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Sweet game! Nicely made.

The story about the text-only website made me smile.. would have loved to see the numbers!

Going to give adwords another shot.

you should have a landing page with an email sign up form that you can link people to.

> If you place stock in the notion that ideas are worthless without execution, paying money to inherit someone else's unsuccessful idea that they lost interest in will only appeal to software developers that have no ideas or inspirations of their own.

Actually, paying $x to acquire someone else's product, try your hand at marketing it, and failing fast for yourself could be an absolute god-send for non-technical founders who waste months/years trying to outsource development or find technical cofounders to execute on a mediocre idea that has been done 100 times before. Now that I think of it, just having this marketplace and being able to see what's been attempted before will hopefully increase the quality of startups that make it to the product stage in the first place. That will be welcome: a lot of talent / energy today is wasted building things that are doomed to fail from the get-go.

We kill most of our ideas when they should be killed: as ideas. Paying $20-1000 to buy a packaged product that lets us test some of our hypotheses immediately is a nice option to have. Thumbs up from me for this reason.

I could also see brilliant developers who love building things using this as a means to connect with brilliant hustlers looking for things to sell/market. Maybe it will be a long time before any individual side project bought from here gets to itself be a major product (and maybe not!), but there's an entire spectrum in between that still adds value to the ecosystem: this could be a very interesting way for cofounders to serendipitously connect based on mutual interest, and of course it's a gold-mine for potential employers and head-hunters.

Edit: I think it's disingenuous to suggest that a side project is a "baby" and should not be abandoned, or if it is it should necessarily be open sourced. A product may be of commercial value but someone doesn't want to pursue because they have no ability to market it, or their interests changed, or they stumbled upon an even more profitable idea that is taking up all their attention, or they got a job at Google, etc etc.

this is a silly comment. democratic process != majority rule. My point was precisely that by democratizing access to information, technology helps the public form an informed opinion.

If digital locks are treated as physical locks, a warrant would compel you to decrypt your files. If you refuse, that is obstruction of justice. Also, correct me if I'm wrong but I think there are few forms of commercially available encryption the government could not crack given time + resources, which a warrant would provide.

no. the correct phrasing for the current of thought you reference would be "we refuse to submit to undemocratic/unconstitutional restrictions on the democratic process and will attempt to overturn the administrative consensus through technology". The majority of the time this comes through democratizing access to information, thus raising awareness and allowing the democratic process to work as designed.

> it is not the US Government's responsibility to secure them

no-one is asking the USG to secure anything (though it seems happy to jump in and do so when it suits other objectives) - the issue is direct, willful, and secret violation of human rights considered inalienable by the USG itself.

I agree with abraininavat; your perspective is an unfortunate one. Or you're being disingenuous. Roman empire and world peace? The Roman empire a) was at constant war, and b) governed over a tiny sliver of the world. And "keep a few guns in reserve just in case" != more military spending than next 20 countries combined; massive spying on allies, enemies, and citizens alike; etc.

Task management, GTD, etc. helps but honestly, that level of productivity is somewhat of a prerequisite - it confers no advantage when playing ball with the big boys.

to me, "burnout" is about staying too productive for too long. i personally work to prevent that through disciplined unproductivity: i force myself to have down-time, get enough sleep, exercise as much as possible, i've even picked up reading books again and watch the occasional TV show. a good significant other also should help keep things in balance - and perspective.

this is a marathon not a sprint - and it's never as easy as it looks on techcrunch. ever. not only that, but a large part of the value you derive at a startup should be from the journey and not just the destination - don't forget it's the meandering off the beaten path that often yields unexpectedly huge rewards. keeping these axioms in mind every step of the way helps big time.

it helps to be doing this "startup thing" for the right reasons (there's nothing else you'd rather be doing - or could be doing), rather than to make money. it also helps to have an amazing team you love spending time with, complex problems you love solving, and good customers you love talking to.

what is most interesting to me is doing multivariate testing well enough to tell us "what we don't know we don't know".

not interested in traditional a/b testing, it has been done to death and there are many software tools that make execution easy.

but.. this isn't anywhere near a new idea.. Weather HD, now Clear Day, is by a team in Egypt and has been doing the animated weather thing for years: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/clear-day-formerly-weather/i...

this is not accurate. OP is referring to multiple _writings_ of the Quran, which is in fact something you'd be flogged for suggesting in most Muslim countries. The accepted dogma is that the words of the Quran have been protected from changes despite its oral nature, thus making the message more pure than that of the texts before it. also important to note is that translated versions of the Quran are not approved for worship - everyone must use the native Arabic. this does help ensure continuity in words if not meaning.

This post gave me a headache. I guess yelling BLACK! WHITE! When something is a drab gray gets page views, but don't people get tired of having the same arguments? Incidentally, I think engineering culture is very important- the trick is to have engineering permeate and bolster strong sales and marketing, not to handicap one in favor of the other.

Your example of china (where google sacrificed profit in order to stay true to their ideals of openness) destroys the rest of your argument. "1.3 billion Chinese" are living in a censored Internet, that is a far greater tragedy than how an public corporation chooses to prioritize feature requests.

This. The US patent system rewards the same kind of "innovation" as the financial sector did pre-subprime. Look at the introduction rate of new drugs vs derivatives of old (and about to expire) drugs over the past decades to see what I mean. The argument that "if drugs were cheaper (=they saved more lives) pharma r&d would crumble" is facetious and speaks volumes about the priorities of the individual making the argument.

this is cool (and a nice endorsement), but our belief is that true killer applications will be multi-platform (which may include Glass's future competitors). We see Glass as a natural extension of the mobile web, not a closed garden by itself. Glass applications need to be able to tie into the lives we (and our friends) are already living. Given the adoption curve of most (non-Apple) tech gadgets, it's difficult to see Glass-only applications achieving sustainable revenue for their creators, which in turn makes it difficult to see this Glass fund as anything other than outsourced R&D - as in "let's have devs throw spaghetti at the wall and buy the ones that stick". Not much wrong with that, I just didn't think it was a16z's style. don't get me wrong: we love Glass, are spec'ing out multiple Glass-ready projects, and can't wait to get our hands on our dev units, but we believe sustainable businesses must be built on more than one pillar. If you decide to take the myopic approach, just be aware that your startup becomes but one roll in someone else's roulette game.

thanks for posting this Kevin. definitely a conversation that needs to happen out in the open.

Simple living and minimizing material possessions is absolutely a philosophy, and an increasingly popular one at that. Im not sure how you argue otherwise.

Affirm saves the user from entering cc info on mobile - a pain for many reasons. Just like PayPal on web.

Your reply here has limited applicability to Affirm. Max is using a user's digital identity to assure them credit- he'd never be able to do that with an "unbanked" customer who by definition would have quite a limited history.

Everyone from McKinsey to Accenture makes the same mistake.

Have you been on an airline recently? Clumsily regulated oligopolies tend to cause races to the bottom in terms of service and hikes to the top in terms of taxes/fees. No, airlines and ecommerce do not share the same destiny. That said: amazon is just another middle man- it's a marketplace with better information/ reliability. extrapolating competition into the future, other equally trusted marketplaces will arise. Amazons benefits of scale are not infinite, and I don't think amazons competitors need to reach her total scale before having similar cost structures. Tl;dr- don't count out competition yet, I doubt ANYTHING on the Internet is "winner take all..forever".

Very nice..!! Although to be fair the concept of deal sites has always partially included yield mgmt (running deals in winter, or restricting use to weekdays, etc).. Not to mention in the industries wherein reservation platforms are prevalent (open table, styleseat), deals tend not to be at all. Will be interesting to see how they solve the optics issue inherent in deals and how that usually conflicts with the aspirational leanings of most reservation platforms (and more importantly those of their users).

Best of luck with this, Max, Dan, Sam, & co! The state of US immigration laws is disastrous, and getting the govmt to do anything is like steering a cruise ship. Will parking one 12mi offshore be a wake up call?

This is an important philosophical question: should humans become better at communicating in machine-parseable ways, or should machines become better at parsing human communication?

It's so a) they get all you and your friends' social data, b) they can prefill your signup form and 3) to make sharing easier and friction-free.

A) not true, the API releases "primary email" which is usually NOT facebook. and B) even if it were that's why you check and verify: if u pull a @fb address don't save it, just prompt the user.

To me as both an app user and developer, single sign on feels like the Right Thing To Do. I'm sick of running through the same sign up flow for every single service I use, like a hamster wheel. Maybe the solution isn't fb, it's some kind of apple or google SSO? Why aren't AAPL and GOOG pushing their own SSO hard on the mobile ecosystems they control?

it's very wrong. take a look at the latest batch of 500.co or YC or AngelList. compare # of companies gunning for AMZN and ecommerce compared to those gearing up to build phones and tablets. if i was apple i'd rather compete against HTC armed with margin than the hordes of YC. the article implies Amazon's scorched earth approach is preferable to Apple's continuing innovation. braindead if u ask me.

amzn see themselves as an infrastructure company, their legacy ecommerce business is being kept at low margin precisely because they're unable to innovate further. aapl keeps selling at high margins because they're building differentiated products. this junk argument is getting tired.