July 2010
15 posts
Great Article about Starting Up in Atlanta
I just stumbled across this article in my TwitterStream..
http://www.inc.com/guides/2010/07/how-to-find-commercial-real-estate-in-atlanta.html
It’s a pretty good article that covers a lot of the dimensions of starting a business in Atlanta. It has a few issues though…
The title of the web page says “How to find Commercial Real Estate in Atlanta” and so does the URL....
Mobile Banking Should Be Easier w/ Android
I just opened an account with Suntrust a couple of weeks ago and I was checking out the “mobile banking” options on their website.
Unfortunately, to get the right “app” you have to tell them which wireless provider you use and what model phone you have.
Well, T-mobile wasn’t listed so I lied and said I used AT+T. Then, of course, the myTouch3G wasn’t listed...
You're wrong to tell me I'm wrong to say you're...
I’m tempted to write a long post that gets into some controversial topics but I think I just haven’t had enough caffeine today and I’m itching for a fight.
Social Music
is rdio too social? is Pandora social enough?
I hooked my Pandora favorites up to friendfeed which gets tweeted. that’s only one way though.
your thoughts?
“Once, my friend Simon was rushed to hospital to have his appendix removed and I...”
– http://www.27bslash6.com/easter.html
James Siminoff: Stalker Ads →
Online advertising relies heavily on the concept of relevance. The better a company can figure out the relevance of a ad to you, the higher percentage they will convert.
I am heading to Monterey, CA for a weekend trip so yesterday I was looking for rooms on Expedia. Afterwards I went to …
“white people like the World Cup because it allows them to pretend they are...”
– http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2010/06/01/133-the-world-cup/
David's Log: Michael Pollan's Food Rules →
Eat food.
Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.
Avoid food products containing ingredients that no ordinary human would keep in the pantry.
Avoid food products that contain high-fructose corn syrup.
Avoid foods that have some form of sugar (or sweetener) listed…
David's Log: Life Improvements →
Things I’ve changed this year:
I added a bunch of mail filters.
I don’t use a computer at home. I keep an eye on my Inbox (and occasionally browse the web) with my iPad.
We don’t turn our TV on unless we’re watching something with undivided attention.
We replaced all of our big…
having stuff blows. indeed. do you own things or do they own you?
“The final thing I’d say about optimism is this. If we took the loopiest, most...”
– Clay Shirky: ‘Paywall will underperform – the numbers don’t add up’ | Technology | The Guardian (via thewavingcat) (via rafer) (via thegongshow) (via bijan)
June 2010
4 posts
4 tags
Initial impressions of RDIO
Image by Gubatron via Flickr
I’ve had an RDIO account for a couple of days now so since my 3 day trial membership is about to expire I thought I’d share my thoughts on it.
The Model
The model is interesting because you can put any music you can find in your queue. It’s not like Pandora’s “we play songs and you have limited control over what gets played”...
bijan sabet: Leap of faith →
Here we are in the early days of summer.
Lots of things come to mind each summer. It’s a time when we spend a lot of time outdoors as a family. Our weekends are beyond crazy. Every summer we get to see friends from out of town and we have a few vacations planned. Our firm makes a number of new…
8 tags
Virtual Telephony Changed Today
What Happened?
As you might have heard, Twilio launched a massive new product this morning that’s going make a huge dent in the Virtual PBX market. It’s called OpenVBX.
A little history
Twilio flew me out to San Francisco in March to get a look at an early version and I was very impressed. We had a weekend hackathon and created plugins for it… but more about that later.
The...
“A second plugin (which was actually created by a third-party developer) hooks...”
– Twilio Releases OpenVBX, An Open Source Google Voice For Businesses (via fred-wilson)
May 2010
2 posts
1 tag
I should have just coached soccer instead of...
As some of you know, I’ve been coaching my daughter’s U10G soccer team this spring. I’ve played soccer off and on but hardly ever in an organized fashion and I’ve never coached ANYTHING.
I didn’t know what to expect exactly when I signed up to coach the team. I was worried I would screw it up for these girls and do a terrible job coaching them.
I have been working...
too cool!
Justin Blake: free comic book day is tomorrow
Justin Blake: i might bring nathan to acme
Bill Evans: cool
Bill Evans: I forgot to tell you
Bill Evans: now that maya can pretty much read
Bill Evans: she's picked her comics back up and started reading them on her own
Justin Blake: whoa
Bill Evans: i came home and she was sitting in a pile of comics
Bill Evans: it was awesome
Justin Blake: watershed moment
Bill Evans: yep
Bill Evans: and i deleted that marvel comics app
Bill Evans: paper comics for life!
Justin Blake: yeah, way better than seeing her sitting in a pile of ipads
Bill Evans: yep
Bill Evans: that shit would be expensive
Justin Blake: "where did you get all those ipads?"
Justin Blake: "I MURDERED TEN HIPSTERS"
Bill Evans: LOL
Justin Blake: "I love you, girl"
Justin Blake: i imagine you guys as big daddy and hit girl now
Bill Evans: good
Bill Evans: because that's pretty much exactly how we are
April 2010
3 posts
Why am I leaving? An example...
Why would I leave my job at a huge, theoretically stable company to go to a small company?
Because at the huge company there’s either no accountability or it’s all in the wrong place. Let me give you an example.
MySQL replication between 2 of our servers has been broken ALL DAY. The monitoring system is sending emails every 10 minutes. Why isn’t it fixed yet?
Because Team...
