How I've Made $200k in the iOS Education Market
To celebrate the v2.0 of my successful and innovative app Word Wizard , and the fact that I’ve made $ 200k on the App Store, I’ve decided t...
Everyone thinks they're hiring the top 1% (2005)
Everyone thinks they’re hiring the top 1%. Martin Fowler: “We are still working hard to hire only the very top fraction of software developers (the target is around the top 0.5 to …
The most difficult CEO skill: managing your own psychology
Ben Horowitz is a cofounder and general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He is the author of the New York Times bestsellers, The
Why programmers are not paid in proportion to their productivity
The most productive programmers are orders of magnitude more productive than average programmers. But salaries usually fall within a fairly small range in any company. Even across the entire profession, salaries don't vary that much. If some programmers are 10x more productive than others, why aren't they paid 10x as…
Why Instapaper Free is taking an extended vacation
Last fall, I conducted an experiment: I quietly removed Instapaper Free from the App Store 1 for three days, leaving only the full, $4.99 Instapaper app . Not only did sales increase incrementally, but nobody seemed to notice.
Google Labs Winding Down
Insights from Googlers into our products, technology, and the Google culture
Could You Modify It ‘To Stop Students From Becoming This Advanced?’
The free Web tutoring service “Khan Academy” has gotten much well-deserved attention, including a feature story in the current issue of Wired . That story includes a quote that literally took my breath away :
Progress against SOPA
When I did my blog post about the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) last week, things looked quite grim. The fight isn’t over, but there’s been a lot of great developments in the last few d…
We’re not going to have a jobless recovery. We’re going to have a jobless future
UPDATE: This is now the topic of my South by Southwest proposal. Please go vote for and comment on it here. We're not going to have a jobless recovery....
Why Startup Hubs Work
October 2011 If you look at a list of US cities sorted by population, the number of successful startups per capita varies by orders of magnitude. Somehow it's as if most places were sprayed with startupicide. I wondered about this for years. I could see the average town was like a roach motel for startup ambitions…
Google to acquire Motorola
Insights from Googlers into our products, technology, and the Google culture
“Real Names” Policies Are an Abuse of Power
Everyone’s abuzz with the “nymwars,” mostly in response to Google Plus’ decision to enforce its “real names” policy. At first, Google Plus went on a deleting spr…
Skype 5 for Mac
A while back, when Skype's group videochat feature was still free, a friend of mine sent me a Skype message, asking me whether it was possible to do videochat with more than one person in Skype. "Sure," I replied, "you can do that, but you need to install the new Skype 5 beta." I sent her the link. A few minutes…