smwhreyebelong

Can you provide more detail on where the NYC-startup scene is ? (Where could one meet people working in these startups ?)

I am new to the whole NYC startup scene. Which, according to you, are some of the cool startups in NYC ? Also, are there any NYC-startup specific news sources ?

+1

I have realized that having an overview of what's on the agenda aka the bullet points is the most helpful thing. Just talking about those bullet points instead of reading from a script makes the presentation more of an engaging/interactive conversation with the audience rather than a prepared speech/lecture.

Humor is a great strategy. Once you have people laughing, you can get away with a few minor hiccups.

It reminds me of a rafting trip I took. The buses being used to transport us from the office to the rafting location were really old and almost falling apart. The guides had a brilliant story about how the buses went from high schools->some backwater in mexico->some other really random places and were finally bought by the rafting company. The funny story had people laughing all the way there than crib about how crappy the buses were.

I second that. I have found that I learn things faster (and they 'stick' better) when I work on something that I find interesting/cool.

The other benefit of working on it is that you really relate to the problem you are trying to solve (since you will be the first user) and you might end up creating a viable product for a niche. There are tons of startups that started this way (one example is hotmail, where the founders needed a way to access their email from multiple locations)

I agree that it's all keyword based. I think it's because machines can only capture the objective factors of a job search. Things like : "will you get along with the team", do you like the people you'd be working with, etc are very subjective and not easily captured by computers.

Meeting people at events, getting recommendations from other people you trust allow one to evaluate the position at a much more subjective level and make an estimation of the human-elements of working at the startup.

HN "Who's hiring", linkedin jobs, even craigslist.

My personal experience with recruiters has not been as good as I would have liked. The recruiters I dealt with mostly did keyword searches on technologies and experience (e.g C++ dev with 3 yrs of experience) ignoring the other skills (teamwork, passion, how excited the person is about the company, etc.) Most recruiters use means that the companies themselves could use(LinkedIn, job boards, etc.) If the founders of the startup are not willing to invest time to find the talent and rather pay hefty fees to the recruiters, not sure if I would want to work for that startup anyway.

The ideal company would be one that you just "come across" than go out looking. For example, a product you heard about somewhere that got you really excited, or an idea that you had and while searching for who is working in that space, you find a company that was doing something very similar.

I had thought about a variation of #2 at some point but I've been too busy to implement anything.

They used to. Yahoo! used to be a great company for an engineer to work for. Given what they have been doing lately, it seems the focus has changed from being a tech company to a media company. In fact, it all probably changed when Terry was brought in to run the company and he wanted to focus on digital media.

There's a lot of small intangible things that go in to making a huge successful company. The core employees "wanting" to work at the company (as compared to just collecting a paycheck) is one of the most imporant ones.

It depends. Ben horowitz wrote a blog post recently on why they prefer founding CEOs :

http://bhorowitz.com/2010/04/28/why-we-prefer-founding-ceos/

I think it's a great idea. Are you sure you want to give up on it ? Why do you call it a failure ? I wouldn't call having 7000 users a failure. You have plenty of room to grow.

Let me know if you want feedback. One reason a lot of people trying to learn a new language give up is because of lack of motivation after a while / not finding people to converse/practice/learn with (and I talk from first-hand experience)

Well, of all the jobs I could like, I narrowed it down to two. And of those two, only one of them made the offer. So even though I liked the position at first, I wasn't so sure after I was done with the interviews.

I think I'll give the team another shot and try to talk to a senior person about what I would be doing and what my role and responsibilities will be.

Funny you say that. pg used an inverse-inverse title for his 2007 Startup School talk. It was titled :"Why to Not Not start a startup"

http://www.paulgraham.com/notnot.html

I agree it's all about priorities. Once you live in the city and get used to the hustle-bustle and the fast paced life where most things are close-by and you can walk to most places or take public transit, it becomes part of your system.

I've lived in cities most of my life and when I had to live in the suburbs once, it was very hard to adjust to the quiet at first. Not seeing a lot of people walking around, going about their lives made me feel something was missing. The mobility and being able to use your feet as the primary means of transport was something I missed dearly.

I once worked for a well-oiled corporate team. It was actually a startup team acquired by the big company. That was the best work experience I have had so far. The team members got along really well and everyone worked really hard and was at the top of their game.

I have worked at a few other companies since then (big co, small well funded team at medium co, small co) but haven't found anything quite like that experience. I guess that's why it was a successful team: people were really productive and looked forward to coming to work, truly enjoying the work environment.

