Month: July 2005

Alex Bendig: “If you cannot provide the top talent in your development team with challenges appropriate to their skill level, they will tend to believe they are wasting their time and talent. Overcoming boredom is not an acceptable challenge.”

Jason Calacanis:

Associate: “Mmmm…. well, you’ve done a lot of cool stuff, but I mean what do you consider your advantage?”

Me: “Hustle.”

Associate: “So your business is based on hustle?”

Me: “Isn’t every business?”

Associate: “I’ve never heard that.”

Me: “They don’t teach hustle at Harvard’s MBA program?”

Associate: “I went to Wharton.”

Kathy Sierra: “What if instead of adding new features, a company concentrated on making the service or product much easier to use? Or making it much easier to access the advanced features it already has, but that few can master?”

Bob Parsons: “It’s your job to make sure each and every employee in your organization understands that they all should have one simple charter. At the end of the day, in some small way, they need to be a little better.”

Joel Spolsky: “Or, roughly speaking, if you try to skimp on programmers, you’ll make crappy software, and you won’t even save that much money.”

Norm Brodsky:

But it appeared to me that, among people who do interior decorating, the habit of taking customers for granted had been institutionalized, and I assumed I was in for another such experience when we hired a decorator for a new apartment we’d bought in Florida last year. Her name was Rosalie Modansky. She wasted no time letting us know that she didn’t work like other decorators. Once we’d agreed on a budget, she explained that she charged a flat fee for her services. “I’ll guide you in the buying,” she said. “I’ll take you places and show you things. But you can pick out anything you want from anywhere you want. It doesn’t matter to me. I don’t make money on what you spend.”

Philip Greenspun: “I’ve decided to amuse myself and, I hope, inspire some young hard-working folks, by writing up ideas for businesses that should be profitable. Here’s the first one: http://philip.greenspun.com/business/chinese-rv“

Jason Fried via Dane Carlson: “The most innovative software designed over the next 10 years will 1. be web-based, 2. will come from small teams, 3. will come from self-funded companies, and 4. will be for the ‘side-business’ or 1-10 person business market.”

Yaro Starak: “Every now and then I ponder these markets. Gambling and porn are industries famous for being very profitable online way before anything else. How well would a gambling or pornography blog do? Think about the affiliate programs, the commissions and easy sell to the target market. Then I remind myself that I don’t really want to associated with these industries and go back to work on the cleaner ideas.”

alarm:clock: “While it would be impossible to support with data, we believe we have experiencing a reversal of this trend and are now seeing more and more successful startups run by geeks without suit supervision. Each week, as we document the startup landscape from search to enterprise software, it seem we come across more companies that are run by geeks.”