INSIDE THE CAVERNOUS INTERIOR of a former Boston-area taxi depot—walls covered in graffiti, pools of water on the concrete floors—three gleaming green-and-white containers sit side by side. The steel boxes are former “reefers”—refrigerated shipping containers used to transport cold goods.…

The next full-margin rupture of the Cascadia subduction zone will spell the worst natural disaster in the history of the continent. Credit Illustration by Christoph Niemann; Map by Ziggymaj / Getty When the 2011 earthquake and tsunami struck Tohoku, Japan, Chris Goldfinger was two hundred miles…

You see a carton of eggs for $3. Is $3 a good deal? How can you tell? What’s happening in your brain? Answer: Reference prices. You compare $3 to a “standard” price that you derive from: You merge all of those sources into a single magnitude. Then you compare this “reference price” to the current…

This article is by First Round Partner Josh Kopelman . Shortly after my first child was born, a friend gave me a copy of a book called “The Blessing of a Skinned Knee.” The book was full of contrarian wisdom. While most new parents' natural instincts are to improve their child’s life by removing…

Just because it generates revenue, doesn’t mean it doesn’t suck Not all, or even most, of these facts need to be true for there to be problems with a software product. But it might be happening right

T he postcard contained only two words: “Hurry up.” John Archibald Wheeler, a 33-year-old physicist, was in Hanford, Wash., working on the nuclear reactor that was feeding plutonium to Los Alamos, whe

Louie Chin Just how bad a mother am I? I wondered, as I watched my 13-year-old son deep in conversation with Siri. Gus has autism, and Siri, Apple’s “intelligent personal assistant” on the iPhone, is currently his BFF. Obsessed with weather formations, Gus had spent the hour parsing the difference…

Treat your reader with respect. Do not underestimate their intelligence or willingness to go on a journey with you. They want to go with you, but you need to give them a compelling enough reason to follow you. These were the lessons my teachers tried to impart on us, their eager—albeit…

The globetrotting chef, author, and TV host estimates that he's been away from home "about 250 days a year, for nearly the past decade," which makes him, among other things, one of the world's foremos

As we came out of private Beta, we announced a pretty unpopular decision at Trak.io: we removed our free plan (and replaced it with a $9 per month plan). I wanted to explain the reasons behind this and why we think it’s the best decision for our company and our paying customers. Hopefully, other…

This article initially appeared on TechCrunch — with a minor update highlighted in red below. Ah. We’re back to discussing convertible debt again. This time by the efforts of Adeo Ressi to introduce a new kind of structure called “ convertible equity .” I applaud all efforts by people to take on…

“Mad Men” on AMC How to Present Designs No matter how utterly innovative, how pristine and beautiful a design idea is, rarely does it speak for itself when you are still in the middle of the creative process. (How can it? Short of being a complete work, it’s a fragment, a paragraph on its way to a…

I’d be happy if 37signals is the last place I work. In an industry so focused on the booms and busts, I find myself a kindred spirit with the firms of old. Places where people happily reported to work for 40 years, picking up a snazzy gold watch at the end as a token of life-long loyalty. Committing…

Malcolm Gladwell, author of "The Tipping Point" and "Blink," keynoted at last week's American Association of Advertising Agencies' Account Planning conference in Chicago. Below is an edited excerpt from his speech. I want to start with a story about chairs, and I apologize if you read my book. Well,…

Editor’s note: Scott Weiss is a partner at Andreessen Horowitz and the former co-founder and CEO of IronPort Systems, which was acquired by Cisco in 2007. Follow him on his blog or on Twitter . “There are a bunch of aggressive, ivy-league-educated, high IQ people working in Bentonville whose careers…

Several years ago I was in the Thomson Building in Toronto. I went down the hall to the small kitchen to get myself a cup of coffee. Ken Thomson was there, making himself some instant soup. At the time, he was the ninth-richest man in the world, worth approximately $19.6 billion. Enough, certainly,…

If Steve Jobs’s life were staged as an opera, it would be a tragedy in three acts. And the titles would go something like this: Act I– The Founding of Apple Computer and the Invention of the PC Indust

The best products don’t focus on features, they focus on clarity. Problems should be fixed through simple solutions, something you don’t have to configure, maintain, control. The perfect solution needs to be so simple and transparent you forget it’s even there. However, elegantly minimal designs…

“Can you ask Sam about that? Stacker is his domain”, “I’d rather let Josh look at the router, he wrote it”, “Jon is better versed in associations, send it to him”. The natural progression of programs is towards the territorial. When a programmer has weaved an intricate web of considerable…

When I wrote my piece entitled “ One More Thing… ” in August following the news that Steve Jobs was formally stepping down as CEO of Apple, I knew that sooner or later there would have to be a follow up. Unfortunately, it ended up being sooner. While the reaction following Jobs’ resignation was…

Editors’ Note: Details from this post appeared in similar form in a July, 2011, piece by Jonah Lehrer for Wired magazine, U.K. We regret the duplication of material. On January 30, 1986, shortly after

Once a year or so, everyone at our company gets together for a week to hang out, work together, and socialize. Because 37signals consists of 28 people located in nearly 20 cities around the world, these get-togethers are rare—and important. Before our most recent get-together, in the summer, I…

Price influences behavior. In order to craft an excellent user experience, the price — and how your users interact with that price — must be central to the development of the product, especially applications. No user will welcome an application if the cost is prohibitive. This makes price every bit…