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Tom Evslin
blog.tomevslin.com · Personal blog · on HN since 2007
Tom Evslin, a tech entrepreneur and former executive, blogs about startups, investment, telecom policy, and the economy.
What HN saysHN commenters quote his posts on startup timing, platform costs, and when a company should spend, treating him as a source of startup advice.
25HN people shared it
3linked it in comments
29stories submitted
143story points
2 years agolast shared
2007people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Why we need bubbles2 people · 2 points · first shared 2016 · discussion on HN
- 2Web 2.0 -- Greater Initial Investments Required2 people · 2 points · first shared 2007 · 2 comments on HN
- 3Microsoft Memories on Fractals of Change2 people · 2 points · first shared 2007 · discussion on HN
- 4When your company should spend2 people · 1 points · first shared 2008 · discussion on HN
- 5Website runs all in S3, no server.1 people · 61 points · first shared 2008 · 12 comments on HN
- 6America’s Industrial Revival1 people · 12 points · first shared 2011 · 1 comments on HN
- 7Too Much Revenue, Not Enough Growth1 people · 11 points · first shared 2008 · 2 comments on HN
- 8Morph of a Nerd CEO - How Hard Will You Work?1 people · 8 points · first shared 2007 · 2 comments on HN
- 9TAC to FCC: Set a Date Certain for the End of the PSTN1 people · 8 points · first shared 2011 · discussion on HN
- 10Hardnosed negotiation HOWTO for hackers.1 people · 7 points · first shared 2007 · discussion on HN
- 11California Shows How *Not* to Deal with Climate Change1 people · 4 points · first shared 2019 · 2 comments on HN
- 12When Angels Fear to Tread1 people · 4 points · first shared 2009 · discussion on HN
- 13Amazon S3 – Backstory for Nerds – Part 21 people · 2 points · first shared 2008 · discussion on HN
- 14Why a Great Programmer Is Worth Fifty Good Ones1 people · 2 points · first shared 2015 · 1 comments on HN
- 15Being First IS The Business Plan1 people · 2 points · first shared 2008 · discussion on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
dpapathanasiou · 2008-12-11
FWIW, Tom Evslin made a similar point:
"So, if you’re just now starting up, don’t get blinded by the successes of the first people to realize a platform could be built and operated on the cheap. You already missed that wave. Now, unless you are extraordinarily lucky or well-connected, you aren’t going to succeed in publicizing your new service and getting up to a critical mass of content or subscribers or both unless you raise or have enough money to create initial awareness or value. There is too much clutter from which you must emerge."
http://blog.tomevslin.com/2007/01/web_20_greater_.html
happy-go-lucky · 2017-09-13
The essay itself is general and surprising, and the combination never loses its effectiveness.
Ideas keep evolving. There was nothing new about the idea of a search engine when Google came into existence in 1998.
In 1945, Dr. Vannevar Bush wrote an article titled As We May Think:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/3…
> he urges that men of science should then turn to the massive task of making more accessible our bewildering store of knowledge.
In the 1960’s, Gerard Salton created and developed Salton’s Magic Automatic Retriever of Text (SMART). He also authored a book called A Theory of Indexing detailing his initial tests that search is largely based off of relevancy algorithms. Here’s a very interesting blog post titled Search Down Memory Lane by Tom Evslin who worked with Salton during this project:
http://blog.tomevslin.com/2006/01/search_down_mem.html
Fast forward to 1990, a man named Alan Emtage created the first search engine known as Archie which retrieved a database files by matching user queries using regexes. Following the growth of Archie’s popularity, two similar search engines Veronica and Jughead were created and they started indexing plain text files.
In 1993, the first bot called World Wide Web Wanderer was created and then it was upgraded to capture active URLs and store them in a database. Then came ALIWEB (Archie-Like Indexing of the Web), which crawled meta information of pages.
There’re others including…
fallentimes · 2008-10-22
Link to the post he refers to:
http://blog.tomevslin.com/2008/10/when-your-compa.html