"6. Tech people adopt early
And you use Hotmail."

"

Because yes, it is frequently kind of sucky to be a woman in tech.

So you know what, Samsung? You’re not helping. Shut up and make me a phone.

"

"

The call ended. There was silence, then frustration, then sadness.

We went back to other investment firms that we had also received term sheets from prior to committing to Benchmark, but after Benchmark pulled out, the news spread and we had the scarlet letter, or maybe the scarlet zero. We were hosed.

"

"

One thing that never ceases to amaze me is how similar some of the metrics are from service to service and company to company. I like to call these the web/mobile laws of physics. One fairly common “law of web/mobile physics” is the ratio of registered users/downloads to monthly actives, daily actives, and max concurrent users (for services that have a real time component to them).

I call this ratio 30/10/10 and so many services that we see exhibit it within a few percentage points here and there.

Here’s how it works:
30% of the registered users or number of downloads (if its a mobile app) will use the service each month
10% of the registered users or number of downloads (if its a mobile app) will use the service each day
the max number of concurrent users of a real-time service will be 10% of the number of daily users

We see these ratios across social web apps, social mobile apps, games, music services, and many other consumer web and mobile services.

"

"Mobile is a different paradigm, and social has re-ordered the way we discover and consumer content. While homepages and verticals are still important, young consumers especially live in a world in which content finds it way to them rather than the other way around."

"They are losers. They are out there. And you should not hire them."

Cristina Cordova: The Biggest Problem in Mobile: Retention

cristinacordova:

When I read Fred Wilson’s post this morning about the tough times consumer companies are having raising money, his second point resonated with me most:

“distribution is much harder on mobile than web and we see a lot of mobile first startups getting stuck in the transition from successful…

"You know who else has great ideas, or at least feels they do? Homeless people. And if the guy at the 24th Street BART station is an entrepreneur, I’m concerned."

"On bringing Fashionstake into their fold (its founders are now Fab’s fashion buyers), he explained, “Their mission was the exact same thing, to make fashion democratic, to find these emerging designers that didn’t have a platform and help them get their goods into people’s hands. What they lacked, honestly, was having an audience. So what we’ve done now is really a marriage of the two; we’ve built this really expansive audience and they have this very deep rolodex of designers who are itching to sell their products."

"Tickets work great for things that are a privilege. Movies, concerts, cruises, and so on. Tickets worked great for flying in the 30′s, 40′s, and 50′s because it was a treat. It wasn’t something everyone did. Now, flying isn’t a treat. For many people, it’s the bane of their week. Parking, the huge time sink at the airport, the uncomfortable seats, the inefficient routes, the bad food, the TSA’s aggressive and unnecessary prodding. Flying sucks. You don’t charge tickets for an experience that sucks. You can’t make money that way."
–

PlaneRed To Taunt Airlines, TSA - Ed Zitron - Tea and Technology - Forbes

All-you-can-fly subscription-based airline with a promise to skip the TSA entirely. I’ve signed up for the first round of PlaneRed, have you?


"Like all gold-rushing douchebags of any era, he’s not starting a company because he believes in it. You can tell because there’s no great idea there, rather it’s a collection of buzzwords and phrases like “We’re the (fill in the blank) of (fill in the blank). With badges."