joshuago’s Bookmarks

TheFunded has produced founder-friendly versions of every legal document necessary to launch a new startup. These documents were carefully written from scratch to keep founders in control of the companies that they create.

Money creates a sort of friction. Sometimes, you want friction. Commitment slows things down in the short run, but ultimately aligns interests.

Imagine if there were no reliable records of global surface temperature. Raucous policy debates such as cap-and-trade would have no scientific basis, Al Gore would at this point be little more than a historical footnote, and President Obama would not be spending this U.N. session talking up a (likely unattainable) international climate deal in Copenhagen in December.

Universal health insurance, far from suppressing entrepreneurship, could be a boon to it. The main reason for this is a phenomenon known as "job lock." Job lock refers to the fact that workers are often unwilling to leave a current job that provides health insurance for another position that might not, even if they would be more productive in that other position.

It wasn't socioeconomics, school funding, or racism, that accounted for the students' poor academic performance; it was their own attitudes, and those of their parents.

You stare at the thing all day, years on end. Of course you think the UI looks tired.

But once I started getting people to view and interact with my prototypes, I realized that one of the big problems was that people didn’t give good feedback when the prototype you present to them is too perfect.

As important as they are, flows are hard to communicate during the design process. Drawing out every state of a flow is too time-consuming. And drawings become instantly outdated as screens change. On the other hand, flows written down into stories or paragraphs are hard to reference and don’t easily decompose into checklists for design and review.

Let’s build great companies that are here to fight, here to win, and here to stay until the next generation after us comes along and kicks all our asses. And again and again and again. That’s how better happens.

If you're a regular at a restaurant and the staff has one off-night, you can be patient because you know the food is worth the wait. If it's your first visit... not so much. And, importantly, you probably won't return. Initial impressions count, in software and in everything else.