Archive for the 'Entrepreneurship' Category
YCombinator Application Guide
July 20th, 2008YCombinator, a kind of mini- venture capital firm, invests tens of thousands of dollars ($$$) into very early seed stage start-up companies run by smart technology hackers.
I applied to YCombinator two times. The first time, when I applied with my friend Mason for the Summer 2007 round, I arrogantly presumed that Paul would lavish on [...]
TipJoy ingeniously simplifies and enables micro-payments
April 20th, 2008I have already written about my distaste for advertising.
Sometimes, however, these newspapers and blogs manage to make something of value. A particularly hard-hitting expose in a newspaper, or a particularly helpful guide in a blog, offers to people real value. Nobody can create this kind of content every day, or probably even every [...]
Untenable advertising
April 8th, 2008Ads annoy me. Ads annoy everyone.
More importantly, I cannot envision building a serious business which depends on these kinds of banner ads, or even text-link ads. But many websites do: TechCrunch, Project Wedding, Reddit, MightyQuiz, Justin.TV, Scribd, Loopt, and so on.
I use many websites online every week. Many provide a lot of [...]
Stanford’s Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Series (now on your iPhone!)
April 5th, 2008The Stanford Technology Ventures Program runs a well-developed incubator for tech businesses at Stanford University.
STVP offers some very cool resources free to the world. For example, I have been listening to their Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders audio podcast. The program brings in some of the greatest entrepreneurial forces in Silicon Valley today. Some [...]
Tiles
November 21st, 2007When someone searches for your name on Google, you don’t know what they might find. They might find an article or two in which you were featured, or they might find a random post you made to an open source project. Or, they might find someone else and not know he is not [...]
Returns year 2
November 18th, 2007I bought and held QID for a few weeks until the NASDAQ dropped. QID is a twice leveraged short of the NASDAQ. The NASDAQ was overpriced, I made an easy eleven percent.
But I want to ensure that I’m actually doing well, and that ostensible success is not due just to availability bias. [...]
Catch-22 Videos
October 31st, 2007I am reading Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 again. It’s hilarious. As I read through Yossarian’s attention-deficit narrative, I can hear his dry, serious voice, “They’re trying to kill me.” I can see the insane soldiers scurrying through abrupt transitions. I can imagine hilarious shorts made from each chapter of the book.
Traditional media [...]
What would you do if you were fabulously wealthy
October 13th, 2007From a NextJump survey:
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12. Visualize a rosy scenario where the company you are working for goes through a wildly profitable public offering, and you personally make enough money from your equity share to enjoy lifetime financial independence. Freed from the need to hold down a job just to meet the financial obligations of your chosen [...]
Orders of Magnitude
October 7th, 2007Never go for the 1% or 2% or even 10% improvements. Although these improvements require time and effort to achieve and maintain, these small gains are tiny, often imperceptible, to a person.
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I want to work
October 3rd, 2007I want to do some work for someone else. Even if I work on just one project in a month, just a few hours, I would love to make just a little bit of money to pay for my food.
While I would be able to do any job very well, I think I can [...]