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Three Stories

justinkan.com

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Re: Three Stories

#11

Post by AznHisoka »

hyperion2010 wrote: post #6
AznHisoka wrote: post #4

Would there still be any objection to making money from a porn site if it gave them 40% of their revenue?

Not only that but everyone wins. The user looking for porn is directed to an appropriate venue and everyone in the community that doesn't want to deal with a horny male at the other end of internet never even notices he is gone! Score -1 for continued prudishness.

Yep and I lost some respect for these guys because they were bullied into stopping by someone in techcrunch... Techcrunch. Makes me want to barf.

Re: Three Stories

#13

Post by hkmurakami »

sanderjd wrote: post #5
dcx wrote: post #2

"Gen George C. Marshall received a report from a general on his staff that some of Marshall’s officers had morale problems. General Marshall said, 'Officers don’t have morale problems. Officers cure morale problems in others. No one is looking after my morale.' " ( http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a454364.pdf )

This is a clever way of putting things, but what it is really saying is that leaders shouldn't let the people who are counting on them see their morale problems. But that doesn't mean that they can't have morale problems, or that they can't find support up or sideways on the chain of command.

IIRC there is a section in Horowitz's book that covers this during the doom days of Loudcloud.

Re: Three Stories

#14

Post by krschultz »

cassieramen wrote: post #3

It's always interesting to think about the key moments in a start-up's life. Those ride or die moments that lead to great success or losing the Jonas Brother. I wonder how many a startup gets? How many are created by action or by luck? Do all startups have a couple of key moments they can look at as lynch pins to their success?

The rare make or break moments exist, but most startups thrive on getting their employees to work as if they're in make or break moments 10x more often than they actually are.

Re: Three Stories

#16

Post by timr »

cassieramen wrote: post #3

It's always interesting to think about the key moments in a start-up's life. Those ride or die moments that lead to great success or losing the Jonas Brother. I wonder how many a startup gets? How many are created by action or by luck? Do all startups have a couple of key moments they can look at as lynch pins to their success?

It would be incorrect to take away from these stories that they were "key moments" in the life of JTV. These are fun stories, but there were lots of other moments that Justin could describe that were equally dramatic (if not worse).

If anything, these are examples of why most of the stuff that you worry about in a startup turn out to be totally irrelevant in the final analysis. While we were stressing about the Jonas brothers, the "gaming" category was off languishing in its own little corner of the site....

Re: Three Stories

#17

Post by cba9 »

livejamie wrote: post #8
pkfrank wrote: post #7

The pizza delivery messenger service is clever and hilarious.

A startup waiting to happen! ;)

The problem is you don't need fast physical deliveries of short messages that often. For example, a few days ago I was pondering how to reach a particular person on very short notice; I had an address, but nothing else, so I couldn't call them, and while I could spend like $50-100 on international mail, it wouldn't get there faster than 3 days from sending. Ultimately, the best solution I could find was... telegrams. Specifically, their modern email+courier incarnation. It would cost like $70 and probably get to the person in a day or two.

I thought this sounded outrageous, but then it occurred to me: when was the last time anyone ever used telegrams? There can't be many uses of them - I've never used one in my entire life - and all the regular costs of a business still need to be paid and the couriers have to be paid and so on.

Re: Three Stories

#18

Post by makomk »

hyperion2010 wrote: post #6
AznHisoka wrote: post #4

Would there still be any objection to making money from a porn site if it gave them 40% of their revenue?

Not only that but everyone wins. The user looking for porn is directed to an appropriate venue and everyone in the community that doesn't want to deal with a horny male at the other end of internet never even notices he is gone! Score -1 for continued prudishness.

One problem with that is that there's no reliable way to tell if someone is looking for porn. I remember this got MSN search in hot water donkeys years ago because they were making money by sending people to porn sites based on keyword matching that triggered on non-porn searches.

Re: Three Stories

#20

Post by cperciva »

noahlt wrote: post #19

I've always wondered this about the pizza-delivery story: how did they know the address where Kyle was staying?

From http://www.foundersatwork.com/1/post/2012/10/what-goes-wrong... :

Let me give you one last example of improvising. The Justin.tv founders were having a lot of scaling issues in the beginning. One weekend their whole video system went down. Kyle was in charge of it, but no one knew where Kyle was. And Kyle wasn't picking up his cell phone. This was live video so it was pretty critical that this get fixed immediately.

Michael Siebel called Kyle's friends and found out he was in Lake Tahoe and got the address of the house. So here's a problem for you, you know the address where someone is and he's not answering his phone. How do you get a message to him right away? Michael went on Yelp and looked for a pizza place near the house and called them up and said, "I want to have a pizza delivered. But never mind the pizza. Just send a delivery guy over and say these four words: The site is down." The pizza place was very confused by this, but they send the pizza guy without a pizza, Kyle answers the door, and the pizza guy says, "The site is down." Kyle was able to fix it, and the site was down for less than an hour total from beginning to end.

So it sounds like they knew someone who knew where he was staying.

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