“Everyone has a plan until they get hit.” ~Mike Tyson. Studying French for 1.5 months and then arriving in France thinking I’m a badass knowing how to sling a few sentences together was a notion rudely trussed, cooked, carved up and served back to me on a giant silver platter called humility by a certain […]
January 13, 2012 | Startups | 2 comments
I’ve moved to South Western France for a year (The Bordeaux region) and will be keeping a few concise notes on my experience getting here and living here. Mostly bullet form and you’re welcome to ask me anything in the comments. French embassy in San Francisco is great for visas but make sure you have […]
January 12, 2012 | Startups | No comments
From Lawrence of Arabia. Probably the finest film ever made. Sherif Ali: There is the railway. And that is the desert. From here until we reach the other side, no water but what we carry with us. For the camels, no water at all. If the camels die, we die. And in twenty days they […]
December 8, 2011 | Startups | No comments
Exec summary: There is a “burnout” meme that is gaining momentum in the valley. Scroll down for a not-insignificant collection of HN burnout posts. Startup employees choose startups for less job security and harder work because there’s the promise of a future reward. If the risk/reward/security/life balance doesn’t work for you then the Valley is […]
November 29, 2011 | Startups | No comments
I’ve been running a small software company for a while now and we are fastidious about reducing costs on hardware and software and getting the maximum bang for buck out of what we buy. Lets put it this way, Hell for a Dell server is spending eternity in our data center. We work them at […]
A good friend refers to the Apple App Store as the California Lottery. So I thought I’d do some rough numbers on how feasible it is to build a big software business creating apps for iPad and iPhone and selling them in Apple’s App Store. The Apple App Store will still own three quarters of […]
Vivek Whadwa, director of the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke has written about some interesting research his team has done in the Washington Post. They found the average age for an entrepreneur is 40 and there are twice as many entrepreneurs over 50 than under 25. They also found that entrepreneurs with a college […]
July 31, 2011 | Startups | 1 comment
In January this year I started researching keywords with high search volume and high earnings per click. I wrote a tool that extracts data from Google AdWords Tool and Traffic Estimator. I built intelligence into it that spotted high earning keywords, retrieved more suggestions and recursed in that fashion. I then looked at at the resulting […]
July 28, 2011 | Startups, Viral, Viral business for sale | No comments
According to Pando Networks, Seattle has the fastest average Internet speed in the country with an average speed of 1,017KBps. Compared to San Francisco and Austin who have 912KBps and 911KBps respectively
July 27, 2011 | Startups | 1 comment
There has been plenty of speculation during the last 2 years that we’re in a tech investment bubble. It seems every blogger is trying to “call it”. It hasn’t burst yet and if AirBnB’s $112 million round of funding announced today is anything to go by, it ain’t going to burst any time soon. Lets […]
July 25, 2011 | Startups | No comments