robfitz

I think you're fighting an uphill battle getting her to appreciate the end result (e.g. the code), but most artists can appreciate the value of the creation process itself.

So maybe focus on the craftsmanship and exploration by drawing comparisons to something like woodworking or sculpture or print making.

Depends a lot on what role you're looking to fill.

There's very little meaningful strategy/business work that can be moved to a new hire. Most very young companies still have terrible development practices, which makes it hard to quickly plug in a new technical hire.

I think there are three possible ways it might work.

1) You're willing to act as an executive assistant, doing whatever crap work comes up (market research, building slide decks, arranging meetings, filtering email, buying lunch) in return for exposure

2) They see you as a strong potential future hire and are thus willing to invest in training you up for 1-2 months as a sort of extended job interview.

3) They have a non-critical, self-contained side project you can come in and completely own. Examples include wireframing/designing a new site or feature, beginning a real content marketing strategy, understanding & documenting existing code & processes, etc.

#2 is the best for you, since you'll get "real" work. #3 is good, but I've seen teams give something which is a little bit too optional and then never integrate the final result, making it a worthless portfolio piece. #1 is the most boring and you'll probably have to switch companies after the stint to be considered a "real" team member, but it's probably the easiest to get into and would be a chance to trial the startup experience in general.

I think the distinction is that you can learn a lot about a problem-centric business (e.g. typical lean startup) from an unpolished version, whereas the article's author is claiming that games are unique in that you must polish BEFORE you learn, which makes the first leap much more expensive.

It's a great town and an amazing climate for getting motivation & support for building your ideas. Move if you'd like to! But please don't go, as some people have, under the belief that you'll immediately stumble across a pile of money upon arriving. The funding climate just got a lot harsher, and even at its best you still need several months and a bit of good luck before you know enough about the community to even begin having the relevant funding conversations.

After our YC round, my first company moved ourselves from the valley to London. It's not as extreme, but you can get some of what the valley offers from London, Berlin, Israel, Amsterdam (app development), and others. I was just in Bulgaria, for example, and they had a decent scene. So does Spain.

If you're in the valley, you kind of can't avoid the startup community. In the other major cities, you have to make a bit of an effort, but you can still definitely build a support network and get in touch with investors when you're ready.

Good luck!

Talking to agency founders, it seems the primary way to make the leap from 1 person freelancer to 3 person agency is to go through a phase of being a 2 person partnership. That first follower can't be an employee. If you're happy staying very small and working on discrete projects, I can imagine this proposal working.

An elite team like in Ocean's 11 works when it's a high return, fixed duration freelance gig with breaks in between. For ongoing or constant work, you need to know your elite team is actually available, which means they need to commit to working with you and you need to commit to paying them.

For web programming, I like to start by writing a simple blog and add rss, tags, search, etc as I need to learn more.

For open source web work, I know Khan Academy needs help and I believe Resig has recently re-vamped their exercise framework, which is the main place for new contributors.

For closer-to-hardware hacking, I learned by making little games for Game Boy Advance and Atari 2600. The Nintendo DS also works similarly, although the hardware is a little more abstracted.

I really feel the GBA is ideal. It has a good combination of bitmap, sprite, and tile drawing modes, fairly good development tools, and lots of interesting bit twiddling to achieve what you want: http://www.gbadev.org/ You can also pick up transfer cables and a flash cartridge to put it on real hardware, which makes it a fun demo piece.

Atari is all assembly, GBA is mostly C with pieces of assembly inlined here and there.

You are seriously on the wrong site.

Are you talking specifically about app & social games, or would you make the same argument for other distribution channels (console, downloadable, board/card games)?

Anyway, excellent article. Looking forward to digging through your archives.

A big steak with stir fried veggies, some grilled pineapple, a loaf of french bread, and a nice beer.

Starving yourself or eating low energy bullshit is not productive =/

Calling their tech "infinite detail" instead of "voxels" feels no different than calling the iphone screen a "retina display" instead of listing its resolution details. Good marketing is not inherently evil.

Here, though, they're suffering a huge PR backlash, which I suspect is because they're out-marketing the work of passionate amateurs and academic researchers instead of e.g. big phone companies.

It admittedly does feel dirty not to give due credit in this scenario, but I can also empathise with their desire for a descriptive term which can resonate with the general public.

On an unrelated note, I'm often impressed by how large a portion of the game development community manages to stay aware of the bleeding edge in their field. I haven't seen any other arena where that's quite so much the case.

After years of notebook use, I've recently fallen in love with index cards.

I hesitate less before writing down a probably-bad idea (some of which turn out to be good) because it won't permanently "contaminate" a notebook.

I can sort & re-order, keep my tasks separate from ideas, and scrap cards when they are dealt with.

When I would use notebooks, I liked to keep one per project/client/theme, so now I no longer need to carry multiple notebooks everywhere -- just a small stack of blank cards.

This feels akin to counting all time in gmail as "work" regardless of what one is reading/writing. The most dangerous distractions are those which disguise their presence.

The mental burden of task switching is about changing mindsets, not applications. The damage here is equal whether you're looking for an album in vim or a gui.

Depends a bit who you're selling to and what you're selling. Governments organisations have special data requirements that are difficult for a small startup to reliably promise, for example. Clients and big brands want reliable phone & tech support for at least a year, and need to know your tech can handle the scale they operate at. There again, you'll need to posture as larger and more stable than you are.

But just because you're at a disadvantage in these types of sales, I still wouldn't recommend misleading anyone, since it's inviting disaster -- I'd suggest choosing products/customers where small is okay.

