August 2008 Archives
True, people do think I am a bit of an asshole, but those are the types who take everything they read on the internet seriously.
Anyway, you ever notice how when some dick writes about startups or entrepreneurship on his "Random Musings of an X Programmer" blog, he writes it with a holier-than-thou tone, implying that anybody who is not an entrepreneur is somehow either dumb or less of a man? You know, cocksteaks like Paul Graham?
Well, I'm not one of those guys. I'm just full of piss and vinegar, and I call 'em as I see 'em.
Being A Successful Entrepreneur Is Free License To Act Like A Dick
If you start a company and manage to sell it or IPO, then you really are entitled to hold your nose up to first-time founders at parties. You can listen to their pitches, let them ask you for $250,000 in exchange for 10% equity, and then tell them to come back when they have users. You earned that shit.
You earned that shit as much as someone who won $10,000 on a scratch-off lottery ticket earned the right to look down on other people for not buying lottery tickets, and then tell them that they're doing it all wrong when they finally do buy a lottery ticket. No, no, no... you're supposed to buy the Scratch4Millions ticket, not the Pot Of Gold ticket. Dumbass. Why don't you know that?
Want To Start A Company? Don't Do It In Software.
Well, why start your own company in the first place? If you're doing it for money, chances are you're going to end up worse off financially at the end. I make less than 30% of my previous industry salary as a startup founder. If the company is successful, then great. If not, then I've lost a few good earning years. Money can be made elsewhere, without nearly as much bullshit: Wall Street, the court room and the operating room, to name a few. If you're a smart person, you can succeed at any one of these.
I didn't go off on my own hoping for riches. I did it so I wouldn't have to take shit from anybody. And you know what? I still take plenty of shit. From investors, the illegitimate tech media, from bloggers, from users, everybody.
Doing a startup outside of software, most importantly, outside of the Silicon Valley microcosm, means you will take substantially less shit from substantially fewer people.
So Why Do It?
Good question. If you ask a lot of founders why they did it, they'll give you some smoke-up-the-ass answer about wanting to change the world. The true answer, the one I would give if you got me drunk enough, is fucked if I knew. But I am starting to figure it out:
Will my startup make it? Who knows, but at least it was more fun than a colonoscopy.
Anyway, you ever notice how when some dick writes about startups or entrepreneurship on his "Random Musings of an X Programmer" blog, he writes it with a holier-than-thou tone, implying that anybody who is not an entrepreneur is somehow either dumb or less of a man? You know, cocksteaks like Paul Graham?
Well, I'm not one of those guys. I'm just full of piss and vinegar, and I call 'em as I see 'em.
Being A Successful Entrepreneur Is Free License To Act Like A Dick
If you start a company and manage to sell it or IPO, then you really are entitled to hold your nose up to first-time founders at parties. You can listen to their pitches, let them ask you for $250,000 in exchange for 10% equity, and then tell them to come back when they have users. You earned that shit.
You earned that shit as much as someone who won $10,000 on a scratch-off lottery ticket earned the right to look down on other people for not buying lottery tickets, and then tell them that they're doing it all wrong when they finally do buy a lottery ticket. No, no, no... you're supposed to buy the Scratch4Millions ticket, not the Pot Of Gold ticket. Dumbass. Why don't you know that?
Want To Start A Company? Don't Do It In Software.
Well, why start your own company in the first place? If you're doing it for money, chances are you're going to end up worse off financially at the end. I make less than 30% of my previous industry salary as a startup founder. If the company is successful, then great. If not, then I've lost a few good earning years. Money can be made elsewhere, without nearly as much bullshit: Wall Street, the court room and the operating room, to name a few. If you're a smart person, you can succeed at any one of these.
I didn't go off on my own hoping for riches. I did it so I wouldn't have to take shit from anybody. And you know what? I still take plenty of shit. From investors, the illegitimate tech media, from bloggers, from users, everybody.
Doing a startup outside of software, most importantly, outside of the Silicon Valley microcosm, means you will take substantially less shit from substantially fewer people.
So Why Do It?
Good question. If you ask a lot of founders why they did it, they'll give you some smoke-up-the-ass answer about wanting to change the world. The true answer, the one I would give if you got me drunk enough, is fucked if I knew. But I am starting to figure it out:
- Being an entrepreneur doesn't mean you're smart. A smart guy will figure out how to make a bunch of money while taking on much less risk. Corollary to this, there are a lot of dumb entrepreneurs out there.
- Being an entrepreneur doesn't mean that your dick is longer than most. No, the guy in high school who got with all the girls while you sat in your room playing Starcraft has that one covered.
- As an entrepreneur, probably 2 days out of 3 are better than they would be if I had a real job. That's probably the best reason I can come up with.
Will my startup make it? Who knows, but at least it was more fun than a colonoscopy.
Alright. I try not to be too much of a God damned nerd around here, but sometimes a soldier just gotta throw down and let the shit fall where it land, ya feel me?
