Redhat, people care about you. Focus on those who take care of you the most. For many of us that is family, but if not family, your friends away from startupland. If not them, we'll help. You never forfeit any option, especially when you keep yourself healthy.
What people don't understand is, patents legally are valued under the legal standard of roughly 'patents that win in court are real patents, those that lose, are not' This means that patents MUST be defended to even really be a patent. This means that, this scenario is almost automatic when a company like Facebook comes up for IPO. Facebook is one of those companies that essentially is 'The Internet' in 2012 on the timeline of companies that have held that title, (Yahoo, Google, Facebook).
This lawsuit will be settled, and then Facebook, Apple, Yahoo-Alibaba, Microsoft, AOL, and everyone else will resume the world war against Google.
Amateur hour in some of the analysis in these articles.
Product guy really boils down to Generalist vs Specialist. Maybe it is 'Versatilist.'
The product person can't be an expert in for example, cryptography, and simultaneously be an expert in photo filter technology, and also the 100 other things that the product needs.
The end product might need all these things, and need specialists on maybe 5-10 of the items. The product person needs to be able to understand how all of them work, and make an end product that has market potential.
A product person can build products on their own if they have to. They are just better and faster when they have a team. If you can't do it on your own, you're probably not a real product person.
Other firms attempting to recruit your people is a sign you've hired good people. Also, a sense that employees have a choice of where to work, and you'll do the best you can to make your company a great place to work is also good.
I think tone matters in blogs like these, and I think the HN community appreciates the positive portrayal of things over bravado. Maybe your original post flowed naturally to you. If so that is ok, but I think you would have had more success with the post had it been more observational instead of confrontational. To each his own.
Best of luck with fab, it is a great company/site.
Retaining great people is something you earn. You don't earn it by daring you hope others attempt to poach your employees to test their devotion. You're a startup, not a religion.
When someone who was really awesome leaves, takes five great people with them right when you've hit a rough patch, you will regret the hubris in writing something like this.
Every company gets contacted by recruiters to the point where you finding it novel to write about makes you look like an amateur.
Mr. Bloomberg, please continue full speed ahead on technology innovation in New York.
The statement that the day is coming that people will not remember that New York was not the #1 tech hub in the world goes beyond just achieving #1 status. Your belief that New York could outpace Silicon Valley at such a pace demonstrates that you either really don't understand the level to which Silicon Valley is established, or you misspoke.
Techstars coming to your city is the equivalent of five movies being filmed in New York and declaring that Hollywood was soon on the way to being the second city of movies. Cool your ego, and maybe you'll have a shot at establishing yourself as the #2 tech hub a generation from now.
Exactly. The end of the PC era doesn't give rise to the 'iPad era,' it gives rise to Ubiquitous computing, and Apple knows this.
The trajectory goes:
mainframe: one computer, many people
personal computer: one computer, one person
ubiquitous computing: many computers to many people
If anything, people are going to be programming the shit out of everything in the future, not pulling back.
I'm undecided about "visualizing the movie they make about you." I think every startuper who has seen "The Social Network" or "Pirates of the Silicon Valley" has done this.
However, I'm leaning on considering it an anti pattern because it borders on a pathological amount of ego.
A better rubric in my mind is, "Can I picture this person in my daily life, for the next decade?" as a slightly more sane variant of this test.
This article makes several valid points, but the overall 'hook' or theme doesn't really make sense. Steve Jobs was very nostalgic, greenlighting the original 'think different' campaign profiling historical figures, and more recently the iconic advertising featuring The Beatles, which apple worked so long to get into iTunes.
There are also valid points made about the manufacturing situation in China, but he did not explore any real counterargument. The factory jobs in China are not perfect, but do we know if those workers are fundamentally opposed to it? China tried to avoid this type of capitalistic society for a generation, and was not happy with the results. I think it is fair to critique the standards of the factories, but without providing an alternative solution to lifting a billion people into prosperity, I think it was kind of a low blow against Steve in the article given the timing.
I think the post was a decent attempt to do something similar to OKcupid's insightful blogs.
The difference is that okcupid had data in their database that is deep, and the team has a bunch of MIT math guys, if I recall correctly.
I'm not sure about Uber, but I'm guessing to write this post they had to go out looking for this information, rather than infer it from their primary data. Still a decent post, but realize the objective here was to market Uber, and the rest makes sense.
The problem with this post has always been it starts out from the outset with a title that implicitly puts down a large segment of students.
Had Joel dug deeper into how someone could solve this problem for themselves, rather than brush off those who learned in this environment, this post would have been great. Instead, it comes off elitist and dogmatic.
Pricing them at $99 with the current inventory amounts to almost a hundred million dollars in what would have been losses to establish a beachhead.
Except, there is no beachhead to be established here. Its not like the kindle because HP has no track record in selling media like Amazon, and its not like the iPad because they don't have the vertical integration like apple does, and its not like android because they don't have the massive advertising business to 'justify it.'
The only way to justify this was to stick it out long term and build a profitable product, and they chose not to. I still think it may have been a big mistake, but $99 bucks isn't a strategy.
It is interesting the level of poker these tech firms are starting to play with each other.
We don't see these announcements playing out the way they would have in the gogo 90's, but the magnitude of these deals are equal or bigger, and have more meaning in the long term than what we saw in the last tech boom.
I never understood why ripping this experiment off was novel. If I put a 100 dollar bill on the street and said "take it, and do something charitable with it," and you subsequently took it, and then bought two handles of liquor and called it a day, why should I find you interesting?
The whole experiments novelty is how about accessible the money is, so who cares that you can run some script and rip it off?
Really just seems like they're adding fuel to the fire. Its kind of a boneheaded move, as people will just organize the old fashioned way the next time around.
I don't think anyone had that feeling when the deal fell through. Many people were surprised Google was interested in the first place. Google had to consider the deal, after all Groupon was buying shit tons of advertising on Google at the time.
If you're company realizes a certain scale on the internet (i.e. a billion dollar valuation) there is a good chance the deal is going to get looked at by all the big consumer tech firms.
Groupon walked in to the negotiations with a publicly speculated valuation of 1B, and after the deal fell through they were being talked about somewhere greater than 5B, and got an extra investment from DST. Seems like negotiating with Google worked out well for them in that respect.
Notice how Andrew Mason never answers the question publicly about why they 'walked away' from Google.
This is pretty simplistic thinking. For all you know Groupon wanted the deal badly, Google walked away from the deal, and both parties agreed to go with the story that Groupon walked away so that it wouldn't kill their prospects of an IPO.