zmitri

Not a problem. Looking back, I admit it was nice to be able to get "instant" credibility, but if you know you are going to eventually pull the trigger, the sooner the better.

I am definitely not qualified to write that one!

Exactly.

That's fair, but unfortunately that's probably the least important detail of the article. I'm still learning how to write blog posts so I'll take that into consideration in the future. I changed it to reflect the fact that many people, whether right or wrong, would currently assume it's a step up.

I totally agree with you, which is why I tried to list out a bunch of things I noticed. There are lots of different approaches when your job starts to sour, but for me, it wasn't just about finding a new job.

By the way, I was actually describing an extremely successful 20-25 person company.

Well, I thought about it for a while, and realized it wasn't worth it waiting N years to get a green card. I filed a petition to go from H1B status to B2 tourist and asked for 3 months to stay in the country to finish up my affairs. After that I left.

As a Canadian, I may enter the US for up to 6 months at a time without requiring a visa, but am I not allowed to work. So when I do visit, I make sure to only visit friends and I make sure not to do any work. I am currently in Toronto, but next month will be taking a vacation to the USA.

Guido --> Dropbox

Matz --> Heroku

Rasmus --> WePay

Your pricing seems way off (too high). What exactly am I paying for that I couldn't do quite easily?

In the article it mentions neighbors not having to deal with ever changing tenants.

Woah, this is very recent! An article published today: http://betabeat.com/2012/11/david-tisch-techstars-new-york-c...

Out of anyone I've met personally in NYC, Rap Genius dudes seem by far the smartest investment. Hard to make sweeping calls like that until you see numbers, meet the founders, and hear about the vision.

I think a lot of money got thrown around too quickly and now investors are being much more wary. With TechStars NYC going on hiatus, and things like this happening, sounds like trouble ahead in NYC.

Find it more interesting though how critical of consumer products cdixon has been lately in his blog posts, and how founder collective's seed investments seem to be very b2b focused lately, and yet he's going to be dealing with mostly consumer internet it sounds like.

The "virality" of an app is so important and yet overlooked by many first time consumer app creators. Even if you make an absolutely beautiful app, chances are most people won't share from it if you don't focus on that 100%. I am literally redoing flows in my app to get this done now.

I think DrawChat is a beautiful example of how all the flows in the app are focused on getting you to share the content, and close the user feedback loop.

Who is the CEO? I thought Tikhon was, but he is gone from the team page https://parse.com/about/team

Here's a youtube video from 2010 of almost exactly the same presentation he gave at startup school http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-LBSqm3xh4

If you need to be assured that it's the same talk, here's a live blog from sus2012 http://backspac.es/r/Xx8736cUap

I tried to summarize it here http://backspac.es/r/Xx8736cUap

Supposedly he gave a very similar talk in 2009 and it's somewhere on youtube.

For those who weren't there, Trello was funded by Fog Creek employees investing their bonuses into developing the product.

I thought his slides also added a lot. Very straight forward and clear -- he almost didn't need to speak.

I totally agree. Her talk was by far the most practical, and provided serious actionable advice. I really liked it!

I also agree that Travis was probably the only one who didn't give much insight or advice into entrepreneurship, which was unfortunate.

I tried to summarize most of them here if you don't want to watch video http://www.backspac.es/tag/sus2012

PS. Scoble tried to ask Ron if he would still invest in Highlight

Here's a summary I made with backspaces:

http://backspac.es/r/Xx8736cUap

also more at http://backspac.es/tag/sus2012

Thanks. I totally see it. Will have a think on alternative designs.

Backspaces (http://backspac.es). It's the app you're looking at it with. If you want to be more specific about what makes it unclear I would love if you emailed me at dmitri at backspac.es and let me know.

Definitely true. It's pretty cool to think back and imagine gas companies, airlines, or basically anything that has now been commoditized on an industrial scale and imagine them being built as a two or three person team. I'd love to read a book on it, although I wouldn't be surprised if most of them were started by wealthy land owners or government sponsored undertakings in the first place. That other private bus line article on the front page looks interesting.

