My daily readings 02/28/2009

• 【drug-news】生物技术2009年将出现反弹，投资抄底正当时 – Welcome to DXY.CN Forum

  tags: no_tag

  • ▪ Investors are optimistic about biotech stock performance
    o 70% expect biotech to outperform the rest of the market this year.
    o 59% consider biotech “undervalued” while only 4% say the sector is “overvalued.”
    o 57% expect biotech to rebound during this year; another 30% expect a rebound in 2010.
  • ▪ Investors are optimistic about biotech stock performance
    o 70% expect biotech to outperform the rest of the market this year.
    o 59% consider biotech “undervalued” while only 4% say the sector is “overvalued.”
    o 57% expect biotech to rebound during this year; another 30% expect a rebound in 2010.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

My daily readings 02/27/2009

• How FriendFeed uses MySQL to store schema-less data – Bret Taylor’s blog – Annotated

  tags: database, mysql

  • hi – post by joel
  • As our database has grown, we have tried to iteratively deal with the scaling issues that come with rapid growth. We did the typical things, like using read slaves and memcache to increase read throughput and sharding our database to improve write throughput. However, as we grew, scaling our existing features to accomodate more traffic turned out to be much less of an issue than adding new features.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

My daily readings 02/26/2009

• Joel Spolsky’s Secret to Start-up Success? Careful Morale Management

  tags: startups

  • Consider, for example, the sales chart for one of our products, Fog Creek Copilot. At first, we charged $10 a day, and every time a customer wanted to use the service, he or she had to whip out a credit card and type in those 16 digits or use PayPal. As the green line on the chart indicates, we had steady but unremarkable sales. Then, in December 2005, one of my developers built a subscription service so that customers could sign up to be automatically billed every month. We thought this would be a minor convenience for some users. Turns out, we had wildly underestimated the impact this new method of payment would have. As the red line shows, sales took off.

    We might have given up on Copilot if we had kept it as a pay-as-you-go product. We develop other kinds of software, but if we had been a one-product shop, we might have turned into just another start-up that fails because everyone becomes demoralized and wanders off, never knowing how close good reception was.

• Hacker News | You Will Probably Fail in a Boring and Project-specific Way

  tags: startups

  • You will probably fail because you give up.

    Starting a business from scratch in a market that doesn’t exist is like solving an equation with Newton’s method, and you’re starting with a really, really bad guess.

    The first iteration or two is almost always a complete failure. You get such poor results you can’t even tell which knob to turn to get better results. You start with another guess, maybe a different business altogether. It takes a lot of persistence even to get to the point where you can figure out that you’re onto something that might work as a real business. Then it takes a lot more work to get to the point where you even HAVE knobs and dials you can turn to try to fine tune the business so it actually works.

    I asked Jessica Livingston to speak at the business of software conference, and I suggested that she talk about all the ways Y-Combinator startups fail. “That would be boring,” she told me, “it’s always they same thing: they just stop working on it.”

  • The biggest reason founders stop working on their startups is that they get demoralized. Some people seem to have unlimited self-generated morale. These almost always succeed. At the other extreme there are people who seem to have no ability to do this; they need a boss to motivate them. In the middle there is a large band of people who have some, but not unlimited, ability to motivate themselves. These can succeed through careful morale management (and some luck).

    I’d say about a quarter to a third of founders we fund have never-give-up morale. The rest are mostly in the middle group.

    For the people in the middle group, I think the big danger is not knowing what to do next. That’s why it’s so important to launch early. Once you get something in front of users, they tell you what to do next. Not that you should do exactly what they tell you; you have to guess what they really need. But at least you start to have some data about that.

  • That was the big reason for me. There were a bunch of contributing factors – rejected by YC 3 times, no luck with other outside investors, better opportunity came up, all other founders quit, scope of the project was much bigger than we envisioned, continuous problems simplifying the UI enough that I’d want to use it myself, and some doubt about whether current browser performance is even good enough to run the product – but I kept going through all of them until I really had no idea what to do next.

