For newcomers: StartupDigest Reading List is the members-only weekly email newsletter of the best articles in the startup world.

You can become a member for free here.

Special heads up for everyone – we will soon be launching a new digest that will feature the most interesting startup in the world every week. 500+ people have already signed up for it in advance. You can sign up too here. Stay tuned :)

Also, we changed up the messaging and process of becoming a StartupDigest VIP. What do you think of it?

- Chris

StartupDigest Reading List is curated by:
Chris McCann – Co-Founder, StartupDigest
Chris Burnor – Lead Engineer, StartupDigest

 

 

StartupDigest Reading List is supported exclusively by:
Watch the Kauffman Foundation’s first-ever Super Bowl ad for entrepreneurs. The next great entrepreneur is out there with ideas that can change the world. Will it be you? Pass it on.

 

 

What You Need to Read This Week

An epic rant on how you should stop being intimidated and just build a product you would use.

 

The Hacker Way

Buried within the Facebook’s S-1 filing is a personal message from Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook’s hacker culture.

 

There is a slew of wonderful JavaScript libraries out there to aid in adding dynamism to your webpages. But how do you actually put them together without turning your webpage into a Cthulhuesque nightmare?

 

A look at how investors think about risk in a startup from Brendan Baker, who used to work with AngelList and is now with Greylock Partners.

 

Sometimes profits aren’t always the right answer. Here are the tradeoffs between growth and profit and how to decide which path is right for you.

 

A brief guide to tech internships

An in-depth guide to getting an internship at a startup from Alexey, who interned at Facebook, started the PennApps hackathon, and was an engineer for the Israeli Defense Forces.

 

Love this. We definitely need more articles like this written from a designer’s (and woman’s) perspective.

 

See all of the best startup resources here.

For newcomers: StartupDigest Reading List is the members-only weekly email newsletter of the best articles in the startup world.

You can become a member for free here.

Last week Brendan McManus re-designed all of our StartupDigest Video pages to make them a little easier on your eyes :)

If you haven’t seen any of our videos before I suggest watching our top 3 talks by Steve Jobs, Sergey Brin, and Peter Thiel.

 - Chris

 

StartupDigest Reading List is curated by:
Chris McCann – Co-Founder, StartupDigest
Chris Burnor – Lead Engineer, StartupDigest

 

 

StartupDigest Reading List is supported exclusively by:
Check out these sketchbook videos on “finding the magic sauce of entrepreneurship” and “three things entrepreneurs do” and more from the Kauffman Foundation.

 

 

What You Need to Read This Week

This really applies to any position you are hiring for. Make sure to be kind to new people meeting your company for the first time.

 

An inside look into what buyers are looking for.

 

Using Python’s date functions and can’t remember if uppercase AM/PM is %A or %p? Sure you could go look it up in the documents and scroll down the page until you find what you want. Or, you could go to strftime.org and get all the info you need on one, gorgeous, simple page.

 

I hate how Business Insider sensationalizes titles but this is a good look at a great sign-up flow. I love how Pinterest keeps their entire process very personal.

 

A 7,000 word essay on the idiosyncrasies of salary negotiation. The key point here is to stop feeling guilty about asking for market compensation.

 

 

For newcomers: StartupDigest Reading List is the members-only weekly email newsletter of the best articles in the startup world.

You can become a member for free here.

This week was a historic one for the internet. We stood up to the progess of SOPA and PIPA in the US government, but more pushback is coming. This was the week that government realized that the internet matters. This was also the week that the internet realized that government matters too. Let’s make sure that government continues to hear our support for an open and free internet.

- Chris

 

StartupDigest Reading List is curated by:
Chris McCann – Co-Founder, StartupDigest
Chris Burnor – Lead Engineer, StartupDigest

 

 

StartupDigest Reading List is supported exclusively by:
Check out these sketchbook videos on “finding the magic sauce of entrepreneurship” and “three things entrepreneurs do” and more from the Kauffman Foundation.

 

 

What You Need to Read This Week

Paul Graham, partner at Y Combinator, has noticed that the startups that are hungry to take action and can take care of themselves are the ones who tend to do better than the others.

 

 

Growth is the lifeblood of new companies. Here is how Jeff, a partner at Andreessen-Horowitz, thought about growth while at OpenTable, PayPal, and eBay.

 

Probably the most amazing Stop SOPA page to come out of Wednesday’s blackout was Zachary’s flash-light page. Check out the repo and see how he did it.

 

Here’s a broad overview on the different types of design: graphic, interaction, and UX.

 

Forget what all the browser-specific tags are for using border radius in CSS3? Forget no more with the simplest, but most useful way to instantly see and get the CSS for a cool rounded-border box.

 

Joel built Trello to be a horizontal product similar to how he built Microsoft Excel back in 1991.

 

Here are the resources and timeline Eddy went through to learn Python/Django himself and become his own technical co-founder.

 

Here is a video on the historical context of SOPA/PIPA and what companies that support these bills are really aiming for.

