About a month ago, I started working at Groupon. It has been a pretty exciting month since then. Here are some random observations based on that time: 1) Groupon is working on exciting technology problems. Big scale, big data, multi platform, … [Read more]
How To Recruit Developers
I received a nice email today from someone living outside a major metro that wanted to do a startup but couldn't find a developer. While I'm no expert on recruiting, I do read a lot. Here's the response I sent him, slightly edited and cleansed of … [Read more]
iPads are awesome!
I've had my ipad for a couple months now and I love it! This is the first long thing i've typed on it so it's taking me a while and I'm having to fix a lot of typos. But other than that, it's great! Most of the obvious things have been said … [Read more]
Everybody Hates Jason, or Why We’ll Never Have Robot Cars
[I had written a better, longer version of this but then WordPress barfed on it. Enjoy the shoddy, hastily retyped version.] This week, more details came out about the TechCrunch extortion scandal (too boring and non-eventful to link to). The … [Read more]
Build Your Own Mentor (or Why One Hour of Mixergy Isn’t Enough)
Lots of people read, liked, and shared my post about Mixergy yesterday (thanks to @prague360, @brentcapello, @kicauan, @technophilis, @antest, @monocat, of course @AndrewWarner, and others for spreading the word). The outpouring of appreciation for … [Read more]
Critical Fans (or how Mixergy did the Impossible)
I'm a regular reader of Hacker News from the beginning. For those of you who don't know it, it's a community site where people post, vote on, and comment on links that are of interest to hackers. A corollary of that is that people want to find new … [Read more]
A Closed Apple Platform is Inevitable But Temporary
A big thanks to Chris Dixon for writing "Should Apple be more open?" I was going to write basically the same thing but he saved me the trouble. If you don't understand what he's writing, read The Innovator's Solution. The short answer is that see … [Read more]
Followup Questions to Strategic SEO for Startups
Anyone who is doing a startup should be reading Patrick McKenzie's blog MicroISV on a Shoestring. He's an American living in Japan and in his spare time over the last few years, he has built his Bingo Card Creator product into a business that has … [Read more]
Why We Should Boycott ComScore
[I haven't worked with ComScore but I've heard for years from a variety of sources about how their numbers are inaccurate and deflated. In a world with Google Analytics, KissMetrics, and Quantcast, the thought of chargins $10K to collect and report … [Read more]
Why Transit Used to be Profitable and Isn’t Now
I had fun writing this on Hacker News and thought I'd share it here. The question was "How would you make public transit profitable / create more value?" and I answered with this: It's a complicated issue, so here's a little background (I have a … [Read more]