    Joel’s comment about it taking a long time before you can even know what knobs to tweak is right on. Early-stage products are almost completely wrong, and oftentimes they’re so fractally wrong that nobody will bother telling you how to make them right. Launching helps, if you can get users. But many startups fail to get even one loyal use

• Joel Spolsky’s Secret to Start-up Success? Careful Morale Management

  tags: startups

  • The survivorship bias in entrepreneurship was on my mind a few months ago. My company was putting together a conference in Boston, and I invited my friend Jessica Livingston to speak. Jessica is the co-founder of a small angel investment group called Y Combinator. Its model is to give a few thousand dollars to groups of two or three geeks to start tech companies. She has also written a book called Founders at Work, in which she interviews the founders of about 30 successful start-ups. When she asked me what she should speak about, I asked her to consider describing all the different ways a start-up can fail, rather than the usual stuff about lessons learned from people who succeeded.

    “That would be boring,” she told me. “They all fail for the same reason: People just stop working on their business.” Um, yeah, well, sure, and most people die because their heart stops beating. But somehow dying in different ways is still interesting enough to support 40 hours a week of prime-time programming.

  • Paul Graham, Jessica’s husband and partner in Y Combinator, has tackled this subject on his website. “The biggest reason founders stop working on their start-ups is that they get demoralized,” he writes. “Some people seem to have unlimited self-generated morale. These almost always succeed. At the other extreme, there are people who seem to have no ability to do this; they need a boss to motivate them. In the middle there is a large band of people who have some, but not unlimited, ability to motivate themselves. These can succeed through careful morale management (and some luck).”

    So, who is capable of “careful morale management,” and what does it entail? In my mind, an entrepreneur is like a kid playing with his first shortwave radio. He takes it home and turns it on, and what does he hear?

• Good design: The ten commandments of Dieter Rams

  tags: design

• What I’ve Learned from Hacker News

  tags: startups

• Paul Buchheit: Communicating with code

  tags: PM

  • Of course none of the code from my prototype ever made it near the real product (thankfully), but that code did something that fancy arguments couldn’t do (at least not my fancy arguments), it showed that the idea and product had real potential.

    The point of this story, I think, is that you should consider spending less time talking, and more time prototyping, especially if you’re not very good at talking or powerpoint. Your code can be a very persuasive argument.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

My daily readings 02/25/2009

• Startups in 13 Sentences

  tags: startups

  • One of the things I always tell startups is a principle I learned
    from Paul Buchheit: it’s better to make a few people really happy
    than to make a lot of people semi-happy. I was saying recently to
    a reporter that if I could only tell startups 10 things, this would
    be one of them. Then I thought: what would the other 9 be?

• The cross-platform option: Web apps for smartphones | InfoWorld | Analysis | 2009-01-20 | By Peter Wayner – Annotated

  tags: iphone, cross-platform

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

My daily readings 02/23/2009

• Building and Scaling a Startup on Rails: 12 Things We Learned the Hard Way – Axon Flux – A Ruby on Rails Blog

  tags: no_tag

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

My daily readings 02/21/2009

• Recked: A Night of Recommendation Technologies

  tags: recommendation, video, algorithms

• Load Impact – Free web site load test

  tags: Load, testing, service

• peHUB » Marc Andreessen Forms VC Fund

  tags: VC

  • Andreessen, who became synonymous with Internet success after co-founding Netscape, first spoke about his investing collaboration with Horowitz on the Charlie Rose Show last night. We followed up with him this morning, and he confirmed that the partnership is a venture capital fund.

    We’re still working to nail down more specific details. The firm registered with the California Secretary of State under the name Andreessen Horowitz in July 2008 and has taken an office on Page Mill Road in Palo Alto, Calif.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

My daily readings 02/20/2009

• Hacker News News

  nice feature log

  tags: feature, development

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

My daily readings 02/19/2009

• Recession? No, It’s a D-process, and It Will Be Long – Barrons.com

  tags: no_tag

  • of the global money-management company he founded more than 30 years ago, began sounding alarms in Barron’s in the spring of 2007 about the dangers of excessive financial leverage. He counts among his clients world governments and central banks, as well as pension funds and

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

My daily readings 02/16/2009

• Search Y Combinator – Blog

  tags: Search, performance

  • Some have speculated that we’ve moved on. And while that’s true to some extent, we are still actively maintaining this website as a service to the YC community. Call it a personality flaw, or whatever you want, but there’s just something about letting a website die that doesn’t sit well with me.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

My daily readings 02/14/2009

• Planet PDF – Thoughts on Adobe Acrobat Plug-in Development

  tags: Acrobat, plugin, development

• Directory of plugins for acrobat

  tags: acrobat, plugin

• Acrobat9_HTMLHelp

  tags: acrobat, javascript, API

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.