Disqus - Latest Comments for alabut

Re: How To Run A Design Studio In 90 Minutes Or Less

Al Abut — Wed, 19 Feb 2014 18:32:27 -0000

You're right, that's probably a key step. I got lucky that I knew the ones I listed were discussed pretty often and there would be at least 2-3 that we were passionate about.

I'm not sure how much prep work it would take in advance though, since it probably depends on the team (and how clear the priorities are in the first place). I can see it being as quick as throwing ideas on a shared google doc somewhere.

Re: A Seed VC’s Decision Tree

Al Abut — Mon, 09 Dec 2013 02:51:27 -0000

Mapping out your workflow reminds me of the investors in the book Checklist Manifesto, who also added structure and process to standardize their investment criteria. It's impressive to see a clear and repeatable workflow at the seed stage, since most investors at this level seem to thrive on unstructured coffee meetings and gut feelings.

Re: Soundbar With Most Boom Per Buck

Al Abut — Fri, 27 Jul 2012 20:38:01 -0000

I couldn't wait any longer and bought the E450 instead. It sounds amazing! The 3D effect is really noticeable and especially impressive given it's low price point.

Re: Soundbar With Most Boom Per Buck

Al Abut — Tue, 10 Jul 2012 17:30:59 -0000

This page has been in a "wait, don't buy" mode the last few times I looked. Would it be a good purchase to just get the successor - the E450 instead of this old D450?

http://www.amazon.com/Samsu...

Re: on to the next chapter

Al Abut — Tue, 28 Dec 2010 22:08:31 -0000

Sad you're moving but this sounds like a big opportunity! Take lots of pics of #snowmageddon and keep in touch.

Re: Live+Long+And+Prosper+With+YC-Funded%26nbsp%3BFutureAdvisor

Al Abut — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 14:05:55 -0000

Yeah and I was the designer at Cake until it was acquired by E-Trade, so the opportunity's back on the table for some small focused startup to tackle the same problem.

Re: Toolbox: A Workshop for Startups

Al Abut — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 14:23:26 -0000

What Dan and Jesse said! It was great meeting you and I'm really glad to hear you got a lot out of the workshop - it's exactly what we were hoping for.

Re: My Best Friend’s Wedding: The Startup

Al Abut — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 13:04:15 -0000

If it makes you feel any better:

1) I've had this happen to me several times, it's a trippy "how did they read my mind?!?" feeling.
2) the idea might be the same, but the execution varies so wildly that the end result is almost never exactly what you would've created.

That second reason is a powerful incentive to always keep creating and to not worry about first mover advantage. It's that Paul Graham thing of getting the first version out purely as an excuse to get feedback and iterate into what the product will eventually be. So maybe one day you'll create your own thing after all!

Re: Running the Carlsbad 5000

Al Abut — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 09:11:22 -0000

Oh cool, my hometown! Well sort of - San Diego. It really is a fast course - I ran the half marathon there in high school and gained liked half an hour over my previous time.

Treat yourself to a "California" burrito - carne asada with french fries - at any local Berto's afterwards.

Re: Why The Agency Of The Future Looks Like My Fantasy Baseball Team

Al Abut — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 07:44:58 -0000

Ironically, the closest thing to what you're describing is a sports-themed collective called Athletics: http://athleticsnyc.com/about

Usually virtual collectives are more for fun side projects than serious client work - I'm not sure how these guys pull off the team interactions or even practical matters like availability and scheduling, like Dan alluded to.

Re: YC-Funded WakeMate Helps You Kiss Groggy Mornings Goodbye

Al Abut — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 20:44:33 -0000

Thanks for doing the comparison Greg, I can see a little more differentiation now. The SleepTracker definitely is bulky (I've found my hand falls asleep when the band is set to anything but the loosest setting) and your site's personalized suggestions are visually slick.

Re: YC-Funded WakeMate Helps You Kiss Groggy Mornings Goodbye

Al Abut — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 18:13:08 -0000

"It seems like it would be easier just to integrate an alarm directly into the wristband, along with a cheap LED display so you can set the time... (perhaps they could include a ‘vibrate’ mode)"

That's exactly why I bought the Sleeptracker after David Pogue's review in the nytimes earlier this year.

http://www.sleeptracker.com/

Works pretty well! Especially the vibrate mode, since I'll often get up before my wife and don't want to wake her.

Re: Being Open and Honest About Startup Process

Al Abut — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 06:48:25 -0000

I'd love to see it in action because I was considering doing the same thing for 14gears, especially if we go through the ycombinator session. I've often wondered about the nuts and bolts of the program and it doesn't have fancy video segments like techstars :)

We found out today that we made it to the interviews in a few weeks - wish us luck!

(apologies for the cross post)

Re: Map

Al Abut — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 14:41:45 -0000

How long are you going to spend in Istanbul? Depending on how long you're there, I've got all kinds of non-mainstream "for locals only" tips for that town (was born there, all my fam is there, spent a summer in college there, etc) and tested them out on my wife for our honeymoon last year.

Re: How to Price Your App – Learning from Basecamp

Al Abut — Wed, 20 May 2009 13:14:07 -0000

One thing I noticed is that the release on February 7, 2005 was when they switched from the standard left-to-right increase in pricing to go from right-to-left instead, which they've kept until today. It's a smart and unconventional strategy that places their most expensive plan first.

