Category Archives: starting a company

User-Generated Content? Do not use BurstNET

A hosting provider, BurstNet, shut down a wordpress hosting service, Blogetery.com, last week. This is an example of egregious abuse of power by BurstNET against Blogetery.com. Blogetery.com hosts 70,000 wordpress blogs. Apparently, a few of those blogs had “an al-Qaeda … Continue reading

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why people bother to interview here – if you can’t teach (Part 2)

Part 1 was a technical question that I ask because so many “strong” developers cannot answer that technical Java question. Part 2, is more about the valuable soft skill of teaching. One of my standard questions that candidates constantly struggle … Continue reading

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Bad management advice from Jason Calacanis

I am beginning to think that Jason Calacanis’ advice should be taken in the opposite. Jason Calacanis’s latest advice on when to fire people ignores human psychology: Calacanis goes on to examine the three categories of that mistakes and employees … Continue reading

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Facebook indifference at work again

Last week, Facebook made a change resulted in small businesses losing the ability to create custom landing pages. Facebook later reversed their decision. Dennis Yu at Blitzlocal comment on the custom landing page change noting: this just underscores the risk … Continue reading

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Empathic Developers?

Amazing! Someone else also recognizes the crying need for “soft”, people skills in the hard, rocket science techie community! I ran into Ari Krupnik at the Hacker Dojo job fair. I have constantly beaten my head against the wall trying … Continue reading

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explain the trick

What happens when something looks too easy? Or the context is wrong? This Labor Day weekend ( For the non-US people The “official” end of the summer in the U.S. first Monday in September – not May 1 ) me … Continue reading

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Tell Jerry McNerney why we need health care reform

Help make the case for health care reform! Tell Jerry McNerney D-CA11 your story. This is mine: I am an entrepreneur starting my own company in Silicon Valley. I am reliant on expensive COBRA coverage for my own health care … Continue reading

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Don’t let the lawyers run the business

This past weekend, my sysadmin ( James Sparenberg ) and I, were figuring out which cloud hosting service to use. We had been pitched a number of times by GoGrid. I had been given a “try us out” credit by … Continue reading

Posted in amplafi, broken, starting a company | Leave a comment

Blame. NO. Responsibility. YES!

When reaching for the stars, something will go wrong. Rockets blow-up. Servers crash. Regressions happen. How you handle the setbacks is critical. Blame is a useless response. Blame is negative. After blame has been assigned, the rocket is still in … Continue reading

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The 100-hour work week myth

Chris Yeh calls out workaholism as the stupid choice it is: If you work 100-hour weeks, no one (investors, co-founders, employees) can blame you if things don’t work out, right? And I like to think I’ve worked a lot smarter … Continue reading

Posted in amplafi, management, rants, starting a company | 4 Comments