jmm

Right. But this could have happened at any point once Android became a legitimate competing platform, and that's where the argument loses steam for me.

Did anyone else take the title to mean "reasons why you shouldn't read Fred Wilson's blog?" :)

Except that the dispersant /necessarily/ makes it way into the water. Because they put it there.

A bookkeeper will want to eventually categorize all your receipts by type, so if you're losing detail by going paperless (or losing track of things altogether), you may need to rethink that.

There's bookkeeping and there's accounting. Some accountants will set you up with a bookkeeper to take care of the more menial and regular tasks and then coordinate when that bookkeeper (or not) when the time comes for more formal and "artistic" accounting. The bookkeeper that comes into our office (Los Angeles) is billed around $20/hr.

I've been helping out a friend's office recently and their books are a total mess. Some checks entered against invoices, some not, accounts receivable and accounts payable are totally unorganized, nothing reconciles...

So here's a recommendation - it's probably better to keep all your receipts in a folder system, along with records of your bank statements, and do nothing in software until you're totally committed, or can hire a bookkeeper. You can hand the receipts over to a professional a little later, but handing over a half assed mess in Quickbooks or whatever is much worse IMHO. Just don't wait too long to find that bookkeeper :)

Also, if being generally organized and fastidious is not one of your skills, bookkeeping is probably better handled by someone else, whether you have a great accounting tool or not.

Sure. Though Jonathan Ive has gotten a fair amount of credit/exposure of the years, too, for the industrial design side of things.

Unless you count trash pick up as a utility. Would that it were tiered/pay per lb... would encourage less waste.

Good stuff. Really like the artwork and the idea.

I just dug out a bed in the back yard which is waiting to be planted, so I would seem to be your target customer. However, I'd be inclined more to use your free email reminder service and buy seeds and seedlings from another source. I wouldn't describe myself as cheap; just that I want control over the source/type of the seeds and would like to know whether I'm paying a reasonable amount. One thing might be to make it clear what kind of seeds I'm getting earlier in the purchasing process. Bulk? Heirlooms? Makes a difference, I think. But maybe I'm just a snooty gardener.

And I know this an extreme suggestion, but I think a heftier garden planner would also make me more likely to buy... work on summer/winter layout and buy the calculated seed quantities. That gets away from the subscription model though.

Here's the site if anyone is curious about Farmscape: http://www.farmscapegardens.com/#home

The cost saving argument is probably a stretch: "In many cases, installing a Farmscape garden in the place of an existing lawn can lower your monthly yard maintenance and irrigation expenses. Depending on crop selection, most customers can expect to break even against the installation cost of the garden with the savings over organic grocery or farmers market purchases and the gas and time for the errands. This also depends heavily on how you value high quality fresh-picked produce and how you value your own time spent inspecting fruits and vegetables in the produce aisle."

But as another commenter points out, this is more about keeping up with the Jones than saving money. There's a chicness in CA these days in having a bountiful garden (chickens provide an extra level chicness in some places). And whereas the DIYers have set the trend and have embraced the dirt and sweat of the enterprise (see http://www.amazon.com/Farm-City-Education-Urban-Farmer/dp/15...), the green-leaning elite are willing to buy their way to the promised land. Another version of the same old story, no?

In terms of urban harvest, I think this is way cooler, although who knows if it's successful from an environmental-economics standpoint: http://nymag.com/guides/summer/2009/57477/

Jason would probably defend his manner as east coast shoots from the hip, no bullshit. But that's a joke. He's just rude and coasts have nothing to do with.

Passion is a good thing, and Jason's passion here is warranted, but the guy needs a bit of a filter.

Huh? First off, I'm not really into Malcolm Gladwell. Second, what are you replying to anyway? The general point that anything one does matters?

I'm often amazed at how cavalierly advice like this is given. We're talking about a major (yes, major) decision here.

And the logic... drop out of college because a handful of very smart entrepreneurs were able to start successful businesses without their degree? Come on. Let's count the successful college graduates who have made it big AND the college drop-outs who have tried and failed (and double count the ones that never went back; yikes, hard to count). Or let's make it conditional, "if you know you're of Bill Gates' stature and timing is of the essence, sure, drop out. If not, get the piece of paper you've already put time and money towards (and have fun!). Then start your business."

But at least they're putting their money where their mouth is via investments. I'd be curious, though, whether the drop-outs they're funding are recent drop-outs, or whether the founders cut their teeth elsewhere before starting their current venture. If the latter, the advice perhaps becomes, "drop out of college to get a job at a start-up and maybe start your own business later." Which leads us to the obliging question to Fred and Caterina (and everyone else in tech) - how many young non-grads have they hired recently in their own companies or portfolio companies.

Soft lock in? I don't know... I guess I'm being a bit literal with the term "lock." It's not binary (literally handcuffed or not), but more of a continuum taking into account the cost of moving away. So sure, I guess I missed that.

And though I realize others may feel differently, I'm of the mindset that the costs are relatively low in walking away from facebook without my data. I have all my pictures anyway. Other peoples' pictures of me? Na... I don't own them. Statuses, messages, connections, likes, events? Sayonara without qualms.

