Archive for the ‘Things That Interest’ Category
Venture Investing down 61% percent from Q1 last year - ouch!
Posted by: andy in Things That Interest on April 18th, 2009
This is going to come as a surprise to no one but it’s a bit shocking to see the actual numbers. Check the NYTimes story here.
As a result, investors are funneling time and money into existing portfolio companies instead of a new generation of start-ups. Only 132 start-ups raised money for the first time, the lowest number in 15 years.
The Sound of the Other Shoe Falling
Posted by: andy in Things That Interest on April 9th, 2009
From an article entitled Tech jobs getting zapped, “Year to date, 8,000 tech jobs have been slashed, including 4,100 just last month.”
I’m not sure if this is good for us or bad for us. The recession has forced plenty of early-stage tech companies to find ways to do more with a lot less (aka: good for us) but there will be plenty of laid-off tech workers that will be willing/required to work for less (aka: competition, aka bad). I guess we’ll see.
iSteam? iFart? Big money in Iphone development.
Posted by: andy in Things That Interest on April 6th, 2009
From the NYTimes today. This validates our idea that small is the new big. I wonder what it says about our culture that an electronic farting app is one of the hottest sellers.
Is It Safe?
Posted by: andy in Things That Interest on March 24th, 2009
Great Op-Ed piece in the NY Times about the US perceptions of the drug cartel violence here. I feel like I need to chip in my two cents here.
Mexico is not without its warts and the drug wars do indeed represent a huge problem but the view from the street bears little resemblance to the pornography of violence that one sees in the media (my Mom called me the other day (from the Midwest) and asked me how I was dealing with all of the beheadings!)
I’m not sure which cartel was the mastermind behind this heinous act, but we DID have some lawn chairs stolen from our porch. That’s been the extent of the crime that we’ve witnessed here. I’m sure that there is violence around us but I’ve not seen any, neither have any of my friends, nor their friends. Let’s put this into perspective:
Gun violence in the U.S. kills 14 out of every 100K people. In Mexico, it’s 12 out of every 100K. Dig a little deeper and you find that 4 out of 5 gun deaths in Mexico are narcos killing other narcos (Mexico’s “self-cleaning-oven”). Unless my math fails me, that means approximately 2.5 out of every 100K normal everyday citizens are killed by guns here. I don’t know what the narco-on-narco numbers are for the US but I suspect that they are negligible. Add it up and you are 5 times more likely to be shot and killed in the US than in Mexico.
Are my numbers accurate? Who knows. There are so many variables (crimes committed vs reported, non-gun murders, etc. etc.) but certainly Mexico doesn’t deserve the bad rap it’s been handed as of late. As mentioned in the article: “Let’s leave caricatures where they belong, in the hands of cartoonists.”
How to Run A Company (again)
Posted by: andy in About Us, Things That Interest on March 9th, 2009
Good post from Joel Sposky of Joel on Software. His prescription: build something, stand back and see how it works (it probably won’t), tweak the knobs until it does what you want it to, don’t give up. This seems about right to me.
…certain aspects of a business can be off by only a little bit and then, one tiny adjustment, and BING! The thing starts working.
How To Run A Company
Posted by: admin in Things That Interest on March 8th, 2009
I came across this article by Malcolm Gladwell the other day and it almost perfectly summed up my views on how to run a company. In a nutshell, vision is overrated. To be successful is to experiment and then promote the good, and drop the bad. This goes for hiring, product development, marketing, and sales. Seems simple but virtually no one wants to admit that they can’t see the future. From the article, “A prediction, in a field where prediction is not possible, is no more than a prejudice.”.
Comments welcome.
$700,000 A Month - OMG!!
Posted by: admin in Things That Interest on March 8th, 2009
Check this. My little heart did a backflip when I read it. In my mind, small is the new big.
We’ve gotten word from SocialMedia, a popular ad platform for social network applications, that one of the company’s clients pulled in over $700,000 in advertising revenues from their Facebook apps in December alone. Granted, this was spread over 30+ of the client’s applications, but the company only consists of a handful of (very prolific) developers.