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Apple's Audacity
This year’s WWDC presented an Apple that was finally ready to move past the iPhone.
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The next big thing will start out looking like a toy (2010)
programming, philosophy, history, internet, startups
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Mailchimp to Sendy: Cutting Email Costs
Mailchimp was getting too expensive, so I moved this blog's newsletter to Sendy.
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The curious economics of being ripped off on holiday
I once wrote that there are two types of charges: the ones you see coming and the ones you don’t. Perhaps I was too reductive. There’s a third category: the fees that you know are looming, but the …
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The Secret Rules For Getting Hired
I'm going to let you in to three TOP SECRET rules for getting hired. These are the hidden techniques used by TOP interviewers… Never Tell The Candidates The Rules Of Success I read an infuriating blog post recently: "If someone doesn't send a thank you email, don't hire them". This is a great way to limit your talent…
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Finding My Next Bootstrapped Business Idea
Most business ideas are neither objectively good nor bad. The quality of an idea for you (as a founder) depends on your goals, your skill set, and your risk tolerance.
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Hiring Is Broken?
I can’t keep track of the number of articles I’ve read about hiring in the past few years. Inevitably, they all follow the exact same format. First, they claim that hiring is broken. Ne…
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Netflix Flexes
Netflix is an Aggregator, with a value chain that lets it drive demand, raise prices, and dismiss competition.
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The Glorious, Profitable, Inescapable Art of Addiction
Get those numbers up! Those are rookie numbers! I've been reading a lot about Anthem. It's that gigantic, mega-budget looter-shooter fr...
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Lyft vs. Uber: A Tale of Two S-1’s
Benjamin Tseng — startup operator, deeptech investor, and applied technologist. Writings and projects across deeptech + AI, biotech, operational models, and software systems.
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Microsoft Screws Azure Customers and Its Own Advocates Alike
Microsoft’s recent licensing change for Windows Server is a great modern-day example of why so many businesses hated Microsoft two decades ago. Is this an aberration, or are they back to their old tricks?
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When AWS, Azure, or GCP Becomes the Competition
It starts with someone posting an AWS press release in the company chat. “AWS Announces FooBar,” the headline reads. The announcement skirts around technical details, as usual, but contains a worrying amount of buzzwords that overlap with the company’s product. Somebody responds with a grimace emoji 😬. Others reply…
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What's Amazon's market share? 35% or 5%?
Amazon is a big company, but what does that mean? How big is ‘big’? What does ‘dominant’ or ‘scale’ or ‘huge’ mean when US retail is $6 trillion every year?
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Amazon as experiment
Amazon is so new, and so dramatic in its speed and scale and aggression, that we can easily forget how many of the things it’s doing are actually very old.
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The soul of a new computer company
Over the summer, I described preparing for my next expedition. I’m thrilled to announce that the expedition is now plotted, the funds are raised, and the bags are packed: together with Steve Tuck and Jess Frazelle , we have started Oxide Computer Company .
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80% of the Web Powered by PHP (2017)
Today, PHP is used by more than 80% of all the websites whose server-side programming language we know. Popular websites such as Slack, Etsy, Cloudflare,
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The Internet and the Third Estate
Mark Zuckerberg suggested that social media is a “Fifth Estate”; in fact, social media is a means by which the Third Estate — commoners — can seize political power. Here history matters…
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Tumblr
The news hit yesterday that WordPress has purchased Tumblr from Verizon (which owns it by virtue of its acquisition of Yahoo! and AOL). USV seeded Tumblr along with our friends at Spark in the summer of 2007 and were actively involved in the development of the company until its sale to Yahoo! in 2013. I […]
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AgileFall – When Waterfall Sneaks Back into Agile
This article previously appeared in the Harvard Business Review AgileFall is an ironic term for program management where you try to be agile and lean, but you keep using waterfall development techn…
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The New iPad Mini
If you want a device that is bigger than a phone, but smaller and more holdable than a laptop-screen-sized thing for reading and just walking around with, the iPad Mini is it.
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Self-serve first: an overlooked paradigm underlying great software companies
“My biggest regret is that our first customer was $1M ACV*,” my friend lamented over coffee the other day. “I wish I could take it back.”
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A Cold Take on IBM, Red Hat and Their Hybrid Cloud
I start more blog posts than I finish, due to no shortage of other distractions and at times a near-crippling inability to blog short. When IBM announced they were acquiring Red Hat in October 2018…
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Why Windows 10 Sucks or Everything Wrong with Microsoft Windows
It's funny and equally sad that year 2015 marks the end of the Windows OS for a lot of people. There are several issues with Windows which, at present, make Spyware/ Malware OS 10 inappropriate and even outright dangerous for a lot of people. The most egregious, of course, is a total abandonment of any form of privacy…