Accountable to users is a HUGE point. What happens to a site when users feel alienated or violated or whatever? Those users begin to walk away towards an emergent alternative.

The facebook "lock in" isn't a lock in at all. It's more like a disincentive to walk away from the user base, media storage, and slickness of the service. But that can be reproduced if need be, I think.

I think there are better things to be worried about than the hypothetical situation where Zuck goes nuts.

Holy... The output of this guy is as awesome as it is diverse. Way to go, Zed.

cool! that was one of my original hangups, if i can call it that.

I don't know if I'd call it "artificial" exactly, but last time I checked, Posterous was limited by how big of an email you can send (gmail limits to 20 or 25 mb, I think). Have they opened up on-site uploads yet?

Right. I suppose Sachin has to say that Posterous is for everyone, but it's really not. Those who want to socially share within a walled community will continue to use Facebook. Those who want to curate their media online without as much context will continue use Picasa, Flickr, and the others. So Posterous' niche will involve some mix of people in between, I think.

I will say though that their service is dead simple to use. But then again the Facebook and Flickr exporters are pretty easy to use, too.

Well, not literally a Ponzi scheme, but I guess I get the point. He means to say, simply, that advertisers will eventually catch on and stop using facebook ads because they're ineffective.

The analysis suffers in trying to shoehorn facebook's biz model into google's. Facebook is relatively young and may very well find different ways to make money. If their push to be a major platform pans out, they're in a powerful position.

This is a bigger issue than simple exposure. Students studying finance/econ at Ivy League schools are on a track that starts early (our author, I assume, applied directly to Penn's Wharton School). The expectations and goals start in high school then, sometimes earlier. It's hard to get away from those expectations and pressure, and students emerge at the end of the conveyor belt onto Wall Street before they even know it, ready to earn their "seven in seven" (a milly in seven years).

I think the bigger deal here is talking about start-ups as a viable career option all around (cultural shfit?), and encourage kids (high school and college) to experiment while in school, since risk is relatively low and time is readily available for most. A better system of on campus incubator/meet-up programs would be a nice complement, too.

another similar issue i've come across is when there are multiple like buttons on the same page. e.g., does one like this blog/site or just the article?

not a terrible confusion or potentially too sinister, but a bit more attention than usual is required than the simple share.

$1000 plus fees to install a web app that doesn't do much more than a stand alone mobile phone? Hmm.

Yeah, yeah, I know my comment was too off the cuff and sentimental.

But the ethical evaluation of labor practices is not as simple evaluating an improvement in standard of living. There is a line that can be crossed - the line certainly isn't crossed in your NYC vs. Arkansas example, but it /can/ be crossed (min age, min wage, max hours, safety, etc.).

I myself am from a former steel/rail/textile boom area and have seen the effects of the exodus of big manufacturing in the states on a local level. I suppose a service economy isn't "icky" in and of itself - it's that people often operate with a simplistic evaluation that an improving economy (GDP or whatever) is a healthy economy. Meanwhile certain manufacturing sectors have atrophied to the point of nonexistence with disastrous effects on many communities. And what has picked up the slack over the last 50 (?) years to keep us all peachy with the economic shift? The service sector.

There's lots to talk about in regards to why the shift occurred, but one contributing factor is the unsavory (unethical?) labor systems abroad that we so conveniently continue to overlook.

p.s. Some might argue these days that a service economy is "icky" when a fair amount of the services are financial services.

Yeah, petty. Deleted.

Two part terribleness of globalization - we port manufacturing jobs overseas to cut costs. The cost savings are based on acceptable exploitation in another land. Meanwhile the US transitions to an icky service economy and lose core middle class manufacturing jobs. (I'm ok paying more for transparent and/or domestic.)

The debt that MBAs leave school with, and the peer push towards making it big (the finance crowd) create guys are just too singularly focused on the financial aspects of a situation, whereas many developers are happy to simply be working on a cool or interesting problem. Personalities can also be totally in conflict as the author mentions (I certainly wouldn't want to spend considerable time with the MBAs he describes), which can be a pretty terrible recipe for a startup "team."

I wonder if the higher ranked entrepreneurial MBA programs are better at producing more palatable characters for startups.

The fact they both left shortly after a year would perhaps point to something a bit more substantial than a signing bonus. More like a retention bonus tied to the acquisition. That's what I thought when I read about LC's departure the other day anyway.

I think more specific context on "SQL databases don't scale" might be appropriate here, especially for the noob hackers that are figuring out just which technology to use in building their first or second apps. Is it worth ignoring defaults and conventions on a simple Rails app and not use an SQL based db? Probably not? And I reckon that Heroku itself hosts a good deal of apps where "will this db scale?" isn't really relevant. I could be wrong.

Another question worth knowing the answer to is how much of hassle it is to switch horses midstream (from a well normalized SQL db to something else), after there are some data in the tanks.

Maybe this is Adam's recommendation specifically to the dreaming-big community, which I can certainly appreciate. And maybe everyone should be dreaming big.