Entrepreneurship

"In the previous post Why Twitter hasn’t failed: The Power of Audience, I claim that Twitter has been so successful because it gives users a concrete model of who is listening to them — it gives them a sense of Audience. Designing for this sense of Audience is a powerful tool to create cohesion and sense of utility among users of a service. Twitter is a prime example for this kind of attachment: it survives countless outages and a slew of alternatives that could all pull users away… but don’t." - Leon Ho from Bookmarklet

"When we read Y Combinator applications there are always ideas we're hoping to see. In the past we've never said publicly what they are. If we say we're looking for x, we'll get applications proposing x, certainly. But then it actually becomes harder to judge them: is this group proposing x because they were already thinking about it, or because they know that's what we want to hear?" - Leon Ho from Bookmarklet

"Michael A. Cusumano, a professor at the Sloan School of Management at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, sees the difference in terms of what he calls “direct network effects” and “indirect network effects.” The direct effects, he says, include software document formats and technology standards that are owned by one company and that are incompatible with a rival’s technology. The indirect effects, he adds, include large numbers of users, the ability to learn from those users, the power of a well-known brand and user inertia." - Leon Ho from Bookmarklet