Overnight success takes a long time
paulbuchheit.blogspot.com
paulbuchheit.blogspot.com
My two previous employers were both started in 2001, in terms of the idea and not the corporate entity. Last I heard, they are both still around, though in one case a founder let the company fold and then ran off to China with the IP to start again with cheap labor. But the ideas are increasingly irrelevant now.
In one case, the product was software to tunnel through firewalls. Most recent products just build that into the product itself now (witness: FogCreek CoPilot, AIM, anonymous proxies), using essentially the same technology we were working on 8-9 years ago (FogCreek calls it the Reflector) so there is less need for a general solution.
In the other case, the product started out as a desktop quant analytics interface. But then around 2002-2004, everything switched to the web. They did too, but they fell off the leading edge of technology: other firms now have much more web expertise than they do. And now with the financial crisis, I'd guess that people are increasingly suspicious of quant analytics.
I keep thinking about whether it's better to go for breadth or depth (in anything, not just startups). The answer always seems "Go for depth, as long as you're going deep into the right thing." But it's often not possible to tell what the right thing is until you've gone deep into it. By then, of course, you've already sunk a lot of effort into exploring the territory. Maybe that's why people ascribe so much of success to pure luck.
Amiable guy - the organization I was part of bought a site license. It provided windows sockets support for Windows 3.x. It was made irrelevant in Windows 95 (and I believe MSFT baking in 32-bit Winsock support was a big deal - that leveled the technical hump of getting online)
Now that was an experience - most people can type faster than 300 baud!
Getting market timing right is a simple matter of predicting the future ;)
The Only Thing That Matters: http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/06/the-pmarca-gu-2.html
How much funding is too little? Too much? http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/07/the-pmarca-guid.html
* Well, Zoe had a go, but was always buggy and now seems dead.
I think the main reason why we'd like to be able to add Posterous through the FF main page is the fact that people don't understand RSS, especially our users who are brand new to blogging and are doing it for the first time through email.
In the longer term as FF reaches mainstream, these considerations around dead simple import of feeds become even moreso important.
Then you, I, or anyone passionate about getting her/his own site easily integrable with FriendFeed can set up a UI to do it from our end.
For example, http://friendfeed.com/settings/services/blog?url=http://mybl... will add the blog http://myblogurl.com/ and redirect the user to http://myservice.com/afteradd afterwords. There is also a "nextcancel" parameter which can be used to distinguish between success and cancel.
i.e. Be patient and don't give in.
By not nudging users into any one specific direction, it effectively aggrandizes collective genius.
Now, it just needs an option for HN posts. . .
Also, what does it mean to effectively aggrandize collective genius?
Sounds like The Truman Show. That, and every scare article about Millenials being the most spoiled, self-aggrandizing generation ever.
Doubly creepy because that's basically reality now - a lot of us now broadcast are thoughts, opinions, daily activities, and so on to the whole web. It just seems a lot more normal when I say "Oh, I added the FriendFeed FaceBook app" then when you say "Turn to channel me."
FriendFeed helps you discover and discuss interesting stuff that your friends and family find on the web.
Like I have time with which to look at interesting stuff after spending all day on news.yc....