I'd guess around 12-14 hours of actual thinking and working time. At a normal startup as an employee, I'm guessing you'd average around 10 hours, but more around crunch time
Sorry dude, but you must not remember them vividly, because the majority of these sites did actually have a user base and did actually make revenue. In some cases (WebVan for instance), they actually made quite a bit of revenue.
They were simply prey to illogical economics. They had all created machines that were too large for the revenues to support.
As for Friendster, I know it's been fun to say that they've failed for the last 3 years, but as far as I can tell their story isn't even close to being over. They have billions of pageviews and a growing userbase. I'm guessing you'd probably switch places with them right now.
It's simple user psychology. So much of traffic on social networking sites is lurking around on other people's pages, especially those that you're 'interested' in. I'd rather not let other people know that I've been looking at their page, especially when I've been looking at their page a lot. If I know that they know, it dis-incentivizes me from surfing around at all, killing page views.
In other words, social networks need to do everything they can to nurture their creepers.
Yeah, I'm not sure what the hell he's talking about either. The fact that specific funds exist for both iPhone and Facebook applications kind of obliterates his point.
This dissertation on how not to feel like a worthless gnat because of simple turns of phrase makes me think of another mantra I use to feel better about myself:
I think the idea is that early adopters can evangelize your product and create its foothold, but it's the late adopters who play mass market kingmakers.
I got the inspiration for this post after talking to some non-tech people about how they find and use new software. You realize that they live in a different world, without all the chatter.
I'm not implying that what we're doing is going to shake the foundations of the planet, because it won't -- simply relaying what I'm thinking about as we work.
That may be the best quote I've read in awhile. I've convinced that profit is a function of creating happiness, both with your customers and within your company.
You're exactly right. They paid the third founder $700,000 to go away after their Series A. Smart, but I actually didn't respect him leaving his friends out to dry and forcing them into awkward conversations with their investors. I guess that lesson is make sure your founding team is committed before you dole out the stock certificates :).
Their 'additional scrutiny' concluded that I was a student even though I had massive amounts of documentation pointing to the exact opposite conclusion. It is their job to investigate extra-ordinary situations. Suggesting that I needed a student visa was just plain wrong.
You are 100% right about the unpleasantness of the entire ordeal. They did do the fingerprint, mugshot deal... but until I realized that he was going to refuse entry, I was being optimistic for some reason.
I did go easy on them in this article... perhaps as a reflection of my own paranoia about getting back in when I need to... I had mental images of 5 idle border officials googling my name as I sat in the waiting room.
I wouldn't worry too much about it -- most every foreign-national other than me has had no problems getting in for the program. I think I just ran into a couple bad border officials. Perhaps I was even over-transparent the first time. By having so much documentation prepared, maybe I made myself look suspicious.
"If you are a Web 2.0 company in today's Web you really need to ask yourselves, 'Are we solving a problem that everybody has or are we building a product for Robert Scoble?'"
Couldn't have said that better. There is a market for niche products online, to be sure. I think the problem is niche products pretending to be widely useful.