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Crap. I have 11 years experience doing some pretty awesome shit. I guess this is the last year I can get a legit job in a startup.

The building isn't leased - they bought it for cash a year or so ago.

This is something that is often overlooked in any analysis of global vs. local illumination. Local illumination gives you perfect control, and allows you to "paint with light", which is the cornerstone of the pixar lighting process.

We used GI at pixar when it was appropriate, even at the expense of long render times - that is to say, only when it made the final product look better. How you get to the result doesn't matter, only what it looks like on screen.

Ed is one of the world's greatest managers. He has created something very special at Pixar, where creativity continues to flourish, the team absolutely loves working there, and where art and technology coexist.

I have one problem with Phineas and Ferb, a show I otherwise enjoy. The sister is a classic Disney tween show girl. It sets an awful example for my daughter as she relates to her brother and other peers - the boys are doing all this great, awesome, fun stuff while the girl tattles on them and cares only of boys and popularity.

It ships when it ships is a great mantra for someone working on something in a vacuum.

Marketing, sales, demos, meetings, running out of cash, press embargoes, and a host of other reasons can create real deadlines whether you like it or not.

Plans and deadlines are also helpful as a measure of progress - are we ahead or behind what we planned?

Boston, MA

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I predict that the new CEO will be a current or former exec at Zynga - likely one of the execs that were "poached" from EA a few years ago.

If you want to make money in games and reach a large audience you absolutely, positively need to be on iOS, then Android before you are on Win8. According to your bio, you used to work @ MSFT so I understand the choice of platform but you want to keep making games, right?

I would take a close look at your retention rates and find where people are dropping out of the game and use that information to make the best iOS version possible.

It looks like a great game and will translate well to touch interfaces. Do it.

Hard problems are everywhere. Every company, every app, every product has unique and difficult problems to solve.

Sometimes those problems are with product design and UX. Sometimes those problems are mathematical. If you are successful, often they have to do with scalability and reliability. If you work with great people there are always hard problems in enabling productivity and building great tools. Many companies have serious and significant challenges around security and may not even know it. If most companies are solving simple problems, then why aren't most companies automatically successful?

If you broaden your definitions of "hard" you might find that there are many things that qualify. If what you mean is "hard mathematical problems" then yes, you will have to learn some math.

This is an accurate and uplifting account of what it was like for _Sash_ to work with Mark.

The reality for many other people, myself included, is quite different.

And that's all I'm going to say about that.

+1.

I've spent lots and lots of time on this. I've used nearly every off-the-shelf system as well as some really well-done in-house systems (Zynga, in particular).

All have major shortfalls, and many startups have piecemeal data in multiple providers (AppAnnie! Flurry! MixPanel! Google Analytics! Internal Databases!) that only solve one little sliver of the problem and don't talk to each other. There's plenty of room for innovation and improvement.

Why doesn't coursera take the same approach as Uber and respectfully disagree to comply?

As someone with a lot of experience modeling growth, I think this teaching approach is a good one.

I find that most teams start exactly where this article starts - modeling total installs over time using constant virality. They then realize they care more about active users, and do the same for retention, then realize that retention and virality change over time, and do a cohort model.

Jumping to the end is likely to confuse people who haven't already organically gone through this process. I was also a little underwhelmed at first read, so some mention of the plan in future posts would help us know where you are going.

Teams have value greater than the sum of their parts. It is highly unlikely that $BIGCORP would be able to poach 100% of the team, or even 100% of the key players outside of an acquisition offer, and to do so could be much more expensive.

In successful acquihires, the acquired teams stay together and work on a new but related project with the additional resources and weight of the big company behind them. When it works, it is much better than just putting random people together since building effective teams is hard and takes time.

Also, keep in mind that acquihires often give the majority of value to the employees in new, unvested stock options vs. cash or vested stock.

VC firms are becoming more like top-tier universities and less similar to private equity firms.

Hire luminaries in fields to become mentors. Invest in training, teaching, and mentorship. Create an alumni network of successful people.

In part, yes.

New distribution channels don't appear that often and when they appear you should rush to be early and aggressive, as they decline in effectiveness over time, which limits competitors' ability to match you.

Of course a strong product and good retention are essential to keeping those users, but you are a video app and this opportunity were to present itself you would be crazy (stupid) not to jump on as quickly as humanly possible.

Makes sense. In the context of auto-identifying social networks, this is very valuable - I could see glassdoor/identified/branchout finding value in this as well.

It's not clear to me that the main hypothesis of this engine is correct - namely, that request recipients who are closely clustered to other users are more likely to accept the request. Do you have data that supports this hypothesis?

That said - request recipient optimization works, and offering it as a service could be a successful business. I think your primary value proposition (higher CTR's on lower volume) is solid, but would like to see verification that your approach (using clustering) is valid for that use case.

It depends!

Options:

* Paid: Ads, other pay marketing.

* Inbound: Blog. SEO. Etc.

* Viral: generate incentives and reasons for users to invite and refer people they know via social networks, email, etc.

* Other "organic" channels: hack your way to the top of the app leaderboard, for instance.

Data please.

Not in this article, but that's what I've heard from everyone who works there or knows people who work there.

"The Company is experiencing an economic downturn."

Um. No. You mismanaged your finances and chose not to give your employees any warning that they will be without pay or health care.

A word to all you startup founders out there - don't toy with your employees' lives. If you are running out of money, let them know so they can plan.

As I remember it, the love lounge and the lucky 7 are different rooms. When Animation moved to another part of the building and Andrew got a new office, he built lucky 7 and the love lounge stayed intact.

I sat in the office next to the love lounge for over a year. Great way to see all the celebrities visiting the studio.

Full disclosure. I'm a Zynga employee. I run the Boston studio, which was built out of a startup acquisition and is responsible for Adventure World. This comment is 100% my own opinion, not that of my employer. I'm an engineer and entrepreneur at heart, a long-time hacker news contributor, and now a GM / product guy. Above all else, I'm not evil. I claim that no one I work with is evil either.

It's a shame Shay didn't join Zynga so that he could see how we really operate and how we really think about our players instead of taking on what is essentially an uninformed and cliched conventional wisdom opinion about the company.

I don't know anything about contracts, so I have no opinions about that part. I just take issue w/ the last half of his article that slanders me and my team without any first-hand knowledge in order to market his new dev shop.

Because doing real data analysis is hard and time consuming. If you are a very data-driven company, you need someone focused on it.

a16z is taking an incredibly well-structured approach to value-added investing. It's nice to see a strategy and mission that actually explains how they are different and goes beyond generic platitudes like "enable innovation".

This is a more thorough version of what a popular bike blog "bikesnobnyc" used to call the "pistadex", where he used the average price of a bianchi pista to determine the popularity of the fixie trend.

Jobs without Woz would have found another company to run and another great idea to build.

Woz without Jobs would just be some really good engineer inside some gigantic company no one has ever heard of. He even is quoted in the book as having aspired to that.

It works too. The atrium is a very common chance meeting place, and that's nearly 100% due to the coffee, conf. rooms, and bathrooms being centrally situated.