matrix

The whole series is painfully accurate; glad to see someone telling it like it is.

That aside, article is actually not as anti-establishment as the author makes out -- unless your source of prevailing wisdom is from click-baity 4 Hour Work Weak style articles. But I doubt any serious founder puts any stock in that stuff. There's a lot of valuable info to be learned from high quality sources like Steve Blank's articles, or even a good MBA entrepreneurship class.

While these would be welcome improvements to Java, the future of Java is not about these sorts of tweaks. What Java really needs to revitalize their ecosystem is a sustained focus on improving developer experience with modern applications.

That means elevating languages like Kotlin and Clojure, and producing modern libraries for basic web development so that there's a foundation of high quality components that people can build with, similar to .NET. Today, Java developers have to pick through a confusing mess of implementations for basic things with highly variable levels of quality and interopability (the biggest gap probably being security).

While the author does quote the very low odds of success, I think he does readers a disservice by minimizing that risk. Very few people have the right disposition, the right partners, the right idea, and the right skill set to launch a startup. Being a freshly minted PhD doesn't change that. Failing at a startup sucks, and sucks really hard. But of course, its not in a VC's interest to tell you the pain that comes with a startup.

Better advice: if you want to do a startups, get some experience, find some good partners, test out ideas in your own time, and when you have enough runway and something that looks solid, only THEN make the leap.

I totally get where you are coming from. I really do. Some software is just complex, and it feels impossible to ship anything without all those parts in place.

Regardless. You must find a way to ship early and often. You will go under if you do not.

It helps to make a mental shift, and understand that the problem you are trying to solve is not related to features. You're trying to prove whether enough people want what you are building, and if so, what exactly it is they want (you will get it wrong the first time, and probably the second time too... this is why iterating fast with as many customers as possible is key).

Will the product be sort of crappy and missing all sorts of "essentials"? You bet. But, crappy code that does what people want and they will pay money for always, always beats an untested fully-engineered solution.

Ditto. If Google offered an equivalent of RDS PostgreSQL, I'd switch tomorrow.

Squarespace is awesome, but until they offer SSL certificates I can't recommend it to anyone. This is very unfortunate because it's a great product otherwise.

Now, if only Hubspot took their own advice... They say the reason people block ads is because they are annoying, and yet Hubspot has one of the most annoying marketing teams I've encountered. They probably think deluging my inbox with emails is effective, but the truth is, it's annoying to the point that I'm actively turned off.

The concept of good/bad market is attractive, but I'm wondering is this is really a good model. How do you account for innovations that require a market to learn its benefits before they want it?

In the beginning, a market for a innovation looks like a terrible market. Few people wanted a PC in the early days. Vacuum cleaners were a hard sell when they were first introduced, and there are countless other examples. All of these markets required that the buyers be educated and they had to be convinced it was worth the effort to learn how to use the new thing.

It seems to be, saying "don't be in a market where it is hard to sell" is great in theory, but honestly I think every truly innovative product has to create their market to some extent.

Having been on both sides of the hiring process many times, there's some useful tactical ideas in this podcast, but in my experience tactics should only play a small role.

As a candidate for a job, before you go to any interview (even a phone screen) you need to know what the local market salary range is for the type of job in you are applying for. If you don't know that, you're in a position of weakness and any amount of verbal judo isn't going to be useful.

A good hiring manager will not try to cheat you - they will make you a fair and reasonable offer. It might be at the low end of reasonable, but nevertheless it will be reasonable. If they give you a ridiculous lowball, they're not a good hiring manager, and at that point you should just walk away. Even if they come back with a reasonable offer. You don't want to work for a company or a boss that thinks that's ok to do to people.

A good hiring manager will not ask you your current salary. They might ask you early in the process: "what are your salary expectations?". It is acceptable to not name a number and just say something to the effect of "competitive market salary" which should signal to the hiring manager that you know what that range is, as does he, and you're good with that. If you need to give a number, just state range near the top of the local market salary range and move on. Yes, there's a theoretical risk that you've anchored yourself lower than they might pay, but you've anchored yourself at the top of the market range - not exactly a terrible outcome.

Caveat: this advice might not apply when dealing with a recruiter.

I'm tackling a very similar issue right now and it's a maddeningly difficult problem to solve. It would be incredibly helpful to bounce some ideas off someone who has been there if its no imposition? My email address in in my profile.

Agreed. The code I write with JOOQ is so much leaner, and easier to reason about than any ORM I've used. To me, JOOQ is a great example of what modern Java should look like.

My only complaint about JOOQ is that there isn't a .NET version.

This is interesting to me more because it's rare to see a story about someone building products for the Indonesian market, which is very large. To the author: I'd love to see an article with more about some of the challenges and opportunities you see in Indonesia for startups.