C-x C-c I believe

Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer :)

It's crazy seeing this, after just reading this

http://www.quora.com/PayPal/What-strong-beliefs-on-culture-f...

Congrats Lemon. Ben and Marc are both ridiculous Gs in their own right, and I'm glad you guys hooked it up.

We once had 2 links on HN front page for http://backspac.es for the better part of a day -- although neither made it to number one spot -- running only 1 dyno. Something like 18K uniques.

Also had two techcrunch posts about something I made (http://venturecrapital.us) running on a single micro ec2. tornado + nginx + mongodb and proper indexes go a long way. Similar traffic.

THIS. Referrals are how all great freelancers I know work. Word spreads very quickly if you produce quality work in a reasonable time frame and have solid estimation skills.

I agree, there are a lot of people who don't learn that well like that. Visual programming makes it a bit more approachable but whether or not it helps learn beyond the first couple lessons (or is overkill) -- I'm not sure. With a lot of these early concepts I feel like just getting one or two reference points can start a snowball effect. Eg. Tell a philosophy student that object orientation is like Plato's Theory of Forms.

From personal experience however I still would argue that just building something is the surest way to go because it requires you to follow through.

After about 2 years of programming full time, I started to develop a sense of why and when things would go wrong up and down the stack, and I don't really think it's something you can teach. It's something you get from loads of accumulated practice -- eg. Oh that's how indices work in Oracle vs MySQL, dynamic proxies on Groovy methods don't work when called from Java, I just built this but now I see I can refactor and save tons of code next time, what are kwargs in python, etc.

I've tested out little one offs like try mongodb, try redis, or interactive js tutorials, but I forget what I've just learned until I need to build something on my own.

Cool demos, but very long article for what I thought he was trying to express. Bunch of thoughts, I enjoy thinking about this, so would love some conversation around any of the points:

If programming is a way of thinking/problem solving, I'm not sure how supplying the context in line teaches you how to think -- as opposed to sitting down and figuring out a problem on your own.

My experience has been that the best way to learn to program is to try something out for yourself. Whether you write it from scratch or use example code to help you get started. It takes a bit of time, but you get better at it.

You need to be able to sit down and spend the time thinking to solve a problem. It's actually quite hard to teach this even in school -- I honestly believe that the main advantage to taking a CS degree over using the internet to learn is that you are actually are forced to group together and work on projects whereas a self study course would not enforce that.

Often the best way to make something more mainstream is to "dumb it down". I don't think it's because most people aren't intelligent enough, it's because it needs to have mass appeal, and therefore needs to interest a wide range of people. Doing this with programming is quite hard if programming is a way of thinking -- how can you "dumb down" a way of thinking to make it more appealing when a lot of programming is dealing with detail.

The thing about flow, if/for statements, is that you tend to master them very quickly. While the visualizations are cool, they have very little usage beyond the first 3 or 4 lessons.

Very interesting examples, but I don't see these examples helping out much more than other sites (I agree that sites that CodeAcademy aren't at all how the press/Mayor Bloomberg/TechCrunch makes them out to be).

I upvoted this the first time I read this for your point on risk aversion.

The thing that I disagree with is that people move to the US to make more money. I had a job that paid very well in the US and there's a very good chance I would have made much more doing that than starting my own company.

The US is often years ahead in design, advertising, the latest tech trends, etc. American brands are more likely to try new things out/it's easier to reach larger scale adoption more easily. Through out my life I have always waited for American products/chains/innovations (no matter how novel -- Easy Mac, Yogurt Tubes, MTV, Old Navy) to make it up to Canada. In my opinion those are definitely reasons to move to the US.

So much of starting/running your own thing is dealing with mental blocks. When you are around more people who are breaking through those blocks, or have done so before you, it's quite advantageous.