The question that got me to leave Seattle for greener startup pastures
From Futuristic Play by @Andrew_Chen Seattle is a great tech city Since I was 5 years old until 4 years after college, I called Seattle my home, and technology was intertwined with my childhood. As a kid, I found lots of avenues to my formative years in computing, including access to gopher and telnet via Seattle Community Network, the pre-web BBS scene

Adding design to an agile development process
From Futuristic Play by @Andrew_Chen Upfront design and agile don’t mix well It’s an interesting problem to try and mix traditional design tasks – visual polish, user research testing, etc. – to an agile development process. A weekly development cycle doesn’t leave much room for several iterations of mockups, the immense effort of recruiting and interviewing users, and all these other important tasks. Anyway, I was sent this recent link I’d encourage you to

Why my blogging has sucked lately :)
From Futuristic Play by @Andrew_Chen I’ve been blogging less and less As many of my readers may have noticed, I’ve been blogging less and less lately – it used to be multiple times a week, then it became once a week, and recently I’ve been blogging once every other week or so. I’m sure I can keep up that pace for quite a while, but it certainly makes for a less interesting blog

The necessity of early stage valuations
From Tony Wright dot com A friend/contrarian Tweeted the following that I though was worth a discussion (the 140 character limit of Twitter quickly got too painful for me). “What’s wrong with this world: Twitter is making $4mil per year yet is valued at $1bil. #newmath” I think this is an important thing to talk about– it’s certainly something that would have resonated with me before I raised money from investors, but now falls pretty flat. I have two quick points to make about it, then I’ll wait for Marina to attack me in the comments. 1. Valuation does NOT equ

The importance of institutional redundancy
From cdixon.org Every system built by a single institution has points of failure that can bring the entire system down.  Even in organizations that have tried hard for internal redundancy – for example, Google and Amazon have extremely distributed infrastructures – there will always be system-wide shared components, architectures, or assumptions that are flawed.  The only way to guarantee there aren’t is to set up completely separate, competing organizations – in other words, new institutions. This insight has practical implications when building internet services.  One thing I learned from my