“Designing Facebook Home” Video Gives Rare Look At Prototypes And Iteration Process. Facebook Home’s launcher was inspired by Lunchables. That’s just one nugget of insight into Facebook’s design process from a presentation it gave to Bay Area designers in May and that it’s now released as a video. The 40-minute clip illustrates how Home evolved, iteration by iteration. Facebook’s Julie Zhuo introduces it saying “the things that the articles never write about is the journey.” “We all just see the final product, we see the design in its completed state, and we don’t really get to tell the story about all of the things that happen along the way, the ups and downs, the bad ideas we tried, the endless iteration and critique,” product design director Zhuo explains.
Designing Facebook Home, embedded below, tells that story. While that end product hasn’t gained the traction Facebook might have hoped for, it’s slowly getting better. Mirroring The Real World “This is how we should design our products” says Facebook designer Justin Stahl. The Social Design Process. Build a Website - Squarespace. Founder Stories: Parse’s Ilya Sukhar On Founding A Startup With Strangers. For this week’s episode of Founder Stories, I sat down with Ilya Sukhar , co-founder and CEO of Parse.
The interview was taped days before Parse was acquired by Facebook last month. Parse is a cloud app platform that provides a set of SDKs that enable developers to focus on the execution of their application instead of rebuilding backend functionality for every mobile platform. Sukhar shares his experience of leaving Salesforce and going through Y Combinator.
Sukhar, who entered YC as a solo founder, was connected to co-founder Kevin Lacker through Paul Graham. The duo then joined up with another co-founding team about a month into YC to build Parse. “It was a big risk,” says Sukhar. “The founding relationship is a really deep one and there’s a lot of ups and downs to go through together.” Editor’s Note: Michael Abbott is a general partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, previously Twitter’s VP of Engineering, and a founder himself. Ilya is a generalist’s generalist. . → Learn more.
The $32,000 Startup. After graduating from Harvard Law School in 1999, David Park founded discussion forum service Coolboard.com. It took more than a dozen software developers, product managers, and quality assurance staff 18 months to build the company's core technology. To fund it, Park raised $10 million in venture capital, of which $4 million was spent before the company was launched. It went down in flames in 2003, a casualty of the dot-com bust. In 2005, Park launched his next business, MBA admissions blog and forum Beat The GMAT in San Mateo, Calif. Earlier this year he shifted gears again, embarking on a new version of the site that he describes as a social network for business school applicants.
Less Than a Luxury Coupe I was skeptical when Park and his co-founder, Eric Bahn, approached me last year to ask for advice on business strategy for the site. But Park and Bahn did. In software development, things don't usually go as planned. This brings up another point. The True Costs Of Launching A Startup. Every day someone asks me how much it costs to build a mobile phone application, a website, or an e-commerce site. As a co-owner of Crowd Interactive, and the CEO of an online 360º performance review service called ClearGears, I'm acutely aware of the costs associated with building and running online businesses. Here are a few guidelines to help get your head around your overhead: Informational websites are cheap, often free: You're in luck if your site is informative rather than interactive. You can build a Wordpress site in a matter of hours if you're not picky about design, and in weeks if you hire a designer.
You probably do not need a web development company to build an informational site. You can probably hire one person to design and build your site. Development is expensive: Mobile and web applications and stores are interactive and more expensive. Development doesn't end: Development costs don't decrease after launching. Some strategies to reduce costs:
Technical. Hosting. Culture. HR. CEO. Startup resources. Ecosystem & Trends. Desuign & Focus. Structure. Co-Founder. Patent & IP. Operation Management. Lean & Innovation. Legal. The Co-Founder Mythology. I spoke at Stanford last year about starting a tech company. They really cleverly chopped the video up into small bite-sized segments. So for anybody who reads my “This Week in VC” transcripts but doesn’t watch the video – this one’s for you! It’s only 3 minutes, 44 seconds. I covered what I call “the co-founder mythology.”
So embedded is this conventional wisdom in Silicon Valley that it feels like heresy to even question it. So emotional is the topic that people often want to debate me based on the title before they’ve even heard my point of view. Here is a quick summary of my POV: When you start a company a 50/50 partnership seems obvious. Here’s the reality: most people don’t want to start a business. Most senior employees who join are given 2% if they join early. And here’s the thing – given that all of the hard work is IN FRONT of you (as in the next 8 years of your life) – why would you start out with an unstable position if you don’t have to? OK. I am one of them.
Scaling.