codelust

I can completely understand the way you feel, used to feel the same way many moons ago.

What changed it for me was to look at it differently:

1. If all products that were ever built were 100% good and successful, we'd be living in a different world. But, we don't. Fact is that most of us make a few good products (if we are lucky) and a lot of bad ones. It is the natural way of things, you can't control it. What you can control is how we go about doing it and how much it costs.

2. Money is raised for a lot of reasons. Money is spent for a lot of reasons. Not all worthy causes/products get funded well, same is the case for the unworthy ones. A lot of money, be it that most of it is wasted, tills the ground better and raises the odds for something good to come out of the flood of bad ones. Would you rather have no good ones at all in trying to ensure ONLY good ideas get funded and sustained?

3. You can use the same $$$s in different ways: blow it all up in one go, make different (smaller) attempts at it with clearly defined parameters for failure and success. Those two parameters are very subjective. Especially as product people we tend to keep products alive for much longer than we deserve to keep them.

4. Most important perspective for me: if you think you can do it differently, stop talking about it and have a go at it. Attempting (and even failing) to do half of most of the people we love to criticize brings about a sea change in perspective. It is always different in the trenches.

Unrelated, but relevant point to the discussion: pay for good long form content. It costs quite a bit to produce it. If you love it, buy it.

I have worked almost a decade in the online media industry in my previous life and I don't find this particularly surprising. Somewhere around 2005, everyone in the industry discovered this major obsession with doing stories based on SEO, than doing stories that did well on their own merit. Unfortunately, everyone jumped onboard with this idea as it made sense at scale. Fortunately, half-a-decade down the line, we seem to be waking up to the fact that not everyone can make a living at scale; only a few can accomplish the scales to justify that.

The others have to focus on quality, than quantity, to bring them the traffic.

The other unspoken part of the content business is that a tiny minority of the people who matter in the business actually understand the numbers. Most don't understand anything beyond total pageviews and then starts the hunt to increase them at any cost. The dumbest way to increase pageviews is to do more stories, but they often don't understand the fact that doing more stories don't come for free and that each story is not as productive as the other in getting them more traffic.

Quality works, but quality is not easy. It is hard work, time-consuming and there are no quick fixes.

Of course, they should. It is not whether a company should be profitable or not that is the important question, it is when it should be profitable that is more important.

Depending on a variety of factors, companies have runways of differing lengths. Ideally, you should attain profitability as early as possible. In the real world it is not that simple a construct.

I think you are mixing up the cases here. The Sibal affair was the one from the government. If you read the linked story you'll find two cases - one civil and another criminal - which are behind the directives by the courts. The government is not a party to either case.

I don't have any sympathies for people who try to stifle the ability to express freely, but I also don't have any sympathies for misinformation and needless rabble rousing either.

As part of my work, I do interact and advise members/organizations of the legal framework and, trust me, there are a lot of good intentions there, but sadly that alone is not good enough and we wind up with lousy outcomes. This is the reason why I look unfavourably on a purely black and white view of these things.

The temptation here to go on a tirade against a party or the government is way too overwhelming (it is a private criminal case), but I would urge everyone to take a different view of this. The laws and the legal system in India are ill-equipped and not adequately trained to understand the nuances of the digital world. I had a first-hand experience of this a few years ago at my last job when we were dragged into an investigation that was looking into defamatory comments posted against a particular individual.

We had to work with the cyber crime cell to help them find what they were looking for and found the officers to be well-meaning and nice people. The only downside was the training given to them, which was next to non-existent. We eventually wound up helping them out a lot and also worked with them to help them get a better understanding of the issue at hand. I actually felt quite bad for them. The office we went to had a handful of ancient PCs of which only one was connected to the internet - a far cry from anything that you'd expect.

The same thing applies to courts, judgements are often handed out without a good understanding of the digital world. A judge when shown awful content will almost every time order its removal, there is hardly anything surprising about it.

This certainly won't be the last word on this, but we have a long road ahead increasing awareness and training of both the legal system and enforcement. By the time we finally get there, there will be a lot of mistakes arising from totally unintended consequences, but I am confident that we'll eventually get it right.

Been a customer for a few years and love them. They really know their stuff and are one of the rare shared hosting providers to actually encourage to go and compile things you need. I am surprised to find not many more people using them.

The control panel takes a bit of getting used to and so is the restriction on database names (they need to start with 'yourusername_'), but those are trivialities for the awesome service.

For the Pythonistas here, IIRC, they are a Python shop. I have long stopped hosting production sites on my VPS because of them.

