Paul Graham put up a new essay, one of his longest, called “How to raise money”. It gives a good glimpse into the mind game that is startup financing. I thought it was particularly interesting how he documented three different ways in which investors say “no”, without really saying no.
Parse.ly made its funding announcement — a $5M series A, led by Grotech Ventures and with participation from FundersClub, Blumberg Capital, and ff Venture Capital. Read on for the full list of links to our coverage.
There’s some hoopla lately about “weird” startup names in the Wall Street Journal, with specific coverage of “.ly” domains in The Atlantic Wire: The latest start-up boom has led to the creation of at least 161 companies that end in “ly,” “lee,” and “li,” which is, naming consultants tell us, 160 too many. There’s feedly, … Continue reading Parse.ly: brand hacking
Good post today, A “Third Way” in Entrepreneurship, that discusses the “always be winning”, annoyingly positive veneer of most startup entrepreneurs. This is a community where many founders you meet always share their latest victory and pretend that failures rarely happen. … entrepreneurs are pressured to maintain a totally positive face to the outside world … Continue reading “We’re killing it”
Paul Graham, in a footnote from his essay on “How to Make Wealth”: One valuable thing you tend to get only in startups is uninterruptability. Different kinds of work have different time quanta. Someone proofreading a manuscript could probably be interrupted every fifteen minutes with little loss of productivity. But the time quantum for hacking … Continue reading Uninterruptability
PyCon US 2013 is over! It was a lot of fun — and super informative. The People For me, it was great to finally meet in person such friends and collaborators as @__get__, @nvie, @jessejiryudavis, and @japerk. It was of course a pleasure to see again such Python super-stars as @adrianholivaty, @wesmckinn, @dabeaz, @raymondh, @brandon_rhodes, … Continue reading PyCon 2013: The Debrief
Today, I am teaching a tutorial at PyCon called “Rapid Web Prototyping with Lightweight Tools.” I’ll update this post with how it went, but here are the materials people are using for the course. Video Recording Slides (web) Slides in Note Form (Github) Slides (SpeakerDeck) Code (git) Code (zip) pip requirements
Just came across this essay I wrote on my morning commute from Long Island to NYC in 2007, while I was a software engineer for Morgan Stanley. I was joking with some friends the other day that my “to read” list keeps growing every day, and it only seems like things are added but never … Continue reading Smaller buckets and bigger thimbles
Ten years ago today, I bought myself a birthday present. It was a Brenthaven Backpack. At the tender age of 18, I coveted few things. But among the web designers and programmers whose blogs I read regularly and whom I looked up to, this backpack was the ultimate in durability and functionality. It featured a … Continue reading My old backpack
This continues an article I wrote nearly three years ago, Common Criticisms of Linux, parsed and analyzed. In the three years since I wrote that original piece, Linux has grown — albeit slowly — in desktop usage. After nearly 2 years of no growth (2008-2010, lingering around 1% of market), in 2011 Linux saw a … Continue reading Cloud GNU: where are you?
