I’ve been thinking about the future of work lately, and I keep coming to the same puzzling conclusion: there is a seemingly unbridgeable gap in the market for engineering talent between the elite class of software “makers” and the wealthy enterprise customers who most need their help. The story goes something like this: As Marc continue…
A lifetime ago (actually in the mid-1990’s) I worked for an outdoor apparel company called Patagonia, running several of their product lines and leading their first foray into online retailing. The company was (and is) still owned and the original founder, Yvon Chouinard. Yvon is a brilliant entrepreneur who defies easy classification: a gifted capitalist continue…
I just jammed through Rework, the latest startup manifesto from 37Signals co-founders Jason Fried and David Heinemeir Hansson. It’s a very fast read – a few dozen “chapters”, most just a page or two long – and anyone already familiar with lean startups, GTD and Seth Godin’s writing on authentic marketing won’t find much new in it, continue…
John Cook broke the news earlier this week about our investment in Untitled Startup. Andy led the deal for us and has been closely working with Damon and Aviel for several months now, but I wanted to take a minute to publicly welcome Untitled Startup to the Founder’s Co-op family and share some of the continue…
I’m a huge fan of Charlie Munger, Warren Buffet’s lifetime business partner. I’ve written previously about his distillation of behavioral psychology principles for business, but in today’s Slate piece he covers a much bigger topic: where the U.S. economy went wrong and how unlikely it is (given the dominant influence of monied interests on politics) continue…
As regular readers know I’m fascinated with behavioral psychology – especially as manifested in software development and user experience design (related posts here, here and here). The most successful web + mobile applications (from biggies like Facebook + Twitter to up-and-comers like Foursquare) are masters at exploiting behavioral triggers and game mechanics to drive customer continue…
I’ve spent more time on planes than usual lately, which means I’ve actually had time to read something more than my inbox, feed reader and streaming-sources-of-distraction. Two recent reads worth mentioning for this audience are: Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big (Bo Burlingham) This book did nice job of articulating continue…
A few years back I proposed (and only partly in jest) a “Hippocratic oath for business.” This morning I read in the New York Times that a group of students at Harvard Business School had publicly made a similar pledge. I don’t really expect this to sweep the business world by storm, but I applaud continue…
Ian and I have been having a ton of fun with AppStoreHQ – our mobile web app + developer discovery engine. We haven’t been at it all that long, and at the moment it’s just the two of us. But the other day we were reviewing our roadmap and backlog (which we track on two continue…
Just discovered this deck (thanks for the tip iseff) – great current take on personalized intermittent reinforcement in social media. If you’re designing a social site and want to create user addiction, this is a great refresh on the levers to pull.