thetrumanshow

Sean Fioritto was the first person I met at BaconBizConf while waiting outside the doors on morning #1. Confident, smart, and altogether friendly guy. I was impressed the level of demonstrated grit he showed when he volunteered his site for a teardown. He was over there just scratching notes away while they punished him. We could all use that kind of grit. More of us would launch great products if we did.

Pat Pohler had a teardown too. He should share his lessons learned as well... {Pat Signal}

Agreed, along with stacks of uninformed nouveau speculators that are simply chasing trends. Cheeks have untightened as of late and so much money is just begging to be put to work on good ideas, and bad ones.

My thought is to avoid investing engineering time in this particular trend unless you have a particularly solid inside track with someone already on the move in this space.

HN (this thread's commenters in particular), I love you guys on the whole, but you need to learn that just because its easy for you to build doesn't mean it doesn't provide value to someone else. There are probably customers that exist to which $5/user/month is an excellent deal given their specific pain points.

The only problem is that there is a small window to execute before everyone catches on. ;)

"you know exactly what to do"

Indeed, I do, and I am doing it. Others, however, need the guidance of the sentiments we express here. It was for them, and for our industry, that I expressed this thought. If you follow michaelochurch, he's like the Angry Patrick McKenzie. He also has a flare for the dramatic. But the purpose is to raise the visibility of ideas, and to express agreement and disagreement. I have a similar track. I would like so see our industry move in the direction of entrepreneurship/leadership and away from servitude. Again with the hyperbole, but helps the message hit home. ;)

Love this. I have felt at times that I am simply a mine from which some smart business guy with some capital leverage can delve and extract value. This kind of relationship is becoming more and more frustrating over time.

I feel like we sold our birthright.

Don't misrepresent yourself - That's actually an incredibly good and concise guideline for avoiding trouble.

I've never engaged in any of those kinds of practices, but did find them both clever and fascinating when I read about them ~3 years ago. I never thought of them as being illegal until today.

I guess I'm just concerned with the trend. Things we think of as clever today may land people in prison. Its interesting and scary that we might not see it coming.

Heh. Nope, not _arguing_ that, because arguing what constitutes fraud and what does not belongs ONLY to the administrators of said governing laws.

If I were presiding over this specific case, and had a breadth of understanding that confirmed they were cookie-stuffing beyond a doubt, I would move to convict them.

I do think the line that separates a civil matter and a criminal matter is unclear at times.

Further edit: Oh, were you asking if I thought the Airbnb behavior an example of fraud? Well, now I guess I do... based on what I read today. I still think its a civil issue, but it doesn't matter what I think. Prosecutors be prosecutin'.

I agree, but the line that defines fraud is scarily unclear, IMO.

Should the Airbnb founders be sent to prison for spoofing interest in Craigslist ads and breaking their TOS? If the consensus shifts to yes, then our industry will become a very scary place to invest time and energy.

Wait, so they just rendered an iframe of a random product on ebay that contained their affiliate information on a bunch of widgets they hosted ... and this lands you in prison?

Lets imagine I publish an eBay widget (I don't) to promote products I think people should buy. Lets say the widget just renders products in my sidebar. Lets say thousands of blogs then install this. Would I be then bound for prison?

I'm struggling to understand this murky situation based on how you described it.

"Imagine what high school would be like if the popular kids graded exams. That's what corporate work is like for most people."

This is, sadly, very true. The track to reward and recognition in a corporation crosses the popularity track over and over, even in corporate IT. I saw a very senior engineer buck this whole setup once he used it to get to near the top. He was immediately quarantined and shipped off to another, less popular team. He still has strong leadership qualities, so they won't hellban him, but he's not in line for a promotion any time soon.

Thanks Teng. Hmm... whenever I hear that a new company is taking money to stack the technical team, my first thought is immediately "Aha! A planned run-up to a fast acquisition!", which you have perhaps already pointed out to be a misguided guess on my part.

But, this begs the question: expanding the platform, paying down technical debt, adding some adult supervision (heh) are all very valuable for the medium-to-long term, but can't this be achieved by using contractors alone? BTW, I ask this from the perspective of a full-time software engineer and part-time entrepreneur.

teng, I'm curious what direction you are immediately headed with this funding round. A deeper technical team, salespeople, bizdev, or other. HN is an open community used to sharing ideas, and I'm curious if you have anything interesting to share here. I'm hoping to, one day, get to where you are now.

I would love to see an actual tear-down question list from the man himself, or Gary, or Paul, or Jessica.

For now, I've printed this list of questions to hang in my office. :)

+1 Elad. I seem to specialize in making things that have been tried lots of times before. :)

I think having even a tiny foothold in big markets (with no clear winner yet) puts me a great deal ahead of lots of folks who are starting out from scratch. Should it become absolutely necessary that these things start paying my bills in full and even allow me to hire people to help out, it is plausible that the jump is quite small.

And, if I sense a clear opportunity in one of the spaces I'm already in, and I wanted to take a bit of money to make a run at a $MM business, we're warmed up, we have our cleats on, and we're already in the starting gate.

Same here. Analytics say the only views came from our flyover state.

Hi atrajan, I like the concept and I think there are a lot of large companies who would contract with you to provide those services. Still, the concept certainly doesn't seem easy to scale. You need ergo experts either jet-setting across the globe or regional people who can handle major accounts.

