Kevin Rose Steps Into Part-Time Role at Google Ventures to Build a New Startup | Hacker News Reader

Kevin Rose Steps Into Part-Time Role at Google Ventures to Build a New Startup

techcrunch.com

42 points_mayo29 comments

    If the model sounds familiar, that’s because it was
    kind of the idea behind Milk. But the world has
    changed since then, according to Rose. “The biggest
    thing that’s changed in the last three years is that
    back then we spent a lot of time spent building out
    the back end… But the scaling piece is a solved
    problem,” Rose told me.

They shipped one app, Oink. Oink didn't fail because of the amount of time required to build out the backend. It failed because it was a me-too product in a sea of me-too products, and didn't do anything to differentiate itself or provide meaningful value to its users.

Edit: On an unrelated note, it looks like Kevin must've been binging on Wes Anderson films recently. The North website looks like one of Anderson's film title cards. Compare http://wesandersontitlecards.tumblr.com and http://www.n-o-r-t-h.com/

Edit 2: Yep, Futura. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futura_(typeface)#Usage and check out the CSS on the North website.

I sort of laughed as well, but everything he launches has a big PR launch day, and I imagine there was excessive engineering time spent on making oink scalable.

I think the statement makes sense if you are Kevin Rose, but it is ridiculous as a general insight. Worrying about scaling before you find out if the dogfood is any good is nuts.

Oink was invite-only at launch: http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/03/kevin-rose-oink-app-store/

From what I remember, Oink differentiated by being about the things inside stores/restaurants instead of the businesses themselves.

For example, if you were in the mood for a certain dessert, you'd see the ratings of the dessert in a city versus the ratings for the place.

Right. There were at least half a dozen other apps in the App Store doing the exact same thing that launched before Oink. It's been a couple years since I've thought about this space, at all, but some of the others were:

* Stamped: http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/26/stamped/

* Chewsy: http://chewsy.com

* Foodspotting: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/foodspotting/id350727118?mt=...

* Ness: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ness_Computing

What an absolutely terrible domain name: http://www.n-o-r-t-h.com/

"I want my landing page to look like a wes anderson movie"

I was thinking the same. North.io? North.co so much better.

The product's name is not north. North is more like the design/dev agency.

Actually, I'm not so sure. It's easy to tell people: "North.com, with a hyphen in between every letter." It's not that hard to type, and once you've typed it once, it's in your address bar.

From an SEO and aesthetic perspective, it's a shitty domain name. But from a branding perspective, it's not bad. It's memorable, easily verbalized, and allows him to brand under "north" instead of some longer or abstract name.

> Nowadays he says, a lean startup can work specifically on product and design, and leave the infrastructure side of things to someone else.

Probably not true. Anyway, that's not what the plan is:

> He envisions North as a team that has one product person, one design person, and a full-stack engineer

What does he mean that scaling a mobile backend is a solved problem? What has changed?

Conventional Wisdom.

Services like Parse - https://parse.com/

Link to his new company: http://www.n-o-r-t-h.com/

nothing interesting. Wish ppl would give more coverage to apps that actually are useful, not just famous ppl sighs

It's either that, or the next Wes Anderson movie

I hope that's not a new trend in domain names... "No dude, there's three dashes between the r and t, you're gonna get the _other_ other North"

I'm sure it's just a place holder until he can secure north.com or some variant of that. The foundation video series run by Kevin seems to have gone through a dozen domains.

This doesn't surprise me. To me Kevin seems to have a drive to tackle the latest interesting trends in social and always with a new twist. Success or Failure. This is a good quality. Good Luck Kevin.

It's weird to see a shopping cart powered by Squarespace at n-o-r-t-h.com

http://www.n-o-r-t-h.com/commerce/show-cart

I admire this guy's talent at failing upwards.

He'll be CEO of HP in no time.

+1 :-)

A true valley inspiration

interesting domain name n-o-r-t-h.com i wonder if the hyphens could become a trend like "getX.com"

Kevin seems to be full of ideas. I look forward to seeing what they release.

Did anyone else actually laugh out loud at the "Scaling is a solved problem" line?

Guess I can take off early for the weekend then.

Cool vibe to it. I've always enjoyed how Kevin organizes things. Curious to see what they'll be working on.

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