robbfitzsimmons's comments

I think actually the basic problem with Mint isn't those mentioned in the article (UI is meh, miscategorized transactions, data import customization).

It's actually as mentioned in Wesabe's postmortem (http://blog.precipice.org/why-wesabe-lost-to-mint/); for most people Mint doesn't actually get you to change your behavior. It just provides twentysomethings with some feeling that they're managing their finances, in return for getting pitched credit cards.

Harder and more worthwhile than UI or functionality fixes are changing twentysomethings' behavior, or doing something interesting for older people with more complicated financial situations. [Mint's useless for my parents, with multiple bank accounts, investments, retirement, education and health savings accounts, etc.]

One problem (and barrier to good competitors) are that aggregating finance data sucks. Mint started with Yodlee, which is nothing but a scraper for bank sites, and now runs on something Intuit built internally. It's hard to imagine many startups meaningfully tackling the problem.

The key consideration for me here is "they communicate well."

As someone who's just recently started to consider full-time hires beyond our founding team, it's ridiculous how important this is relative to how little it's talked about. The other traits - "avoiding crises", "doing their research" - often boil down to effectively working together with your teammates and finding information / reaching decisions quickly.

And I do think it's got something to do with educating programmers. Working with interns and contractors we've had at Harvard, MIT, etc., the best have been Olin College (http://olin.edu).

I'm not going to gush about it in this comment too much, but suffice it to say the best communicators about technical problems are usually the ones who spend the most time working in teams and presenting their work, and those are Oliners to a tee.

Love the art here. The giant crashed robot looks like an homage to "Iron Giant" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Iron_Giant), one of my favorite movies as a kid.

I can imagine this having great utility for many businesspeople, but I think anyone mildly privacy or security conscious probably already thinks LinkedIn trends to the spammy. Making them an intermediary to 100% of my email is nuts.

On a lighter note, one of the "shared connections" in the blog screencaps is actually Good Girl Gina, of Reddit meme fame. http://note.io/HfhtzE

+1 for Whitelines (though I've had a bit of crash trouble with their iOS app of late).

Frankly, I don't think I'd love to have notes leave my physical possession, if are important enough to pay for scanning in the first place.

Agreed, this is kind of DOA in my book.

The thing that none of the ambient-social apps (this, Highlight, etc.) get is that literally no amount of social data is going to make hangouts happen spontaneously.

Once you get the context right (networking events, dating) to motivate people, that's when the location-awareness and social data make a huge difference.

But when I'm at CVS buying toilet paper at 11pm, there's no amount of social data that could make me wanna hang out with a person, no matter how close we are.

This is awesome.

For two years, my roommate and I hosted drinks at our house every Wednesday night; the effort of continually remembering to add people to an email list + calling + texting was a drag. We were always trying to find ways to reduce friction for the event, and a similar setup would have been fun.

I continue to be confused about when a README is appropriate for documentation on Github, and when a wiki is preferred, as do my coworkers. (It's a minor bone of contention.)

If you have this many pieces that it's hard to keep straight without a tool like Gutenberg, isn't that modularization the whole idea of a wiki?

I think the key quote for me is about how effective Githubbers are as communicators. Which isn't at all common in our industry.

I think about it is as being highly networked. [...] you look at the strength of connections between people, the communication channels, and how information travels amongst them, and then you can draw a diagram.

What seems like a higher-than-average percentage of Githubbers are particularly effective communicators publicly, even outside the management team. (Zach Holman in particular comes to mind.)

Reminds me of my favorite Tumblr lately, wtfviz (http://wtfviz.net/).

Admitting it's totally beside the point, what is the deal with the "trademark" Campfire emoji at the end of the post? Soon(tm)? In-joke?

I still don't really see the pants, but have in the past been guilty of designing, and using for two months in production, a logo that a focus group decided was "swastika-esque."

So maybe don't listen to me.

Just GPG on a text file, checked into a private Github repo.

It's actually a great excuse to give business and designer types an intro to Git / command line.

No worries! It actually got me to click; I was curious how one would accomplish that for a CRM, something that is nothing but a database.

Mods - I think this should be "CMS" (content management system) instead of "CRM" (customer relationship manager), as it's a blogging tool.

Completely agreed (and would also kill to pay); what I meant at the end of my comment that it's that it's a nice opportunity predicated on being a quality app right when the market starts to shift.

Which I think is what Will's betting on.

As a primarily-iOS user / developer who also has an Android tablet (last year's Nexus 7), completely agree with both points made here. [The first being that Android development is better, and the second being that the vast majority Android apps currently suck compared to the iOS equivalent, making for a nice opportunity.]

It's hard enough to peg a real user need and deliver on that need in a satisfying, sticky way. It's at the core of what a startup needs to do to cultivate that product development discipline as a team, and tools that make that harder are insult to injury.

As others have mentioned, though, none of these app startups are launching just for a smooth development experience. And Android just hasn't shown that users will reliably upgrade their OS, much less pay for apps like iOS users do. Until that changes, even if the better dev experience will accelerate a shift, it's sort of a chicken-and-egg problem on app quality.

Looks gorgeous, and recording quality has been fantastic on my Nexus 7 (have been testing the alpha).

Makes me significantly less twitchy in meetings - I'm a compulsive note-taker, and it actually has really changed my note-taking behavior towards summarization and takeaways versus "minutes" style.

Nice work, guys.

The most interesting part to me here is the MSN butterfly on the video. Microsoft has a YouTube competitor - who knew?

I'm not the OP, but this definitely happened several times at Dartmouth (BlitzMail) when I was there 2006-08.