February 2012
6 posts
New OSX could make the Mac as game-friendly as the...
The new version of OSX that Apple announced today feels like it could strangely make the Mac as valuable a channel for games as Facebook or the iPhone.
I say strangely because the Mac has typically been a backwater for games. Even with the the launch of an App Store, transition to Intel chips, and Steam coming to the Mac it remains a distant second fiddle to the PC which is itself in decline....
Clear for iPhone →
Like seemingly everyone else in the tech blogosphere, I’ve been playing with Clear, a new personal organization app from Realmac Software, for the past few weeks.
Super simple. Slick UI that’s bound to be copied quite a bit. Lovely.
Macstories, The Next Web, SiliconFilter, and TechCrunch have solid reviews.
(Disclosure: CrunchFund is an investor in Orchestra, a competitor to Clear.)
On becoming an investor and joining Spark Capital
Today I’m thrilled to say I’m joining the team at Spark, making the switch from entrepreneur to investor. I’ve known the guys at Spark for years and have admired the unique approach, and the unqualified success they have had. This is a big switch for me, but made easier by working with close friends that I respect.
As you could imagine I thought about this decision rather...
Stuck Like Glue: Zynga Accounts for 12 Percent of... →
Facebook said social games are currently responsible for “substantially all of our revenue” when it comes from payments.
In December, Zynga went public, raising $1 billion, and is obviously one of the companies most reliant on the social network. But now with Facebook’s financials also public, we can see that the two companies are actually interdependent.
Startups are not a chess game.
One of the really hard things to do as an entrepreneur is to not try and solve for too many problems at once. I’ve found it is one of the first things I end up talking to early stage entrepreneurs about (twice today, actually). And something I struggle with myself.
We like to think strategically: “what if we had that many customers?” “how is this going to...
January 2012
1 post
“Never underestimate the power of nostalgia. Timehop is awesome.”
– Timehop, A Time Machine For Your Social Media Updates, Gets $1.1M From Foursquare Founders And Others | TechCrunch
(via rickwebb)
December 2011
1 post
November 2011
3 posts
24 hours with the Fire
24 hours in with the Kindle Fire and I feel like I’m coming to the same emotional place as I did with the Droid. The first 10 minutes were “wow, I think this might actually make it!” — but it buckled under extended use from lack of polish.
The good.
Hardware: A better form factor for media consumption than the iPad. ”woah it looks tiny!” were my first thoughts...
October 2011
2 posts
September 2011
3 posts
July 2011
2 posts
2 tags
June 2011
2 posts
Quality or quantity
I’ve been a member of Netflix since the year they were founded, yesterday I cancelled. Netflix remains one of the companies I absolutely love. Their ability to eat away at their current business to invent their next business is inspiring.
But as a user I find I have little time to watch television. If I’m going to fill those hours, I want it to be something really excellent, and I...
Um ... Yeah →
It’s a VCs job to take meetings. So them reaching out to you is more about them than you.
tedr:
Received: Wednesday, June 15, 2011 12:30 PM
Hi Ted,
My name is Aaron and I’m an analyst with ***** Venture Partners, a $2 billion fund that specializes in profitable, fast-growing software and internet companies. Given Dogster’s impressive track record, I thought that a quick chat...
March 2011
2 posts
Wishing Color the best. Envy gets you nowhere, and building companies is a tough business no matter how much money you have.
February 2011
2 posts
What does the next Flickr look like? →
“Flickr isnt doing it for me anymore and it hurts to say that out loud.” - bijan
Bijan’s post struck a chord, which is really hard for me to talk about too. I’ve been a paid user of Flickr for many years. Flickr was the first web2 company I fell in love with. It made it easy for average people to share photos publicly and privately, and it built a community that...
Republicans Vote To Repeal Obama-Backed Bill That... →
After all, it will cost a lot of taxpayer dollars to enact Obamastroid just plummeting us further into debt. Why can’t Obama just understand that free markets will work this out?
January 2011
1 post
Seven deadly social gaming metrics
Albert gives a good overview of the basic metrics that we track in social gaming. Moving from Monthly Uniques and Pageviews to Daily Active Users and Day 1 retention will be a benefit to just about any consumer startup out there. Glad Albert put a basic primer together. (BTW - we used Kontagent at Conduit Labs, and I highly recommend)
Albert Lai
(via nattomaki)
December 2010
2 posts
Hearing my extended family rattle off the items in yet another Apple-filled Christmas, I’m struck yet again at how utterly mainstream Apple’s products have become. In a world where mainstream is synonymous with fast food, Apple’s mainstream success is the counter-example. It is a reminder that, from gadgets to games, excellence and ubiquity are attainable and “indy”...
on wikileaks
To believe WikiLeaks has a real cause is to believe that no one has a right to privacy. There is no civic cause being served, it’s just shamelessly, and criminally, unearthing private information for the fuck of it. “Revealing” something is not merit in and of itself.
Why would a game designer want to work in social...
Last night I went to a meetup for area indy game developers. It’s been a while since I’ve found myself in a room full of folks skeptical (to put it politely) about social games & Zynga. They weren’t exactly booing as the folks from Macguffin defensively explained how they decided to build a Facebook game, but I think that was just because they were friends.
I find...
September 2010
4 posts
3 tags
Pivots are never easy or you're doing them wrong.
Music Pets, a product that our team poured a lot of heart and soul into, closes today. In its heyday it spent 5 weeks as one of the fastest growing games on Facebook, and anecdotally had a huge cohort of users that don’t typically play Facebook games. The shutdown was solely our decision, as I’ve spoken about, and I believe it was the right decision based on both the cold hard numbers...