EDIT: The team knew where they were going and what the priorities were. The clarity of vision and enthusiasm goes a VERY long way towards creating a winning team.

Can you elaborate ? I have been in similar situations before where the organization didn't have a purpose and the strictly top-down management didn't have that much experience to know that they were headed down the wrong path (even when the employees told them so)

It was pretty hard to motivate oneself in that environment. Even when you tell yourself that you have a purpose and try to do your best, you always know what the reality is.

This product could have had a lot of potential had Yahoo! realized what it was worth. For starters, an analytics package could have benefited a lot from this service.

It seems to me that Yahoo!, in it's rush to figure out how to compete and what to do with the traffic is not prioritizing the products that might position it favorably in the future.

The google tech talk on CouchDB talks about this problem :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESDBM9-U804

54:14 in, someone asks a similar question

You can permute the capitalization of the words in the dictionary, and the random characters as well ..

A better approach might be to define overriding classes and include different stylesheets.

I coul have a .sidebar class styled one way in one stylesheet (say base-stylesheet) and the same .sidebar class styled another way in another stylesheet (skin-stylesheet).

This is a much better way of skinning things than using the other approach where you have to modify the markup and add a new class for every new skin/page. In the overriding case, one has to make sure to load the stylesheets in a specific order.

I think the community will auto-correct and weed out the reviewers who are not sincere. For example, if a user buys something based on Amazon reviews (of a Vine member, say), and discovers that the review was insincere, he/she will most likely go to Amazon and give a negative rating to the member/particular review, which will probably feed back into the Vine members reputation, which will in turn be used to determine eligibility for the Vine program.

Agreed that it'll take a while for the system to reach the critical mass, it is, nonetheless, a system that will work very well after it reaches the tipping point.

I remember seeing the service and asking you why one wouldn't just go to Mechanical Turk.

Another hidden lesson : Making something very simple to use (and adding a polished UI) can be a winning formula.

Smart idea, I say.

The other thing was availability of good projects to work on for the languages.

For objC, I can think of a few iPhone apps I could work on to learn the platform. For things like PHP, Rails, Scala (where you'll need a good amount of traffic to really excel at them and get real world experience beyond some small hello-world-like web-apps), how does one get involved with the complicated/ involved stuff ?

I wanna start my own thing in a couple of years. I am doing a bunch of Javascript/HTML/CSS at work.

Agreed that putting their own search results at the top might be considered non-democratic, but if one searches specifically for one of their most recent and supposedly awesome product they will promote and billions of people might end up using, one would expect that would be the first search result at their search engine. Apparently not!

I believe it depends on the situation. Most cases, a little bit of research beforehand almost always helps.

When you go to the expert, you can talk about what you've found so far and how you think you should proceed. This tells the expert that he is not spoon feeding you.

It also makes the discussion more interesting since you are coming to the table with your ideas and trying to refine them using the expert's knowledge, which, I have found, is the best way of learning: finding out what an expert would do if he were in your shoes.

x.innerHTML is a DOM operation too. I would think you want to differentiate between doing an "innerHTML" operation and "other DOM operations"

That said, constructing HTML as a string and using one innerHTML call is much faster than doing createNode/appendChild multiple times. DOM operations are definitely the bottleneck when it comes to performance : The less of them you do, the better off you are. (I learnt my lesson the hard way)

Also, in some cases, the inventor / creator might miss a huge opportunity which other resourceful salesmen might see.

Take the example of fingerworks. They were making touchpads, touch-keyboards, etc before Apple came along and used that technology to create one of the most popular products in the market right now : the iPhone

The bay area will provide you all the things you mention and more. It depends on what you are looking for.

The main advantage of the bay area is ofcourse the people, the collective knowledge, and the culture. You learn so much from other creative and smart people and bouncing ideas off of them (if you meet the right people, that is). On the other hand, it is very competitive out there and very tech centric so you can sometimes lose touch with the 'real world', so to say.

I have lived on both the East and the West coast and although I like the lifestyle in the east better, the west coast is the place to be if you are doing technology (the bleeding edge). You'll learn how the big guys do stuff and learn some valuable lessons that you can then use wherever you go (even if you don't end up living there longer term)

On another note, how is the startup scene in london ? My impression of it is that a lot of the startups are more business-centric (like on the US east coast) than tech-centric whereas it's quite the opposite in the valley.

thanks for the advice, everyone. Wordpress it's going to be, to begin