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Livingston: What advice can you give about raising money?

Graham: The advice I would give is to avoid it. I would say spend as little as you can, because every dollar of the investors’ money you get will be taken out of your ass — literally in the sense that it will take stock away from you, but also the process of raising money is so horrible compared to the other aspects of business. You can’t work your way out of it like you can with other problems. You’re at other people’s mercy.

— Paul Graham

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2010.11.30 Tuesday ACHK

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My philosophy on these types of companies — consumer-based Internet companies — is that you don’t need to worry about the business model initially. If you get users, then everything else follows. Basically any technology can be copied, any concept can be copied. In my opinion, what makes one of these companies valuable is the users. That can’t be copied.

— Mark Fletcher, Founders at Work

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2010.11.29 Monday ACHK

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So we have definitely said to ourselves, “We don’t want any outside money. We actually don’t even want to grow our team.” We’re trying to design our products in a way that they can scale with more users without us having to scale as a company.

— David Heinemeier Hansson

— Founders at Work

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2010.11.25 Thursday ACHK

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The gospel of St. Matthew told of the angry Jesus driving the merchants and money-changers out of the temple, knocking over the tables of the money-changers and spilling their coins on the floor. Jesus was not opposed to capitalism and the profit motive, so long as economic activities were carried on outside the temple. In the parable of the talents, he praises the servant who used his master’s money to make a profitable investment, and condemns the servant who was too timid to invest. But he draws a clear line at the temple door. Inside the temple, the ground belongs to God and profit-making must stop.

— Freeman Dyson

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2010.11.24 Wednesday ACHK

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Livingston: If people have to pay more, they take the product more seriously?

Spolsky: Definitely. There was a five-user license that was like $199, and that just feels like shareware, practically. But today, when you say that a ten-user license is $999, it starts to feel like a more substantial product. In that market, it still is actually a good deal. But you really have to have a price point that conveys what you think the product positioning should be. Many people will judge where your product fits in the market based on its price.

— Joel Spolsky, Cofounder, Fog Creek Software

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2010.11.23 Tuesday ACHK

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We defined success in terms of users, not competitors.

— Blake Ross, Creator, Firefox

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2010.11.22 Monday ACHK

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Ross: I thought marketing was something that required a degree and formal experience. It turns out that marketing is just making the product good enough that people spread it on their own, and giving them ways to do that. It’s a lot easier and more natural than I thought it would be. Now I can’t stand meeting with professional marketers who try to “craft” the “message” and all that junk.

— Blake Ross, Creator, Firefox

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2010.11.21 Sunday ACHK

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Wozniak, at first skeptical, was later convinced by Jobs that even if they were not successful they could at least say to their grandkids they had their own company.

— Wikipedia on Steve Wozniak

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2010.11.17 Wednesday ACHK

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The guy who invented the first wheel was an idiot. The guy who invented the other three, he was a genius.

— Sid Caesar

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2010.11.16 Tuesday ACHK

Startup 3

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Consulting is where product companies go to die.

By which I mean not that it has to make something physical, but that it has to have one thing it sells to many people, rather than doing custom work for individual clients. Custom work doesn’t scale. To be a startup you need to be the band that sells a million copies of a song, not the band that makes money by playing at individual weddings and bar mitzvahs.

* “How to Fund a Startup”, November 2005

— Paul Graham

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2010.11.05 Friday ACHK

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The secret to making things easy: avoid hard problems

That may seem obvious, but in my experience most engineers prefer to focus on the hard problems. Working on hard problems is impressive to other engineers, but it’s not a great way to build successful products.

— Paul Buchheit

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2010.11.04 Thursday ACHK

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Computer programmers historically used “Press any key to continue” (or a similar text) as a prompt to the user when it was necessary to pause processing. The system would resume after the user pressed any keyboard button.

Cultural significance

There are reports that some users have searched for such a key labelled “any”, and called technical support when they have been unable to find it. The computer company Compaq even edited their FAQ to explain that the “any” key does not exist, and at one point considered replacing the command “Press any key” with “Press return key”.

The concept of the “any key” has become a popular piece of computer-related humor, in part because of an episode of The Simpsons in which main character Homer Simpson asks “Where’s the any key?” when confronted with the “press any key” command.

— Wikipedia on Any key

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2010.10.10 Sunday ACHK

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A computer is like air conditioning: it becomes useless when you open Windows.

— Linus Torvalds

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2010.10.09 Saturday ACHK

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Startups in 137 chars: Make something someone specific needs, launch fast, let users show you what to change, change it, repeat last two.

— Paul Graham

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2010.08.29 Sunday

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When we started Artix, I was still ambivalent about business. I wanted to keep one foot in the art world. Big, big, mistake. Going into business is like a hang-glider launch — you’d better do it wholeheartedly, or not at all. The purpose of a company, and a startup especially, is to make money. You can’t have divided loyalties.

It’s hard enough to make money that you can’t do it by accident. Unless it’s your first priority, it’s unlikely to happen at all.

— Paul Graham

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2010.08.22 Sunday

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Customers Don’t Know What They Want. Stop Expecting Customers to Know What They Want. It’s just never going to happen. Get over it.

— The Iceberg Secret, Revealed

— Joel Spolsky

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2010.07.26 Monday