Interesting, I totally agree with you. I considered my dad my Mentor too early on. But as one grows and our world view changes we probably start looking out for other people to look up to and learn from. Have you connected successfully with a Mentor after your dad?
It is totally up to the Mentor to decide on the level of engagement with a given Protege. The type of engagement is usually determined by the problem the Protege is trying to solve OR a plan/goal he is trying to validate. It could be one time or a periodic affair. The end justifies the means in a Mentor-Protege relationship. A long-lasting synergistic relationship is the ideal case scenario and we would love to enable that.
I think the author is talking about business method software patents. If the business method implementation needs patentable technology to implement, then it may not be such a bad idea.
But again I feel that for an early stage company, filing a patent just helps mitigate the risks in the VC's head more than anything else. Forget about enforcing your patent. If you are successful and you have a lot of money and you feel like bullying your competition, we all know how some successful companies go about it.
Social News is one of the features as I mentioned and for some users it might qualify as just a Social News site based on the way they adopt it but for others the Social News feature might be one of the features they will end up using. Our problem is how do we identify the least common denominator without having to do extensive A/B testing?
I came across this old article about how successful people work just recently. And I started wondering if there was some gap between how these guys work and how you guys work your time?
My question is to you HNers: How do you guys work?
Thanks!
p.s: I am pretty a whole bunch of HNers will consider themselves fairly successful to answer this question.
I think this is a useful metric for evaluating a startup team, but I do think the metric is subjective!
I am sure a lot of us (not so fortunate ones) realize our best abilities while working on something we really love.
So the best bet would be to describe your abilities relative to the problem you are trying to solve. How are your abilities helping your startup make significant forward progress?