One time purchases that don't rely on support, upgrades, or workflow changes are easiest for big customers to buy from startups. On the other hand, consumers enjoy supporting small businesses with small purchases, so I think it's always in you radvantage to be honest there.

Jason Cohen's post on this is good and he's far more knowledgable than I: http://blog.asmartbear.com/convert-shortcomings-into-advanta...

Providing a little more detail would help your cause.

SearchYC is dead because there's now a search field at the bottom of every page.

Please stop posting this spam.

4 Steps to the Epiphany by Steve Blank did the trick for me, but a lot of people find it too detailed/boring.

There's an ebook at custdev.com that's meant to cover the same content in a more accessible way, but I don't think it's a good starting place since it assumes you have some knowledge about the concepts. Just googling around and digging into "customer development" is probably a safe starting point, and then grab Steve's book if it resonates w/ the way you think.

I did customer development around a similar idea in London and discarded it. End users (desk seekers) want it, but it's a marketplace and the value proposition for desk sellers is more troubling.

You get useful postings in 1 of 2 ways:

  * You keep the data fresh yourself
  * Office managers keep their own data fresh

In the former case, you need to be making money to continue spending the time beyond its novelty period. In the latter, the office managers need to be getting good value-for-time or some related benefit which is enabled via their site activity.

Of the potential problem office managers care about, you've got:

  1. Dealflow & advertising
  2. Showings & deal closing
  3. Dealing with current tenants

#1 is adequately handled by craigslist/gumtree. I thought it would be a pain point, but the office managers disagree.

#2 is a huge pain, but you can't resolve it without manpower that would require a much more profitable business model than exists here.

#3 is the most promising, and is a legitimate pain point, which is where I decided the most plausible business lay. If you can handle the billing for office managers, then they'll put their desk spaces on your site to be saved the problem of hustling tenants for payments. There are liability issues here, but it's probably a similar model to AirBnb.

This is such BS it's unbelievable.

Beyond the obvious correlation/causation issues, tech city offers startups little direct benefit. The advantages are going to be:

1. Subsidised office/living space converted from olympic village (2013+)

2. More large tech companies to help attract tech talent from E Europe and provide a visible alternative choice to the UK tech grads who primarily go into banking

3. ?

It's hugely unclear what impact this program is going to have. I support it, because I think that making [UK] startups more visible as a career path is a major win. But the developments may also kill the current tech area by raising rent -- the community is there because it's a cheap and fun area for young people.

It's worth noting that this poll has dramatically increased the vote diversity of the new page. I hope that the increased attention will continue -- the new page needs lots more flagging & voting than it currently receives to keep the front page high-quality & diverse.

Currently working on a strategy board game at http://multiplayful.com which is a combination of a collectible card game and Go.

It's very much in development.. core gameplay is in place but missing all the collectible and PvP elements and still only has a tiny bit of single player content.

I would forever adore anyone who helped with single player content (AI campaign mode, puzzles, AI decks), game design (new units, effects, playtesting for balance) and art (units, boards).

The whole frontend is just images and javascript animations, with the backend in django nonrel running on appengine, so there are probably also accessible coding tasks that I could easily make use of as well.

My previous investors always said that the first 1000 signups to any startup should get a personal email from the founder.

I used to send a quick one liner saying I'm rob, thanks for signing up and let me know if there's anything I can help with.

It led to a lot of useful conversations. We already had a running service at the time though, so not 100% sure it transfers to a pure landing page.

For the former, very different investors. Medical, biotech, and agriculture each have their own VC & angel communities.

You can choose to position yourself as a more defensible tech company backed by some patents if the core R&D is already complete, e.g. from your phd. In that case you'd be talking to the tech investors.

Or, if you're going ongoing heavy R&D before market viability, or there are big non-tech infrastructure costs, you're probably going to want to check in with the alternate investor communities.

For example, the UK has big angel networks who invest almost exclusively in product & medical innovations (the same sort of stuff you see on Dragon's Den) and Atlanta has a strong biotech investment community.

No idea about brick & mortar.

Certainly, as long as you can avoid giving board seats and heavy veto privileges to people you consider dumb. You can also bring in more relevant investors in future rounds.

Pass a karma threshold, which raises over time due to karma inflation.

It's at a nice big pub with fancy beer and a stage for live music, so I'd guess it's a social event plus the companies introducing themselves from the stage so you know who to focus your mingling on.

Working at home --> working at cafes Video games --> hobby projects Following my natural social inclinations --> going out most days Developer --> Developer who can do sales & biz

You suggest it to 4-8 of your peers and then go out of your way to make it happen every 1 or 2 weeks in person or on email/skype.

I don't know if the people upvoting looked through the syllabus, course notes, and assignments, but I'm going to go so far as to say this is completely useless, and might even be damaging for a new entrepreneur to read.

The course is divided into 4 sections

  * Valuations
  * VC Deal Structure
  * VC Types & Strategies
  * Exit

The assignments are of the form: 1) read a case study 2) write your thoughts. You will answer inane questions like "What should the pre-money valuation be" and "Would you invest" with arbitrary answers like "$10M" and "Yes", spread over a 2 page memo.

Since it's from 2002, it is missing relevant information on angels, super angels, accelerators, and incubators. The VC market has also significantly changed. It doesn't address bootstrapping.

More importantly, it doesn't touch on how to actually run or think about companies. Spending the time on this will help you understand a few more items on your terms heets and deal packet, but you can also just as easily ask your lawyer or a founder friend when the time comes.

Like everyone here, I've read a lot of stuff about SEO.

I'm not sure exactly why, but this article got me to actually decide to change the way I'm building my sites. All the others I just filed under: "Good to know. I'll use that some day."

You've just made the dozens of hours I've spent reading about this stuff actionable. Thank you.