Disqus - Latest Comments for aaronwhite

Re: Caterpillar Cowboy

aaronwhite — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 13:18:47 -0000

pretty sure they are extremely young. Least, I recall reading that somewhere, and having it verified consistently when I ran adwords trials.

Re: kevinmook: 3D Eye Tracking from TAT, the guys... - Aaron White

aaronwhite — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 11:15:50 -0000

Drew, many thanks!

Re: Too bad the show Dexter is in a bit of a decline,... - Aaron White

aaronwhite — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 14:21:34 -0000

thanks, Mo

Re: Too bad the show Dexter is in a bit of a decline,... - Aaron White

aaronwhite — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 14:21:26 -0000

heh, mission accomplished on both accounts; thanks

Re: Aaron White - What animal has a grandfather, but no father?

aaronwhite — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 14:12:08 -0000

Well, hopefully this isn't cheating ;-) but I posted the answer here: http://aaronwhite.tumblr.com/post/30118991/what...

Re: Dear Steve Blank, this is incredibly irresponsible - Aaron White

aaronwhite — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 15:03:15 -0000

Ok, agreed on that. Steve's whole point/purpose/message/mantra is "demonstrate you have a business by cultivating paying customers, or you have nothing to scale" which is very much in-line w/ your comment, so I suspect you'd agree w/ his CD approach.

Re: Staying The Course vs. Numbers Don't Lie

gbattle — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 13:45:14 -0000

I understand what you are saying and also have a interest in YC's magic. You may also want to examine Ron Conway's approach at SV Angels - he's the alpha and omega in the angel investing game. From his talk yesterday at Betaworks, his magic is simple:

* 1/3 of his investments fail, 1/3 return even money, 1/3 return multiples
* investments from $50-$200K, almost always part of a syndicate
* no board seats
* very rarely do they do follow on, but they have done follow-on funding through liquidity (Sean Fanning's last company)

Ergo, my back of the envelope is that Ron Conway's follow-on funding percentage is very low. This is not a negative signal to the market as I would gather his portfolio of 500 investments have a high percentage raising funds outside SV Angels. Frankly, if I were Ron, I would advertise these numbers to entrepreneurs. YC should also.

Re: Staying The Course vs. Numbers Don't Lie

aaronwhite — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 13:31:55 -0000

my un-stated assumption was that it'd be difficult (read: impossible) to provide meaningful numbers if there were 0 participants in the program. Transparency around follow-on % needs to follow at least some information about level of seed activity. I have an intellectual love-affair w/ YC's general approach and uber-transparency regarding their portfolio.

Re: Staying The Course vs. Numbers Don't Lie

gbattle — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 13:23:28 -0000

I don't work for Spark so I can't answer that question Aaron. Again, I'm not being specific to Spark here - Mo, Bijan and the Spark team are fantastic and nothing but accessible online or offline - I am just pointing out that Mo's piece did not answer Chris' question. I provided the exact statistics to address it. Do I believe I'll see it in the market generally? Only from early-stage VC's whose percentages are superior in the market.

Re: Staying The Course vs. Numbers Don't Lie

aaronwhite — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 13:16:45 -0000

Greg, is there a public list of companies that have received Start@Spark funding? I haven't heard news of one yet

Re: Prediction: 2010 will be the year of game mechanics

dlifson — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 17:34:35 -0000

Game mechanics aren't anything new, and generally they can be great,
but there is definitely a need to "only use when appropriate". There
are lots of cases where game mechanics encouraged destructive behavior
(Digg leaderboards come to mind).

The whole concept of badges and mayorships that reset periodically is
an interesting one, and I'm excited to see how it plays out.

Re: Prediction: 2010 will be the year of game mechanics

aaronwhite — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 16:44:52 -0000

Wrote this almost exactly a year ago, would love to hear your thoughts!

"Prepare yourself to see game-like elements appear like wild-fire across the web in the coming year (if you haven’t already). Examples include goal based systems: guided profile completion, guided and staged interactive tutorials. Achievements: social rewards, system rewards, points & merits. Competitive rankings: global leader-boards, social leader-boards, etc."

http://aaronwhite.tumblr.com/post/57278732/web-...

