deyan

If he doesn't leave, he risks quite a bit - he might be banned from visiting/working in the country and indeed even deported.

Update: USCIS just reversed its decision and allowed back Amit into the country. (Source: he just posted on his facebook wall).

I know Amit and how hard working he is and am very thankful this was resolved so quickly. At the same time, I hope it grows into something more than just a lone media frenzy-induced example. If the US is to stay competitive, it needs to reconsider its immigration policies. (Full disclosure: I am a foreigner myself).

Great book indeed!

Thanks for the link! Does anyone know if this breaks the 3.0.2 recommended patches (e.g. muffling logging, etc.)

Note that the article is talking about VC-scale (think 10s/100s of million in revenue).

Thank you for this essay - I spent a lot of time researching (higher) education and had similar conclusions - although certainly not as substantiated by experience and well put.

This really captured my biggest concern as well - thanks for the link!

Thanks for the link. To be honest though, I feel quite overwhelmed by what I perceive to be an incredible increase in js frameworks - has anyone seen an article comparing different alternatives and their pros and cons?

Gosh I was closing the tab and noticed with the corner of my eye this title. Almost couldn't believe it - it has been so long since I remember reading Phrack and this ground breaking article in particular.

Thanks for bringing up good old memories!

Here is the Phrack archive: http://www.phrack.org/ and the article in particular (I like the design better): http://www.phrack.org/issues.html?issue=49&id=14#article

More narrow sounds more like it :)

May be this is the wrong decision, may be it is the right decision - it is quite unclear and only time will tell. However, from an entrepreneurial perspective, Reed has all my respect - it is incredibly difficult to disrupt yourself and he has certainly placed his bet. That takes balls and I respect that.

As to why separate, I assume that from an operational perspective it makes running the businesses easier. It is strange that some things e.g. ratings, accounts, etc. will be separate though, that's for sure.

I can't wait to see this play out!

Thanks, I will check those out.

To add: I highly recommend Principles of Product Development Flow (http://www.amazon.com/Principles-Product-Development-Flow-Ge...) - incredibly difficult book to read (i.e. lots of good but dense information) but it explains well the underlying principles - and thus goes beyond the buzzwords.

Respectfully and realizing it is all relative, $25M is not swinging for the fences. By a very long shot. It is a great outcome for them certainly, but not swinging for the fences.

Quite disappointing to hear that they didn't swing for the fences - especially given that Zite was doing well, is arguably better than Flipboard, and news consumption is a major use case for tablets in general.

I think you are missing the point of the thread. The argument was that working long hours gives you trade off with working smart. So it is an either /or, at least to some (in my opinion large) extent.

This is incorrect. You can acquire and merge nonprofits just like a real corporation. The difference is that you don't have equity, therefore, if you do want to compensate people (e.g. employees or investors or whoever), you need to do so with cash (e.g. bonuses).

Could be. After all, MBA is meant to train managers, not entrepreneurs. That's what has always surprised me about the common sentiment towards MBAs: why does everyone expect all MBAs to be amazing entrepreneurs out of the box? We don't have a similar expectation for anyone else. It might have something to do with the attitude (especially during the last boom) - but that's a story for a different time.

In my experience, an MBA or equivalent (meaning someone with experience building/running a business) adds value mostly through pattern recognition. In a startup, it is easy to get lost in the noise and go down many wrong paths. An MBA should be able to use their experience and knowledge to guide the company to better paths more cheaply, quickly, and efficiently. And of course, later on, grow the fledging organization (e.g. hiring, scaling the organization, etc.).

I meet and advise many entrepreneurs and most of the time they fall into common traps stemming from lack of understanding of market dynamics, how companies make decisions, what companies worry about, what matters, etc. A common example: thinking about cost and not value when it comes to selling a(n enterprise) product. Or forgetting about risk management for their new cloud-based solution.

For tech startups, there is no question that everyone on the early team needs to understand, live, and breathe technology. A lot of folks are attracted to the Facebook-size wealth generation (including MBAs) and end up destroying value because they don't understand technology.

