31–40 of 177 posts
'Chamath had been previously known to me from my friends at Winamp as "the guy who fucked Winamp," (after Winamp had been sold to AOL) and seemed like a pretty lame dude.' Does anyone know more about this back story?
'Chamath had been previously known to me from my friends at Winamp as "the guy who fucked Winamp," (after Winamp had been sold to AOL) and seemed like a pretty lame dude.' Does anyone know more about this back story?
A google search about numair faraz turned up this article http://www.engadget.com/2008/03/26/motorola-insider-tells-al... . An interesting read mainly because it was brave.
or one could conclude that he has a history of publicly blaming higher-ups and corporate management for failures in which he was involved. what's brave about embarrassing your boss and your company publicly? or making unsubstantiated claims about conspiracies against you?
what's brave about embarrassing your boss and your company publicly
Knowingly doing so is brave and/or foolhardy regardless of whether your motives are noble or crass.
The one thing I learned from my time in the valley is that EVERYONE is looking out for themselves. That isn’t meant as negatively as it sounds. People go there to prove themselves. Either by making money or making their mark on the world (which is why people like Sean Parker stick around even after they’ve made money). But whatever the case they’re in it to win at all costs.
That’s why people work 18 hours a day and pour every cent they have into their startup.
But that’s the relevant point. If people are going to give up everything in their lives to win you can’t assume they’ll then hinder their chances by looking out for your needs. In this story the author is upset because Facebook decided they had a better chance of winning by partnering with iLike. But could you really expect any company in the valley to act differently?
There are plenty of places in the world where the environment isn’t as competitive and if that appeals to you then you should go there. But if you decide to start a company in the heart of the startup world you should expect everyone to be working towards their own goals and plan accordingly. That means NEVER relying on ANYBODY more than you have to and ALWAYS having a backup plan.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> In the ideal case, you have the option to choose among competing platforms. My ideal is not to entrust my livelihood to any third party. Obviously, it depends on what I want to build, but so far I'm happy not using any social platform beyond, say, email. The free, open platform of the Internet, LAMP stack, a web framework, and search engines is fine for me. I almost, but not quite, regret the time I've put into usi…
Spoken like someone whose business was never impacted by a search engine update, or whose email was never filtered by a major email provider. While some platforms are more free and open than others, our livelihoods are all somewhat dependent on third parties. Hope for the best and plan for the worse.
I disagree about email filtering. A friend sending another friend an email that says, "Check out this cool thing I saw" does not get filtered by anyone. Email that borders on spam gets filtered, sure, but overall, email serves as one of the most open communication platforms we've ever had. It's a drastic difference from Facebook or Myspace.
"If you are entrusting your life data to Facebook, or if you are depending on Facebook and its platform for your livelihood, beware." I think you should always be careful when you are entrusting any third party with your livelihood. You can only plan so much, but when your business plan requires that one crucial system and you have no way to even have a contingency plan, then you have to realize that it could easily…
On the other hand that doesn't mean you can avoid them altogether. In the ideal case, you have the option to choose among competing platforms. The problem with facebook is that since the end of myspace, it's still the largest web app platform.
So, it doesn't matter if Facebook is evil or not - I simply don't like it, and it seems that others share that sentiment. I had seen notable figures for a recent up-tick in deactivations, but I was very interested to find other people flipping the switch with a shrug.
How much time should I invest in anything exhibiting that kind of trend?
As a facebook app developer i am aware of what shaky ground it is. I must attest the best days of the platform was when Morin was in charge, people were actually flocking to make apps and the platform was adding features. Ever since he left, feature pruning started, policies were not enforced, facebook changed their designs every month and the platform team inexplicably started reinventing the wheel. Then at some poi…
"Live your life as though it is the world's best-kept secret, as though you are living in an amazing TV show with an audience of one."