Read this first The Ghost of Swift Bugs Future Update : I wrote this with Xcode 7 β1, and playgrounds crashed a lot at the time. As a result, I gave up on testing all the cases, and a lot of errors cr
The Big Winner from Y Combinator’s Success? Sequoia Capital Priceonomics Yesterday, Y Combinator’s president, Sam Altman, announced that the seed investment firm had funded 716 companies that were cur
I've written about this stuff before, but I continue to be interested in it. I actively use the following messaging apps on my phone: Kik – my primary channel for The Gotham Gal, my daughter Jessica, and USV people Snapchat – my…
I know a thing or two about Objective-C. It’s not bragging. If you’re reading myblog, there’s a decent chance that I know more about Objective-C than you do. Ihave opinions about it. You should take t
Thus the highest form of generalship is to balk the enemy’s plans; the next best is to prevent the junction of the enemy’s forces; the next in order is to attack the enemy’s army in the field; and the
Earlier this year, Tool guitarist Adam Jones told a group of fans that the prog-metal heavyweights’ next record was not only done but would be coming out the next day – then he waited a beat and tacke
Going against the freemium gaming grain, Monument Valley , the sumptuously designed, premium priced iPad game which launched back in April and snagged its makers an Apple Design Award at this year’s W
Bitly began in 2008 by solving a simple problem for consumers: Links were too long for Twitter’s 140-character limit. So it shortened them. As far as technical solutions go, building a link shortener
Marc Andreessen Download Photo Marc Andreessen is a cofounder and general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He is an innovator and creator, one of the few to pioneer a software
The rise and fall and rise of Upcoming.org Published in The Message · 9 min read · May 28, 2014 -- You haven’t made it until someone calls you a sellout. My moment was October 5, 2005, the morning aft
Published in Monday Note · 6 min read · Jul 13, 2014 -- Satya Nadella’s latest message to the troops — and to the world — is disquieting. It lacks focus, specifics, and, if not soon sharpened, his wor
Here’s a tiny confession. I’m bored. Yes; I know. I’m a sinner. Go ahead. Burn me at the stake of your puritanical Calvinism; the righteously, thoroughly, well, boring idea that boredom itself is a mo
I am excited to announce that betaworks is participating in the seed round of Yo . I wanted to share a few thoughts on how I see Yo fitting into the ecosystem of services on, and beyond, phones. Over
“Deep linking” is a topic that is still simmering below the general conversation around mobile, but is due to have a major impact on mobile apps, ads, and commerce. As much as mobile dominates the con
On Saturday, a Twitter account appeared that perfectly predicted the outcome of the final World Cup game, down to who scored the winning goal for Germany. It was a con—and a classic one. (We’ll talk a
Who wins? Users or Growth? 3 min read · Jul 13, 2014 -- Aaron Batalion and Arin Sarkissian are obsessed with podcasts. Last week, over a donut, they were suggesting podcasts and apps to me like the pr
Don't Link that Line Number! 16 Jul 2014 Today I saw a co-worker take a link from a specific line number in our team’s github repository and place it in the comments section of a user story. This is v
Knewton isn’t an easy product to explain. Analyzing hordes of data, it adjusts lesson plans for students in real time across subjects, determines how they learn, and suggests the best way to help them
YC Portfolio Stats by Sam Altman 7/16/2014 We get asked a lot for statistics on the YC portfolio. Even though some of these aren’t that helpful [1], here is the latest update on the numbers we get ask
Learning from the things we make over and over Published in The Message · 7 min read · Jul 14, 2014 -- Did you ever notice, wrote my friend Finn Smith via chat, how often we (meaning programmers) rein
3 min read · Nov 2, 2012 -- I've been lucky to be part of the early growth of several really interesting and now important networks including LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. One of the things that I
Six months into growing and evolving Secret, our community has shown us how much demand there is for a social network centered around honest conversations. Whether it’s reporters in Moscow using Secre
This visualization displays the data for one random NYC yellow taxi on a single day in 2013. See where it operated, how much money it made, and how busy it was over 24 hours. A Special Thanks goes out to Mapbox and Heroku for assistance with covering the surge of activity when this project was first…
If you’ve spent any time in a newsroom, traditional or otherwise, you know that publishers are obsessed with measuring where their web traffic comes from. Whether it’s Google Analytics or Chartbeat or
FLICKR USER indraw http://www.flickr.com/photos/indraw/ How we measure engagement Published in Data Lab · 5 min read · Nov 21, 2013 -- One million page views! 50,000 signups! Five million posts! 165 m
Christina Farr’s Reuters article is pretty bad, as helpfully detailed by John Gruber . Apple’s accessibility support leads the industry by a mile. But the actual issue, buried in the sloppy article, i
Ben Horowitz Download Photo Ben Horowitz is a cofounder and general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He is the author of the New York Times bestsellers, The Hard Thing About Ha
Christina Farr, reporting for Reuters, “Advocates for Blind, Deaf Want More From Apple”, the gist of which is that the National Federation of the Blind is considering litigation to force Apple to requ
I was in the bathroom this morning catching up on all the blogs (via Feedly) that I hadn't read this week since my head was in a bunch of other things. I came across one from Nic Brisbourne (Forward Ventures) titled I'm a stock picker. I wish he…
Sometimes at Panic we build internal stuff that never sees the light of the outside world. This is one of those projects: an automatic in/out tracker for the Panic Team. OK, sure, there’s not that man
Today marks five years since I launched the website that my mom still refers to as ' the other bedbugs '. Happy business birthday to me! Any site that aspires to be an archive starts life with a credi
Scaling growth is hard – there’s only a few ways to do it When you study the most successful mobile/web products, you start to see a pattern on how they grow. Turns out, there’s not too many ways to r
Fun With iBeacon written in You probably know already what iBeacon is, but just to reiterate, iBeacon is the Apple way of saying Bluetooth 4 Low Energy. At the cost of sounding like a mindless drone,
It’s now 7 years since the iPhone reset the phone business, and indeed the entire computing and internet businesses. But it was pretty clear at the time that the first iPhone was an MVP, and Google’s first Android… homage, the HTC G1, was even more so. It feels rather like the last 7 years have…
Yancey Strickler is chief executive and co-founder of Kickstarter.
The world was introduced to Kickstarter when our Web site went live in 2009. But the idea had been around much longer: Company co-founder Perry Chen came up with it in 2001. The eight intervening years were spent doggedly trying to…
“How could she do something like this to me?” said a voice in my head. All the time. Everyday.
Back in 2011, when everything had gradients, iOS icons made sense, and people used deodorants, I was stuck in middle of a pretty bad depression due to my divorce.
Thankfully, I think I was smart enough…
Communities have long been an integral part of the Internet, online places where people can connect and share their passions and interests. And communities can have great network dynamics, where they
I have seen the future of desktop computing, and it is very small. Ironically, it is also very portable. Imagine a Macintosh in a smartphone form factor. Pull it out of your pocket, and it works like
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