Interesting insider Q&A with Paul Sutter, co-founder of Quantcast. Via Hacker News: Q: What methodical process did you follow for your startup? Did you first test the market using tactics similar to the lean startup approach? A: Basically, make a list of known problems that you’re well suited to solving, rank them by criteria, fail … Continue reading Solving problems with startups
Startups die due to a variety of causes. Over the course of the last three years, I’ve watched many of my friends pour their hearts and souls into companies that, for one reason or another, just fizzled out of existence. In 2007, Paul Graham gave a variety of causes for startup death in How Not … Continue reading Why Startups Die
Early on during this startup adventure, a person I trust told me, “Watch out — startups aren’t for the faint of heart.” Looking back on my personal net income graph from 2009 to present, I can see what he meant. May 2009 is when I entered Dreamit Ventures to begin working on what would become … Continue reading Startups: Not for the faint of heart
Last summer, we got our company, Parse.ly, off the ground at DreamIt Ventures incubator program in Philadelphia. Since then, we’ve talked to a lot of founders about our experience in the program. Many founders are data-driven people who are looking for concrete advice about how to optimize their experience at these programs. One of the … Continue reading The Startup Diet
Background: This is a post I put together as part of an annual ritual I started in 2023, documented in 2024, and continued in 2025: the smartphone app audit. This is where I use a phone upgrade or phone data migration as a moment to reflect on what apps I have installed on my phone … Continue reading My 2025 app audit: less mindless scrolling, but more mindless listening
For years, every backend software engineering team I worked with struggled with one unavoidable bottleneck: turning working local code into live production reality. Running and debugging your code in the cloud was always slow, brittle, complex, and confusing. Often, it required total code rewrites into sophisticated frameworks to get the code to even run at … Continue reading PX: from laptop to cloud cluster within seconds
In 2017, CrashPlan was one of the most popular full-computer offsite/cloud backup tools for consumers. It had millions of paid users, usually paying around $10/month for a few terabytes of offsite storage. But then… “On August 22, 2017, Code42 announced they were shutting down CrashPlan for Home, effective in October 2018. They were not accepting … Continue reading Linux backup workflow for hackers with restic, rclone, Backblaze B2
I have a long relationship with digital media. I’ve been blogging for decades. I’ve been a news junkie forever. And I started a startup in the real-time and historical content analytics space (Parse.ly) that ended up shipping a widely-used product in the industry. What’s more, Parse.ly’s network-wide data (billions of online news reading sessions every … Continue reading My relationship with digital media in the last few years
In 2009, I quit my first programming job after college to work on a startup. That startup eventually became Parse.ly. I’ve written about Parse.ly’s startup beginnings and evolution elsewhere on this blog, including: “The Startup Diet” “What One Does” “Startups: Not for the faint of heart” “Why Startups Die” “Shipping the Second System” It is … Continue reading Parse.ly, Automattic: the long view
Frederick Brooks once wrote: The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. In his classic essay, “No Silver Bullet”, he also wrote about software’s “essential” complexity: The complexity of software is an essential property […] Hence, descriptions … Continue reading Managing software teams: the definitive reading list
