Y Combinator Startup School Interview with Mark Zuckerberg

“If I were starting now I would do things very differently. I didn’t know anything. In Silicon Valley, you get this feeling that you have to be out here. But it’s not the only place to be. If I were starting now, I would have stayed in Boston. [Silicon Valley] is a little short-term focused and that bothers me. He explained that he had a conversation once with Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos about this, and the average time someone stays in job at Seattle is twice as long than it is in Silicon Valley. There’s a culture out here where people don’t commit to doing things, I feel like a lot of companies built outside of Silicon Valley seem to be focused on a longer-term, he explains. You don’t have to move out here to do this. There’s this culture in the Valley of starting a company before they know what they want to do. You decided you want to start a company, but you don’t know what you are passionate about yet…you need to do stuff you are passionate about. The companies that work are the ones that people really care about and have a vision for the world so do something you like.” – Mark Zuckerberg

Groupon’s IPO presentation by Andrew Mason (Founder), Jeff Holden (SVP Product), and Jason Child (CFO):

this commercial is hilarious:

An excellent 20 minute keynote by Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures on the “fragmentation of online marketing”. He shares his perspective on the latest trends in online marketing and highlights the importance of having the resources within your organization to participate in a constantly growing list of web services and advertising mediums.

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/17521806

“Facebook is giving people what they don’t yet know that they want… …it’s not about needing a share button. It’s about not needing a share button.” – Techcrunch.com

“Spotify is great, but turntable.fm is amazing.” – New York Times

“Biggest threat to productivity today: turntable.fm,” – FastSociety’s Andy Thompson

Turntable.fm founders Seth Goldstein and Billy Chasen sat down with TechCrunch editor Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch Disrupt to talk about the rise of Turntable.fm

Turntable.fm is a browser-based chatroom that streams music based on the choices of a rotating cast of DJs drawn from whoever is in the room. There are up to five DJs at any one time who create playlists; the station cycles through the playlists one song at a time, moving from one DJ’s pick to the next, as the room votes on how “lame” to “awesome” the track is. A (sometimes fast-moving) discussion takes place in a chatroom on the bottom right of the screen. DJs get points for picking popular songs and if enough people think a song is lame, it skips to the next. You can upload songs or search through the Medianet-powered library to create your playlist when it’s your turn to DJ.

Adoption:
Streaming $1 million songs a day
600000K users
40% active users
some power user sessions lasting 12hrs
10s of thousands of song downloads per day

Malcolm Gladwell’s first two bestsellers, The Tipping Point and Blink, earned him a place on Time’s 2005 “Most Influential People” list; and with Outliers, the “10,000 Hour” theory made its way into the zeitgeist.

Businessinsider.com paged through his titles and pulled out 12 of his most mind-blowing theories… (more…)

In an interview with WSJ’s Alan Murray, Betaworks CEO John Borthwick discusses the future of social media and how it is changing internet navigation. He claims that the business models of establishment internet companies like Google and Amazon are threatened by social media tools.

“YouMail (www.youmail.com), the mobile industry’s premier consumer
voicemail service, today announced a new transcription capability that
will enable users to receive voicemails converted to text. Users who
opt-in will receive automatically transcribed voicemail messages to
their email inbox or via text message to their mobile phone or PDA.
The transcription service is available now for free through a beta
program, with general availability expected later in 2008.”
- “Youmail Adds Speech to Text”, Reuters.com

Youmail Voicemail Transcription Example:

Signup for youmail.com here….

Technology Review (a magazine published by MIT) recently asked various thought leaders what the Web might be in ten years. Below is one of the most creative responses but all the interviews are quite intriguing.

Jonathan Abrams
Founder of Socializr and Friendster; San Francisco, CA

“In five to ten years, we will all have chips in our brains. When you look at someone’s face on the street, your Google Brain software will automatically call up every embarrassing photo of them from ancient websites such as Flickr, Facebook, and MySpace; list all mutual friends; and remind you of the person’s annotated bio. As a response to the perceived slowness and verbosity of antiquated services like Twitter, people will send everyone they know nanobursts of information about anything they might do or think before they actually do or think it. Every website, blog, and social-networking profile will include an aggregated feed from every other website, blog, and social-networking service, resulting in an exponential and infinite length of repeated content on every possible site, overloading our brain chips and causing frequent nosebleeds and occasional cerebral hemorrhage.”