 

See all of the previous resources and articles we’ve featured here.

 

For newcomers: StartupDigest Reading List is the members-only weekly email newsletter of the best articles in the startup world.

You can become a member for free here.

Below are six articles and one amazing video by Sergey Brin on the early days of starting Google. By the way if you have any amazing startup videos we should check out respond to this email and let me know about them.

- Chris

StartupDigest Reading List is curated by:
Chris McCann – Co-Founder, StartupDigest
Chris Burnor – Lead Engineer, StartupDigest

 

 

StartupDigest Reading List is supported exclusively by:
Check out these sketchbook videos on “finding the magic sauce of entrepreneurship” and “three things entrepreneurs do” and more from the Kauffman Foundation.

 

 

What You Need to Read This Week

An epic letter by James Currier, 2x exited founder and now founder of Jiff, to his alma mater on how to do something exciting instead of wasting your life at a cube job.

 

An inside look into how Loudcloud used business development to save the company after the dot-com crash by breaking itself up into two companies. Opsware the software company eventually sold to HP for $1.6 billion.

 

Ruby and JQuery developer Yehuda Katz argues on the subtle but key differences between JavaScript’s first class functions and Ruby’s block syntax.

 

Why learning the basics of software development is important, even for the business people.

 

There’s only a couple sites people will use on a daily basis but if done right you can retain people to your app through either notifications or using your service as a start point for something.

 

Need to edit a bunch of files all at once? Too complex of a refactoring for sed? Try combining ack and Vim macros.

 

Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, talks about how simple ideas built for one person are so powerful and why just trying things is so important.

 

See all of the previous resources and articles we’ve featured here.

For newcomers: StartupDigest Reading List is the members-only weekly email newsletter of the best articles in the startup world.

You can become a member for free here.

This week we have two incredible videos, a technical vidcast, and 6 articles with one from us on how compensation at a startup isn’t much different than a large coproration.

Welcome to the new year!

- Chris

StartupDigest Reading List is curated by:
Chris McCann – Co-Founder, StartupDigest
Chris Burnor – Lead Engineer, StartupDigest

 

 

StartupDigest Reading List is supported exclusively by:
Check out these sketchbook videos on “finding the magic sauce of entrepreneurship” and “three things entrepreneurs do” and more from the Kauffman Foundation.

 

 

What You Need to Read This Week

I’m sure a lot of people have “learning to code” on their new year’s resolution list, but don’t fall into the learn code in 4 hours trap. Learning to code is awesome but takes a lot of hard work.

 

 

Charles Hudson, who is both a founder of Bionic Panda Games and investing partner at SoftTech VC, details out the minimum four things you should update your investors on.

 

Don’t worry, have focus, and be nimble. In the post are 5 examples of startups who won the war against the Goliath.

 

Meet people in real life, have a mission people want to join, treat people well, and don’t be stingy with equity or compensation.

 

We asked some of our alumni VIP’s about the difference in compensation between their big corporate job and their new startup. The differences were much smaller than we anticipated.

 

[Video] Peter Thiel on building companies with purpose

A quick talk (Q&A section is long) by Peter Thiel on how he evaluates companies as an investor & entrepreneur.

 

[Video] Bonus Steve Jobs on the early days of NeXT

An awesome old school PBS documentary on Steve Jobs after he was fired from Apple in the middle of starting NeXT. Shows real scenes of Steve conducing meetings, product brainstorming, and motivating the team.

 

See all of the previous resources and articles we’ve featured here.

For newcomers: StartupDigest Reading List is the members-only weekly email newsletter of the best articles in the startup world.

You can become a member for free here.

Happy early New Year’s! Over the holiday break I watched this vintage Steve Jobs video, filmed in 1980, and it was one of the best videos I have seen recentley. Definitley reccomend watching this when you have time.- Chris

StartupDigest Reading List is curated by:
Chris McCann – Co-Founder, StartupDigest
Chris Burnor – Lead Engineer, StartupDigest

 

 

StartupDigest Reading List is supported exclusively by:
Check out these sketchbook videos on “finding the magic sauce of entrepreneurship” and “three things entrepreneurs do” and more from the Kauffman Foundation.

 

 

What You Need to Read This Week

Here is a basic rundown of what SOPA is, where it is now, and why its important for the startup community to know about.

 

 

When companies start they need to make one very important decision at the beginning of their life: do you want to build organically or get big fast?

 

If you have 1,000 servers each individually rated at 99.9% uptime, on average, one of those machines is always failing.

 

Alison shares some lessons she learned from working at Box.net and now starting her own company.

 

Co-founder and hiring problems, especially with the first 5 hires, trouble shipping, and trouble communication are all deep problematic signs for new startups.

 

CanCan is a great authentication system for for Rails, but how do you rigorously test it’s magic?

 

People love to talk about working on meaningful things but Elon Musk, who started Tesla Motors and SpaceX, is one individual who lives and breaths making a huge difference.

 

A rare video filmed at the Computer History Museum in 1980 of Steve Jobs talking about the beginning of Apple and his plans for the future.

