There's a lightbulb in the bottom right you can click to give feedback. We have already gotten feedback that it's a little hard to find so we will fix that in the next day or so! And if you're a coder we would love comments and PRs in Github.
80 karma · joined May 6, 2008
http://www.marinamartin.com
No idea if they can actually pull this off, but thought the Longitude Prize story is cool (thank you, "Stuff You Should Know" podcast, for mentioning it earlier this year).
Drupal is fine for a prototype, and your partner may want to cut his teeth on it because he just enjoys learning new technologies. What technologies is he familiar with?
I'd peruse idea/complaint websites and see if one idea tickles your fancy:
http://www.sixmonthmba.com/2009/02/999ideas.html http://www.whynot.net/ http://www.quirky.com/ http://logolalia.com/ideafactory/ http://mybiggestcomplaint.com/ http://www.ilovetocomplain.com/
Anecdotal stories of people securing funding in one day over lunch are true, but not the norm. Usually fundraising is a six month full-time process. If you're on the precipice right now and truly feel (and I think you have to truly feel it!) that revenue is right around the corner, then stick to that path for at least a couple of months. You can always get jobs and pursue funding at that point.
Go Wired magazine for choosing your covers based on what will sell and not based on the loss of the five readers who might be offended by it. They can read "Bitch" (which is somehow not an offensive name for a magazine if written by feminists?). If Wired doesn't sell magazines, Wired doesn't exist.
If someone is encumbered a geographical non-compete and they're leaving another state where they signed a non-compete, I'm willing to bet that the court battle will actually be in the original state, so CA law wouldn't apply. But again, IANAL.
I'm anti-non-competes unless a truly specific case warrants it (for commissioned sales teams, for example... I think it's reasonable that your new salesperson can't come in, print off your leads and go off on his own the next day).
"I’m here to tell you this. Forget about your life expectancy.
After all, it’s calculated based on an average. And you never, ever want to expect being average."
If you opened the same company in Seattle instead of SF, you'd get to keep around 9% more of your income. That was enough margin for me to leave CA for WA five years ago. (Though the recall election didn't help my feelings toward the place.)
I'd definitely be interested to see two different programmers write up their approach to a given problem. Something like this would be an excellent monthly blog post.
Best thing for me was to escape the textbook-like examples (quadratic equations, rock paper scissors) and actually [attempt to] build real things. Once you have cursory Python knowledge, pick up "Practicel Django Projects" -- you'll build a working CMS by page 28 and feel really good about yourself. By the end of that book I was pleasantly surprised by how comfortable I was writing other programs, even if I am slow as hell and have a reference book open in my lap.