Category Archives: starting a company

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

Posted on June 3, 2010 by patrick

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

Posted on May 28, 2010 by patrick

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

Posted on May 23, 2010 by patrick

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?

Posted on January 16, 2010 by patrick

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

Posted on September 8, 2009 by patrick

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

Posted on August 21, 2009 by patrick

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

Posted on August 17, 2009 by patrick

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!

Posted on August 16, 2009 by patrick

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

Posted on July 5, 2009 by patrick

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

Open Letter to Virtual currency companies: “universal” is not a feature

Posted on July 3, 2009 by patrick

Interesting post from Lisa Rutherford about reaching for a universal currency and some discussion about some problems with that dream. While the glories of a “universal” currency are appealing, I think this might be a “feature” that is in fact … Continue reading →

Posted in marketing, starting a company | 2 Comments