Blog

240 posts from 1996 to present • Page 4 of 10

2014

Android Makes Me Sad

10 min read

A few months ago I installed iOS8 on my iPhone 5. I was pretty unimpressed. The new OS, admittedly a beta build, was sluggish, crashed often, and didn’t have any really revolutionary new features that made using an iPhone better. I think one is allow...

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Dear Foursquare: A Breakup Letter

3 min read

Oh, Foursquare. We’re breaking up. It’s not me. It’s you. I know this may come as something as a surprise; after all I’ve known you longer than I’ve known my wife and been with you more places. I’ve paid extravagant international data plans simply fo...

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Four Typical Post-Product Mistakes

6 min read

> You’ve built a great product. You’ve got a couple customers okay, most of them are friends and/or free, a small but passionate team, and a product that demos well. Now you just need to turn it into a company!...

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HDMI 2.0, 4K@60fps, and UHD Content

3 min read

Current display technology, using HDMI 1.4, can only do 4K at 30fps. This has rather limited the adoption of 4K screens since there has been no way to get high frame rate content all the way to the display &8211; and of course there's no way to...

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2013

Life@FB: Last Day of Bootcamp

2 min read

9am, Facebook Headquarters: Cafe 18. My laptop is open next to a plate of kiwi and mango. It's Friday and my last day of "bootcamp" at Facebook. Every person in the engineering organization &8211; VP to fresh-outta-college &8211; has t...

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How To Handle Recruiter Calls

6 min read

Unsolicited calls from a tech recruiter are one of the banes of existence of a technologist with a LinkedIn and/or GitHub profile that has been anything close to meaningfully filled out. Or a startup founder. Both sides get hammered with calls. And e...

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2012

Oha.na Begins

1 min read

One month ago1, we started working on our newest idea, connecting extended families through sharing. We’re now proud to announce the name for our endeavor: Oha.na2....

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Four Archetypes Startups Need To Succeed

8 min read

Much1 has2 been3 said4 about the classic "Hacker + Hustler" dynamic, but I think a lot of the discussion misses the subtly of what both bring to the table and some of the other critical archetypes that need to be filled in a successful star...

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Term Sheet Basics (VIDEO)

1 min read

In this video, I walk folks at Blackbox1 through my Guide to Stock & Options2 and the ins and outs of founder stock, options, term sheets, and more....

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Getting My Feet Wet Again…

2 min read

A funny thing happens to technical founders: as the company you built takes off and a proper Engineering Team develops, you find yourself doing less and less code. You need to spend your time managing the business, recruiting new talent, setting dire...

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2011

Interview With Dr. William Marshall of NASA

1 min read

David interviews Dr. William Marshall of the NASA Ames Research Center about his current projects to build low cost satellites, the neccessary creation of a lunar base, and his path in coming to Silicon Valley....

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Interview With Browserling

1 min read

David Weekly interviews James Halliday and Peteris Krumins, the CEO and CTO respectively of the newly-established Browserling, a browser testing firm in which David made his first angel investment. The interview was done a mere hour after closing the...

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Blackbox.vc: Interview with Bjorn and Aleksandra

1 min read

Bjoern Lasse Herrmann and Aleksandra Markova describe the Atherton, CA based incubator-house they live in called Blackbox.vc, how it sprung out of a global network of youth entrepreneurs called Sandbox, and how a young, rural German came to meet a yo...

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