Instagram Founder Kevin Systrom
Fantastic interview of Kevin Systrom by Kevin Rose taking you through his upbringing and background leading up his first startup Burbn which eventually became instagr.am.
“We found the startups that did best were the ones with the sort of founders about whom we’d say “they can take care of themselves.” The startups that do best are fire-and-forget in the sense that all you have to do is give them a lead, and they’ll close it, whatever type of lead it is.”
— Paul Graham on the correlation between resourcefulness and success in startups.
I am incredibly thankful for my years at 2Advanced back in the fast-paced, mid-2000s Flash era. Everyone who worked on that team during that period of time learned the value of resourcefulness as you were expected to often single handedly art direct, animate, and develop large campaigns all while managing the clients. The level of expectation, stress and demand was high, but whether or not it was the best approach to it developed a character of resourcefulness by fire.
Design Sets the Tone at a New Start-Up Square
Square’s front door to customers is a smartphone application. Square has to provide the simplest experience possible, Mr. Dorsey believes, because, along with good design, it will evoke trust and confidence in a new financial institution that lives in a smartphone.
Yet another example that strategic differentiation begins with design.
Color 2.0
Color is a live broadcast from your phone. Unlike videos, there’s no audio, editing, or uploading. You got 30 seconds to tell your story. Up to 5,000 friends can simultaneously visit your broadcast from their phone and Facebook.
So after rehashing the complete flop of the first version of Color, they’re putting their $41,000,000 in funding to use to launch a platform to broadcast 30 seconds of boring, soundless video to Facebook. Isn’t audio half the magic of video?
Jotly: Share Everything with Everyone
Ever since I started working in startup land, I’ve felt the need to ingratiate myself in the ever-buzzing world of *tech*. This means staying up on other companies, the blogs, and the general Silicon Valley scene. This can be very repetitive. People get funded, apps get released, and companies buy things. Sometimes a conference happens. Having spent the better part of the last few years neck-deep in this hullabaloo, I figured it was time to parody it.
A parody from the creators of Nosh and the most amazing 404 page on the internet. Read more on the ISO50 blog about the creation of the video and the 15x increase in signup for Nosh as a result of the parody social network.
Wordnik - All The Words
“Hey I have this great idea for a new startup! We’re going to launch an online dictionary.”
What would be your first though?
“Yeah right buddy. Good luck with that.” or “You know that might work.”
Wordnik proves that even the most crowded ideas still have massive room for improvement. When you look up a word on Wordnik they will return definitions from multiple sources, example usage from literature and news, etymology, related words (synonyms, hypernyms, hyponyms, same context, reverse dictionary, tags), tweets using the word, visuals and sound pronunciations.
For the devs out there they have a massive API and code library and active Github repositories
Designers Are The New Drivers Of American Entrepreneurialism
This growing desire among designers to bring their user focus, strategic vision, iterative methodologies, and propositional thinking to the still-geeky, tech/engineering-centric world of startups promises to be transformative and explosive.
This is exactly why I left the ad agency world and ditched all clients after an amazing 11 year run. The future is incredibly bright.
Nosh 404
The new mobile app Nosh, that helps find out what’s good to eat here, has one of the most epic 404 page. They’ve employed a special ops team to track down and use deadly force if necessary to take down rogue pages.
How Intellum switched from making a plan for VCs to making a product for customers
We had been writing a plan and basing decisions on what investors told us they wanted to see.
All that chasing left them living off credit card debt and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. So the team made a decision: Stop chasing a funding event and figure out how to make money.
Armed with a working prototype, the team kept hustling. But now they were hustling for customers instead of investors.
**Note to self. Re-read this article.
“First, if you’re going to start a business, make it your business. Don’t take capital or lose control of the company before it’s even off the ground, because if it fails — most do — you’ll never know if, done your way, it would’ve been a success. It’s relatively easy to get money for a start-up, but usually the founder is risking a lot more: his time.”
The 10 Golden Principles of Successful Web Apps
Venture capitalist Fred Wilson delivers his perspective on what makes a web app a hit at the Future of Web Apps Miami 2010. His instincts for finding and investing rising startups has helped fuel the success of Union Square Ventures and the companies they’ve invested in including Tumblr, Disqus, Etsy, Foursquare and Twitter.
Life is a Daring Adventure
“Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.”
—Helen Keller
Insane video of Jeb Corliss demoing his wing-suit. I’m all for taking risk, but this is crazy (especially at 3:00).
Reblogged from Tim Nolan
"3 Startup Lessons I Learned the Hard Way"
Excellent post by David Cancel
Over the past decade, I’ve spent most of my professional life building startup businesses. In thinking about what I’ve learned, I realized that the most valuable lessons can be boiled down to three simple lessons:
- The middle sucks.
- Your idea doesn’t matter.
- There is no secret to startup success.
Read the rest of the article.
Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.
- Andrew Grove
It must be the paranoia, because I’m sitting down at 10pm on a Sunday evening in order to launch out a new project early this week.
Reblogged from Startup Quote
