BenS

Congrats to Daniel and Dave! I'm biased b/c I know these guys, but I'm excited about their startup. And hats off to Dan b/c it's never easy to leave a salaried, full-time gig for the ground floor of a startup.

I appreciate it travis. if you ever want an invite to try it out, just ping me ben (at) pinterest (dot) com.

thanks Travis. I totally agree about focusing on improving vs. benchmarking against others. I was more just curious. The product is http://pinterest.com

We are hiring a designer at our startup: http://www.pinterest.com. We are in Palo Alto. 3 people, funded.

Congrats! Overall, this list had some great ideas. It's refreshing to see a whole crew that aren't being discussed in the typical Silicon Valley blogs. I thought sparefoot.com was especially cool.

Tell people you care about that you are starting a project. Keep them up to date on your progress. Your friends and your ego can be powerful motivators to finish.

I wasn't able to find it on the site either, but it was in their lumber department. I read about it on a couple blogs: http://www.johnmurch.com/2007/10/20/diy-whiteboard-on-the-ch...

No, that is feet.

The best startup office tip I have heard is buying sheets of 'Solid White Tileboard' from home depot. It is a material used in commercial shower installations that works well as a white board. 8x12 sheet is ~14 dollars.

I really enjoyed this talk. One of my favorite parts was a list of book recommendations Kevin provided at the end:

- call to action

- landing page optimization

- small giants

- the ultimate question (how to design surveys and define meaningful metrics)

- why marriages succeed or fail (john gottman's research on relationships)

- predictably irrational (behavioral economics)

- sway: the irresistible pull of irrational behavior

This makes delivering rich application experiences with tools like cappuccino more interesting to me.

On #2: you have missed the point of why a hand written letter to a loved one is special.

I know the big story here is cross platform support, but I also LOVE the idea of being able to see common friends as a way to break the ice.

Personally, when I do a local search query, seeing short listings on a map with ratings and a phone number is pretty much exactly what I was looking for even though it doesn't meet the author's definition of 'organic'.

Focusing on problems that impact lots of people does not make Google Microsoft. Google is still innovating quickly -- see pubsubhub, chrome, wave, android, maps, gmail, etc.

You can argue that Google's products lack the personality of startups, or that Google hasn't excelled in social applications, but taking a quote, bringing up successful startups, and then saying -- i heard that at microsoft therefore google is microsoft -- is absurd.

Cold Brew Labs (based in Palo Alto & NYC) is a 2-person startup building mobile shopping applications.

We're hiring, and just closed our seed round with some great folks from mobile, consumer internet, and retail. Our first app is in review, but we have a lot of things to build, so definitely looking for good engineers / designers! jobs@coldbrewlabs.com

I would like to see thumbnail images. Ideally, as many as possible in a grid with prices. The hard part browsing craigslist for me is clicking through to see listings/products with images. The UI seems more optimized for non visual browsing (e.g. airplane tickets).

i really like g.iraffe. could i get in touch about maybe trading or buying?

This is really cool - congrats. I'd really like to see google-trend-like features but on much shorter time scales. Even a weekly-zeitgeist tied to news stories instead of having to wait for the end of year.

Steve overlooks an important part of the competition - the opportunity to win non-dilutive financing in a time where fundraising is hard.

I think it's popular because people love to promote themselves. Low level of required engagement feels secondary to me.

I think there are as many successful companies started by careful market analysis as there are company's started by an entrepreneur's mission to solve a personal problem.

Jeff Bezos coldly examined markets and decided books were the right entry point into ecommerce. However, these don't make the best pr stories, and so aren't told...or in some cases, the story is just fabricated after the fact, such as Pierre Omidyar building ebay to sell pez dispensers.

I agree that ambitious ideas are important, and technically hard solutions are inspiring, but I think it's a mistake to assume those qualities always make better businesses.

Great businesses solve problems people care about in a way that makes money. Identifying those problems is often as hard as creating the solution. The notion of releasing early and often is important because it lets entrepreneurs quickly identify the problem users want solved and test their solutions.

I'm happy people tackle hard problems, but keep in mind that precious few arrive at their solution (or even figure out the real problem) in 3 months. Wait a few years and I'm confident you'll see great innovation out of YC, or YC-like programs.

http://psd.tutsplus.com/ - has a mix of free and 'premium' tutorials.

Also, smashingmagazine.com frequently has good links to tutorials.

I find this approach really exciting. The fact that it builds into existing communication channels is very very cool, and the idea of a scalable real-time service is powerful especially for mobile. I like the idea of more services embedding directly into my core communication -- chat, phone, email.

A more useful discussion would be, what kind of apps should be paid? and what kind should be free? In my opinion paid apps/services have to meet a few criteria:

1. substantially better than free alternatives 2. deliver significant value at limited (user) scale 3. not built on open source technologies w/restrictive licensing

For broad consumer-services, those 3 criteria actually limit the universe of services significantly.

Thanks for the feedback. I also pinged another entrepreneur who had offered this opinion:

Often 1/4 to 1/2 is vested immediately. Typically you will have accelerated vesting in the event of an acquisition. This can come in the form of a single or double trigger (first trigger is when the acquisition happens and second trigger is if you are fired or quit from the acquiring company).

Assuming your non-immediately vested shares have a one year cliff (no vesting until 1 year worked) and 4 year vesting (month by month after the first year), you should consider not having any vesting in the event of an acquisition.

Acquisition probably won't happen until you've been going for a couple years at least, and much of your shares were vested immediately so fractional vesting of the balance won't make a big difference to you. On the other hand the fractional vesting might make a big difference to an executive you hire between founding and acquisition and you can assume that a big time hire will negotiate to match your accelerated vesting provision (might really erode the value to the acquirer to not have that exec with golden handcuffs).

If you have FF shares, those should represent 1/4 to 1/10th of your total holding and you should make sure that these shares are all vested immediately at founding.

I would suggest looking @ notcot.org and notcouture. People love it, they seem to make money, and you can learn a lot about (1) how to present non-standard images in an appealing way, and (2) the types of inventory/writing that appeals to folks.

Also, i like your username.

I'd like to see this running android.

This article bugs me. First, the author's distinction between real and momentum vc is very retrospective. Especially with early stage investment, it's just not always clear who will be a 'real' investment vs. a 'momentum' vc. All early stage vc's are trend spotters who are trying to time their investments in companies to the market.

Second, there is no real analysis to support the headline. Even in bad economic times, I bet historically, traditional asset classes like equities have done much better than vc investments as a whole.