UPDATE 2: Apparently, Dan Storms of Originate also sent me Jelly Bellys, but due to a mail miscalculation, I just got them. Let the weight gain begin! UPDATE: Julie Fredrickson of playAPI sent me 10lbs of Jelly Bellys! My dream has been fulfilled. I recently wrote about a CEO I advise who was having trouble reaching out […]
The short lesson here is: don’t keep in features just because they were hard to build. Good and bad are not the same as hard and easy, and even if worthwhile things were always hard (which they aren’t), that doesn’t mean that all hard things are worthwhile. The longer explanation starts with the documentary a […]
This post has a backstory. When I was considering colleges, I was living in Hong Kong and it was really between two great schools: Lewis and Clark (which offered me a full-ride along with a stipend) and Swarthmore (which offered me some aid, but not really very much). Lewis and Clark, in their extreme interest, […]
I’m convinced that a marketer could learn everything they need to know about their brand just by walking through NYC neighborhoods and listening to peoples’ conversations. For example, today I heard someone tell someone not to get the iPhone 5 because “the maps suck” and that’s most of what they use their phone for. I […]
A friend pointed out this quote from a Vanity Fair profile of Obama. This time he covered a lot more ground and was willing to talk about the mundane details of presidential existence. “You have to exercise,” he said, for instance. “Or at some point you’ll just break down.” You also need to remove from […]
Here’s the premise: if you’ve set your analytics up properly, it means you know which metrics mean success. And knowing what success is means that you’ve chosen the goal of your product ahead of time (which, by the way, is a really damn good idea). And if you can measure success, you know when your […]
My most recent post got made into a Someecard, so I’m feeling pretty good. Sure, its not something that my parents would understand (being made into a joke on a site that 800K people visit religiously) but it is still a high moment. I was also on FoxNews, trying to help more women get raises. […]
The lovely and talented Meghan Casserly recently wrote a piece entitled “If Time Is Money, Millennials Are Broke–And They Couldn’t Be Happier“. The piece is great, but the title is a bit misleading – I’d argue that she does a fairly good job of talking about all the reasons that the millennial race to be “busy” is […]
Chris Dixon recently wrote (in an incredibly brief post) that recommendation systems are features, not products, and pointed out that Hunch was only compelling after being bought by eBay, where it successfully powers both recommendations and discovery on the site (not 100% sure on this). I agree with Chris and have a few notes. 1) […]
I love AdventFinancial. It isn’t just because their co-founder is a friend and one of the nicest guys I know, but they actually have a great business in a space that often doesn’t have much greatness: tax prep. The pitch is pretty simple. Mostly, two kinds of people get their taxes done in the US: the rich and […]