Disqus - Latest Comments for tmarman

Re: URDB - Most 2465 Pounds Leg Press Repetitions

tmarman — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 12:13:33 -0000

I don't know how to classify this, but I think it's pretty clear that these are not "leg press repetitions". I used to put a bench under a squat rack and lift 800+ lbs several times to get my joints used to heavier weights... but to say that me lifting the weight several inches was the equivalent of a "bench press repetition" would be very silly.

And, to be honest, it doesn't look like many of the reps even move 12"... not that I would consider that a rep anyway.

Re: Startup Hotbed Inferiority Complex

tmarman — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 01:12:56 -0000

Well, we do live longer. http://nymag.com/news/features/35815/

Re: bijansabet.com | a tumblelog by Bijan Sabet | We are spending a few days in NYC and having a...

tmarman — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 05:40:48 -0000

Hudson River Park is awesome... I used to live down in Battery Park City which was really a nice undiscovered gem prior to 9/11 (after which it became very crowded as hordes of tourists walked up from the Statue of Liberty).

Pretty amazing for NYC eh? :)

Re: One word resolution

tmarman — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 13:30:56 -0000

I've been doing this every year for the last few years - setting "themes" for the year instead of specific goals. E.g., "flexibility", "discipline". In those cases, flexibility meant not just improving physical flexibility but also in my work and willingness to, say, try a different kind of food.

It works :)

Re: We Live in Public

tmarman — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 06:42:01 -0000

Oooh... 9 chars? That's short. I have one that's 11 chars counting the @ and dot. I am pretty proud of that one :)

Re: We Live in Public

tmarman — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 06:41:20 -0000

It's very generous to say that Scott "tackled" him :)

Re: Founder Dilution - How Much Is "Normal"?

tmarman — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 16:11:17 -0000

Chris, I think what Fred was saying is that the purpose of these provisions is to protect "dead equity" from a founder who walked vs. punishing a founder for a quick exit.

Our stock purchase agreement says that basically with any "Change of Control" (merger or dissolution) the Repurchase Right goes away (i.e., we are fully vested). I think it's fairly customary to accelerate all vesting .

Re: Truth

tmarman — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 06:55:19 -0000

I attended an intimate presentation by Dave Thomas (of Pragmatic Programmers fame) awhile back called "Herding Racehorses, Racing Sheep". It was a high-level talk on software development, psychology, expertise and generally how to move (yourself and/or others) along the expertise curve.

I've personally never been a big fan of rules and best practices and I thought his discussion really captured why. As I wrote then (http://bit.ly/IC2L):

"Dave asserts that expertise cannot be boiled down to rules because we lose the original context for the rule in the process. This is one of the biggest challenge in artificial intelligence, of course, and a similar problem with best practices. Truth, he says, is contextual - and it's often very difficult to capture the context in these situations. Rather, there are two dials - rules and intuition. As we move along the five stages, we increasingly rely less on rules and more on intuition. The expert rarely uses a recipe.

It should come as no surprise, having attended a liberal arts college, that I agree with and have been preaching most of the points that Dave raised. The whole point of a liberal arts education is learning how to learn and trying to understand something in the greater context."

Like you, I am a firm believer that there is no singular truth. I believe there are absolutely shades of truth, and the only way I can arrive at a conclusion I am happy with is to read as many sides of the story I can and apply my general intuition. I think this applies in both "objective" contexts like a news story and clearly "subjective truths" like best movie, best phone, etc.

I think this is why Boxee, Facebook, blogging and other "social" tools are so interesting - because it's a democratization of opinion. Instead of, as you said, points of authority expressing these opinions, it is everyone. With more opinions out there (whether it's music, points of view on a story, etc), it's easier to build your own view of that subjective truth appropriate for you.

This is also the cornerstone of what started us building Notches (http://notches.org). Blogging may have been the printing press in the context allowing those without technical knowledge to write if so inclined, but there's still a barrier to entry in having, say, my mother write reviews. We want to let a thousand interfaces bloom (including things like voice) to further democratize these opinions. Ultimately, this is the best way to get to a "subjective truth", and make recommendations based on your personal values and beliefs. The question isn't what's "best", but "best for me".

Re: BlueBlog:

tmarman — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 17:01:57 -0000

Oooooh I want one! XL... or if you happen to have any hats......

On a related note, I like the Blue, works well... not sure I like the yellow and I feel like the blue has a branding effect too...

Re: Your own body: An entrepreneur's most valuable asset

tmarman — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 18:04:18 -0000

Ha... I can go to Bay Ridge any time, but the problem has been when I'm not working from home and want to go during the day.

I'm not ready to Bic it just yet... I'm going to start with a shave on a 6 or something and work down from there.

Re: Your own body: An entrepreneur's most valuable asset

tmarman — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 18:58:10 -0000

I find the same thing. A consistent workout routine always makes me feel better and makes me more productive. Unfortunately I didn't sign up for the NYSC Passport, so I can only go to the SoHo gym on off-peak hours, which means I usually miss more than I would like to.

Re: Viacom to Time Warner: We’ll take Dora, and online episodes too

tmarman — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 22:25:05 -0000

And I should note: this undoubtedly means my TWC bill is going up again soon, which is ridiculous. My bill is up over 15% for the same exact service in the past 15 months.

Re: Top 10 Records Of 2008

tmarman — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 12:33:24 -0000

Good list. A few on there are definitely in my top albums, though there are a few I still need to get to.

