11–20 of 113 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a very long winded way of saying nothing.
Yeah, I was going to mention something to the effect of how dumb it is to hide your content behind a crummy text-scrolling interface when your users already have one they probably like pretty OK , but in this case I'm actually not too bent out of shape about it :P
A world that is aging, where half the young are unemployed and the old demands to be paid to live to 98 A world lead by visionless, spineless leaders, employed by multinationals to kill anything that threatens their existence A world that is feminized, where men are taught to grovel for a women's affection, and to earn their attention with gucci and prada, paid by their mcjob A world ruled by bankers, where the mindl…
"Starbucks everyday." ... said the guy named chailatte :D "A world that no longer needs you, the passionate, explorative, imaginative, thinking you." AS IF any passionate, imaginative, thinking blob ever cared about how much "the world" (wth is that supposed to mean) needs her/him or not...
The problem isn't just that "we got 140 characters." The problem is that Peter Thiel asked for it by investing in and therefore promulgating Mark Zuckerberg's vision of ubiquitous irrelevance. I think he's right that VC is destroying itself by investing in what I have often referred to as trivial nonsense, but he and his firm are part of the problem, not the solution. Just look at the portfolio companies: Winster? Quid? Slide? Path? GoWalla? And of course, Facebook? None of these companies improve my life or the lives of anyone I care about. Founders Fund has 22 consumer internet companies in its portfolio and one or two in the other categories listed on the web site.
Furthermore Thiel has stated that he wouldn't bother doing PayPal again if he knew what he knows about the payments industry today. This is of course the space that I'm working in. Bold words, Peter. If only there were more VCs willing to run and hide.
Frankly I'm sick of venture capital firms writing self-serving slogans, or in this case, entire essays. Actions speak louder than words. I'm doing serious work and my company has been rejected by sixty (that's six-zero) VC firms in the past five years. It's going to take more than a manifesto to convince me that any investor is serious about the future.
I should add ...can be changed after much deliberation.
Here is some concrete feedback:
- WebKit lets you make custom scrollbars if that's important to you: http://www.webkit.org/blog/363/styling-scrollbars/ . Using a real scrollbar means that shortcuts I'm familiar with (e.g. shift-space to page up -- wow, I had no idea how frequently I used this until this page broke it) won't break.
- Whitespace is nice, but the double-spaced-feeling line-height combined with the "back to founders fund" heading at the top combine to make it feel uncomfortably cramped vertically -- not enough information density per page.
- Similarly, the lines are so wide they are uncomfortable to read. (I actually use a user stylesheet that limits lines to 50em, which makes many sites including HN more readable.)
I'm sorry I don't have any feedback on the content, I was too distracted to start reading it yet.
Their manifesto makes me question if my current project is thinking big enough (I think it is).
I think the problem entrepreneurs who would apply to Founders Fund might have is how to present their idea as being big and bold. Often the big and bold are not understood in common terms, so we dumb them down to something that is achievable in the short term, and seems realistic, while having a long-term goal which only makes sense if the shorter term goals can be accomplished.
Facebook would be a perfect example here. They couldn't be discussed as 'world changing' in the early days as they were just another social network. Nothing seemed insurmountable, nothing seemed challenging, even the idea of this 'social graph' probably wouldn't have made much sense until tens of millions of people were using it.
It's clear whoever put this together put a lot of effort into making the page fancy and there are some nice effects there, but it ultimately harms the message. Here is some concrete feedback: - WebKit lets you make custom scrollbars if that's important to you: http://www.webkit.org/blog/363/styling-scrollbars/ . Using a real scrollbar means that shortcuts I'm familiar with (e.g. shift-space to page up -- wow, I had n…
- Support normal scroll behaviour (swiping my trackpad scrolls but only very slowly; I can't press spacebar to page down; clicking underneath the scroller should advance a single page, not jump ahead to another part of the document)
- Show diagrams by default (no reason to require a click)
- Add a place for comments
- Narrower line length
Enough with the flying cars! That was never a good idea.