Gabriel Weinberg: Google Web spam
Jason Baptiste: If You Build It, They Won’t Come
Christopher “moot” Poole’s new startup, Canvas Networks is hiring
Semi-intelligent filter.
Gabriel Weinberg: Google Web spam
Jason Baptiste: If You Build It, They Won’t Come
Christopher “moot” Poole’s new startup, Canvas Networks is hiring
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Categories: Quora, daily-links, startups.
Nassim Taleb: Government Deficits Could Be the Next ‘Black Swan’
Paul Graham: The Acceleration of Addictiveness. Interesting comments on HN on the essay.
Eliezer Yudkowsky: Superstimuli and the Collapse of Western Civilization
Desh Deshpande’s talk and Q&A July 22, 2010
Interesting startup: yCumulus — GPU clusters in the cloud
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Categories: daily-links, startups.
Interesting presentations from Velocity 2010: (all links pdf/ppt)
Marcus Westin & Martin Hunt: Building Fast Webapps, Fast (Lessons From Creating the Meebo Bar)
Arvind Jain & Michael Kleber: Don’t Let Third Parties Slow You Down
Urs Hölzle: Speed Matters
John Rauser: TCP and the Lower Bound of Web Performance
Joshua Bixby & Hooman Beheshti: The 90-Minute Optimization Life Cycle
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Categories: daily-links.
Paul Graham: The top idea in your mind.
Josh James: On how he started Omniture (video)
Peter Norvig: On Lisp – past, present & future — from 1999
FasterWeb resurfaces as Acceloweb with some interesting features
Yale Patt: Future Microprocessors: Multi-core, Mega-nonsense, and What we must do differently moving forward (pdf)
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Categories: daily-links, startups.
$9 footlong? Subway teaches you how to raise your price.
Dharmesh Shah: 7 Non-Obvious SaaS Startup Lessons From HubSpot
Mike Troiano: How To Sell. “In the end your ability to surface opportunities is a straight-line function of the number of people who are thinking about you this week, and job one is to make that happen among as large a group as possible, week in and week out.”
How Entrepreneur Gabriel Weinberg Bootstrapped & Created A Search Engine (video)
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Categories: daily-links, startups.
More from the Startups topic on Quora.
How did LinkedIn get initial traction?
How did Chatroulette become such a global phenomenon so quickly?
What generic first order principles should a new technology project or startup follow?
What are the most common mistakes first-time entrepreneurs make?
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Categories: Quora, daily-links, startups.
From the Startups topic on Quora.
What is the best advice you could give to a young, first-time startup CEO?
What is the best advice for a startup applying to Y Combinator?
What do you need to get a meeting with, and then present to, Ron Conway?
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Categories: Quora, daily-links, startups.
When Genius Failed covers the fascinating story of the rise and fall of Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM).
LTCM’s partners and traders including John Meriwether, David Mullins, Eric Rosenfeld, Gregory Hawkins, Larry Hilibrand, Victor Haghani, Myron Scholes, Robert C. Merton and the Wall Street banks form the crux of the story.

The first half of the book covers the rise including John Meriwether’s early days at Salomon, the genesis of trading strategy (J.F.Eckstein & Co.), the formation of the arbitrage group, the formation of LTCM, raising capital, first year in operation, first few years of success, the shift from bond trading to equities, Merton & Scholes winning the Nobel Memorial Prize, etc.
The second half delves into the beginning of the losses, the various crisis in the markets and their impact on LTCM’s trades, the attempt to raise additional capital, Warren Buffett’s offer to invest with Goldman Sachs & AIG, and finishes with the fourteen Wall street banks getting together at the Fed to take over the LTCM fund.
Favorite quotes from the book:
One time a trader named, Andy who was losing money on a mortgage trade asked for permission to double up, and J.M. gave it rather offhandedly. “Don’t you want to know more about this trade?” Andy asked. J.M.’s trusting reply deeply affected the trader. J.M. said, “My trade was when I hired you.”
Neal Soss: “You don’t sell what you should. You sell what you can.” By leveraging one security, investors had potentially given up control of all of their others. This verity is well worth remembering: the securities might be unrelated, but the same investors owned them, implicitly linking them in times of stress.
There was subtle pressure on the staff to invest their bonuses in the fund, but most of them were eager to do so anyway — ironically, it was considered a major perk of working at LTCM. And so, the staff confidently reinvested more of their pay.
David DeRosa, a currency trader who teaches at Yale, dubbed Value-at-Risk, “a lighthouse for the soon-to-be-shipwrecked”.
“You’re picking up nickels in front of bulldozers” (a friendly money manager to Eric Rosenfeld)
Eric Rosenfeld, one of the partners at LTCM, gave at MIT in February of 2009 analyzing their story, including the myths & misconceptions. (Thanks to Charles Krohn for recommending the video.)
Also, on Quora, What are the former employees of LTCM/JWM doing now?
If you liked this post, you might like my review of The Big Short by Michael Lewis.
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Categories: books.
Sachin Agarwal: If you can’t buy your investor a beer, don’t take their money
Bill Gurley: Google’s Acquires ITA: Will Deeper Vertical Integration Lead To Higher Revenues?
Niel Robertson: Everything I learned in business I learned from these 3 charts
Nassim Taleb: Why I Walk (pdf)
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Categories: daily-links, startups.
Linda problem: Behavioural Finance’s Smoking Gun
Marco Arment nails it: Great since day one
Clay Shirky: “No medium has ever survived the indifference of 25-year-olds.”
Location-based Mobile Ad: A Lesson From Japan
The Way I Work: Justin Kan of Justin.tv
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Categories: daily-links.
Paypal history from Quora.
What strong beliefs on culture for entrepreneurialism did Peter / Max / David have at PayPal?
What are the most important things that David Sacks did while running product for PayPal?
Why did so many successful entrepreneurs and startups come out of PayPal?
What were the early achievements that drove PayPal’s awesome fraud detection systems?
What’s the hardest puzzle question asked at PayPal?
Why has no payment startup emerged as a meaningful challenger to PayPal?
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Categories: Quora, daily-links, startups.