CloudKnow

Paul Graham: What Happens At Y Combinator. comments on HN

Todd Agulnick: End of the Road for Xmarks

MailChimp: Going Freemium – One Year Later

Max Levchin: On ambition

Matt Douglas: The Doctrine of Completed Staff Work

Rands in Repose: The Update, The Vent, and The Disaster

Fairchild Oral History Panel: North American Sales and Marketing (pdf)

Dan Ariely: Making the Most of Our Irrationality

Dr. Joseph Mercola: If You Want to Age Gracefully, Don’t Eat This

Scott Adams: Affirmations

Interesting startup: Hipmunk

Ask HN: Do you use programming tricks in real life too?

D. J. Bernstein: On debugging

Ben Horowitz: The Right way to lay people off

TechZing 68: Gabriel Weinberg & DuckDuckGo

Marco Arment: Most common words unique to 1-star and 5-star App Store reviews

Timothy Fitz: Why HTTP?

NoSQL, Heroku, and You

Graph Your Inbox

Shaival Shah: Sell-Side vs. Buy-Side BizDev: Hunters vs. Evaluators

Michael Lewis: Beware of Greeks Bearing Bonds. Money Quote: In Greece the banks didn’t sink the country. The country sank the banks.

Jim Rickards: Treasury Bills: The New Opium

Michael Burry, bets on farmland and gold

Chris Dixon: Things I’d do if I ran a big VC firm

Sean Murphy on the first dozen enterprise customers

Robert Benchley: How to Get Things Done

The Wilderness Downtown

Art Markman: When will this streak end?

Paul Graham: The Power of the Marginal

Ravi Mohan: The Secret of Professional Happiness

Here you go Adam.

Jason Calacanis note to startups on working with Facebook

Jared Diamond: “The Worst Mistake In The History Of The Human Race” (pdf)

Pmarca Guide to Personal Productivity

Reading between the Lines: How We See Hidden Objects

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

Why do you think startups fail?

How do bootstrapped companies hire talent?

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

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

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)

$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)

Michael Bodekaer on getting traction

More from the Startups topic on Quora.

How does Meebo make money?

How did LinkedIn get initial traction?

How did Chatroulette become such a global phenomenon so quickly?

How did Mint acquire 1.5m+ users without a high viral coefficient, scalable SEO strategy, or paid customer acquisition channel?

What generic first order principles should a new technology project or startup follow?

What are the most common mistakes first-time entrepreneurs make?

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?

What are some of the main reasons that tech companies haven’t tended to IPO much over the last few years?

What is Keith Rabois’s hiring process for people in Sales, Business Development & Product Management?

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.

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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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)

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

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?

What was PayPal’s most important strategic decision early on in achieving widespread customer adoption?

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?

Michael Lewis’s fascinating page-turner, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine takes us through the Subprime mortgage market through the eyes of the cast of characters who not only saw the coming crisis but bet heavily on the catastrophe, and won big.

What’s interesting about the cast of characters is their contrarian view on the financial crisis, events that shaped their worldview, and holding on and increasing their bets while under tremendous pressure, in some cases, from their own investors.

Lewis focuses largely on four groups, and among them mostly on Steve Eisman, Dr. Michael Burry, Greg Lippmann and Charlie Ledley:
• Frontline Partners (Steve Eisman, Vincent Daniel, Danny Moses, Porter Collins), Ivy Zelman and Wing Chau
• Scion Capital (Michael Burry, Steve Druskin), Joel Greenblatt and Kip Oberting
• Formerly of Deutsche Bank (Greg Lippmann & Eugene Xu)
• Cornwall Capital (Charlie Ledley, Ben Hockett, Jamie Mai) and David Burt

The book starts with Eisman, moves on to Burry, Lippmann, Ledley and how they go about learning more about the Subprime market, various interactions with Wall St. Banks, AIG, how the protagonists put together the pieces of the puzzle, and finally culminates with Howie Huber losing billions and the financial crisis of 2008.

If you liked this post, you might like Daily Links #171 (Michael Burry edition).

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Scott Locklin: The economist; staffed by statistical buffoons?

Joel Spolsky: Building Communities with Software

Xan Brooks’s excellent running commentary starts at 4.05 pm on the epic John Isner and Nicolas Mahut match

Joel Reymont: Ask’s HN: How do I turn 100K into 1 million?

Dan Crow: Google Squared – Web scale, open domain information extraction and presentation (pdf)

Keith Rabois: The State of Angel Investing & What Startups Can Learn From It

Chris Dixon: On Startups & Why the VC Model Is Broken

David Cohen: You have acquisition interest – now what?

Wolfire Blog: Thoughts on OnLive

Sebastian Deterding: Why Games Are Fun: The Psychology Explanation

YC Founders at Work Interview: Posterous

SeaMicro’s interesting new product for the server industry

Thomas Korte: 16 Tips for Founders @ YC Demo Day

Dan Ariely: The 7 Habits of Highly Ineffective People

YC: Need to process payments?

Richard Dawkins interviews Steven Pinker for “The Genius of Charles Darwin” – fascinating video conversation

Vision Quest: A half century of artificial-sight research has succeeded. And now this blind man can see

Paul Graham interview by a 7th Grader

Loading screens: PrettyLoaded

You’re Doing It Wrong: CS in the real world

Interesting presentations from UX London 2010. all pdf links

Leah Buley: Good Design Faster

Peter Morville: Information Architecture with Maps

Joshua Porter: Metrics-Driven Design

Stephen P. Anderson: How To Think With Pretty Pictures (Demystifying Concept Models)

Kayak: Where can I fly for how much? (awesome tool)

Founder Dialogues: Tim Healy, co-founder and CEO of EnerNOC

Gabriel Weinberg on Mixergy: How The Founder Of Duck Duck Go Previously Bootstrapped A $10 Mil Company

Chris Dixon’s blog content page. Many gems in there.

