startups

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    During a dim sum lunch with staff, someone asked Koum why he wasn’t crowing to the press about it. “Marketing and press kicks up dust,” Koum replied. “It gets in your eye, and then you’re not focusing on the product.”
    How Whatsapp was born, a very interesting read.
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    Five Hard Questions You Should Ask Yourself Before Starting Up

    Five Hard Questions You Should Ask Yourself Before Starting Up

    Ryan Hoover for some pragmatic, necessary questions you need to ask yourself before starting up. The most important one, for me, is passion. Would like to do what you’re doing for the next five years?

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    Specialization might give you a temporary boost in productivity, but it comes at the expense of overall functional cohesion and shared ownership. If only Jeff can fiddle with the billing system, any change to the billing system is bottlenecked on Jeff, and who’s going to review his work on a big change?
    David from 37signals shares some interesting thoughts on specialization in a startup. Everyone needs to do (at least a little bit of) everything.
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    Two system for successful startups

    There seems to be two product systems which are quite popular and successful at the moment, for mobile apps. 

    1. Simple, mono-action apps

    This is Instagram and Vine.

    Focus around a unique use case, craft a superb user experience, wait for the market.

    Instagram: Take a picture, apply a filter, share it to all social networks. 
    Vine: Take a 6 second, non-continuous video, share it to all social networks.

    2. Kill the middleman

    This is Uber, Airbnb, iCracked and Exec.

    Find some market which does not need a middleman, as we now have phones with constant Internet connections. Then make connections, and exchanges of goods/services between people super easy, peer-to-peer style. 

    Airbnb: peer-to-peer house/room rentals
    Exec: peer-to-peer house cleaning

    In the case of Uber and iCracked it’s business-to-peer via the app.

    So you know what you have to do, if you want to build a startup now. (Or you could build a cheap, efficient solar panel (apparently, you can’t).)

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    Why Square is the next big thing

    Farhad Manjoo:

    I believe the tech industry’s next great company is Square. If you’ve heard of Jack Dorsey’s three-year-old firm, you likely think of it as a payments startup. Square is famous for its white plastic card reader, a device that lets small businesses use phones and tablets to accept credit cards. But calling Square a mere payments company minimizes its potential, and it misses Dorsey’s world-changing mission.

    Square is currently processing 8 billion on a yearly basis. So, they’re already big. But Manjoo sees Square grow even further:

    Dorsey is bent on creating frictionless commerce. His long-term goal is to make accepting payments a breeze for businesses, and he wants to make paying for stuff invisible—for everyone, across the entire economy, for all types of goods and services. If Square succeeds in that mission, it will become a persistent, ever-present part of our daily lives. You’ll use it every time you engage with businesses—which might mean you’ll interact with Square more often than Google, Facebook, Amazon, or even Apple.

    If someone can make this, it has to be Jack Dorsey.