Re: Good lord, what has science done?! ... - Aaron White

aaronwhite — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 14:17:10 -0000

haha; glad someone remembered that video :)

Re: Just ordered the new Magic Mouse. Amazing. - bijansabet.com

bijan — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 16:32:47 -0000

you bet they are. my 3 year old son tries to "swipe" and "tap" every screen
he sees....

Re: Just ordered the new Magic Mouse. Amazing. - bijansabet.com

aaronwhite — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 16:30:34 -0000

do I dare swing by Boylston tonight and see if they have them in the flesh... err plastic?

This is a really neat step forward. Once all macs have, or have access to, simple touch inputs, I hope to see similar innovation in interface as on the iPhone.

One wonders if Apple is "training" the next gen os OS X users on "touch interfaces 101"

Re: Finally Deactivated my Vark.com Account

Alison — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 14:30:46 -0000

Thanks for following up - you do a great job of providing constructive criticism. We're constantly working on improving the service, so hopefully we can win you back soon :)

Re: Finally Deactivated my Vark.com Account

aaronwhite — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 11:45:13 -0000

Hi Alison... I did see the new social connections coming through (A friend of John has a question) and that is fantastic. My only comment here is that at the present time the volume of "3rd party" vs. "2nd party" questions seems to weigh heavily towards the former. Even still, that may motivate me to answer a few more questions, but eventually the burden returns. Evan had some interesting ideas of using it for self-promotion (perhaps not unlike LinkedIn's question/answer system)

I enjoyed reading the reasoning behind not adding a scoring system, and can get behind that.

Looking forward to hearing/seeing what Aardvark does next, as I said, I have tons of startup-respect for you guys!

Re: Finally Deactivated my Vark.com Account

evanleonard — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 16:57:54 -0000

Good point - the system would be *more* useful if this were built-in to take advantage of any potential network effects. For example, if it added my link for me, and automatically tracked who clicked on it for me - that'd be cool

Re: Finally Deactivated my Vark.com Account

aaronwhite — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 16:49:23 -0000

Fair use... though why doesn't vark do that for me? It doesn't have to be 'hard' for them to fix the service, they just need to be aware it's broken :)

Re: debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in... - Aaron White

aaronwhite — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 10:43:53 -0000

Haha, I dig it. There's just a sticky edge-case; what if you're already the smartest guy out there? Tough life to live, I bet.

Happy to meet another Aaron White! If there's one thing Google & Facebook are succeeding at, it's making me feel less unique every day :)

Re: debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in... - Aaron White

aaronwhite — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 22:21:09 -0000

Don't worry, I've seen all of our code, we're not at risk.

Re: Complete GAE + Lift + Maven project zipped up, with datastore

aaronwhite — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 13:20:17 -0000

Definitely going to do a bigger post on why this is so cool... fits the whole 'lean development' arc I'm digging into now.

Re: Aaron White - Free Idea #1: iCal desktop background

aaronwhite — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 20:16:25 -0000

Oh awesome, that's totally what I wanted, thank you!

Re: Heresy and Usurpation

aaronwhite — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 12:32:13 -0000

I have an old memory of a bowflex commercial, "The human body is an amazing machine, the more you work it, the better it becomes" (something like that). Nice example.

Re: Facebook Events: You're Doing It Wrong

dlifson — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 17:03:17 -0000

Ok yes, I change my mind. I was thinking more about myself (I rarely
care what others are doing), but I can see how people could be swayed.

I do think an A/B test is in order. And Brian Van (I can't spell his
last name from memory) correctly points out that the design of the
Accept / Decline UI does make it seem like your comment should only be
used for "Why are you declining?", creating the social proof you
mention.

Honestly, though, I don't see Facebook addressing this any time soon.
They don't have any motivation to fix it; what gain to they get out of
improving the Accept :: Decline ratio?