medinismo

I so agree with this argument that I think it should absolute, ie no provisos for "The only time a house makes sense is when raising kids." Long term, stable rental income is the dream of any landlord. Families provide that. So capitalism work just fine here too.

I am glad to see a real payment solutions for marketplaces getting the nod from a16z. Congrats to Jareau, Mahmoud, and team!

SEEKING FREELANCER - in cities (Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Toronto)

We are experiencing a surge of businesses in the form of project work the cities above (most needs to be local) in the following stacks: Node (SF), Drupal (NY, Seattle), Backbone.js and Ember.js (SF and NY), Rails (Chicago, NY), LAMP (Toronto), iOS (LA and SF)and Android (LA and SF). I know is a handful - but we vet and scrutinize every opportunity to make sure it does not suck and there is real money behind it. To take a closer look at the scope and size of each project ping me at manny at grouptalent dot com.

This is a great piece and something we had to think about a lot ourselves.

Name changes never makes it to the top of the list, as it often times it masks other - bigger - problems about story telling and value prop.

That however may not apply to payments, where trust matters most - so this is a really good read if you are thinking about it!

anyone building a marketplace eventually comes to the realization that the key to success is getting to liquidity. It is an elusive yet obvious conclusion. This post is useful in that it attacks that problem with a bunch of tactics - and marketplaces like chess, is 90% tactics.

completely agree with this argument. I really like the authors argument that when the time is right many people will have the same idea at the same time. copying an idea is trivial, copying the execution, the stamina, the bravado to get shit done, and the balls to get other people to follow - significantly more difficult

Can someone explain to me how someone like Fog Creek would let an app like Trello go dark. Dont their carefully selected and perfectly screened engineers get paid gobs of money to prevent exactly this scenario from happening by having data centers in other locations replicate the one you have in your own house.

The tech stack and level of seniority comparison reflect correlation not causality.

To your point, I think you experience is relevant whether is mainstream or not. You are pointing to a problem with mainstream recruiters, ie that they only consider "mainstream" work as useful experience - whereas in the freelance market all experience is relevant and affects your rate. hope this helps.

any other insights as to why they are shutting down? did they raise anything after being featured on the TC London Web Summit in March? how were they bootstrapping?

Hey Sacha - how are things in Japan! Good to see you are doing well and that you are doing whatever it takes to keep Folyo up and running. What do you think of Scoutzie? launched by not too long ago with much fanfare along w the latest YC batch. Feel free to reach out to GroupTalent if you need project flow

love the term "we are reaching Peak Talent". It think we are already there

from the guy who got into TechStars with Nick - he is one of best hustlers I know

precisely!

has anyone bought/read/use the paraprog guide for raspberry py at pragprog.com/book/msraspi/raspberry-pi? I would like to get started and this book seems to be the only viable starting guide

I really do not see the benefit of this deal. Square - sure, another bunch of retailers. Starbux, not so much. NFC will take over and then square is out. can someone explain?

In my humble opinion, I think most these comments miss the root problem which is getting paid for the work. I know I am not supposed to plug own companies, but since we have been dealing with this very issue at the platform and process level, I will chime in with what we know. We decided that the way to go was pre-payment - ie work only begins when funds are in hand. The next questions is how to break down the chunk of work to make it easy for a project owner to pay and yet meaningful enough to the developer. We settled on a week's worth of time. Ie a developer in GroupTalent can submit a "sprint" of a week's duration working as many hours a developer would like to work in that week (most settle around 20-30hrs).

I am personally exploring a new twist in this process with the ability to force customer requirements into user stories and let developers charge for implementing a number of these stories in the same prepayment model.

hope this helps

exactly. Your competitor just help your shortcut the whole value prop conversation, so you can skip that pitch and go into why you are better. It saved you a cycle of story telling. that is good marketing!

I actually did not think about this angle, but I agree it is brilliant. Knowing your competitors are using the software you gave away for free also gives your assurances they are a step behind! ha! I am a little giddy with excitement here :) such a good idea

I cant mention that one in particular due to confidentiality but would love to point you others such as Tazo's topal, Rich Jones' gun.io, Sacha Grief's Folyo. you should visit all of them - they are great services!

even though I like the thought of the article, the author botched it by turning into an unsubstantiated complain fest. We are all curious to figure out how MSFT screwed up so badly, however blaming stack ranking is just amateur. Stack ranking is used by many great companies that are doing v well, thank you very much, such as Johnson and Johnson, Bain, McKinsey, Coke.

Any amount of work done in the name of making something better should be given the benefit of the doubt and be rewarded. I love the work this dude did - and even if it sucked or missed some important aspect, it deserves a bravo!

priceless

helped restore my belief in humanity