Likes & Launch
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Hey Chickens, We Have Eggs. Oh Shit, Now We Have Too Many Chickens. Hey Eggs! The next lesson in solving the chicken and egg problem is that you need just enough of one to make the others happy. You need to build one side up and be able to point at all of these potential matches you’ve created for them. But once you close plenty of the other, you need to switch, and so it goes for quite some time. You bounce back and forth building up each side just enough to keep the others happy. Imagine if AirBNB had 4000 rooms for rent and 6 renters. Those rooms would sit there forever and those people would think AirBNB sucks. So, don’t over do it with one side.
Things worse than failure.
The first version of http://jobs.github.com that we built didn’t share a single piece of functionality with what shipped on day one. It wasn’t an iteration — we straight up threw away a few months of work because we realized it was a bad idea. We started using our creation and realized we couldn’t figure out how to make money without pissing off our customers. So we abandoned that idea and started anew — even though we could have shipped it and started making money immediately.
Shipping features because you spent time or money on them is a coward’s excuse. It takes balls to abandon features — grow some.
”—Great look at product design from Kyle Neath at GitHub. It’s so important to look through and cut out features. Sometimes you let them see the light of day - only to realize they aren’t as important as your originally thought.
The beauty of technology - you can cut it and keep moving.
Make Learning Amazing Together HackThink is an idea conference and entrepreneurial competition for “hacking” the experience and practice of education in a very fast changing world. Spend a weekend meeting amazing people while you learn to model build innovative solutions that blur the line between institutional education and day to day learning. Come hack, learn, network, and make a difference.
If you’re in NYC this weekend -you should definitely check out HackThink - push your mind & meet new people this weekend. Tickets on sale now!
Kiip’s Brian Wong On Taking Risks As Young Entrepreneur
Congrats to Brian!
Never mind tablets, smartphones, and mobile-social-location-photo-sharing apps. Heck, never mind computers. The single most important technology of the last half-century, the one that has most drastically changed the day-to-day existence of very nearly everyone on Earth, remains the plain old GSM phone: unloved and half-forgotten in NYC and Silicon Valley — but still used by the billion in the rest of the world.
Awesome post on what CEOs should focus on each week.
Being the CEO of a startup is a hard and complex job. Here’s my quick list of the 13 things every startup CEO should make sure to do each week:
- Remember your One Thing. Your startup can only do one thing well at a time. Know Your One Thing. Write it on the wall. Repeat it every day. Put it…