 

See all of the previous resources and articles we’ve featured here.

For newcomers: StartupDigest Reading List is the members-only weekly email newsletter of the best articles in the startup world.

You can become a member for free here.

Happy Holidays! This week I’d like to introduce everyone to our new co-curator for the StartupDigest Reading List, Chris Burnor! Chris is our lead engineer and felt the reading list needed some more technical articles. Super excited to have him with us :)- ChrisStartupDigest Reading List is curated by:
Chris McCann – Co-Founder, StartupDigest
Chris Burnor – Lead Engineer, StartupDigest

 

 

StartupDigest Reading List is supported exclusively by:
Check out these sketchbook videos on “finding the magic sauce of entrepreneurship” and “three things entrepreneurs do” and more from the Kauffman Foundation.

 

 

What You Need to Read This Week

An interesting interview with Nick Swinmurn, the original founder of Zappos, about the company’s early days.

 

An internet of people
by Chris Dixon

 

A short post about why companies that have been tried before like Etsy, Kickstarter, and AirBnb are succeeding today.

 

A Tmux Crach Course
by JDClayton

For developers who spend most of their day in the terminal, tmux is a great GNU Screen replacement to augment your workflow.

 

Hiring the best people
by Scott Wiess

Why the best people join the best companies.

 

Finance for Geeks
by Eric Sink

A quick overview of financial statements, profit margins, and funding.

 

Exploring Client-side MVC with Backbone.js
by Jared Carroll

A rails developer tries out a different MVC framework: Backbone.js

 

Assessing a Company: Questions you need to ask in an Interview
by Michael Chen

This post will help you decide if the startup you are thinking about joining is right for you.

 

See all of the previous resources and articles we’ve featured here.

For newcomers: StartupDigest Reading List is the members-only weekly email newsletter of the best articles in the startup world.

You can become a member for free here.

Last night we visted Causes to hang out with them after they hired our friend Herman Ng through StartupDigest VIP. Check out the awesome view from their office of downtown SF!

- Chris

StartupDigest Reading List is curated by:
Chris McCann – Co-Founder, StartupDigest

 

 

StartupDigest Reading List is supported exclusively by:
How do new businesses get ahead in the “Money Game”? Navigating the growing startup financing landscape is the focus of the latest animated video from the Kauffman Foundation’s sketchbook series. Watch “Money Game,” where Kauffman Senior Fellow Paul Kedrosky breaks down the methods entrepreneurs use to raise capital, and the benefits—and hazards—of each.

 

 

What You Need to Read This Week

David is a partner at SV Angel, Ron Conway’s investment fund.

 

 

Everybody loves to talk about starting new companies (and exiting them) but no one talks about the many projects that struggle to take off and when to stop working on them.

 

Some of the most creative ideas come from the empty space while you aren’t working.

 

Sometimes old-fashioned sketching is the best way to visualize a design idea and iterate on it. Our team does this all the time on our whiteboards at home :)

 

Make sure that you surround yourself with some people who don’t just pat you on the back all of the time.

 

Derek started CD Baby, which became the largest seller of independent music online with $100M in sales for 150,000 musicians. Here is his talk on 8 different profit models.

See all of the previous resources and articles we’ve featured here.

Below is an archived version of the DC StartupDigest Events List – a weekly curated listing of the best tech startup events in DC. If you would like to get next week’s digest on Monday, sign up here.

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DC StartupDigest is curated by:
Michael Mayernick – Co-Founder, Spinnakr

 

 

DC StartupDigest is supported exclusively by:
Check out these sketchbook videos on “finding the magic sauce of entrepreneurship” and “three things entrepreneurs do” and more from the Kauffman Foundation.

 

 

What’s Going on in the DC Startup Community

Join DCEW, Do It In Person & Ladies DC to celebrate the holidays and entrepreneurship in our nations capital.

 

If you’re a builder of web things or a creative designer, writer, or UXer who wants to get out of the house (or office) a bit, then come join us. We’ll be the group of people nerding out over laptops in various coffee shops and art spaces around Arlington, Virg.

 

It’s time to celebrate all of our accomplishments for 2011. This will be a fun opportunity to get together, enjoy some great appetizers, drinks and holiday cheer. Space will be limited. If you wish to come please RSVP early. (Please, no recruiters.)

 

Venture Capital Outlook 2012 is part of the Potomac Tech Wire breakfast series that brings together senior executives in the Mid-Atlantic to discuss technology issues in a conversational, roundtable environment moderated by the editor of Potomac Tech Wire. The panel will focus on the overall outlook for venture capital investing in the DC area, current deal terms, technology trends, valuation issues and predictions.

 

ProudlyMadeInDC is turning 1. Come celebrate with us!

 

The Product Innovators is comprised of people engaged in product innovation, product development and product market management in the greater Washington D.C. metro area.

 

JOIN is a career fair, but done differently. For hiring startups only, we create a pool of qualified candidates from the requirements that companies list on the registration form.