Presentation. Usability. Finance. Hiring. Most Startups Should be Deer Hunters. This post is part of my series “Startup Lessons“ Elephants, Deer and Rabbits – Some thoughts on start-up segmentation Nearly all of the mistakes I made at my first company I fixed by the time of my second company. This is the only mistake I repeated twice and it is a mistake that I see many, many companies make. I know that this advice won’t apply to every possible startup – but I think it applies to many.
When you start your company the very first question you need to ask yourself is which kind of customers do you want to serve. Make sure you know what the size of customer you want to serve is, what the people in a company of that size do, the problems they have, the features that will resonate and the channels you’ll need to sell into and service that customer. I’ve stated my animal bias in the title – but each can work for different business types.
Elephants: It is very tempting for many start-ups to hunt elephants. It’s tempting on many levels to be an elephant hunter. Rabbits: Deer: Relentless – The Difference Between Motion And Action « Steve Bl. Never mistake motion for action. -Ernest Hemingway One of an entrepreneur’s greatest strengths is their relentless pursuit of a goal. But few realize how this differs from most of the population. Watching others try to solve problems reminded me why entrepreneurs are different. Progress ReportLast week I happened to be sitting in my wife’s office as she was on the phone to my daughter in college. She had sent several emails to the resource center asking for help. She believed she had done all things that could be expected from her and was waiting for the result. I realized that my daughter had confused motion with action. This reminded me of a conversation with one of my direct reports years before my daughter was born.
Status ReportAt Ardent the marketing department was responsible for acquiring applications for our supercomputer. Think DifferentI still remember the day I discovered that I thought about progress differently than other people. Why? This was my fault. Lessons Learned. Zygna guy. (I’m live-blogging from Startup School, a daylong program from startup incubator YCombinator held at Berkeley today. Mark Pincus is the CEO of social gaming company Zynga . If these notes are a bit scattered, it’s because it’s paraphrased and Pincus is doing a stream-of-consciousness style talk.)
So Pincus starts his talk by outlining his pretty conventional career right out of college — he went into banking. Then to business school. Then he said he hadn’t really succeeded at any of those companies. “I thought I was washed up at 28 or 29. He went and built the company up. “It was really a disaster. So then I did the cliche thing with all the credit cards. So then you kinda realize there was some other reason you were doing that.
I’m going to diverge on that for one minute. Anyway — I had a bad idea and then I shifted it into a good one. …. I find that we all occasionally end up building companies that we ultimately don’t want to work with. Then you think: I don’t like this. Iraqi who saved norway. Figure out what people want... advice for work and business. Bookoutlines / Never Eat Alone. Things Caches Do. There are different kinds of HTTP caches that are useful for different kinds of things. I want to talk about gateway caches -- or, "reverse proxy caches" -- and consider their effects on modern, dynamic web application design. Draw an imaginary vertical line, situated between Alice and Cache, from the very top of the diagram to the very bottom. That line is your public, internet facing interface. In other words, everything from Cache back is "your site" as far as Alice is concerned.
Alice is actually Alice's web browser, or perhaps some other kind of HTTP user-agent. There's also Bob and Carol. Cache is an HTTP gateway cache, like Varnish, Squid in reverse proxy mode, Django's cache framework, or my personal favorite: rack-cache. And that brings us to Backend, a dynamic web application built with only the most modern and sophisticated web framework. Expiration Most people understand the expiration model well enough. Thirty seconds later, Bob comes along and requests the same welcome page: