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Kevin Rose Will Join Google

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Re: Kevin Rose Will Join Google

#131

Post by anigbrowl »

xpose2000 wrote: post #16

Sorry if this sounds harsh, and I know he has a lot of fans out there. But this guy struck gold 5 years ago with Digg. Sure, he deserves props for this. However, he's not a developer. He's an "ideas guy" as far as I can tell. As a developer, I hate these kinds of people because more often than not their ideas suck. In any case, what I am saying is that it seems like people in the industry get by based on one previous…

What could he possibly be bringing to the table with Google?

Knowledge of how things fail, as much as how they are started. He's not just an ideas person, he's also a signing-the-checks person and a making-the-deals person and a catching-the-flak person. In short, a business guy.

I have never liked or used Digg so I'm not carrying any water for him. But I've had that 'I do all the work and he gets all the credit' feeling, only to realize that the difference was that I had taken a job rather than starting a business. Code is just a means to an end. Sure, architecture and good code are important, but they're important so that users don't have to care what's making it work. When I walk into a store, my life is in the hands of the architects and laborers who built the structure; and having worked in construction, I can tell you that they did a hell of a lot of hard work. However, that's incidental to my purpose in entering the store, and I don't hold it against the store owner that he didn't personally build any of the structure his business operates in.

Re: Kevin Rose Will Join Google

#132

Post by skeptical »

mkramlich wrote: post #127
beatle wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

developers are a dime a dozen. I can hire ten people from India or China who are better than you (xpose2000). most developers hate successful people who don't have technical skills (Steve Jobs, MBAs, managers, non-technical founders, etc.) because they make the developers look a lot less important.

speaking as an American engineer who has had to deal with a lot of code produced by "cheap" Indian and Chinese programmers, I can't help but laugh at the naivete of this perspective. You tend to get what you pay for in a global market where the price is efficient. Also in my experience ideas and idea people are a dime a dozen. I have notebooks full of hundred ideas I don't have the time, energy or money to execute on…

Very insightful post. I've been trying to understand the common factor of successful stories and I had a blurry idea of what it takes to be successful.

While your first paragraph is something I came to realize very long ago, I couldn't put the finger on it like you did in the punch line. You nailed it!

Re: Kevin Rose Will Join Google

#133

Post by AtTheLast »

Google+ is not cool. It might be a better product then Facebook, but when it comes to social you need a network of people to make a product fly. I see the hiring of Rose as an attempt to give Google+ some street cred and make it cool.

Re: Kevin Rose Will Join Google

#134

Post by brown9-2 »

ot wrote: post #14
jgrahamc wrote: post #7

Feels like a Google-jumped-the-shark moment.

Can you elaborate?

Google certainly seems to have a trend lately of spending their huge cash reserve to acquire companies to fix perceived problems or holes they have. This is sound business strategy but to a lot of us involved in software/development/technology, it certainly doesn't seem like a proven winning method.

Re: Kevin Rose Will Join Google

#135

Post by mikeryan »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #72
xpose2000 wrote: post #16

Sorry if this sounds harsh, and I know he has a lot of fans out there. But this guy struck gold 5 years ago with Digg. Sure, he deserves props for this. However, he's not a developer. He's an "ideas guy" as far as I can tell. As a developer, I hate these kinds of people because more often than not their ideas suck. In any case, what I am saying is that it seems like people in the industry get by based on one previous…

Heh. Developer angst. Very common. Specific comments on your rant: 1) "Ideas" types do well at Google, they reward people for starting new things, not so much finishing things. 2) "it seems like people in the industry get by based on one previous successful project." - works both ways, people also get tarred with one unsuccessful project. And like success depending on how hard the fail was it can be an influence on t…

People also get tarred with one unsuccessful project.

This doesn't actually seem to be the case. The startup space is littered with ex-CEO's who can still raise capital. These folks are seen as battle hardened. I think all of the Color guys are going to end up fine despite that debacle.

Re: Kevin Rose Will Join Google

#136

Post by kmfrk »

drewblaisdell wrote: post #126
jgrahamc wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Details in CrunchBase: http://www.crunchbase.com/person/kevin-rose Fab (Series A), Zynga (Series B), Twitter (Series B), Foursquare (Angel). Only Foursquare looks like an Angel, the rest look more like he knows the right people and/or has the right name.

