper used version of the product from a third-party. And so on.
Throw in their speed, low prices, and reliability, and it's no wonder they've captured such a strong slice of the e-commerce market.
I felt the effect of being in Silicon Valley the moment I moved out here. The area is not only teeming with endless talent, energy, and enthusiasm, but (and this is important) we have an entire culture that makes this talent, energy, and enthusiasm possible in the first place.
When I moved to San Francisco from Chicago, I felt the change immediately. People simply get me out here. They understand why I'm doing what I'm doing. They ask intelligent, insightful questions. They give me invaluable advice. They share their knowledge freely. And they do all of this because they believe in -- and belong to -- the same amazing culture that I now do.
I wouldn't be surprised. I saw James Hong from HotORNot talk about virtual gifts a while ago. You know what one of the biggest sources of revenue on their site was? Flowers.
You could send three different kinds of flowers to someone -- a cheap one ($1), a medium priced one ($3), or an expensive one ($10. Yes, $10 for a stupid little flower icon.)
People bought flowers by the hundreds of thousands; they became one of the biggest drivers of site revenue. Moreover, and this is interesting, James said that when someone sent a flower to a person, they were considerably more likely to get a response when sending a message.
I agree. I ran a company that started making serious revenue its second year in operation. My partner and I made the choice then of paying ourselves salaries, keeping a considerable portion of the revenue in our business bank account.
It was one of the best business decisions we ever made. The income that we saved is paying for our living expenses while we work behind the scenes to launch our new startup. If we had pocketed the cash, I doubt we'd be in as strong a position.
You're absolutely right. (I'm the author of the post, btw.) I've brought up these issues with Facebook in the past, and I've yet to receive satisfactory answers.
Using FBConnect is a calculated risk for us. It gives us the chance to grow faster (via News Feed integration), to make our site more social ("15 of your Facebook friends are on Trogger. Click here to follow them."), and to streamline the login/signup process.
As an early-stage startup, our top priority is to launch quickly and grow fast. We feel that FBConnect helps us do both of these things better than any alternative.
If we establish traction, and get a bunch of users, then we'll be paying a lot of attention to the points you brought up. I think it makes a lot of sense to have a contingency plan if Facebook significantly alters or restricts FBConnect, in a similar way they diminished the prominence of applications not too long ago.
At the end of the day, though, it comes down to growth. Many startups launch and fail because no one knows about them. FBConnect gives us the best opportunity to break out of this mold, and reach the proverbial hockey-stick a lot faster than would otherwise be possible.
Yup. The takeaway from our post is simple: if you're working with people from successful companies, mention them. If your lead engineer was a high-ranking team lead at Google, that carries more weight than if his latest work was, let's say, managing the database for a potato factory in Ohio.
I haven't used mTurk personally, but I know people who have, and I've looked a lot into their model.
Here's the deal: For a small amount of money (1 to 5 cents, or more if you like), you can pay people to take a specific action on your site, like posting a review, voting on 10 items, commenting to a post, etc.
- Look at 25 photos and click on the parts that are sidewalk ($0.02)
- Enter the title, name, and residence of a US Patent ($0.08)
- Write a 30-word comment to a blog post ($0.03)
- Find the longitude and latitude of a business, given its street address ($0.10)
- Write a one-paragraph abstract of an information technology article ($0.05)
I find it amazing that so many people are willing to do such drudgery-laden, time-intensive tasks, but evidently, when you toss a bunch of nickels into the air, lots of people jump.
My grandma started practicing zen meditation in the 1950s, when it first was introduced to the US. She taught my mom, who's now a teacher, and introduced me to the practice when I was sixteen.
Meditation, I find, confers a number of benefits. It's energizing and relaxing. It improves my sleep. It hones my listening and observation skills. It makes me more aware of the thoughts in my head -- which can be deafening at times -- and will help me quiet them.
I find that the time and effort I spend meditating is tremendously valuable and enriching.