One album that I've really been enjoying lately is The '59 Sound by Gaslight Anthem (came out in Aug). Have you listened to this at all? Wondering if it made your top 25... I think they sound a lot like Kings of Leon (particularly their latest), but for whatever reason I find myself enjoying this more than KOL.

The one other one I would definitely have to put in my top 10 is Beck - Modern Guilt. I liked TVOTR a lot too, but not sure if that would make the cut.

Re: What Pownce Could Have Been

tmarman — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 19:49:53 -0000

Not all that surprising considering one of the founders (Kevin Rose) was one of the biggest users of Twitter, and never once mentioned people going to his Pownce page.

Just saying :)

Re: The Universal Record Database The definitive site for human achievement, regardless of discipline or category

tmarman — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 17:29:25 -0000

My sister's feet are bigger.

Re: The other side of Paul Graham's Coin: Ideas on the kind of VC we'd like to get funded by

tmarman — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 00:28:44 -0000

The VC business is a relationship business, much like investment banking. There's a reason that places like GS are always near the top of the league tables - reputation is of the utmost importance there. Mark Davis (an associate at DFJ Gotham who writes a great guide at Get Venture) mentioned this as well. (http://www.markpeterdavis.com/getventure/2008/0...)

There are plenty of VCs out there and many sources of money. While I don't know that the ruthless VCs are necessarily going to go out of business, it's short-sighted for them to be ruthless and "screw over" their entrepreneurs. It's simple game theory. They may win in the short term with bigger gains, but they can be punished on repeated plays. Successful entrepreneurs who had a bad experience with a particular VC will probably go elsewhere for their next company, and with things like TheFunded (and maybe eventually a Notches vertical), word will get around.

The point is that the good companies - and thus the good investments - will have their choice on where to go. So, while they build a reputation through successful investments, their reputation as far as principles, etc is important because it will in part dictate whether they get those deals.

Re: The other side of Paul Graham's Coin: Ideas on the kind of VC we'd like to get funded by

tmarman — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 00:28:20 -0000

Re: Is there anybody out there? The results of last week's engagement and influence experiment.

tmarman — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 19:01:09 -0000

My post about not starting a company in Silicon Valley was on the top of HN and I linked to your post... shortly afterwards your post was ahead of mine. I'm sure the title helped with that audience :)

Re: Reblogging Music

tmarman — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 12:56:42 -0000

Songbird does this on some sites - it finds media on a given page and presents it like a playlist at the bottom of the page (load Hypem.com or Last.fm in Songbird). It doesn't seem to do this on Tumblr (or at least on the two links you gave) yet but I'm sure it wouldn't be too hard to support natively or through a simple extension.

http://getsongbird.com

Re: Twitter buys Summize: Confirmed

tmarman — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 00:25:58 -0000

Allen - that is unless their monetization strategy is with analytics and reporting as Charlie has suggested in the past. In that case, Summize's technology is more than just a fix for the search and replies - it's the engine by which Twitter can make their money.

Re: Can You Build A Business On Browser Extensions?

tmarman — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 10:01:43 -0000

I agree that you need more than just a browser extension - at least to build a business at a scale that VCs etc would be interested in. As @vruz points out, the simple truth is that Firefox itself is miniscule in terms of the reach of a plain old website - and so it's really hard to show the kind of growth and numbers that you would be looking for. If Twitter only had IM or SMS support, it wouldn't have nearly the number of users - rather, the web interface is the "baseline" and all of those other interfaces add to it.

That is the beauty of a "platform" - content generated even on a small, niche shard benefit the rest of the platform. I'd be interested in seeing a breakdown of, say, the delicious content generated via the browser extension vs. the regular website. For one, it seems like geeky users who installed it are more likely to contribute in the first place (that top 10% of content creators). And for me, I know I interacted with delicious much less - particularly on the creation side - when I first upgraded to FF3 and the plugin wasn't available yet or when I was at my old job that only had IE (before the new toolbar was released).

Re: Friendfeed replacing Twitter? Yeah, and sometimes when I want an apple, I eat fish instead.

tmarman — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 14:04:23 -0000

You're right, my comparison downplays the strong community of Facebook and that wasn't my intention - my point was just that most of my (initial) interaction with Facebook these days is through Twitter status updates. Often, that will lead to messages or wall posts, but for the most part it's bringing what I do on other sites to the Facebook community.

And yes, FriendFeed is just like Pulse, and what neither of them have really done well is build the community. Twitter is my "first line" - but the highest percentage of responses always comes from Facebook (which makes sense since it's the most personal group of friends).

Re: Cooking on the web with Debi Mazar & Gabriele Corcos

tmarman — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 13:59:53 -0000

David Morse. Tara makes fun of me to no end, but he's one of my favorite actors. Him and Ed Harris in the kitchen would be bad ass.

Re: Bill Gurley Is Blogging Again

tmarman — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 02:40:56 -0000

Awesome - subscribed.

Re: Friendfeed replacing Twitter? Yeah, and sometimes when I want an apple, I eat fish instead.

tmarman — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 03:05:05 -0000

Agree. That said, Twitter is clearly a "subset" of FriendFeed... and there *IS* an opportunity for FriendFeed to replace Twitter if it can capture those things you lay out. If FriendFeed allowed you to subscribe to certain friends via SMS for certain types of activities (e.g., native messages that would have been tweets), they can fill that space. But I do agree that FriendFeed is simply not interesting to me as is.

In many ways, my interaction today with FriendFeed is the same as Facebook (or, if you want to include this, Plaxo Pulse) - I generate most of my content via Twitter or Flickr or whatever and syndicate it out into those two services. I rarely interact directly with Facebook or FriendFeed.