by Jared Tame on August 19, 2011
When I read that Weebly was pushing forward profitably, I recalled the interview I did with David Rusenko several months ago. Weebly doesn’t get talked about a lot, but it’s one of those startups I really wanted to do when I was in college. I even applied to Weebly as a sophomore in school and got turned down because they weren’t looking for summer interns at the time. I remember thinking at the time: creating web sites online really sucks; the best thing that exists is Macromedia Contribute and that’s a huge piece of software that you have to purchase just to make it work. This was back in the old days, when software came shrink-wrapped and you didn’t download entire operating systems as an upgrade.
Here are a few things that stuck out from the interview: [click to continue…]
by Jared Tame on July 28, 2011
Andrew Hsu, AiryLabs.com Co-founder
I got really excited when I first read about the Thiel 20 Under 20. I had some hesitation about speaking to some of the Fellows for Startups Open Sourced because I tend to look for founders who have at least experienced their trough of sorrow, but Andrew Hsu really jumped off the list of Fellows when I looked it over. He hasn’t experienced a trough of sorrow yet, but he has an interesting perspective on education and his startup is aimed at improving the model of learning for kids. [click to continue…]
by Jared Tame on July 14, 2011
Hermione Way
There was an article written by Hermione Way called “The problem with Silicon Valley is Itself.” The article can best be summarized in Hermione’s own words:
Living in San Francisco since January, I’ve interviewed around two hundred startups and there’s only two, out of two hundred, I think are game changers… Everyone is doing something amazing and trying to change the world, but in reality much of the technology being built here is not changing the world at all…
The problem with this type of thinking and the actual irony is how shortsighted these observations are. I’ve interviewed close to 40 successful startup founders at length, and almost all of them look like they started out as some cute little toy or some neat and easily dismissible feature. And that’s the pattern most startups follow. [click to continue…]
