Category: Building a business
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Don’t blame Twitter. Platforms are hard (re-posted from Rainbow Hat Guy)
Dalton Caldwell has really stirred the pot about Twitter failing the Tim Berners-Lee vision of an open web by abandoning their platform strategy, failing to be data portable, and accepting ads as a business model. I wish him luck as he embarks on his journey with app.net to right those wrongs, but the truth is that Twitter […]
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Building consumer tools instead of consumer products (re-posted from Rainbow Hat Guy)
I want to be able to simplify the interactions I have in a given day to a single purpose. As an example, I’d like to claim that the hammer is there to work with nails. But the hammer isn’t that simple of a product. Similarly when people ask me what’s the purpose of a given […]
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What happened to AboutMyDive.com?
I wanted to do a post-mortem on aboutmydive.com. This was my first attempt at building something that I hoped would become more than a project. It didn’t, and I think it failed for a few simple reasons that I wanted to share here. 1) No audience interest I thought that because I wanted to log […]
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Prices that don’t race to zero (re-posted from Rainbow Hat Guy)
An old friend and I had dinner the other night, and he told me that a friend of his was starting a company focused on rating the customer service of online sites. Why? E-commerce sites can no longer compete on price or shipping, and so customer service has become the new frontier. That’s a fascinating […]
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End of life for Rainbow Hat Guy
I’m killing off the Rainbow Hat Guy persona, and will bring over my favorite posts from that site to this one. I’d like to write more, and that’s going to take focus, and a single point of expression. Focus seems to be a theme generally in life these days, and I’m going to be really […]
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Dependent independence
It’s a very weird time in Amelia Rose’s development right now, and it translates very well to where I feel I am as well professionally. Amelia refuses to sit still. The energizer bunny has nothing on her (plus his insides aren’t on the outside either). However neither walking nor crawling have been mastered. As a […]
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Trying to get to “just right”
Hunch co-founder Chris Dixon wrote a blog post about the “Goldilocks Principle“, and how it affected their relationship with customers as Hunch pivoted from a B2C to B2B offering. Hunch was in the position of being “too hot”. I think that OpenTok is still in a position of being… not “too cold”, but I’d revise […]
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It’s not okay to say nothing
I found out today how important it is to be vocal when you really believe in something. First some background: I believe that the reason that TokBox is successful right now is because we’ve built the right culture. Hiring in the Valley is a bitch, and if you aren’t careful, then you’ll hire anyone out […]
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Don’t yell in email; it doesn’t work
I’m on a soccer team that is a mix between very serious, competitive folks (about a third) and folks who are just out there playing because they want to exercise, have some fun and the like. It’s tough to be on the more serious end because you end up getting extremely frustrated by the folks […]
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Hustling
I can’t quite put my finger on why, but Friday was an amazing day. A lot of pretty large projects finally came together, and I really feel like came to a conclusion. Finish lines are too damn difficult to find in their own right, but when you cross two or three together at the same […]