May 2012
4 posts
How to Identify Talent
I’m blessed with a huge and growing network of people with extremely high levels of talent. This explains how I identify them. My current endeavor is an experiment with six such people, and I must say it’s working extremely well.
In 2009, Paul Graham (aka PG) wrote an essay called The Anatomy of Determination. The essay was republished in the book Hackers and Painters. Like pretty...
“In most domains, talent is overrated compared to determination—partly because it...”
– Paul Graham’s essay, The Anatomy of Determination
April 2012
6 posts
“As far as the iOS library integration process, your SDK is quite easy to use. I...”
– an early keen.io user (via keenio)
“3. Use short words, short sentences and short paragraphs.
…
5. Never...”
– David Ogilvy, 10 Tips on Writing from David Ogilvy
“Small but consistent investments in transparency, relationship development and...”
– Chris Devore, What does transparency buy you?
“If you are a startup building a SaaS product, you have two paths. On one side,...”
– Mark Birch, Vendor Transparency and Future of Enterprise SaaS Sales
March 2012
6 posts
1 tag
If you're an oddball, be genuine
If you’re an oddball, be genuine, because there are people out there who believe in oddballs, and you don’t want to camouflage yourself from them!
I’m one of them. And if I believe in you, I want to help you succeed - and if I’m being honest, it’s not just out of personal loyalty or altruism, but because your success will serve as vindication of my faith that the...
“Replication of code sequences isn’t life, any more than replication of...”
– George Dyson
How to uninstall all ruby gems from your...
I found a nice little ‘nix command for uninstalling all gems in your ruby environment (nice if you’re gem building and want to test dependency resolution):
gem list | cut -d" " -f1 | xargs gem uninstall -aIx
“Culture is not just the immune system for your company—it is the basis of how...”
– “Culture is a Product” by Ethan Kaplan (via marksbirch)
“I believe that the biggest problem that humanity faces is an ego sensitivity to...”
– Ray Dalio (as quoted in the New Yorker)
February 2012
5 posts
keen io: Don't just make a technology, make a... →
keenio:
A common struggle faced by founding teams is understanding the distinction between creating a technology and creating a business. History’s entrepreneurial graveyard is ripe with brilliant, unappreciated inventions — technologies created by talented engineers who, sadly, didn’t know how (or…
keen io: The Early Early Stage →
keenio:
Hi!
I’m Dan.
I have two co-founders. Here’s Kyle:
Here’s Ryan:
We’ve known each other since high school (we’re still good friends with the dude on the left. hi Nate!):
And now we’re keen.io.
We’re a new startup (and I want to heavily emphasize NEW). We’ve…
December 2011
9 posts
The GoDaddy victory is a red herring.
This post is a response to a (rightfully) celebratory post written by Chris Heald on Google+. If you didn’t see it, please first read his original post here.
That GoDaddy reversed its SOPA stance (or at least its PR stance) about SOPA in the wake of our boycott is good news, but it’s also distracting news. While it does demonstrate that we, the citizens of the righteous internet,...
Klout's Score Decay Problem (Do I really have...
Klout is a service that tries to distill your online influence (mostly your Twitter influence) down to a number.
But I believe their scoring algorithm is profoundly broken, because it puts an undue emphasis on recency. With Klout, it’s not “what have you done?”, but “what have you done lately?” I believe recency should be weighed much lower than they weigh it...
How to make Command-G behave sanely in the new...
On a Mac, when you press ⌘G, it normally means Find Next (the next occurrence below my current location), and when you press ⇧⌘G, it means Find Previous (the next occurrence above my current location .
In iTerm (as of the iTerm2 Beta 2 release), the direction is reversed: to “Find Next” means to search upward and to “Find Previous” means to search downward.
If this...
Alfred Extension: Copy the Apple command symbol...
I occasionally find myself wanting to enter the symbol for the Mac “Command” Key into something I’m writing, such as documentation, tweets, IM conversations, or this blog post.
I got tired of googling or having to launch a separate app.
Enter Alfred for Mac!
I made a simple extension for Alfred called Copy Command Key to Clipboard, which you can download here.
Once...
Adobe AIR (Write Once, Suck Anywhere)
If you’re deploying a consumer-facing app with Adobe AIR, you’re making a mistake.
AIR makes it look like either (A) you don’t have the taste to distinguish good UX from bad, or (B) you can tell how bad/mushy/laggy AIR feels, but you don’t care enough about your users to give them something better.
I’m looking at you, HipChat.
Hacker News and negativity vs. productivity
Recently I released a Python library called dstruct, and I submitted it to Hacker News in the middle of the night.
In the morning, I awoke to find it had achieved enviable frontpage status on HN, but to unenviable reception: every single comment was negative!
I was pretty bummed! Then I realized dstruct had something like 5x as many watchers (and lord knows how many checkouts) on GitHub as...
The Venmo app is SO good
I just wanted to throw some love to the people behind Venmo. It’s rare for a company to find someone who understands design at the intuitive level. It’s rarer still for the company to recognize this and grant the person(s) true authority.
I’m notoriously picky when it comes to the interaction design of the products I use.
Venmo for iPhone is the rare app that triggers...
6 tags
Is Venmo sustainable?
Venmo is a beautiful service. It lets me send money to a friend or charge him/her money with just their mobile number. It allows groups of two or more friends to settle up debts over things like rent, utilities, movie tickets, bar tabs, and restaurant bills, all without the need for an IOU service as a middle-man.1
In SF, most of my friends have been accomplishing this via Square for a year or...
October 2011
1 post
Jobs
When I was 15, I met you through a Noah Wiley role in “Pirates of Silicon Valley”. Within minutes, this character named Jobs began a pattern that the real you will continue forever, a pattern of inspiration that only a kindred spirit could ignite.
By the time I was 25, you had ascended to the top of my list of personal heroes, because you combined so many of their traits: A limitless...
September 2011
1 post
A rational defense of the new Facebook homepage...
I happen to like the new FB homepage quite a bit, because I believe it solves a major problem for all of us.
The old layout forced people to choose between these behaviors:
In Top News: See only what The Golden Algorithm denotes as worthy, and embrace it as a benevolent and wise lord.
In Recent News: See everything Twitterstyle, in a time-oriented firehose, without any benefit of the...