Strange, recently posted elsewhere on a similar topic. This quitting thing must be catching on and may soon become the in-thing.

This month I completed a year of deactivating my FB account. I have signed into Twitter only thrice in the past three months and don't miss it much. Deleted my Google+ account too a little while back.

What did I learn from all of that? It is that these platforms amplify you. If you are prone to making bad use of your time (which is my chronic problem), these platforms will take it to a different level. If you are making good use of your time, these platforms can help you make use of it better.

I have made the transition from blaming the platform to seeing for myself that I am the problem and I am still working on fixing that.

If ThemeForest uses a split license in the manner you have specified, it falls well within what the Software Freedom Law Center's interpretation of the GPL.

Themes get stolen and copied all over the place. I often have a hard time advising clients to not do that just because it is available. Most of the redistributed versions often contain hidden links and other security issues.

For that and all the points you have mentioned, the price of these themes are nothing compared to the service a good theme developer provides you.

There was this famous spat in 2009 when one of the popular themes was being distributed under a different license: http://wordpress.org/news/2009/07/themes-are-gpl-too/

As long as the themes and plugins are GPL-licensed, it should be fine by the community is my understanding. Selling, by itself, was never an issue.

Wordpress.org itself showcases some of these commercial themes: http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/commercial/

Absolutely correct there about Facebook being the primary destination to find Facebook friends. Point I am trying to make is that Facebook being open to being indexed by Google also contributes to Google's growth.

Searching for most names on Google throws up first results from Facebook, which makes it one more reason why I'll search for a name on Google than the situation where Google would not have the results on the what is probably the most authoritative page for most people. Thus, in the latter case, creating a situation where I am forced to use Facebook at the cost of Google.

Edit: I think there is a popular zero sum perspective to these things, which is not necessarily true when you look at it closely.

I don't agree with the author on many counts, but I wish that everyone who makes the point about Google being threatened by "social networks, targeted searches, non-web searching and information discovery" would elaborate a bit further.

Let us look at factors you have pointed out:

1. Social networks: Google has 3 positions in Alexa's Top 10 for the US market. Only Facebook and Twitter are the only two sites that are social networks on that list. Other than Twitter (protected accounts), Bing and Paypal, every other site on that list is crawl-able by Google. Even for Facebook, it is better to have public than private pages (6,330,000,000 pages in the Google index). *

It is very much possible for Facebook to be double the size that it is at and also for Google to grow at the same time. There are more people using more of the internet every year. They all need to connect with others and also find other information they are looking for. Growth for both Google and Facebook need not be mutually exclusive.

The most tangible growth-related metric of year-on-year growth for Google is still pretty impressive: http://investor.google.com/financial/tables.html Till a lot of the numbers start veering drastically off-course, I won't worry much about it.

2. Targeted searches: There will always be niche companies who do this over a million domains. I do not think Google would bother too much with it purely because of the clout they carry in the search market. If you have to get good non-organic traffic, you need to be indexable on Google these days. There is also the fact that Google would not want to dominate in everything related to search as it leaves them badly exposed to anti-trust issues.

3. Non-web searches: This is more of an input/interface matter. It has been possible to search through speech for a while on Android and it is something that is only bound to grow as speech recognition gets more and more better across all platforms. What matters is the quality of results and if competing platforms can provide better results from a non-Google platform, then Google would be in trouble. Parsing spoken text is different from delivering results for a query. So, Siri doing a good job of parsing what you are saying is different from Siri being able to serve results from a different search engine than Google.

If the majority of people who do speech-based searches get their results from Google, it will be something for Google to rejoice and not fear. In fact, I think Apple may have even done Google a favour with Siri. There is now going to be a race to be the best voice-based interface on non-iOS platforms as a result of Siri. There is also the increased awareness of this feature now due to Siri.

4. Information discovery: If I am not mistaken, Google already is the leader on this front. They layer a lot of additional information into search results (which, I am not a fan of) and there is nobody of a comparable size who is competing with them on it.

* Alexa is a flawed metric. I am using it as a comparative/indicative measure. Google's page count is broken; but they do have a LOT of pages on Facebook that is crawl-able.

It is not limited to just creation, we seem to be giving up easily the ability to grasp that not everything is black or white. There was much to admire and like about the man, there was much that was flawed about him. But, for most, it is either fully angelic or 100% the devil's cohort that they work overtime to fit him into.

This post http://bechalis.blogspot.com/2011/08/i-dont-care-about-e-com... absolutely nails why the e-commerce scenario is different this time from a customer's point of view. Obviously, it is not at a massive scale yet, but you can see the momentum that is building now.

