"Have you tried affiliate links? You could probably link to tutorial books like "Learn Access in 30 Days" on Amazon and get decent conversion." - Emmett Shear
"Taking more irrelevant classes is probably harder (as I said), but because it's harder it is also more impressive and thus looks better on your resume (as rms said)." - Emmett Shear
"Operating Systems is awesome, fun, mind expanding, and all around probably the best class you'll take on average in a CS program. Database programming can be picked up by reading a couple books, unless they have you implement a database which would be pretty cool. So apriori, take OS; but if one class is known to have a much better teacher take that one instead." - Emmett Shear
"Biology is worthless as a major; as long as you take the pre-med requirements, they don't care what your major is.
Granted, Biology requires a lot of the same classes, so it might be easier to be a bio major if you're already pre-med, but the biology degree itself isn't worth anything." - Emmett Shear
"You say it "can't be measured", but of course it can be. Say there are 10 million people in your demographic; then your vote makes your demographic 0.0001% bigger and shifts it correspondingly slightly towards your political position. That's not nothing, that's a small effect. In aggregate, it has a large effect, which corresponds exactly to the sum of the small effects." - Emmett Shear
"I just picked that as an example to illustrate the point; feel free to substitute "old people and young people" for any two groups of people, and "social security" for any other issue." - Emmett Shear
"A vote for the loser does not count for nothing. It makes you an active political entity worth courting.
Do you know why social security is inviolate, and no one from either party will ever do anything to stop payments? Because old people vote. If you (and people like you) don't vote, you don't count, and no one will ever listen to you.
Voting increases the strength of your demographic, and then shifts the political allegiance of that demographic very slightly towards your views." - Emmett Shear
"I saw all the "this is useless" comments on TechCrunch, so I thought I'd look up what that community thought of "twttr" when it launched:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2006...
"I do not understand the utility of adding the SMS messages to a public webpage or making messages from my network public. I would have to pass on that type of offering. The ability to make messages private should be added asap."
vs.
"What a silly app… well, more like useless."" - Emmett Shear
I think similar things were said about the telephone in the late 1800s. - Chris Lamprecht
Telephones are still useless. Now get off my lawn! - Amit Patel
"Are you working on your startup full time? The cost of a single person working on a startup is at least $30k/year, even if you cut salary to the bone." - Emmett Shear
"This is exactly how oldschool MUDs were implemented; Steve Yegge has actually written a more modern version of exactly the same thing.
It's a great idea, but not a new one. You'll want tons of hooks you can customize interactions with as well." - Emmett Shear
"Basically, there are normally rules preventing most of the offensive players from receiving a pass; by switching the starting formation they make everyone eligible and explode the number of possible passes they can make.
It's an extremely clever hack; I don't care about football either but I'm impressed by the thinking." - Emmett Shear
"From the Alexa top 20 global (http://www.alexa.com/site/ds/t......): Yahoo - users before revenue, success Google - users before revenue, success YouTube - users before revenue, undecided Microsoft - revenue before users, although their internet properties consistently lose money. Not really an internet company. MySpace - users before revenue, success (MySpace is profitable already) Facebook - users before revenue, undecided Blogger - users before revenue, probably a success although google doesn't release numbers so it's hard to say how much money they make on it Orkut - same as Blogger RapidShare - users before revenue, success (very profitable freemium model) Baidu - I'm not sure. I presume they follow the same path as Google did, but with an obvious example of how to succeed already in place. QQ - users before revenue, success (virtual goods turn out to be a great way to monetize a free chat product in China) eBay - revenue before users; they didn't make..." - Emmett Shear
"Google and Yahoo are both obvious successes. Amazon is another. One Google outweighs hundreds or thousands of failures. You can't dismiss them as merely "anomolous" - among the biggest internet companies most of them followed this strategy.
MySpace's acquisition hasn't failed: it's a profitable enterprise for NewsCorp and still growing. It paid back the purchase price in the first year! So that's a success, not a failure.
The jury is still out on YouTube, Facebook, and Flickr as to whether they will be long term businesses, so they are not yet data points one way or another. They are clear success stories for the founders though." - Emmett Shear
"I exactly agree that they're anomalies...but they're by far the most profitable anomalies. Almost all the top websites grew users before revenue! High variance, high payoff. It is certainly safer to start small and grow revenue first; it's also likely not to produce the next Google (or Yahoo, or Facebook, or YouTube, etc.)" - Emmett Shear
"It adds a cost to creating a user account. Sometimes, you actually want that. Also a user with a valid email address is worth more than a user without one; even with dropoff the value could be worth it.
That said, we don't do it at Justin.tv, and I think it's stupid." - Emmett Shear
"The grow-users-before-revenue strategy has several spectacular success stories: Google, YouTube, Facebook, Flickr, MySpace, etc. etc.
That's not to say it's the only valid strategy, but it's certainly a valid strategy. In fact, it probably has the highest payoff, albeit with the highest variance." - Emmett Shear
"You fingered the pitfall. Late comers get the same valuation, so you give up the ability to pressure people into investing now for fear that they'll lose the chance.
On the other hand, we did a rolling close on a round and it worked fine for us." - Emmett Shear
"30 or 60 day free trial, and after that an infinite-use key available for $X. That's what convinced me to buy TextMate and many other software products that I use." - Emmett Shear
