121
Financial Misstatements
First-time startup CEOs make a lot of mistakes, mostly due to ignorance. One particularly bad one is misunderstanding or misusing basic financial terms. I started noticing this in Y Combinator...
122
123
124
125
126
127
Why investors don’t fund dating
I’ve been listening to the excellent Season 2 of the podcast Startup , which gives an inside look at YCombinator startup The Dating Ring (NYT coverage here ). The episodes are all great. They talk about many important topics, but I had some specific comments on fundraising for dating products .
128
Shipping Culture Is Hurting Us
Yet another programming blog. Thoughts on software and related misadventures.
129
Let a thousand flowers bloom, then rip 999 of them out
For the past eleven months I’ve been the tech lead for Twitter’s Engineering Effectiveness group. Engineering Effectiveness is our name for what elsewhere might be called Developer Tools, Developer Productivity, Engineering Infrastructure, or Developer Efficiency. We provide the tools and processes that allow the rest…
130
Organizational debt is like technical debt, but worse
Startups focus on speed since they are burning cash every day as they search for product/market fit. But over time code/hardware written/built to validate hypotheses and find early customers can be…
131
Early employees take the most risk today
Why are we still using old 1990’s cap tables and the same tiny option grants for employees as we did back then? Is that fair? To whom? Is…
132
133
Surviving Data Science at the Speed of Hype
john-foreman.com is your first and best source for information about john foreman. Here you will also find topics relating to issues of general interest. We hope you find what you are looking for!
134
HippyVM goes to Y Combinator and fails
tl;dr; We decided to go to Y combinator with HippyVM , our high performance PHP implementation, and we did not get through after two round...
135
I Hate the News (2006)
Some people start their day by reading The New York Times . Others end it by watching the nightly news. Some get it from The Daily Show . Others download it from a variety weblogs. Some keep up-to-the-minute by following CNN. Others have instant news updates automatically text messaged to their phone. But everybody…
136
137
138
139
Do Not Disclose Your Salary to Recruiters
Recruiters are not my most favorite people in the tech eco-system. They’re the people that will contact you on behalf of some client (the company that pays them) in order to try to find new employees. They typically get paid a fairly hefty sum per employee found and if ever there was a moment when the ‘you are the…
140
141
142
Just Don't Hire 0x Engineers
Written pieces, talks, and other bits by Zach Holman.
143
I was underpaid for years and I didn't know it
The recent hashtag #talkpay on Twitter reminded me of a situation I found myself in at a former job. I contracted with a local startup during my last few years of college, and they gave me a job offer the winter before I graduated. The $40,000/year offer would expire in a week, and I wasn''t prepared to try to get…
144
145
How I killed app sales by going freemium
Why going freemium may not be the best idea for your app
146
The Social Radar: What I Did at Y Combinator
Culture matters for startups. For a startup to succeed, it must have a culture that reflects what it wants to achieve. This is one of my areas of expertise. I've spent the past decade focusing on Y...
147
Coursera is phasing out free certificates
Coursera’s free Statements of Accomplisments die a quiet death.
148
149
Create your own MailChimp clone for $5 a month with Sendy
Possibly the one you're Googling about.
150
Demoralize Your Teams Quickly and Efficiently with Micromanagement (2010)
Apparently I’ve earned the dubious distinction of having become an expert in project failure. I’ve always had an interest in project failure—Jenny and I have been doing our “Why Projects Fa…