It is time.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmS10ESpFwg
My exit today from Cox won’t be quite this dramatic. Well, maybe it will be.
bijan sabet: At this point, a mobile experience... →
It wasn’t long ago that mobile phones had weak browsers and 3g was a network that the carriers built but without the “killer app”.
Smartphones with amazing browsers changed all of that. The web is the killer app. The browser on iPhone and Android are incredible and only getting better.
So if you…
time to re-order out priority list at OtherNum… :)
March 2010
21 posts
FourSquare: We are all developers.
I have been thinking about the FourSquare platform a lot recently. I think that’s partially because of the work I did last weekend at Twilio HQ, their publicity at SXSW and also because of their 1 year anniversary.
They’ve made a huge amount of progress in 1 year. The number of users and venues has exploded. It’s got a brilliant API that’s RESTful and they have OAuth...
Quitting my job. Kinda.
This post has been a long time coming. And here it is.
I’ve been struggling with a cluster dilemmas for weeks/months now and I’ve finally resolved part of it but it has not been an easy. The stress of it all has really taken a toll on my sleep patterns and my attitude / patience with others.
There were 3 major issues facing me. This is the first of them.
I’ve been very...
Watcha young woman was taken off our plane in a wheelchair after our plane returned to the gate. I hope she’s ok!
3 tags
OtherNum Loves Chirbit
Image via CrunchBase
One of the great things about attending startup community events is that you run into other entrepreneurs and you think of ideas to mash your technology together to create something new and different.
That’s where the mashup of OtherNum and Chirbit came from.
I met Ivan Reyes, founder of Chirbit, at StartupRiot in February and again at StartupAtlanta in March. We...
Toyota Guy == Balloon Boy's Future
This guy is a total sham. What kinds of sad, twisted childhood must this guy have had? How desperate and lonely do you have to be to pull a stunt like this?
Phone Number Removal!
Finally switched on a feature that let’s users de-provision phone numbers themselves. Now you have total control over phone numbers in OtherNumber.
Who owns your brain?
Image by gurdonark via Flickr
Does the company you work for automatically own everything you create, just because you work for them? What if you thought of it at night and you didn’t use any company resources to develop it? Can they just claim ownership of it?
This is all purely hypothetical.
Right.
7 tags
At A Crossroads
Image via CrunchBase
I sat down tonight to renew my hosting contract for OtherNumber with A Small Orange and I realized that it had been 1 year since I first got started.
I started originally with a concept I called SayHQ (pronounced Saitsh Queue) and it was going to be a collection of relatively trivial solutions for stupid things like automated reminders and such using the Twilio API.
...
5 tags
A Story of Two Products
Imagine your an investor and you are evaluating two possible products to invest in.
Product A
You’re a real estate agent and you have 20 homes on the market. With Product A You can assign a seperate number to each house. People driving past the house can call the number on the sign to get more information about the house by pressing 1. They can subscribe to SMS updates about open houses...
3 tags
I just want to CRUSH IT SO HARD.
So being an entrepreneur with a day job didn’t sound hard before I started doing it.
I work full time doing software engineering at a huge company. I come home and eat dinner with the wife and kids, help bathe them, shape their young and impressionable minds and put them to bed spend a few minutes doing chores and talking to my wife then get back on the computer and work on my startup. I...
bijan sabet: Scale first, monetize second →
This seems mutually exclusive of the LeanStartup “start charging for your service immediately” camp.
With every (venture backed) consumer web startup there is always the question of when to start thinking about monetization.
If the monthly burn is modest, I usually suggest that startups focus on reaching scale first.
It’s not because I don’t care about revenue or because I embrace...
Are Entrepreneurs the Source of Economic Crises?
This should be a lively topic for discussion around ATDC… :)
Entrepreneurship is often depicted as the solution to society’s problems, the sure path to higher economic growth for nations. Countless journal articles and books have glorified entrepreneurs, turning the Gateses and Zuckerbergs of the world into celebrities and icons. In this concert of praises, casting a critical eye onto...
Of course they distance themselves NOW. Why not... →
Pitch Perfection
UPDATE: Like my pitch, this blog post has iterated due to feedback.
I’ve had the great fortune of being able to pitch my company OtherNumber in front of large audiences three times in the past 3 weeks. First there was Startup Riot, then Startup Atlanta #OnStage and then there was This Week in Startups with Jason Calacanis.
It was, in a word, fantastic.
I was not a stranger to public...
bijan sabet: Startup Adolescence →
In the earliest days of a startup, the assignment for the company is straightforward. Most, if not all, of the resources of the company are devoted to building the product and getting traction with early users.
In a world of constrained resources and limited funding, the focus is clear, decisions…
I’ve seen this happen. It’s especially hard if some of your key...
February 2010
6 posts
whoa.
just re-arranged my desk. ok, something is whacky.
Something about today...
there must be something wrong with me today. I have the lights on in my office. that can’t be a good sign….
bijan sabet: Focus →
Wow, first a post from @jc about focus and now one from @bijan… I think somebody is trying to tell me something…
Focus is something so easy to say but difficult to do.
It’s hard for everyone. I have a hard time with it as my friends and colleagues can verify. I’m grateful that my job allows for a reasonable amount of ADD.
Focus in startups can be quite difficult as well....
“Unread counts cause mental blocks, [David Karp] said, and they’re the reason...”
– this is true of both tumblr and twitter for me. i see what i see and i miss what i miss
Leon Crawl: I talked to David Karp and he said some things about Tumblr (via nickdouglas)
(via fred-wilson)
= It takes a mindset change to get used to it but it’s liberating at the same time. I’ve...
