Posted by mark.
Results > Posts Filed Under > Startups
Jul
29
Posted by mark.
Based on recent events I suspect an investment axiom might exist that says: The further an investor is abstracted away from the underlying asset they’re investing in, the greater the risk.
This has been shown recently to be true with Mortgage backed securities, credit default swaps, the black box that is the hedge fund industry and even sovereign debt may qualify.
When you are shielded from your investment by layers of structure, marketing, repackaging and sales teams, you are too far away …
Jul
8
Posted by mark.
Take Twitter in a parallel universe. The team builds a great useful and viral product. They start growing like crazy and hit their first million members. The growth machine keeps pumping and everyone is watching the hot Alexa and Compete graphs cranking away.
They start getting their first acquisition offers. But the smart folks know the second differential of their graphs is still wildly positive (it’s curving up). They decide to hold off on a sale because they figure that even …
Jul
6
Posted by mark.
There’s a post on Hacker News today pointing to a few open source javascript libraries that Google is hosting on their content distribution network. ScriptSrc.net has a great UI that gives you an easy way to link to the libs from your web pages. Developers and companies can link to these scripts from their own websites and gain the following benefits:
Your visitor may have already cached the script on another website so your page will load faster
The script is hosted …
Mar
1
Posted by mark.
Having coffee at 4am after an all-nighter with my co-founder and wife a few days ago we came up with a rather obvious but interesting concept. I’ll call it The Sleep Test.
Unless your business earns revenue while you are sleeping, it won’t scale.
If you’re an I.T. consultant or lawyer selling your own time, you can’t scale.
If you’re a brick-layer who employs other brick layers and also employs a sales person, driver, accountant and all the other business components so that …
Feb
25
Posted by mark.
Just caught up with a good friend of mine who’s a tech geek and bachelor and needed some cooking advice. I’ve watched bachelor friends give themselves scurvy by getting home and ordering pizza every night. Being a tech geek makes it worse.
Your $badnessOfDiet += $levelOfAlphaGeek**3
So my wife put together the list of recipes below for him this evening. They are incredibly basic but are staples that you can make in big batches at the beginning of a week and eat …
Feb
24
Posted by mark.
Update: The Fabulis story had legs like I’ve never seen before. When I posted it to Hacker News it shot to number 1 in about 3 minutes and stayed there for 6 to 8 hours. A few hours later Robin Wauters from Techcrunch picked up on the story and since then it’s appeared everywhere from GigaOm and ValleyWag to FT.com. Citi has now issued a formal apology to Fabulis emphasizing their support of the LGBT community which you can read …
Dec
1
Posted by mark.
There has been some recent confusion about how much memory you need in a web server to handle a huge number of concurrent requests. I also made a performance claim on the STS list that got me an unusual number of private emails.
Here’s how you run a highly concurrent website on a shoe-string budget:
The first thing you’ll do is get a Linode server because they have the fastest CPU and disk.
Install Apache with your web application running under mod_php, mod_perl …
Nov
11
Posted by mark.
Hold your breath for a moment.
In about 10 to 30 seconds you’ll be feeling a strong desire to take a breath. That’s not caused by lack of oxygen. It’s caused by excess carbon dioxide buildup in your blood.
[Ok you can breathe again.]
The trigger in mammals that causes us to want to take a breath is an excess buildup of CO2. In reptiles the trigger is lack of O2. Free divers don’t hyperventilate to get more O2 into their bloodstream. They …
Nov
10
Posted by mark.
A month ago on Techcrunch, Michael Arrington wrote about “Twitter’s Revenue Dilemma”: “Your valuation can actually go down once you turn on revenue.”.
“Turning on revenue” frames it as a binary thing. You’re either making money or you’re not. It completely disregards the most important variable in finance: Time.
With the tiniest trickle of revenue you can extend your runway infinitely. That means you never have to raise another cent and you even have money to fund your growth. Let’s take an …
Nov
1
Posted by mark.
In any company if you save $1 it goes straight to your bottom line. Meaning it’s as if you just earned another $1. The company that my wife and I have been running for about 2 years now serves over 30 Million page requests per day. We’ve invested a lot of time in getting more performance out of our hardware but about 6 months ago we started hitting pesky issues like limits on the speed of light and electrons.
So we’ve …