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 […]
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 […]
July 8, 2010 | Startups | No comments
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 […]
July 6, 2010 | networks, Startups, Technology | No comments
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, […]
March 1, 2010 | Startups | No comments
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 […]
February 25, 2010 | Startups | No comments
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 […]
February 24, 2010 | Startups | 6 comments
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: […]
December 1, 2009 | Scaling, Startups, Technology | 2 comments
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 […]
November 11, 2009 | Startup Hacks, Startups | 1 comment
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 […]
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 […]
November 1, 2009 | Finance, Startup Hacks, Startups | 1 comment