21–30 of 223 posts
We at blogVault love the above line. We often have our customers ask us for help with things completely unrelated to what we do. However, we always refuse to be paid for it. We always tell them that we are in the business of backups. Everything else we will help out but could not accept any payments for. It ensures that we don't have to commit to deadlines etc.
Systems that don’t scale, or that are reliant on the grunt work of humans, are not part of the training of engineers either. For so many engineers, an unscalable, human-dependant system is a bug, not a feature.
Is it too hyperbolic to say doing things that don’t scale runs counter-intuitive to an engineering mindset? (I’m a left-brained, analytical, systems-minded designer, so I’m definitely not trying to throw stones at my peers.)
Somewhat ironically I am of the opinion that:
(A) this is one of pg's best and most useful essays ever
(B) it is partially more useful because it is longer and more experience driven than some of his other "classic" essays (i.e. the theory behind why blub is bad and lisp is great)
(C) it is too long and could have been edited down a bit more
In the early days of Apple, the founders placed minimum orders for parts on 30-day credit, then built the computers in 10 days and sold them before the payment for the parts came due. There wasn't any sexy software at that point. Apple was a hardware startup.
Web startups are in general probably more attractive to VC, but I'm excited about hardware startups.
I can think of quite a few startups that used a big bang launch with press with success. Off the top of my head - Instagram (MG's series of pieces on Techcrunch), Mailbox, Flipboard, Square, Path. I get where PG is coming from but press can help bootstrap a network effect if you have none.
Dropbox went to YC and to TC 50 and did "double-sided affiliation" and has a great product and and and... etc.
Who wants to start a user-acquisition startup?