Credible Engineering Leadership Skills

Categories leadership, startups
Like many web engineers who have built teams as their startups have grown, I do not have an MBA.   If you are like me in-so-far as you value management practice over theory, you probably learned to bootstrap & scale as a leader without one. That hasn't stopped me from developing my own theories.  Reading this quora thread on why many engineers detest their management reminds me, I have Read the article >>

The amazing value of the Techstars network

Categories life
About a year ago, I was given an once-in-a-decade career opportunity: Join Adam Sachs & Dan Osit to help start Ignighter.com, an online group dating website, at Techstars, the startup incubator program based in Boulder, CO. Techstars typically takes a small equity stake in your company in exchange for a small amount of seed money, a summer of office space, mentorship, and connections. While Read the article >>

5 Twsins that will get you an unfollow on Twitter.

Categories technology
1. Thou shalt not tweet several times per minute. Goes without saying. It's just annoying. Spread them out. Use tweetlater. Whatever you need to do so you don't hijack half my feed. 2. Thou shalt not frequently tweet mundane information. Classic examples include "Eating dinner", and "Driving to the dentist". Do your followers a favor and don't tweet it unless you have something more interesting Read the article >>

List of Twitter Acronyms

Categories technology
Methinks its about time someone began keeping a list of all the twitter acronyms floating around. For simplicitys sake, I've neglected to track any acronyms that began on AIM, IRC, or other earlier internet services (ie: LOL, WTF, etc) FTW - For the Win. Origin: unknown FTL - Opposite of FTW. For the Loss. Origin: unknown FAVRD - Verb. To FAVRD a tweet, is to vote for it to appear Read the article >>

Some tips for newbie iPhone Developers, from someone who’s been there.

Categories technology
For the last several weeks, I've had the blessing (or the curse) of being in charge of the development of an iPhone application for my startup. The development tools are based heavily on OSX development tools. Get to know Objective-C and Cocoa. If you, like myself, primarly program on the web with tools like PHP & Ruby on Rails, you will need to understand the nuances of ObjectiveC up-front. Read the article >>

Startup Email Deliverability

Categories life
Email Deliverability problems begin to happen during the time in your startups life when your organization starts changing from that of a child company to that of an adult company. While there's no "right" time for Email Deliverability optimization to begin, web startups usually start a little earlier than brick and mortar startups—usually between 2 and 6 months of age. Deliverability Optimization Read the article >>

Techstars Investor Day : Morning Wrap Up

Categories life
Today is Techstars demo & Investor day. Ten of the companies from the 2008 Techstars class are presenting their work for the summer to an audience of 150 investors in the Boulder, CO area. Here is my wrap up of the teams that presented in the morning. Gyminee demoed their fitness-centered social network. Their system provides fitness motivation and accountability through the social network. Read the article >>