I’ve been remiss to at least update things here on the selling of Conduit Labs to Zynga. In one of those classic moments where you plan to “get to it tomorrow so you can really do it right” — suddenly it’s a month later.
The delay is mostly because I always do post-mortems on this kind of thing, and it has been taking me a little while to digest the goods and the...
“The very first company I started failed with a great bang. The second one failed...”
– Max Levchin, PayPal cofounder: FailCon: Failing Forward To Success : NPR
(ironic that I am reblogging from Bijan’s repost of my FB status update)
July 2010
1 post
“What will we see coming out of App Inventor? Probably lots of junk, but does...”
– App Inventor and the culture wars - O’Reilly Radar (via bijan)
The creation of online social entertainment is a war against television. You are not taking way 10 minutes of quality time with the kids, you are freeing someone from 10 minutes of soap operas.
June 2010
2 posts
This American team, in all fairness, played well above their talent level this World Cup. The 2002 squad that reached the Quarterfinals was a much more well rounded team with several players, including Kasey Keller in goal, at their peak.
This 2010 squad had virtually no back line (save Cherundolo and the injured Onyewu who wasn’t ready to return so was removed) and no front line (the...
“I was surprised, I was surprised about games. I had a conversation with some...”
– Mark Zuckerberg on games… he’s come a long way in the last 24 months.
April 2010
2 posts
“Don’t be discouraged if what you produce initially is something other...”
– What he said.
Paul Graham - Organic Startup Ideas
you sure the market is too crowded?
Searching for something completely different and came across this quote from Elan Musk (co-founder of PayPal) years ago:
Certainly, the idea of transferring money by entering an email address was originated by neither X nor Confinity. Billpoint (acquired by eBay in 1999) and Danny Shader’s Accept (acquired by Amazon in 1999) were both there almost a year earlier. There were also many well...
March 2010
3 posts
Are you a progressive or conservative on the game...
There is a raging debate in video games about social gaming. The success of Farmville and other social games have many in the traditional game industry angry and upset. Tempers have flared about whether social game designers have any morals, questioning if creators have any interest in bringing joy, and whether they are trying to advance the medium at all or just fleecing players. Soren wrote a...
I have two relatives who have spent the better part of the last two years without health care. Both are over the age of 50, have worked hard their entire life, and are single. The first has had serious trouble getting health insurance because of pre-existing conditions. The second can’t afford it because she’s been in and out of work so often and health care is so tied to employment...
The Case for the Fat Start-Up →
The blogsphere has been serving up a healthy dose of obvious for the last couple months. So it’s easy to recommend this counter-trend article from Ben Horowitz.
February 2010
2 posts
Blik Wall Decals →
if you don’t work with awesome artists who can decorate your walls like this, try Blik.
Are you building for Google or Facebook?
Since the beginning of the web, search engines have represented the center point of a users experience with the Internet. I think (and I’m not the only one) that this long-standing trueism may no longer hold. This hasn’t happened since the web overtook AOL, Compuserve, and others, so of course there are many skeptics. But in December Facebook had more traffic than all the Google...
December 2009
3 posts
The 2009 Whersies →
Moments like this make me appreciate the culture our guys have built at Conduit.
langer:
“We have a mailing list in the office referred to as “whereis”, a list everyone on the team emails with status updates if they’re going to be out of the office or leaving early or otherwise away from their desks.
Josh, our VP of business development, just compiled all the whereis updates of the...
“I cannot believe that the purpose of life is to be happy. I think the purpose of...”
– Author Leo Rosten.
I wish I had this committed to memory for all the times a fellow startup guy complains about how “tough” it is to have a job where they are in a startup, building things they believe in, with people they respect, but have some such problem like the lack of unqualified...
Hi, My Name Is Mike And I Was A FishVille Addict
I’ve never really understood why games as an entertainment medium elicit this kind of cultural shame.
When I was 13 I got really into comic books. I started spending most of my money on it, perhaps all of my spare money. I was showing up at the comic book shop the day a new issue came out. I worked at a comic book store for trade and maniacally...
Goodbye Droid, I'll be Back.
I bought my first Android phone the day the G1 came out. It lasted three days.
I bought the Motorola Droid and it lasted almost a month, until I finally realized I just couldn’t do it over breakfast with fellow former Droid owner Bijan last week.
First, what is better:
Email, for Gmail users, is the best experience on any phone. Also Calendar, Maps, Google Listen (I love podcasts...
November 2009
2 posts
Music Hack Day Boston was one of the better little events I’ve been to in a while. Mostly because it actually felt like people were getting things done, there was soldering and coding and deals — it felt like the opposite of a chatter-fest. I was happy to have been able to contribute in my very minor way by speaking on a panel about Starting a Music Business.
For those who run events,...
October 2009
2 posts
How To Measure The True Stickiness (And Success)... →
Just wrote a piece for Techcrunch on predicting the success of a product, the over-dependence on virality, and the nefariousness of Best Buy — all in one compact little post. Plus charts!
1 tag
What Batman can teach startups
A little while ago Brad Feld turned me on to the book The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. Basically, it’s a book, about comic books, that is about entrepreneurship.
I have no idea if this passage is going to translate for those that have not read the book, but it is as good a piece of startup advice at the early idea stage as you’ll hear. The context is that the two main...
September 2009
5 posts
“When we were building Flickr, we worked very hard…a lot of what we then...”
– Caterina Fake - Working hard is overrated - Sept 25, 2009
Startups are hard. They require an insane amount of hard work and stress. But I like how Caterina calls out the difference between freaking out vs working hard.
(via bijan)