The valuation maybe over the top, but the fact is that in India we are reaching a stage where expanding into large tracts of our market can't be done on the cheap. And I am not talking about spending on marketing here. Most of us take putting together the logistics and supply chain on a pan-India level as trivial. It is unbelievably hard and that at least some of the new breed of companies are getting it right is a significant differentiator from anything else we have seen so far.

Also, compared to where we are otherwise headed with the ad-based online business in India (which has not shown growth worth speaking about since forever), give me a bubble any day.

They were one of the earlier ones, but not the earliest. If my memory serves me right, a VPS as a viable option first gained publicity with Johncompanies.com, who were one of the early sponsors on kuro5hin.org following the famous DOS-attack on it. From the domain name registration it would appear that Johncompanies have been around since 2001, while linode.com was registered in 2003.

If you are talking about the post here, it was not made by me, so not sure how the title can be edited. I don't see a problem with it, though.

I don't think the point is that Indian companies don't get bought in the US.

Quite presumptuous is it not to say that nobody is grabbing every little opportunity here? I quit a well-paying job during the downturn to explore this side of life, so, yes, risks are being taken, but that is not my point.

I'm not saying we are screwed big time, if that is how the post appears to you, I need to apologize for the way that I put it across. My intention is this - what we are doing now is not working, let us try something different as the potential is certainly there.

YCombinator works in very mature and evolved market/ecosystem where efficiency and filtering provides a major advantage as there is an oversupply of decent concepts. Thus the money invested itself is only a relatively minor factor, compared o the speed up that YC brings to both companies and investors.

India is not that evolved and there is a shortage of good ideas. Even when you get good ideas you may not have a market to sell it to, thus making it necessary that you have more than a YC-level round to get it going.

The McDonalds comparison is valid only to an extent. They did not launch in India with funding the size of YC round, which is my point in the previous paragraph - it needs a lot of money, you will often be opening up markets on your own and that is not cheap.

Agreed that the market is global and that PG, the team and the philosophy is a major factor.

I'm trying to point out the underlying fundamentals, other than the above factors: Supply of quality stat-ups, the size of the investments and market sizing.

Lots of programmers need not equate to programmers who can build products. It is a mindset thing. The lower burn rate theory has already been tested with a company called True Sparrow Systems in Pune, who were the building team behind SocialMedian. The cheaper programmers angle eventually slides further towards the service model, which is good, but not very good if you are looking to put together companies that build products.

1. Big exits, outside digital, do happen here. They need not always be international.

2. 2-3 players show a healthy and probably growing market. Ability to attract investment is always tied to the potential of the market and ability of the company to bite into it.

No doubt about the market size in India, the question is about the right approach to unlock it.

I'm the author of that post, can't recollect many exits from web-based companies in India to companies from outside in India. You could, I guess, point at sosasta.com (acquired by Groupon), but the deal flow certainly is not there.

User acquisition will always peak at some stage for most companies (the universe being the total number of people with access to the internet), so the attempt drive more usage is not surprising.

I do believe, though, that Twitter has lost its way since end 2009 and are largely making stuff up as they go along. It is also fair to assume that they will have pressures to ramp up monetization as they run out of time to bridge the gap between potential and actual revenues. Such is the curse of an insanely high valuation.

Good presentation by the team on their scaling challenges.

They run Django, PostgreSQL.

http://ontwik.com/python/disqus-scaling-the-world%E2%80%99s-...

Quite impressive that they run ~100 servers to serve about a billion page views in a month.

Actually, it is essential for Facebook to have its content crawl-able by everyone - which is why there is the constant push towards downplaying privacy. A quick look at Facebook on both Compete and Alexa says that they get ~8% of their referral traffic from Google alone (the search engine is also their largest referral traffic source) and the Google properties together contribute referral traffic in double digit percentages.

"Social" itself is not a product. It is almost like gasoline - by itself either product does not give you any value, but use it as a fuel or an enabler and it takes on a different form. Facebook's enablement is primarily through connections (the gateway drug) and later it transforms itself into a tool to easily eat up plenty of your time at varying levels of interaction/engagement. As much as Google wants to tap into these primary and secondary objectives now owned by Facebook, Facebook itself would want to move beyond these two.

Facebook has to eventually become the arbiter of transactions online, which has to be a full-on solution than the teetotaler approach taken on FB credits. That would, though, expose Facebook to higher standards on privacy. But, if they manage that, Google can be easily overrun.

