Most startups spend all their time on optimizing the experience for registered and logged in users. But what about those who come to a site through a link? Or right to the home page by either typing the company’s URL or more likely searching for the company name. Most companies spend very little time on this which is a mistake because it is the top of the user acquisition funnel. Companies that get the logged out experience right can get a lot of mileage from that. In particular showing immed...

A couple of years ago Shapeways was a tiny company based in the Netherlands with a big idea: providing 3D printing as an on demand service and marketplace. Following an investment from Union Square Ventures and Index Ventures the company relocated to New York City (and recently raised more money including from new investor Lux Capital). Today marks a critical milestone in the growth of Shapeways: Mayor Bloomberg presided over the groundbreaking for a large 3D printing facility in what used to...

Most startups spend all their time on optimizing the experience for registered and logged in users. But what about those who come to a site through a link? Or right to the home page by either typing the company’s URL or more likely searching for the company name. Most companies spend very little time on this which is a mistake because it is the top of the user acquisition funnel. Companies that get the logged out experience right can get a lot of mileage from that. In particular showing immed...

A couple of years ago Shapeways was a tiny company based in the Netherlands with a big idea: providing 3D printing as an on demand service and marketplace. Following an investment from Union Square Ventures and Index Ventures the company relocated to New York City (and recently raised more money including from new investor Lux Capital). Today marks a critical milestone in the growth of Shapeways: Mayor Bloomberg presided over the groundbreaking for a large 3D printing facility in what used to...

This is the second post in my Scylla and Charybdis series on why startups are quite so hard. Up today: hiring. Here you can go wrong by hiring too fast but also by hiring too slow. The first problem of hiring too fast is fairly obvious. You wind up spending money too quickly. For most Internet startups payroll is the biggest fixed expense and it is far easier to hire than to fire, which winds up being a problem if raising money turns out to be harder than expected. But there are also more sub...

This is the second post in my Scylla and Charybdis series on why startups are quite so hard. Up today: hiring. Here you can go wrong by hiring too fast but also by hiring too slow. The first problem of hiring too fast is fairly obvious. You wind up spending money too quickly. For most Internet startups payroll is the biggest fixed expense and it is far easier to hire than to fire, which winds up being a problem if raising money turns out to be harder than expected. But there are also more sub...

As previously promised, this will be the last Tech Tuesday post on Data Structures for a while and starting next week we will return to other aspects of programming. Much of what we have seen in the previous data structure posts are structures that are built into the respective programming languages, such as structs in C, associative arrays in PHP, JSON in Javascript, objects in PHP and multi-dimensional arrays in C. Today we will take a look at rolling our own data structures that let us set...

As previously promised, this will be the last Tech Tuesday post on Data Structures for a while and starting next week we will return to other aspects of programming. Much of what we have seen in the previous data structure posts are structures that are built into the respective programming languages, such as structs in C, associative arrays in PHP, JSON in Javascript, objects in PHP and multi-dimensional arrays in C. Today we will take a look at rolling our own data structures that let us set...

Yesterday, Felix Baumgartner jumped from 24 miles up, briefly traveled at supersonic speed and landed safely with a parachute. While it’s highly debatable whether this stunt did anything to advance science, it makes for utterly awesome science teaching. In fact this is so rich that it made me wish we were still home schooling our kids because science class in school is beholden to the curriculum. So I was reduced to a walk to school with my youngest but here are some of the things we talked a...

Yesterday, Felix Baumgartner jumped from 24 miles up, briefly traveled at supersonic speed and landed safely with a parachute. While it’s highly debatable whether this stunt did anything to advance science, it makes for utterly awesome science teaching. In fact this is so rich that it made me wish we were still home schooling our kids because science class in school is beholden to the curriculum. So I was reduced to a walk to school with my youngest but here are some of the things we talked a...

Yesterday I posted about how the current Do Not Track debate is muddling the underlying issues. I got a great reply from Mike Yang on Twitter that rightly pointed out at P3P had been a mess in part because Microsoft jumped the gun on it. That got me to think about an even broader context here which is the shift to mobile. A do not track battle on the web only is even more absurd in the context of a rapid shift in where people spend time and can be tracked even better (at least in the new iOS)...

Yesterday I posted about how the current Do Not Track debate is muddling the underlying issues. I got a great reply from Mike Yang on Twitter that rightly pointed out at P3P had been a mess in part because Microsoft jumped the gun on it. That got me to think about an even broader context here which is the shift to mobile. A do not track battle on the web only is even more absurd in the context of a rapid shift in where people spend time and can be tracked even better (at least in the new iOS)...

The Do Not Track discussions that are currently going on are fascinating because they highlight the huge gap between how the internet actually works and how people are talking about policy. Politicians are giving consumers a false sense that there is an easy “on/off” switch for tracking. And industry groups aren’t helping the debate by making it easy to argue that they are using self policing as a fig leave. All of this completely drowns out the difficulty of the underlying problem: our onlin...

The Do Not Track discussions that are currently going on are fascinating because they highlight the huge gap between how the internet actually works and how people are talking about policy. Politicians are giving consumers a false sense that there is an easy “on/off” switch for tracking. And industry groups aren’t helping the debate by making it easy to argue that they are using self policing as a fig leave. All of this completely drowns out the difficulty of the underlying problem: our onlin...

Today’s post is over at USV where we are looking for design talent to help us update our identity. Funnily there is a question about our logo on Quora. We are excited to be leveraging Behance’s design community for this update. Participate or let other designers know that they should. We will select and commission five designers. Here is the competition on Behance.

Today’s post is over at USV where we are looking for design talent to help us update our identity. Funnily there is a question about our logo on Quora. We are excited to be leveraging Behance’s design community for this update. Participate or let other designers know that they should. We will select and commission five designers. Here is the competition on Behance.

If you have been a faithful reader of Tech Tuesday, you may be asking yourself just how many more posts on Data Structures could possibly be coming up as this is now the sixth such post (including the introduction). The answer is that after today there will be at least one more before moving on to a different subject for now. But that’s not for a lack of material – there is always more to say about data structures. And if nothing else one important takeaway from these posts should be that und...

If you have been a faithful reader of Tech Tuesday, you may be asking yourself just how many more posts on Data Structures could possibly be coming up as this is now the sixth such post (including the introduction). The answer is that after today there will be at least one more before moving on to a different subject for now. But that’s not for a lack of material – there is always more to say about data structures. And if nothing else one important takeaway from these posts should be that und...

Salman Khan has a blog post on CNN where he suggests that credentialing can and should be separated from learning. He makes a compelling argument for why this would be desirable:What this will change is the opportunities for the 50-year-old laid-off engineer. He could now show that he still has the analytical skills and brain plasticity to work alongside 22-year-old college grads in a 21st-century job. It would allow the smart, young, single-mother to re-engage with a real career. It would al...

Salman Khan has a blog post on CNN where he suggests that credentialing can and should be separated from learning. He makes a compelling argument for why this would be desirable:What this will change is the opportunities for the 50-year-old laid-off engineer. He could now show that he still has the analytical skills and brain plasticity to work alongside 22-year-old college grads in a 21st-century job. It would allow the smart, young, single-mother to re-engage with a real career. It would al...