StartupDigest Reading List – March 2, 2012

2/03/2012

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.

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We’ve started to organize all of the past articles by topic on our startup articles page. Check out our top three article topics: big ideas, becoming a better programmer, and hiring for startups
- 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

Looks matter – good graphic design can compel viewers to process information and use software differently.

 

Wisdom: Business folks believe that conversation solves all problems. Designers believe visualization solves all problems. Engineers believe that optimization solves all problems. Communication mayhem ensues!

 

If you are going to SXSW or any big upcoming conference, this is a must read.

 

Startups can startup anywhere but here’s what you will encounter outside of the major startup hubs.

 

Traction trumps everything
By Gabriel Weinberg

What investors (and press and employees) look for is traction. Traction is real customers for your product or service.

 

Here are a few tips on getting visitors to click and engage, not just view and go away.

 

File system links are great for structuring your application for flexibility and space, but do you know that *nix systems have both hard and soft links?

 

If you’ve read Paul Graham’s essays, you know how much he loves LISP and functional programming, but if one is writing for high performance web services, Java is still one of the fastest languages out there.  How can one take the benefits of LISP and apply them to Java?

 

Mercator: A Scalable, Extensible Web Crawler
By Allan Heydonand Marc Najork

This paper outlines a system for building a scalable web crawler. Even for those who are not trying to take down Google, it is a great way of seeing a case study in designing a scalable system.

 

[Video] Peter Diamandis on Abundance

Peter Diamandis founded the XPrize Foundation and Singularity University. Here’s his talk on why we should be optimistic about the future.

 

See all of the best startup resources here.

 

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StartupDigest Reading List – February 24, 2012

24/02/2012

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.

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One of my friends Craig Montuori who is helping to get the “Startup Visa” legislation passed wrote an awesome post on How can tech startups begin to exercise political muscle in Washington, D.C.
After the SOPA/PIPA debate it’s very important for us to stay on top of all the issues that affect our community and let our voices be heard.

- 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

Fire And Motion
By Joel Spolsky | More articles on attitudes

The key to productivity is to get started. The more you move forward every day, the better chance you will have at winning.

 

Understanding Git Conceptually
By Charles Duan | More articles on coding

Git has become the standard version control system for the startup world, and most of us use it every day, but how well do we really know how to use it?

 

Airbnb UX Wins and Losses
By Jason Shah | More articles on design

A designer’s take on Airbnb’s main landing page and what makes it work well and what doesn’t.

 

Why You Only Need to Test with 5 Users
By Jakob Nielsen | More articles on early products

The best usability tests for learning come from only 5 users. After that it’s just repetitive.

 

There is a myriad of excellent frameworks and libraries for organizing and structuring browser JavaScript, but it is really useful to understand how JS can be structured without the need for any third party code.

 

A tactical guide for buying a domain name.

 

Software is People
By Kenton White | More articles on coding

Understanding that people will be using and building your software is just as important as the code itself.

 

Hackerspaces Aren’t Factories for “Idea” People
By Daniel Miessler | More articles on attitudes

If you’re someone with an idea, take the time to actually learn how to code. Don’t expect a developer to just build something for you.

 

See all of the best startup resources here.

 

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Life is too short to work at a boring company. Tell us about you here.

 

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StartupDigest Reading List – February 10, 2012

10/02/2012

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.

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StartupDigest VIP is now open for the best CS and Design internships: http://startupdigest.com/intern- 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

A post on reddit on fitness that surprisingly has huge implications for being more productive on a daily basis. Start your day off by listing what you want to accomplish and don’t passively read twitter, hacker news, facebook, or reddit.

 

You Are Solving The Wrong Problem
By Aza Raskin | More articles on attitudes

A story about solving the right problem, not just the obvious hard problem.

 

Vim Anti-Patterns
By Tom Ryder

Vim’s minimalism and elegance are hard to learn, but worth the effort. However, even for experienced users, there are common antipatterns that can be fallen into and there’s always more to learn.

 

Designer Toolkit
By the Stanford Design School | More articles on design

An in-depth PDF about the design process and design thinking.

 

The importance of sleep in a startup
By Leo Widrich | More articles on daily life

Productivity doesn’t come in hours; it comes in the amount of energy you have every day.

 

You may have heard of MapReduce, perhaps even tried to slog through Google’s Whitepaper and you know that it was one of the keys to Google’s early successes in massive computing. But what is it and how does one implement it, and most importantly, what do you use it for?

 

Think big things
By Brendan Baker | More articles on big ideas

It’s ok to start small but have big ambitions and set out to solve big problems. Life is too short to work on another groupon clone or social media aggregator.

 

Even the best engineers can become myopic and complacent when it comes to preparation for disaster. Perhaps this is especially true for the best engineers, for whom disasters are rare. Richard Feynman’s personal appendix to the report on the Space shuttle disaster is a great study in how such failures happen and perhaps how they can be prevented.

 

[Video] Life lessons from an ad man
By Roy Sutherland | More startup videos

Many of us are typically quite skeptical of advertising, but sometimes the “intangible value” of your product or service can outweigh its production value.

 

See all of the best startup resources here.

 

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StartupDigest Reading List – February 3, 2012

4/02/2012

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.

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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

By Eric Ries

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.

