betterlabs's comments

Awesome - glad to see PicBackMan on the list. We are excited about our mission to end photo backup anxiety for everyone around the world!

I believe investors and startups that are / were looking for Facebook as an easy exit were not building a company / business anyway. Such a situation is better overall for everyone - only the teams that are focused on building a real business survive and create value for everyone involved.

Here is a blog post that describes the inspiration behind PicBackMan and how it works: http://www.picbackman.com/general/backup-photos-into-multipl.... Would love to hear your comments and feedback.

Just downloaded and tried it and it looks really good. It has the simplicity of Notepad which I keep going back to after trying a new app and I have tried "many". I only wish they were cloud based and had a web version to it so my lists are not stuck on my iPhone alone. Hope that is coming!

The right thing to do. However, their 2nd paragraph should have been the one starting with "We believe you should have control when it comes to sharing your personal information..."

The rest of it is a repeat of yesterday and is really not necessary.

I do want to know how I can backup by Path to a S3 or Dropbox account. Does anyone know if they support this?

This is insightful especially since we have thought about this problem and had not come up with a solution. I am assuming all the icons will be unique though, else it may lead to a lot of confusion. Also, I believe people choose icons that they best identify with and if it is not unique their association with the icon may not be as strong.

Another thing I have experimented with is if you can upload a picture and create a hand drawn painting / image like Chris Dixon's or Fred Wilson's image which I think are brilliant in creating a brand and identity.

Rapportive is best amongst the products that add social profiles so this is an awesome outcome. Congratulations to the team!

I always wondered how they could turn it into a business, though. Its useful but tough to say you'd pay for it and Google and others could add it easily, which they have done.

Great post and I couldn't agree more on how important retention is for web businesses. Our product, Nurture (http://www.nurturehq.com), addresses this need in a flexible fashion and is being used for exactly this requirement (User Lifecycle Marketing for improving engagement) by a few customers.

If Google+ is aimed to be a utility then yes, I agree with your point of view. But if they are looking to create a competing product to Facebook then, I am not sure that creating a free multi-way video conferencing solution is the going to help. And, I feel, users who signup to Google+ to use this free service, are not likely to adopt Google+ for their social networking needs just because they are using this free utility.

I agree that Google may acquire a few new users with this but this cannot help them compete with Facebook. They need to get the core (the critical mass, social sharing dynamics etc.) right where as, I feel, they are investing in building utilities to get users which they are not getting based on the basic social networking product.

This is what I meant when I said "I don't get it".

I don't get it. It just feels like they are trying to do too much too soon. I don't know any other than marketers who are building content on Google+ and I wonder what their engagement metrics look like.

Another thing is for conference calls, there are already several free and dead easy solutions out there, so its unclear who this is aimed at.

Nice work.

I love the way the new Path app looks / works but not a big fan of the fly out menu. It adds an additional click versus having a simple bar of the actions appear at the bottom of the screen. Does anyone else feel the same? Just curious.

They were my own :-)

Yep, I remember that line.

But I believe it doesn't speak about "giving up your life" to do the startup. There is a big difference, I feel, between "low intensity work" and "working hard and smart" and "working hard and smart and giving up everything else".

And that "giving up your life" has to be explained with examples: cancel your long due family vacation because the a sales VP wants you to go to a customer site without having a solid reason, camp at a customer location in the carribean until you get a PO because thet want you to make it happen (though you know camping there is going to do nothing). Postpone a surgery because your travel schedule doesn't allow it. A lot of these can be clearly unreasonable which is why it sucks to do a blanket statement.

And investors and business owners like smart work but I believe they eventually like hard work also - they just don't want you to work smart and not work more because you worked smart. They want you to work smart and work even more for the time you saved by working smart. I DO NOT want to generalize this but as people building businesses we are all (including myself) are too focused on growing and more of everything. And sometimes we and everyone with us loose a lot of what won't come back - youth, family time and more. I have been guilty of this myself as a founder and I remind myself to refrain from this as much as I can.

Eventually its a personal decision though. Do what you think is right for yourself and learn from your "own" experiences.

I was actually referring to PG's views on that issue that Arrington wrote about.

And the whole discussion definitely applies to founder and their startups too, imo. The issues are the same and so are the trade-offs. Would you give you your life for your startup but not for anyone else'?

I would love to hear PG's comment / viewpoint on this whole issue.

I have done 3 startups so far (1 VC funded, 2 bootstrapped) and I work very hard because I love it BUT I never ever work at the expense of the time with my kids and anyone saying you have to give up your life to find success in the startup world is just misleading in a big way. There are tons of examples of highly successful people across many industries who have made a fortune without giving up their lives. And its wise to look beyond such myths which are made to seem like the "norm" sometimes.

I ended up jumping straight to the 3 points and loved them. Having said that, I think negotiation is a skill that is cultivated over a long period of time through experiences (and making tons of mistakes) and just knowing the tactics doesn't make you good at negotiation. I think its important to understand your personal values / temperament / thought process, and come up with a way to negotiating that you can be good at and leveraging these and other points. Mark McCormack's "On Negotiating" is brilliant on this topic - http://www.amazon.com/Negotiating-Mark-H-McCormack/dp/078710...

Its unbelievable how business (school) buzzwords and tactics tend to overlook the most important aspects of a particular industry / problem / scenario that are non-financial in nature. There is an important strategic perspective(s) which cannot be accounted for in IRR, RONA or any of the other hundred such terms. Loved the quote from the founder of TSMC.

It is also surprising to see that most Asian conglomerates ( in India, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, China etc.) seem to have strong vertically integrated businesses where are they continuing to build and expand expertise in the core areas, while letting the west become their marketing managers.

Sorry but IMHO, this is the classic "product looking for a problem" example. There are several things I believe make products like this tough to succeed, most important of which is this: for a transaction-based model to work there needs to be buyers and sellers who go to a marketplace to buy or sell. Without this focused ecosystem, its really tough to make it work. I understand that one could argue that sellers can broadcast across all channels (twitter, facebook etc.) and create a buyer ecosystem in a distributed fashion. But I feel it is merely good theory and cannot work at scale in practice (barring few examples of flash sales, deals etc which have short shelf life and apt for viral / social spread).

Yelp is an awesome service, but I am surprised to see that they are still not profitable. Considering an annual revenue run rate of approx. $70m, I am wondering what costs them $70m a year to run the site - with most online businesses salaries and marketing are the biggest expenses and considering Yelp's amazing organic rankings, I doubt they are buying a lot of traffic. Any idea what the other big costs are? Sales teams, perhaps?

The hardest thing is to take this learning (and the concept of deliberate practice) and hack it to your startup founder role and your chaotic day. Its easy to say that this concept it not applicable there but I believe it is. I have tried to apply it by splitting my day for new sales calls, existing account management, product dev management and operational issues and it does work well on the days that I can be disciplined enough to not get distracted. There is also a tremendous sense of achievement when it works. So that is my take away from this article - take the core concept and make an attempt to apply it to whatever it is that you are doing - so you can do it better, faster and cheaper ( in terms of energy spent!).