Source: The Future of The Web, Technology Review 7/2008

Mint.com released an interesting charting tool since my initial write-up on their online money management services. It’s titled “SpendSpace” and helps you stay “below the average”.

• Now you can track spending online and compare your spending on all the categories you spend on, such as Coffee Shops, Movies, Clothes, Groceries, to the average spending of people in over 30 US cities, all 50 states, or the entire US national average.

Here’s an example:

Pretty cool stuff… and it’s still a work in progress…

Thanks to Keith for passing this along… have a great weekend everyone!

1. Go to google and type “find chuck norris”
2. Then click the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button

Below is a story extracted from a rather creative email marketing campaign which I actually read all the way through this morning (yes, 2 minutes of my life I’ll never get back again). It highlights a taxi driver’s perspective on the imminent recession…

Very cool how the company uses a real life experience to illustrate and validate the ominous state of the economy… telling the story in first person and then positioning their service as a solution to the problem.

Great job of seeking out opportunity in a somewhat dismal forecast…

A foreboding Monday morning Dan!

It was about 5 o’clock in midtown Manhattan and I was desperately looking for a taxi to get to a meeting in Greenwich Village when signs of the impending recession landed on my head the way the coming of the robins announces the spring.

Four–thirty p.m. is changeover time in Manhattan. All the taxis light their “off duty” signals and head for the home garage, which makes it difficult to get anywhere in a hurry at the end of the day.

So I was relieved when the driver of one black Town Car – so prevalent in New York streets and “Sex in the City” re–runs – pulled up and rolled down his window.

I’m used to negotiating with these guys. This was probably a $15 ride in a yellow cab, but the black cars will usually ask for $35.

I figured I’d offer $20 and haggle my way to $25.

So I was shocked when he offered “Bank and West Fourth? Twenty bucks.”

“That’s pretty odd,” I thought. But then I got in.

Drivers like to chat. It’s a staple of conventional wisdom and Hollywood movies that the musings of the wizened, world–weary driver are worth more than all the high–priced consultants and fancy lawyers you can hire.

“Tough year, man, so far…” he said over his shoulder.

“Oh yeah?” I asked.

“Yeah, none of them big firms are hiring us. It’s dead. That’s why I’m doing street hails.”

And that’s when it hit me, folks: the recession is really coming. When the financial services and law firms are announcing write–downs and lay–offs and, horror of horrors, they start to economize on expenses, that’s when the crimp has really hit the fan belt.

Cheapo town cars on the streets of Gotham mean one thing for you, Readers: the economy is really slowing up, and it’s time for you to take action.

We’ve got over 70,000 jobs right now on TheLadders.com, and it’s time for you to upgrade to Premium, start applying to jobs and contacting recruiters, and get your job insurance against the coming recession. It’s time to make sure there’s something else out there in case your division, your company, your industry suddenly finds itself doing the “Layoff Polka.”

And it’s time to get serious, folks. I’m asking all 200 employees here at TheLadders.com’s Manhattan headquarters to get even more serious on your behalf… we’re going to dig for every job, polish every resume, and call every recruiter we can in order to make your $100k+ job hunt shorter, more effective, and less painful.

Happy hunting, this week, folks, but also an admonition… get hunting now!

Warmest Regards,

Marc Cenedella
Founder & CEO
TheLadders.com, Inc.

A pretty good laugh…

YouTube  Tech Bubble Video

After reading this article on Toyota’s Robotics division…. it seemed like a good idea to check in on some of the latest robotics engineering… here’s what turned up:

The Violinist…

YouTube  - Robot Playing the Violin

The Trumpeter…

YouTube  - Robot Playing the Trumpet

Dancing Robots…

YouTube  - Japanese Robot Dance

A Real Live Transformer…

YouTube  - Transformer Robot

The Cyclist…

YouTube  - Robot Riding a Bicycle

Terminator…

YouTube  - The Terminator

The Humanoid…

YouTube  - The Humanoid Robot

Related: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.01/robots.html