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The trouble with the AdMob-like behavior is that acquirers pretty much know founders would flip and go. No rational acquirer these days can expect founders to stick around very lon…

I am noticing a trend lately where private market valuations seem higher than what equivalent public companies get. Of course, it is hard to find a public company equivalent of Fac…

I made that original comment. Thanks for doing the analysis I was too lazy to do! Your analysis jives with the broader point I was trying to make - in the past 15 years, finance ha…

pg, unfortunately for America, in recent years most of the highest paid people (to the tune of hundreds of millions per person) have been financiers. Even fairly successful outcome…

I have some colleagues and good friends in Beijing, most of them coming from various provinces to Beijing for their jobs - they are not high up in the ladder socio-economically. Th…

My suspicion is that Facebook revenues could be much higher than they are letting on. I say that as a non-Facebook user and a fairly neutral outside observer. If they were being co…

I sense too much negativity and frustration on this thread. I can sympathize. I was exactly the same way at 24, a nerd who couldn't hold a conversation with the opposite sex, had r…

This is one of those evil taxes - you pay a life time of taxes and accumulate stuff, and then when you die, it gets dinged another 55%.

Can anyone compare Git vs Mercurial? This decision is coming up for us, and would appreciate the input.

You hit the nail on the head. This is really the effect of the massive credit bubble - natural resource companies and financials. Given the way things are going, we will likely see…

There is an interesting analogy to India too, which had a sclerotic, state-dominated economic system for 40+ years. India had far less of a dispora than China, but far more than Ru…

In the name of freedom, what the MySQL flavor of GPL has achieved is to give special powers of dual-licensing to the "original author" - all animals are equal, some animals are mor…

I think the real debate here is that value in the internet is moving relentlessly away from content producers towards content aggregators. Even a big newspaper site doesn't have th…

When I was in college, I wanted it all - wanted to prove theorems, found companies, join politics and so on. As I got older, I realized that just getting deeply focused on one thin…

This is a great article, but keep in mind that the numbers are illustrative of one type of company. Mint was dealing with financial information, so they had to get "serious" fast a…

I am afraid this is the predictable consequence of the Fed orchestrated monster credit bubble. These private equity players, through investment banking and other financial intermed…

I agree. This would only complicate the language, without adding much of value.

My heartfelt condolences.

I attended a presentation he made some time ago, and came away really impressed. He has a remarkably clear vision, understands what not to do as much as what to do, and seems to kn…

The reason this "upside" notion is so pernicious is that it's fed by powerful biases. We read about the successes. Even the failures we hear about, we're reading about them by and …

I worked in a large successful tech company right after school. One of the best periods of my life. I learned a lot, worked on really cool technology, and I was treated well. I lef…

My point was that FSF achieved its maximal influence during the reign of Microsoft. And I argue that is not a coincidence.

I clarified my point above: forking MySQL will not solve the "GPL-in-the-hands-of-Oracle-salesmen" problem. Any forks will still be bound by MySQL's original terms, which in practi…

Exactly my feeling. My thesis is that FSF achieved its popularity in the heyday of Microsoft monopoly serving as a counter-force, and as Microsoft's hegemony declined (thanks in pa…

Summary (it is all a little meta for me): the reddit link above started as a fairly innocuous reddit thread comparing the sizes of the two books "Javascript - The Definitive Guide"…