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
Last Friday and again today the DJIA got a nice bump from data showing unemployment has dropped from 9% to 8.6%. This number is known as U3 and only counts those actively looking for work. U4 is what the government should publish which counts U3 + those who have given up looking. We “added 120,000 […]
December 5, 2011 | Business, Economics, Finance | 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 remember seeing Napster in 2000 when I worked for eToys.com and thinking “This isn’t going away. It has too much momentum and we always move forward.” I was wrong. Today I’m wondering about the free Web and whether it will ever go away. Our intuition tells us we always move forward and things will become […]
November 22, 2011 | Politics, Technology | 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 […]
SOPA is a bill (HR 3261) sponsored by Lamar Smith (R-VA), John Conyers (D-MI), Bob Goodlatte (R-VA), Howard Berman (D-CA) and several co-sponsors. The first hearings on this bill will begin in congress tomorrow, November 16th. If SOPA is passed, it will give the US Government control of the Domain Name System in order to […]
November 15, 2011 | Politics | No comments
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 […]
Big News [April 24th, 2012]: I’ve launched Wordfence to permanently fix your WordPress site’s security issues. Click here to learn more. I’m reposting this again because many of the emails I’m getting say “if you’re still interested”. Please contact me at mmaunder at gmail.com if your wordpress installation has been hacked. I need you to […]
I took a lot of crap when I decided to vertically integrate our business four years ago and I invested around $40,000 with Dell to buy our own server cluster. Right then THE CLOUD was the hot new thing, and still is and I was not getting on board. I leased a rack at a […]
October 31, 2011 | Technology | No comments
Big News [April 24th, 2012]: I’ve launched Wordfence to permanently fix your WordPress site’s security issues. Click here to learn more. I’m driving through Europe for the next week so am not very available online. Currently in awesome Andorra. So if I’m not very responsive to your WordPress security needs I apologize. However, I have […]