You do realize that all of those companies grew immensely after their Series A/B rounds of funding, right? Regardless of what I think of the guy, there is a lot of hate on here, and it's easy to look back and say "well of course Twitter did well, he's so lucky he got to invest in it in '08" as if it was common knowledge that it would be this big.

Not to mention that people on HN still aren't sure whether said companies will be profitable.

Re: Kevin Rose Will Join Google

#137

Post by samstave »

joering2 wrote: post #113
samstave wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was not trying to imply reddit evolved FROM digg. (I have been using all three sites since their inception - starting with /. in 1997, I am familiar with their history). I am saying the IDEA of social content sites evolved from one, to the next, to the next. As I mentioned, it is not about UI, or content, it was about UX! The UX that digg had, especially in V4 wrapped too much UI around the content resulting in a p…

> If you were worth getting $1.7MM to piss away you would have had $1.7MM to piss away. So you are implying that a luck and contacts and more other things such as your experience, geolocation, etc. don't matter as long as you are worth getting $X, you will have $X to piss away. uhm, is there any website to sign up? I want to try my skills against it -- perhaps I am "worth it".

Yeah he is saying that money is the only meaningful measure of success.

Re: Kevin Rose Will Join Google

#138

Post by debacle »

samstave wrote: post #24
hinathan wrote: post #8

Did not see that coming. This seems like an odd route for to Google add depth to Plus.

What is this term you are using, Depth?

If you're not being facetious, depth in this context refers to the overall quality of your staff.

A good example of a lack of depth would be the Indianapolis Colts, who with the loss of Peyton Manning had a dismal, almost winless season.

A good example of a team with a lot of depth would be Ask Ketchum's pokemon. He's got a Charizard, a Butterfree, a Wortortle, a Pidgiotto, and Pikachu. If one of his pokemon gets injured, he has a handful of equally good pokemon suited to other tasks that can fill in.

Re: Kevin Rose Will Join Google

#139

Post by joering2 »

functionform wrote: post #115
beatle wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

developers are a dime a dozen. I can hire ten people from India or China who are better than you (xpose2000). most developers hate successful people who don't have technical skills (Steve Jobs, MBAs, managers, non-technical founders, etc.) because they make the developers look a lot less important.

Maybe you've never heard the famous expression "Ideas are like *, everybody's got one".

> Ideas yes. GREAT ideas? rare. Great ideas + execution? rarer.

Beatle, I think the problem is with defining what "great idea" is. looking back today at "ideas" from couple years ago websites like youtube or even myspace would look like "illegal, won't touch it" and "oh, who would have time to build groups of friends and post stupid status updates". as we both know, both were/are worth alot in a terms of $.

Take example of Pinterest and read recent article with the founder -- even he wasn't sure about his idea at first. First 8 months there was no growth so you can easily say it was a "poor idea". I am pretty sure today he knows it was a great idea, but just because stats behind it that proves it.

There was a plenty of "good ideas" that didn't take off -- not because there were not great, but either market wasn't ready or internet userbase not mature enough or investors fighting over money, who knows? The bottom line, as much as your comment sounds smart, I think you are 100% wrong.

Re: Kevin Rose Will Join Google

#140

Post by bentlegen »

revorad wrote: post #84
wavephorm wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's jealousy and hatred, then it's not because of being jealous of success. A lot of developers work really, really hard on their startups for years bootstrapping, just scraping by, and being ignored by investors because they're not famous. And Kevin Rose comes along with a half-baked idea of posting pictures of the food you're eating to the Internet, and his "startup" that he's "really dedicated to" get's almost…

That half-baked idea got hundreds of thousands of users in 3 months. That is success. Just because your definition of skills is limited to writing code does not mean having connections, being good at marketing, PR or selling has no value. It's exactly the same mentality we developers hate when idea-men want to hire us as code-monkeys to implement their perfect vision. Reading stories on tech blogs does not mean you k…

I thought success was measured in dollars, not a shuttered web service.
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