A year ago, the Diddy spirit pervaded Seattle, resulting in a NerdPartySupernova led by an Ephod-clad Michael Arrington as the Grand Poobah. Beer-hauling trucks conked out, young men fell fatally in love, entrepreneurs with Hare-Krishna looks in their eyes rampaged through the ranks of venture capitalists. This year, we’re doing something bigger. First of all,… Read More
Redfin has just begun raising money for what we hope will be our last round of private financing. If we’re lucky, it’ll take us four months. To kick things off, I’ve spent the past two days powering a rented Dodge Avenger up and down Interstate 280, through oak-covered hills that are bright green from the… Read More
All of us in software have been in a little bit of a funk over the new new thing in Silicon Valley, alternative energy. It’s the preeminent challenge of our time, and it’s largely in the realms of material science, not computer science. Watching a new vanguard go by is a novel experience for many… Read More
Steve Jobs is the Internet generation’s Robert Kennedy. Close your eyes, and the Apple CEO even sounds like a Kennedy: follow your passion, the charismatic icon tells our youth; change the world. Except Jobs is selling gadgets, not civil rights. No one seems to have noticed. Now, oil companies gush over the environment. Insurance ads… Read More
Jobster CEO Jason Goldberg announced layoffs at his company yesterday: 60 people, or over 40% of the staff. It reminded me of Sequoia Capital’s only advice about a lay-off: cut once, cut deep. And now, as an angry mob forms in outrage at the idea that a new company could struggle for its life, every… Read More
There are very few postings about startups that I agree with more than Paul Graham’s 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups. It came out a while ago and I saw it a while ago, but it popped up again in a friend’s del.icio.us feed and for some reason I clicked on it again, and was reminded… Read More
Guy Kawasaki takes it to the rack again today with a stunning piece about what it takes to be a great VC. But what about the things a VC shouldn’t do? 1. Pressure a small company do more than it can do well: less is more. 2. Try to run the company: if you don’t… Read More
We complained last week that Google gets too much credit: it hasn’t brought to market a gigantic innovation since search, mail and map (acquisition), despite massive R&D investments, amazing engineers and a much-ballyhooed creative environment. You could even argue that Google hasn’t fundamentally improved its own search experience over how it was, say, four years… Read More
Guy Kawasaki has one more excellent post on how to build a plan. His best advice is to make it bottoms-up (what’s likely to happen vs. what you want to happen, what your best sales rep thinks you can do), to limit variable costs to keep per-unit profits high (Kozmo’s variable costs were all those… Read More
The University of Washington had a big computer science job fair today. Microsoft was there. Google was there. Eight Zillovians were there, all wearing Zillow t-shirts. And Redfin was there too, wearing a T-shirt that said, “NO, we don’t compete with Zillow.” Standing in front of our bare table, I found myself wishing I had… Read More