For Google, "social" cannot be force-fed. "+1" is such an eyesore and is such a horrible effort at branding your social interaction touchpoint for the masses.

Spot-on there. Found myself leaning more towards the latter party, so I have started sitting out most of these debates.

Disabled my account in Dec 2010 and what I have figured out is that while Facebook is a powerful platform, but it is also pretty inefficient and unpredictable. You have to spend a lot of time and effort for returns that are not always predictable.

But that is just for me; may not necessarily the case for others.

Moving from a start-up to bigco: Most important change - you can go from VP/head Engineering (in a 2-man team) to something significantly smaller, especially if you don't have many years of experience.

Career credit: Depends entirely on what you have done at the start up and how it fits with the target company/role.

The answers aside, life decisions are not popularity contests. You need to do what makes most sense for you and most importantly, what sits right with you. Outstanding HN karma does not pay anyone's bills :)

Early stage companies are much like relationships, they don't always work out. You need to know where the invisible line that demarcates your being good for the company and being bad for it lies. Sometimes, the propensity of things/people you love and care for the most to cause you more harm than even your worst enemy is incredible. Stay on the right side of the line.

Not everyone will like you all the time, you can't do everything right all the time, nor will good fortune follow you all the time. When it is bad, lie low, survive, find your way out. When it is good, pay it forward and make up for the bad you have done.

Good luck :)

Thanks :)

I am a convert - from an eternal pessimist to a nouveau-optimist. But, even that does not spare me from being very pessimistic about the eventual fate of Twitter.

The company, apparently (http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-api-announce/browse_t...), grew 3x in terms of volume of messaging in the past 12-months, but it is very unlikely that their revenue has grown 3x.

If that assumption is right, they are on a limited timeframe where their burn rate will eclipse their average possible spends (funds brought in via investments + revenue).

In effect, they have a very short time frame to get this story right - irrespective of whether they piss off the developer ecosystem or not.

I don't like "dead future" stories, but I don't think this is going to wind up with a different fate.

The past year and half, Twitter has given me the distinct impression of being the dog that chased a car and actually got the car, now it does not know what to do with the car.

For a more reasonable analogy, Twitter is the equivalent of a telco. They are the plumbing and the dumb pipe of the 140 character web at the moment. That alone does not guarantee enough returns to justify the billion-plus dollar valuation. Sadly, they don't have any other choice than to stifle the same community that built the tooling which led them to be the success story they are today.

I am not sure the Windows precedent applies here. At the height of the reign of Windows the landscape as far as the competition goes was extremely different. To point out one of the many contrasts - Apple did not have the kind of money it has today or the strong auxiliary channels: apps, music, ebooks etc to support its main product line.

I don't think anyone can say the world is going to be 90% Android or 90% iOS as far as handhelds are concerned. It is a market that is still opening up and there are at least three distinct pricing segments in it. Plenty of space for the top 2-3 to grow without killing anyone else.

Which of the following scenarios are unlikely?

1. iOS triumphs everything else as the one mobile OS to rule them all. Everything else dies.

2. Android triumphs everything else as the one mobile OS to rule them all. Everything else dies.

3. In the big wide world, both iOS and Android do well, appealing to different masses and classes. The developer ecosystem also makes money off both platforms, albeit in different ways.

I use the above question to grok most of the stories in the tech community these days. And I think both are fine platforms that appeal to different people in different ways.

Yes, a popular game is making more money off Android than Apple. So what? Tomorrow there will be another story about someone making more money off iOS than Android.

The Wired story on Rovio posted yesterday has many points relevant to this madness. They optimized towards maximizing their profits from all available platforms by adapting to the strengths and weaknesses of each platform.

Honestly, companies that succeed for any reasonable periods of time all do that. The whole 'kill x' angle is the breathless reporting and commentary that plagues most material on tech these days. It has little place in the real world.

I'm someone who thinks that Facebook still has massive scale and hype on its side, but will struggle to deliver on the potential it has. But, I don't agree with the 'X is dead' contention - the media and start-up community seems to have embraced it wholeheartedly.

It is perfectly possible to have a world in which both Google and Facebook exists and exist as giants.

It is perfectly possible to have a world in which Facebook loses a lot of its current sheen, but still rakes in a handsome profit. Google will continue to be brilliantly profitable, but the blowout quarters will be harder to come by.

Most market segments are large enough to support, 1,2 or 3 profitable leaders. Even in a segment as niche as commercial aircrafts, you have multiple players. The entire contention of one killer market leader is the greatest eyewash of our times.