Re: Over 20 startups later & so goes Startup Weekend San Francisco

Al Abut — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 14:44:27 -0000

A few of the teams are still going and trying to be serious about continuing. Mine is one - http://gosnoozemail.com - we just had our first official team dinner last night and are meeting again this weekend. And that's just for the important in-person stuff - the developers are checking in stuff via svn like mad, while the designer and business guy have been going to town on Basecamp.

Re: My Startup Weekend Experience (Part 2)

Al Abut — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 14:37:58 -0000

It was great meeting you guys this weekend!

Our demo starts at the 40:00 mark and ends at 45:00 exactly, right on the dot like we were told :)

Remember our app? http://gosnoozemail.com

Re: Startup Weekend SF or Bust!

Al Abut — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 18:46:10 -0000

Great blog post! I have to reiterate how awesome it was to meet you over StartupWeekend and how much you blew my mind with your ideas on Friday about how to expand SnoozeMail. I'm still trying to capture them all!

(brief shoutout: http://gosnoozemail.com is what we ended up building)

I can totally relate to the concerns about moving to SF - I came from a *super* tight-knit community of web nerds in San Diego and made friends for life in that scene, I'm talking we've been to each others weddings even though we spread out across the globe, and it can be really easy to get lost in your work here in SF and forget about getting involved in the scene enough to make similar deep friendships.

For what it's worth, this weekend was one of the few times here that I felt like I made "San Diego-level" friends again! And how awesome is it that we're going to do monthly meetups in the same space to catch up and gauge progress?!?

Re: StartupWeekendSF produces a record 23 startups

Al Abut — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 10:45:44 -0000

Thank you so much! We had a blast making this thing and I still can't believe 20+ viable startups exist out of nothing now, what we accomplished is just starting to hit some of us now on Monday morning :)

Re: StartupWeekendSF produces a record 23 startups

Al Abut — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 04:39:47 -0000

I have the same issue :) this is the designer behind SnoozeMail and our url is actually http://gosnoozemail.com

And I'd love to hear more about your email setup, especially if you think getting reminders about old important unreplied messages wouldn't help you!

Re: phodroid | kmakice

Al Abut — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 22:54:32 -0000

She's so tiny! Oh my goodness - tiny!

Re: Facebook Poll: 94% Of Users Don't Like Redesign

Al Abut — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 21:51:04 -0000

I hope they can keep perspective on the feedback - 710k sounds like a lot of negative votes until you stop to consider that it's 0.4% of the total number of users and that people usually don't pipe up to say positive things, especially when something is so entrenched into their lives that they log on every day like it's just another utility, like email.

Re: Don't try to dodge the recession with grad school

Al Abut — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 22:41:32 -0000

It's worth noting that you can and should apply #7 - "Most jobs are better than they seem: You can learn from any job" - to grad school as well and treat it as a job with a long term contract, one that you need to mine for all kinds of interesting things that you didn't think you'd learn. For example, I bet a lot of people (understandably) go into a top neuroscience or cell biology program thinking they'll learn a lot about biology and research, and they do, but the ones that do really well learned things like how to manage your time well, motivate yourself on an independent and long-ranging schedule, network in a loose non-corporate environment and blow off steam with non-contact sports.

I had a unique job right out of college that gave me a lot of firsthand experience with a top notch phd program and allowed me to witness the grad student lifestyle w/o having to go myself. I was a web developer for the biology department of my college and worked out of a research building, separate from all the other admin staff, which was great because I got to hang out with people my own age, all the grad students (and even some of the younger associate profs) near my office.

Re: Facebook%26%23039%3Bs+Response+To%26nbsp%3BTwitter

Al Abut — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 20:01:47 -0000

The new Facebook homepage layout is similar to a change Twitter made last year as well - moving the filters from horizontal tabs above the feed to a vertical one running next to it. Twitter made an identical change in September of last year, described in their blog post here:

http://blog.twitter.com/200...

The interesting thing is that the deign rationale is probably the same for both companies, yet Facebook users already have the ability to form adhoc groups and filters of their contacts, whereas Twitter doesn't. It's probably a big part of the reason why my Facebook friend list feels pretty manageable at close to 300 people, yet following a similar number of people on Twitter drives me a bit nuts and my Twitter feed increasingly feels like a crazy RSS reader with only big giant folder and no sorting abilities. I've been trying to deal with the info firehouse overload by going old school with browser bookmarks and grouping twitter pages by "friends", "designers", "San Francisco", etc.

Re: The Exciter - Getting Webby With It

Al Abut — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 00:30:56 -0000

Hey, how's my favorite 3ones euro programmer? Ok, the only one :)

I saw your site go by in the referrer logs for some old comment I made and we haven't talked in forever, so I thought I'd stop by to say hi and what do I see but you making a post about something that's on my mind right this second! The reason I've kept my site's blog on Blogger all these years is because I like that it generates static html files, I never really felt comfortable with the overhead of a php/mysql setup, even something as popular and smooth as Wordpress. Blogger's been lacking in a lot of areas since Google acquired it - hello, what about simple stuff like categories?!? - but nothing's tempted me enough to get me to seriously consider bailing until recently. Switching to something like Webby, Nanoc or RubyFrontier has a lot of appeal for me - super fast performance like I'm used to from Blogger, but with a much-needed upgrade on features too.

Good to see you're still blogging man, hope you're well!