Full disclosure: I have an MBA. I also have been programming since I was 9 and have built and sold two companies. I fully believe that a lot of MBAs don't add value when it comes to startups in particular (see Steve Blank's recent posts explaining why) and many times in mature companies as well. Of course, that is true for people in general - i.e. there are many engineers, designers, marketing folks, etc. who are just not very good at their jobs. It all comes down to looking for the exceptional gems!

I was not sure about the purpose of the website. On the one hand, it apparently wants to help people with projects find great coders. Great. On the other hand, it appears that it is also aiming to help you find (technical) cofounders. I don't think these are very related so I was a bit confused as to what the actual goal is.

Any thoughts?

I could not agree more - but would also add that in addition to learning about learning, learning about yourself, others, and society is also very important.

I can never understand all these kids who somehow mistakenly believe that the purpose of college is to prepare you for a very specific job. That's what job training is for. College is about fundamentals.

Seems to me that your analysis suffers from a fundamental attribution error (blaming you rather than circumstances). While it is possible that you could have done a few things better (with the help of the ever so omni-potent captain hindsight), my experience is that such deals are complicated and involve a lot of people. So I think it is much more likely that the final outcome was more out of your control than your essay implies.

Does anyone know the people behind the initiative? I am not referring to the instructors, but rather the people who started SEE and pushed for making the courses available for free, etc. I am doing some research on how to get more universities to do the same and would love to connect and learn from their experience. Any tips are highly appreciated.

pavs, that was a very interesting set of suggestions. are you interested in this space? if so, would love to get in touch as I am thinking of doing something in it for my next venture.

just curious, what do you do now? what brought you to HN?

A better title might be "This is reverse engineering" :) Ah good old times..

I am curious to get feedback from the HN community. Looking forward to it!

I disagree with the article. Except in some rare occasions, startups have 80%+ chance of failure. If that's the kind of risk you are assuming, then making big swings is the only reasonable bet.

That's why existing companies innovate incrementally for the most part too - they are better suited for tackling lower risk problems and will crush undercapitalized startups. Which is why "not disruptive, and proud of it" sounds like bad advice for startups to me.

Clayton Christensen's books (Innovator's Dilemma, Innovator's Solution) talk a lot about these issues. I will be adding them to my Startup Lore (http://www.deyanvitanov.com) as well in the next few weeks.

Curious to get HN feedback!

I am surprised this thread didn't grow larger.. Or perhaps I shouldn't be..

As someone who only came to the valley recently, I agree with the majority of observations in the article. I wrote a short article with my comments here: http://dvitanov.posterous.com/innovation-and-the-interdiscip...

I think a lot of the comments in this discussion, yours included, seem to be misunderstanding what business school is about.

Business schools are teaching management, which by definition is about reducing risk and optimizing existing operations in a running business, hence the emphasis on accounting, finance, etc. The idea is that looking at the whole picture, an MBA is able to more efficiently manage an existing corporation. The comments made about MBAs seeing people as "tools" is spot on and in recent years the organization behavior subject has made a lot of progress in reversing this damaging trend, started during the industrial revolution.

On the other hand, entrepreneurship is all about taking an invention and turning it into an innovation and a sustainable company, and in the process mitigating various business risks (e.g. is there anyone to buy the product, how to make the product, what product to make, etc.). The two (startups vs. companies) are fundamentally different (I elaborate on this here: http://www.deyanvitanov.com/entrepreneurship-foundations/sta...). Very few business schools make the claim to be catering to the entrepreneurial crowd, and even fewer do it well - I can speak only for Stanford GSB, although I have heard similar for Berkeley and Babson, among others I am sure.

So the comment about talking the talk and walking the walk sounds nice, but the assumptions behind it simply fall flat.

FYI, I have an MBA from Stanford and I am basing my comment on my experience there. At the same time, I came to business school specifically to start a new company, so I am hardly the typical MBA I think.