Tony Hsieh: Why I Sold Zappos

Gabriel Weinberg: Paths to $5M for a startup founder

Steve Blank: When Big Companies Are Dead But Don’t Know It.

As a side note, I asked Ben Horowitz on How he arrived at the decision to sell the Loudcloud business to EDS and become Opsware the software company?

The Optimizer’s Guide to Google Adwords: How to setup and organize your SEM account

Will Thimbleby: MISC: An experimental LISP-like language

Set during the NBA 2005-06 season, ace sportswriter, Jack McCallum spends time with the Phoenix Suns as an “Assistant Coach” and covers the inner-workings of an NBA team. The book stems from an article Jack wrote during the pre-season which turned out to be quite popular.

The name of the book refers to Coach Mike D’Antoni’s philosophy of scoring in the first 7 seconds of the 24 second shot clock. The 2005-06 season was significant for a few reasons:
- Amare Stoudemire was lost to injury for most of the season
- Steve Nash receives his 2nd (back-to-back) MVP after playing point-guard at a level similar to Magic, Cousy & Stockton
- Raja Bell clotheslining Kobe Bryant and getting suspended for an elimination game

The book starts off and devotes a good portion, almost half, to the first round playoff’s with the Lakers, where the Suns comes back from 3-1 down to win the series, segways to training camp and a few regular season games. After which, the book moves on to the series with the Clippers, goes back to the cameo appearance Amare makes for 3 games, and then covers the western conference finals against the Mavs. All along you get insights into the players, coaches, how teams prep for games, how they deal with losing and winning games, the chemistry and the interplay.

While insights into teams might be common today with the advent of twitter, videos and interviews done by the players in the locker room, this books covers the era before all that. Jack McCallum is a fantastic and engaging writer and Seven Seconds or Less: My Season on the Bench with the Runnin’ and Gunnin’

Phoenix Suns is a fast paced page turner which is well worth a read.

If you like this post, here are some videos from the 2009-10 season from the Suns showcasing their chemistry and why they advanced to the western conference finals.
- Nash covering JMZ in the locker room during the playoffs
- Steve Nash & Robin Lopez, balls talk
- Goran Dragic shuts down the Spurs with 26 points (23 in the 4th quarter) in 17 minutes. Check out the end of the video on how the bench, the owner (Sarver) and the GM (Kerr) feel about Goran’s play.

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Jawed Karim: YouTube: From Concept to Hyper-growth (video)

Brian Halligan: Sales Management, Strategy, & Transformation (pdf)

How butterfly wings can stop counterfeit currency

Visual Website Optimizer: A/B Testing + Clickmaps = Awesomeness

John Perry: Structured Procrastination & Procrastination and Perfectionism

Philip Zimbardo prescribes a healthy take on time and The Time Paradox

Performable: Which button color converts best?

Dan Zambonini: Why are the East of Cities usually Poorer?

Daily Routines edition:

“The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind.” — Haruki Murakami

“His writing methods had not changed in years. He would sit and brood in a favourite armchair, draft a paragraph or two in pencil, then move to the typewriter, ..” — P.G. Wodehouse

“I don’t believe the muse visits you. I believe that you visit the muse. If you wait for that “perfect moment” you’re not going to be very productive.” — Michael Lewis

Grisham says, he had “these little rituals that were silly and brutal but very important.” — John Grisham

“A mathematician, is a machine for turning coffee into theorems.” — Paul Erdös

Sean Ellis: Key Elements of a Massively Scalable Startup

David Greiner: Promoting your product or service with banner ads – is it worth it?

Andres Kutt: Learnings from Five Years as a Skype Architect

Mozilla Presentation on Space & Narrative: Designing for Social Interaction

Steve Blank: You’re Just the Founder

Interesting presentations from HPTS (High Performance Transaction Systems) 2009 (all links pdf)

Andreas Bechtolsheim: Technologies for Data- Intensive Computing

Ted Dunning: Search in the Cloud

Bradley Kuszmaul: A Performance Puzzle: B-Tree Insertions Are Slow on SSDs

Steve Mushero: Lessons Learned Dealing with Massive Scale and Slow Networks in China

Randy Shoup: Challenges and Lessons from Growing an e-Commerce Platform to Planet Scale

Jeff Whitehead: The Design and Implementation of the Zetta Storage Service

Marc Andreessen: A Panorama of Venture Capital and Beyond (video)

Patrick McKenzie: Introducing Appointment Reminder

Sachin Agarwal: Building startups from the heart

Steve Blank: Consultants Don’t Pivot, Founders Do

Startup Insights from Paul English, Co-Founder of Kayak

Ben Horowitz: Why Startups Should Train Their People

Steve Huffman on Lessons Learned at Reddit

Incenting your customer

John Kay: Obliquity

Search Engines don’t create Intent, they Harvest It

From Zero to a Million Users – Dropbox and Xobni lessons learned

The 221B Baker Street illustration

Ben Horowitz: The Scale Anticipation Fallacy

Bill Simmons: Kerr finally has Suns in the right place. Money quote: “Absolutely. If we are going to shed our baggage, it has to happen in exactly this way … this ludicrous, preposterous way. And it’s the only way.”

Daniel Engber: The Underdog Effect – Why do we love a loser?

Bill Gross: Lovin’ Spoonful