 

Let’s peak under the hood of Ruby’s run time environment and see how the garbage collector works. While we’re at it, maybe we can help save your application from slowing to a molasses mess.

 

A brief guide to tech internships

By Alexey Komissarouk

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.

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StartupDigest Reading List – January 27, 2012

27/01/2012

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.

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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.

 

strftime.org
by Unknown

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.

 

Pinterest’s Sign-Up Process
By Nicholas Carlson

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.

 

The JS kids these days. What can’t they build in that language we all originally learned about as a way to make dialog boxes follow your mouse around the page? Well, some folks at LinkedIn figured out how to make a full-fledged VNC client in pure Javascript!
 

The tale of 7 failed products. The reoccurring themes: they didn’t build something people would actually pay for, didn’t learn from their users, and got straight-up beat down by the competition.

 

[Audio Only] Interview with Mark Zuckerberg

An interview with Mark Zuckerberg when Facebook had 5 million users, was only for college students, and they had just launched their photos application. It’s pretty amazing to hear Mark sound like many early-stage founders I meet now.

 

See all of the best startup resources here.

 

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StartupDigest Reading List – January 13, 2012

14/01/2012

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.

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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

The first step
By James Currier

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.

 

Vim Macros and You
by Josh Clayton

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.

 

 

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StartupDigest Reading List – January 6, 2012

6/01/2012

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.

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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.

 

How to organize your app’s JavasScript without relying on third party libraries.

 

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.

 

Oh My ZSH
by Ryan Bates

If you aren’t a Rails Developer or don’t regularly watch RailsCasts, this one’s worth making an exception to watch. Ryan Bates details how to get started in the supremely powerful z-shell using Oh-My-zsh.

 

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.

 

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StartupDigest Reading List – December 9, 2011

9/12/2011

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.

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This week I got to hang out at one of the Singularity University sessions with Vivek Wadwha and I saw a talk on cyber crime that completely blew my mind. Not startup related but if you’re interested in this kind of stuff check out this video. I have a whole new perception on privacy and security now.
- 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

A heavy and emotional post about the lows of startup life by Ben Huh, previously founder of a failed startup, now founder of the Cheezburger Network.

 

 

A firey post on why programming can be for anyone if you are really interested in learning. The site is a little confusing but if you’re interested in learning to program the free book starts here.

 

A very tactical post on how to respond to investor emails. Much of this also goes for responding to intro’s in general.

 

An older post about the different stages of a company’s growth and the different people needed at each stage.

 

Taking responsibility
By Daniel Tenner

It’s easy to blame external factors for your company or product not succeeding. It’s even harder to take responsibility and action to make it better.

 

[Video] Marketing for Startups
By Rand Fishkin

The video was taken at Hackers and Founders to answer the question what is marketing and why is it important? Rand Fishkin is a co-founder of SEOmoz, one of the largest SEO and inbound marketing companies.

 

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

 

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StartupDigest Reading List – November 18, 2011

19/11/2011

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.

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Welcome back to the StartupDigest Reading List, the members-only guide to the best articles on startup life. This week features a look into the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). Take time to read more about it and decide for yourself how the startup community would be affected if it were passed.- Chris

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

 

 

StartupDigest Reading List is supported exclusively by:
Global Entrepreneurship Week kicks off in one week. Be among of millions of people in 123 countries celebrating, networking and learning about entrepreneurship. Find an event near you or plan your own. Visit gewusa.org for U.S. info. or unleashingideas.org for all other countries.

 

 

What You Need to Read This Week

Learn more about what the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is and how it affects internet freedom.

 

 

One person’s take on why he works with startups instead of bigger companies.

 

A summary of a class taught by Brendan Baker (previously with AngelList now with Greylock Partners) on how to communicate traction.

 

An inside look into Amazon and how its founder Jeff Bezos thinks about building a lasting company.

 

[Video] Three things entrepreneurs do
By Carl Schramm

A sketchbook video narrated by Carl Schramm, president of the Kauffman Foundation.

 

Find all of the best articles on starting, joining, and leading a startup here.

 

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StartupDigest Reading List – November 4, 2011

4/11/2011

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.

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Welcome back to the StartupDigest Reading List, the members-only guide to the best articles on startup life. This week there is no theme but we have 4 posts from different startup disciplines and perspectives. We also have a soft launch of our new Startup Videossection, a curated list of the best startup talks from around the world.- Chris

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

 

 

StartupDigest Reading List is supported exclusively by:
Startup Weekend founders share tips and insights in their first book, How to Take a Company from Concept to Creation in 54 Hours. Funded by the Kauffman Foundation, the book outlines key beliefs that have yielded powerful results. Order your copy by Nov. 8, 2011.

 

 

What You Need to Read This Week

An awesome post of pure epicness for engineers. It’s long but totally worth it.

 

 

This post focuses on term sheets, but it really applies to any business situation. When people show their true colors, always trust your gut.

 

A sobering message from Startup School 2011. Don’t start a startup just for the sake of starting a startup.

 

Traction Verticals
By Gabriel Weinberg

Traction, traction, traction. Here are a bunch of different marketing verticals which you can use to get distribution.

 

Startup Videos
By Brendan McManus

My co-founder Brendan watches a ton of business/startup videos so we figured it would be a good thing to compile all of the good ones into one place for you.

 

Find all of the best articles on starting, joining, and leading a startup here.

 

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