Nothing seems self-servicey about this (probably not your intention), which means you'll need a large investment beyond building the product. And, well, that's just fine, but it also means that organization and cash-flow is going to be a big issue, and hopefully your team is prepared for that.

I would say the barrier for you guys is having sales skills out the wazzoo.

Best of luck!

"Sales Cures All." --Mark Cuban.

http://blogmaverick.com/2008/03/09/my-rules-for-startups/

Edit: I shouldn't have pulled that card. Apologies. I'm not helping matters. There's already way too much vitrol going on in this thread.

Don't get complacent though, Chris :). Technology is leverage and those who wield it (i.e. those closer to where the rubber meets the road) will have the potential to stay ahead of the game on average... though most will choose not to employ it.

Engineers can typically simply stay on-par with changing technology and in-effect be moving up market. What is changing fortunes right now is that innovation has stalled in software, and everyone is simultaneously catching up to the early innovators.

Once the market shifts to another platform/technology/methodology, we'll be kicking your ass again... by default. :).

That said, I'd love to have a gutsy sales guy in my corner as a mentor. Drop me a PM.

It is a fairly recent development that the tech industry has acquired ways to make building a v1.0 easier. And the salespeople are looking around now, clearly able to tell the extent to which you can execute v1.0 with C-Level talent, and wondering why so many companies are still run by software people.

The answer I believe is: because this all used to be much harder, and you had to rely on your engineers to pull you through some tough moments. I'm afraid this is becoming less true over time. The pendulum is swinging back from technical implementation, back through design, and the power is returning to sales and marketing, IMO.

HOWEVER, people who can engineer marketing outcomes... those guys will keep the power.

TLDR; Hie thee thither to up-market positions ye men of valor!

Listen to this guy. Most interviews (even technical ones) don't dive that deep at all. Lets be honest, its just like your college courses. They just touch the high-points on the surface of the subject.

Try this experiment: ask someone in school who just finished a hard-sounding class (that you haven't taken yet) to interview you based on knowing answers to things they learned in class. It should sound mostly greek to you. From your perspective, you don't stand a chance of knowing the answers. But, now you know that the delta between not knowing and knowing is one semester, or if you're brilliant, two nights of cramming.

My point is, there is very little delta in what is required to prepare for an interview and what is required to prepare for year-end exams in any given subject. You don't need a lifelong working knowledge of theory. You need enough immediate knowledge of algorithms to get you past the meat-grinder. Remember how you crammed in college? You can get by most of the time by cramming hard for the interview. Also, you get partial credit for thinking out loud about the answers you're considering giving, if you're anywhere within a mile of the correct answer, the interviewers will likely give you a passing grade on the question.

Once you're inside, most of those challenging questions, well, they'll likely never come up again. Just like the stuff you "learn" in college.

Source: In my previous life, I was part of a team of developers who interviewed people for technical positions. We were mean, ruthless interviewers. I've also been through the meat-grinder myself a few times.

This takes humility. Some people don't have enough to survive contact with a grizzled veteran without coming away bitter.

By the way, this is why many self-preserving large companies use humility as a filter for new hires. They want knowledge to pass down effortlessly from the veterans to the noobs (and others) without creating unnecessary internal battlegrounds.

The questions lead me to believe that Blackberry is hanging their hopes on a native wrapper around an HTML5 framework/interface like Phonegap, which is such a horrible mistake, IMO. Platforms should push for the best experience for users and let 3rd parties like Phonegap deal with the 2nd-class user experiences while bringing more developers in.

Frankly, I don't think a platform wants developers who prefer quick-and-dirty frameworks like this. Take some pride in your platform!

Its because of the way they phrased the title. It made you look for a quick answer, which they didn't give up front, and the article seemed texty. So...

Its REALLY easy to hate unions, because they seem like money-grubbing fools on TV. However, as a young engineer at a Major DoD contractor back in the day, I shook my head in wonder at what the unions had clearly done for us in beating our path to more money (never been a union member, btw).

Our culture today despises unions to our detriment. Bargaining power isn't inherently evil! BUT, I would argue by anecdotal observation that it turns out that the more that said bargaining power concentrates wealth, the more evil it actually is.

Ryan, treehouse is an awesome way to learn technical subjects. It looks like you guys put a tremendous amount of effort into making the quality just superb. I'm curious if your pricing going forward will change with your focus on younger students. I have a little one at home who is really jazzed about the iOS classes, and the price is totally doable but causes a bit of a wince.

Secondly, I have really been wanting to setup a "Computer Club" for young kids in my town, but I don't have an educators training. Just wanted to say that this seems like a perfect fit for filling in the gaps of my knowledge by using your content and get this group up and running.

I assume this isn't a full-time endeavor. If not, that 5K a month sure sounds like enough to get another smart person involved.

Thanks for pointing out github.com/mattt/shenzhen. Very cool/useful.

I clicked the up-arrow soooo hard.

Businesses MUST focus on incentivizing their capable employees correctly. If they did, there would be far less of these side-projects which double as portfolio support.

I know a few people who are very well-incentivized inside of the company they work for. They are very entrepreneurial, but they've been bought-off by very smart managers. When they retire, they will have done very well indeed without ever having to launch anything.

The problem for companies has become that it is so easy for many more people to create a startup on a shoestring budget that you have to incentivize many more people than you used to. What's a company to do? I'm not sure. I think this frustration is at the heart of David's grievance.