January 2012 Archives

I watched Moneyball last night and saw a lot of parallels to startup land, but tying them all together was the notion of competing effectively by changing the game. In the (true) story the Oakland A's competed against big money teams by leveraging undervalued players to achieve real world gains (focusing on runs instead of wins, though which of course correlate with wins).

Between two kids under three and running DuckDuckGo I have a very tight schedule. I try really hard to maximize my productivity through a variety of efforts like online services (just added RescueTime to the mix) and attempting to maintain a makers schedule.

I few weeks ago someone asked me how early does a decision start to form about whether I would make an angel investment or not. Thinking back and looking at prior nos and yeses I have to say a lot happens when reading that very first email.

I've heard a lot in the past few years about how online we're competing for attention and that people will only use x sites regularly. I'm coming to believe that view is slightly wrong. 

A lot of the biggest Web successes in the past few years have been services that have achieved some sort of "check-in effect." By that I mean their users are actively checking in to their services for updates. Check the latest deal. Check my activity stream. Check on my farm. Check if there are more updates or comments.