Conceptually, I love this idea. A few questions:

1) How do you ensure that the work is valued fairly and that realistic expectations are set for scope, etc? When working for cash, these questions are resolved by market forces, but getting paid in something that is difficult to value, I'm concerned there's a lot of opportunity for unhappiness.

2) How do you ensure that the value doesn't get wiped out by liquidation preferences, or some future action dis-proportionally dilutes the value of the shares?

Yes. I'm told that some people who bought property in Vancouver the early 80's were upside down on their properties for 15 years.

That said, I'm not predicting that outcome myself -- at this point, I would not want to place any sort of bet on that market.

And to think that I thought the Vancouver real estate market was crazy back in 2005...

This story is very relevant to tech. As much as I would love to, I wouldn't even think about locating a new business or office in BC today. And I'm sure I'm not alone. Attracting and retaining good employees is just too difficult when housing is more expensive than San Francisco - in a city where pay and buying power is much, much lower.

Most lists of this type are silly, but for those of you looking for business ideas, this one is actually pretty interesting. But caveat: make sure you get out of the building and talk to potential customers first. Usually there's a very good reason these ideas haven't been executed on yet.

Sure; I don't see a way to contact you in your profile. There is an email address in my profile.

Generally, what do you find to be the break-even point for owning hardware, for small shops without dedicated sys admin/devops on staff?

Obviously this is highly variable with respect to what the business is doing, but I'd love to hear any general observations you can make. I'm guessing you'd need to get to the point where you're spending $10K+ on cloud infrastructure to make it worth switching?

I agree with you. A product manager doesn't need to be a great developer - they just need sufficient experience with development to assess the impact and complexity of changes, and to better understand where there might be opportunities. You have that plus passion for the role, which is a rare combination. Hopefully your employer recognizes the value of it!

It is; this is a not-so-subtle feature request on my part to Google.

Anyone have any idea when we're likely to see this on RDS (or Google SQL, for that matter)?

The core point of the essay, that product design is a different skill to software development, is obviously true, but to me this feels a bit like the title "Software Architect" was 10 years ago; i.e. people who want to design software products without the pesky whole writing software part.

Like being a dev manager, defining the vision, design, etc requires a different set of skills from development. However, a person can do those jobs much better if they have spent time in the trenches. They understand costs and tradeoffs better, can better sell the ideas to the team, and so on.

Mind expanding on how one might find such an investor? I agree that the ideal scenario would be for investors to take the same risk (and reward) as other shareholders, but I have no idea how to find investors receptive to that idea.

The issue of administrative costs (e.g. IT) growing rapidly boils down to the fact that there are no economic forces that would otherwise enable the administrators to be held accountable for their spending.

In the private sector, if you are responsible for a P&L, and "P" isn't a positive number, you'll eventually lose your job. In higher ed, there is no metric that similarly lays bare whether an administrator is effective or not. This allows spending to run rampant and weak managers to thrive, which just continues the cycle.

If anybody figures out how align spending with outcomes in this sort of environment, they deserve a nobel prize in economics.

Thanks for this PG, it's wonderful to see Jessica get the long overdue credit she deserves.

That essay is also comforting for me on a personal level because like Jessica, I'm uneasy with attention, public speaking, etc and that's a tough thing to struggle with when you're a startup founder, where a big part of your job is to be the affable, extroverted face of the company. The thought of doing a YC or similar interview makes me sweat, even though I know what I'm building is awesome, cool and valuable. If ever Jessica is giving lessons on how to get over that, sign me up please!

I suggest the using the one on color.adobe.com (formerly Kuler) as a starting point.

While I admire the effort that people put into this (and the similar effort of email address validation), what I really want to see is a comparison based on "good enough" validation -vs- performance. I think a reasonably low rate false-positives is a reasonable trade-off for fast validation.

TLDR version; Here's their success factors ranked by magnitude:

Technical co-founder, enterprise product: +230

Elite school: +220

ex AMZN, AAPL, FB, GOOG, MSFT, TWTR employee: +160

Female founder: +128

Discovered investment via non-traditional VC channel: +58

Technical co-founder, consumer product: +31

Team average age under 25: +30

Solo founder: -163

The old content is awesome and is never going to stop being relevant. I think the key to address the criticisms would be

1) Navigation - perhaps some sort of timeline that accompanies each article so that you can easily see the context that technology is in (e.g. direct injection <- fuel injection <- carburetor).

2) Edit the copy to ensure that old technology isn't identified as new. A quick glance turned up examples like: "Some high-performance engines do not have carburettors...".

Good stuff overall though!

Some background to this: the author, Colby Buzzell, is/was famous for his blog "My War" written while we was serving in Iraq. It was compelling reading to say the least, for example "Men in Black":

https://web.archive.org/web/20041206093944/http://cbftw.blog...