Fuck it. Here I go.
I spend most of my day buried in Java code. I toss around acronyms that begin with J and contain the letter X. I think I know an application programming interface when I see one.
Just recently, I decided to punish myself by diving into the data that gets flung around the Web 2.0 interbutts. There are some good links floating around; stuff that could use a good analyzing. Many of these data stores offer an API. Eh, that's a misnomer. For example, if you look at Twitter's exposed methods from the right angle, they seem to be an API, just like if you look at a fat girl from the right angle in her MySpace pictures, she seems hittable.
Sooner or later, reality gonna cut you down.
And While We're On The Subject Of Twitter
Imagine if a graphics library only offered you one method call per minute. What if your database had the same restriction? Well, that's all you'll get out of Twitter's API.
Twitter isn't really well known for their engineering ability, and other startups in the space have proven this by, uh, existing. Twitter is really just a large store of small pieces of data. Why is it so hard to get that data out? There's no intellectual property, so all they have left is the data. Maybe Twitter's appearance of incompetence is just a facade: an excuse for crippling the API so that no one can replicate their data and start a service that works.
I'm not ready to give up on you guys though. When, by divine intervention, you come up with a business plan, maybe you can offer us an API that works. In the mean time, I'll try to make due with what I got, but it will be slow going.
I did have a pretty good experience with Digg, though. No published rate limits, requests return in a reasonable amount of time, and a wide array of data access methods. I did get a little nut-pain because of a malformed request. I failed the request construction and they failed the parsing and served a 500. We called that one even.
tl;dr
Twitter's API is practically useless. Digg's is OK. I feel ashamed for knowing this.
Fuck it. Here I go.
I spend most of my day buried in Java code. I toss around acronyms that begin with J and contain the letter X. I think I know an application programming interface when I see one.
Just recently, I decided to punish myself by diving into the data that gets flung around the Web 2.0 interbutts. There are some good links floating around; stuff that could use a good analyzing. Many of these data stores offer an API. Eh, that's a misnomer. For example, if you look at Twitter's exposed methods from the right angle, they seem to be an API, just like if you look at a fat girl from the right angle in her MySpace pictures, she seems hittable.
Sooner or later, reality gonna cut you down.
And While We're On The Subject Of Twitter
Imagine if a graphics library only offered you one method call per minute. What if your database had the same restriction? Well, that's all you'll get out of Twitter's API.
Twitter isn't really well known for their engineering ability, and other startups in the space have proven this by, uh, existing. Twitter is really just a large store of small pieces of data. Why is it so hard to get that data out? There's no intellectual property, so all they have left is the data. Maybe Twitter's appearance of incompetence is just a facade: an excuse for crippling the API so that no one can replicate their data and start a service that works.
I'm not ready to give up on you guys though. When, by divine intervention, you come up with a business plan, maybe you can offer us an API that works. In the mean time, I'll try to make due with what I got, but it will be slow going.
I did have a pretty good experience with Digg, though. No published rate limits, requests return in a reasonable amount of time, and a wide array of data access methods. I did get a little nut-pain because of a malformed request. I failed the request construction and they failed the parsing and served a 500. We called that one even.
tl;dr
Twitter's API is practically useless. Digg's is OK. I feel ashamed for knowing this.
One of the most common butthurt reactions to web services is the login barrier. Forcing people to create an account before they can use your product makes a lot of potential users say fuck it.
I was eating dinner with Jeff Atwood the other night, and even he gives up on a product that asks him to create an account. If technical users won't fill in three text boxes and click OK, what hope is there for the users that will actually click on ads?
To this end, we've removed the login barrier from Pressflip. Anyone can show up and create an interest without making a new account. We pushed this change out yesterday (with significant amounts of fail surrounding the deployment - sorry to all of you who won a 500 error), and the number of interests created has increased drastically in only 12 hours, as has the RSS usage.
Anyway, here are a few of the things I am following, and you can follow them too, without even giving us your e-mail address:
Yeah, I know that's shameless, but when we ask people "what are you interested in?", one of the commons responses is "uh, I dunno". I think the homepage copy needs a bit of reworking.
Haulin' ass, gettin' paid.
I was eating dinner with Jeff Atwood the other night, and even he gives up on a product that asks him to create an account. If technical users won't fill in three text boxes and click OK, what hope is there for the users that will actually click on ads?
To this end, we've removed the login barrier from Pressflip. Anyone can show up and create an interest without making a new account. We pushed this change out yesterday (with significant amounts of fail surrounding the deployment - sorry to all of you who won a 500 error), and the number of interests created has increased drastically in only 12 hours, as has the RSS usage.
Anyway, here are a few of the things I am following, and you can follow them too, without even giving us your e-mail address:
Yeah, I know that's shameless, but when we ask people "what are you interested in?", one of the commons responses is "uh, I dunno". I think the homepage copy needs a bit of reworking.
Haulin' ass, gettin' paid.
