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SEARCH KEYWORD -- STARTUP SOLUTIONS

  Redesigning the Technical Hiring Process

Since my last post on technical interviews, I’ve been fairly involved in hiring at Pulse as we grew our team from 6 people when I joined last November to 14 full-timers. In my previous post, I suggested that technical interviews, in the conventional sense, are not especially effective (by technical interviews, I mean the traditional 45 minute coding-at-a-whiteboard and algorithm puzzlers interviews). Those do a great job of telling you how well a candidate is at acing those types o...

   Career,Recruitment,Process,Developer,Ski     2011-09-14 12:01:37

  How I Quickly Test and Validate Startup Ideas

Since I’ve technically been unemployed now for a week, I’ve spent most of that time brainstorming some new ideas and putting them into a Google Spreadsheet.This week I began going through that list and pulling out the ones I think have a chance and I narrowed a pretty large list down to just a few.Let’s take one of the examples from my list. It doesn’t have a name, so let’s just call it Patient Connect.The idea behind Patient Connect is that it integrates with ...

   Startup,Idea,Choose,Validation,Verify,Invest     2011-10-28 10:14:41

  IDC lists top 6 myths, realities about open source

Summary: What are the top 6 myths? That open source software will enter every market, is inherently innovative, it improves faster than commercial software, that it has less lock-in, that it’s free and that it has little benefit if one is not involved in the community. IDC calls these ideas “myths” but acknowledges there’s more than a grain of truth to all of them At its Directions 2012 conference in Boston today, IDC rev...

   IDC,Open source,Reality,Free,Contribution     2012-03-16 08:47:53

  The Long Grind Before You Become an Overnight Success

“So, what do you do?”Ugh. I hated that question.The truth was that we were trying to start a new venture but we hadn’t really made any progress.But, instead of just muttering something, I would force myself to enthusiastically pitch our current struggling idea. They would nod along but the skepticism on their face was hard to ignore.And, when I was done, they would sometimes hit me with: “So, is that your full-time thing?” Ugh. What that really meant was: youâ€...

   Startup,process,Waiting,Hardtime,Working     2011-09-29 10:42:54

  Why we don’t hire .NET programmers

Skip my post and read this one instead.  It says the same thing, but less offensively.  (Or, rather, more offensively to Facebook and Google employees, less offensive to .NET developers, though the underlying message is the same.) Tuesday midnight edit: After >500 comments, >1000 tweets, and >1000 Facebook likes, I’m closing comments on this thread so we can all get back to work.  The very last comment takes the cake, however, and is a fitting close.  Th...

   ASP.NET,High level,Low flexibility,Weakness     2011-12-20 08:43:28

  How Many Hours Can a Programmer Program?

I am a little late to this party where Michael Arrington says that startups mean working hard and sleeping under your desk. But I will add a few words. I read a lot of commentary about how such death marches can be counter-productive and ultimately unsuccessful, and also the real dangers they pose to the well-being (short-term and long-term) of the lives of the programmers. But I didn’t see many people actually do a quantitative analysis. So here it is. Your average working day...

   Programmer,Working hour,Efficiency     2012-01-28 07:17:17

  Spurring the Consumer Feedback Loop with Connected Devices

In a press release from earlier this year, Gartner had predicted that by the year 2018 mobile devices would account for initiating 5% of consumer services cases, registering a marginal rise of 0.02% from 2014. Research shows that most businesses lose around a whopping $83 billion owing to poor consumer services (Source: kissmetrics) in the US alone while globally, the average cost of losing a consumer is $243. It is only viable to think of automating support services as a way to lower the costs ...

   Big Data Analytics Solutions, Loyalty Programs for Customers     2015-08-18 07:11:35

  Don't. Waste. Time.

Stuff we startups do that doesn't delight users:Office spaceLaunch partiesHealth insurance plansSalary negotiationsFounder equity splitsSeries F stockOffice Food Team-building activitiesCRM systemsBookkeepingHead countWorking in SOMAConvertible debt capsValuationsTechCrunchKarma scoresISOsPowerpointBusiness CardsBanksLawyersDesks1099sBug TrackersAgile ProcessesAdvisory BoardsHiringCap TablesPayrollMeetupsMeetingsOf course, much of this stuff still needs to get done.  At some point.&nbs...

   Time management,Work,Startup,How to     2011-11-21 09:55:06

  Install and setup Kafka on Windows

Kafka has become a very popular distributed message delivery service which decouples different services while making message delivery between service easy, fast and reliable. In this post, we will walk through how to install and set up Kafka on Windows. Pre-requisite Java Apache ZooKeeper Installation Go to Kafka's download link and download the latest stable release, we downloaded 2.2.0 as of this writing. After downloading, copy the installation file to some folder and unzip it.  Sinc...

   KAFKA,STREAM,USER GUIDE     2019-06-01 02:12:07

  Opinion: Top 5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started My Own Business

1. However much money you think you'll need to start a business, you should take that number and double it I thought I had strategically planned every penny when I first started, but I had no idea that there would be so many unanticipated costs. Since we have a home office, I use temporary commercial office space and conference solutions for meetings and demonstrations. We always like to buy lunch for our clients, and we like them to lunch well. By the time everything is factored in, depen...

   startup,own ownership,business,care     2011-08-22 12:10:18

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