How soon will we have practical autonomous cars? There are so many factors that determine timing: How safe are the systems compared to human drivers? How fast will ride sharing companies embrace them? How will competition force acceleration of deployment? How will regulators enable or block a deployment? Will cities compete to be first? I was chatting with some friends about the space, and we were…
If you’re offered a job at a startup, your offer probably comes with a stock grant. If you don’t know how much of the company you’re getting, this grant number has almost no information. You need to know what percentage of the company you’re getting. Founders know this, so they sometimes lie by omission to pay you less. This isn’t ethical and you shouldn’t work for such founders. Not knowing how…
I’m doing an AMA about growth on GrowthHackers.com RIGHT NOW. Go here, vote up the story, and ask me a question. I’ll post a synopsis of the thread here, so save this link.
I don’t like most discussions around “Work Life Balance” because so much advice is just personal experience. The problem with giving advice via personal experience is that it doesn’t necessarily apply to everyone. This post is going to try to start from first principles. I want to show you why this is a hard problem. Let’s start with your home life. This might mean your spouse, maybe your kids,…
I’ve been giving my startup ideas away because I’m too focused on YesGraph to work on other ideas. I try to describe the idea enough to give you a head start in taking on the problem. If you like it, share it, try YesGraph, and subscribe here to get future posts. This latest idea has been brewing for a while. In short, I think we can change how we get work done using computers. To set the stage,…
My parents are immigrants, so I grew up respecting the desire to pack up and move to a better life. It is brave and takes grit to make it. My dad was an engineer, so I also grew up with a respect for building things. I’ve since become a software engineer and startup founder. In technology, immigration is a hot topic. The conversation usually goes like this: there is a big national debate about…
Fundraising can be frustrating for companies. There are a myriad of reasons, including the time it takes from making a real product and helping customers. Beyond that, the most frustrating aspect for me personally is the lack of feedback. I had thought that the million ways investors can say “no” indirectly was about keeping optionality. They want to be able to come back later to invest, and this…
If you’re reading this, hopefully a friend sent you here to find a list of ways to help promote a recent app launch. Friend launches are surprisingly common, at least in Silicon Valley, but I’ve only ever seen tutorials about promotion for app makers, not for their friends. Well, here it is. If you see something missing, please email me . 1. Use the App and Give Feedback Download the app, signup,…
I think splitting up apps is probably a bad idea for most companies. I just read two explanations as to why Foursquare split things up. I find this a bit odd, and there is almost certainly a model that works better in a single app. For background, Foursquare built up an amazing amount of location data based on checkins. When they added background tracking, their sharing model needed to evolve…
Before I started YesGraph , I was helping Dropbox on their growth team. I ran a quick campaign on Twitter for Dropbox that produced the most successful single tweet ever published from the @dropbox twitter account. Here is a quick story behind the tweet, and why it worked so well. Background Dropbox is in an interesting position. It solves problem many people don’t know they have. It does so…