Don Dodge

what's the point of working so hard if nobody gets to enjoy it but me? Life starts posing those existential questions at the extremes of sacrifice, especially when you're working for something your brain subconsciously knows could potentially turn out to be vaporware. If you're going to play the game of wanting users, then 1) immediate and regular program-shaping user feedback is king and 2) many overnight successes take longer than expected [1]. At 4 years in you're really just getting started with learning. Obviously you're in the phase now where you recognize you need help and can't do it all yourself, so how badly do you want your Everest? It always takes teams to reach any great summit. [1] https://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2008/05/guitar-hero-a-…

You could search the web as a whole and find many examples of fast follower used as I used it. You don't have to look very hard at all to find it applied to Google. Your definition is excessively narrow. Even Don Dodge calls Google a fast follower: http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2010/10/first-mover-vs-… Guess where he works?

I love that this is on the front page at the same time as Don Dodge's blog article about what an amazing job google does at hiring people: http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2010/09/how-to-get-a-jo…

This is a shoddy sales pitch, at best. Remember his first post as soon as he left Msft titled "Thanks Microsoft, Hello Google" (http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2009/11/thanks-microsof… I'm all for talking about your past work experience, but that particular post just costed Don his credibility.

Most of my favorites are startup related or at least in the tech industry. http://mashable.com http://centernetworks.com http://scalableintimacy.com/ http://chrisbrogan.com http://xconomy.com http://dondodge.typepad.com/

>> We've done this five times now, and we've seen a bunch of startups die. About 10 of them so far. So, not counting this batch (19), 10 out of 39 [1] startups died so far. So, the survival rate is 72%. Not bad! I know that some more YC companies might die at some point in the future, but the numbers so far seem impressive. [1] The following article quotes 58 companies funded in all: http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2007/08/paul-graham-on-…

Bing's travel search is the best in the Biz as far as I'm concerned. Wolfram Alpha is phenomenal for certain types of queries. I find their results for companies pages to be so cleaner and more intuitive than either Google or Bing's. I think there are huge openings for competing with Google and Bing when focused on a specific niche. Google's revenue per search query in the US is $0.12.[1] And, I know I"m getting frustrated with their search results, and I find myself using multiple search engines for different types of queries. There's tons of room for competition in this market, and I don't know why more startups aren't taking advantage of it. <shameless plug> This is the reason that we're turning http://Newsley.com into a search engine for economic and financial news. The news sections of Yahoo Finance and Google Finance suck IMHO. We're trying to make financial news search suck less. We're focusing on building our index and results pages like crazy right now. We're currently indexing the Economist, NYT Business and BBC Business[2]. Bloomberg News should be online this week. After getting Bloomberg online, we're going to focus on getting the alpha version of our search released. We're making our results pages available as soon as possible, however, so we can start building a bit of organic search traffic to our site even before search is released. So far, it's worked great. Since we started releasing those pages 6 weeks ago, our traffic has tripled. In…

Looks like Don has a history of picking winners working for DEC, Forte, Compaq, AltaVista, Napster, Groove, deNovis and now Microsoft. [0] I love microsofties, they go straight for the throat. The circumspect ex-softies trash MS these days for MS's lack of focus & ability to adapt. This is because MS has lost their core asset, their API. '... The cornerstone of Microsoft's monopoly power and incredibly profitable Windows and Office franchises, which account for virtually all of Microsoft's income and covers up a huge array of unprofitable or marginally profitable product lines, the Windows API is no longer of much interest to developers ...' [1] There is still some great stuff coming out of MS, but they hardly excite the next generation of developers of software. Some of these issues revolve around the dollar costs associated with owning MS operating systems & associated software. Cheaper and more open alternatives don't help. [2] To hear Office, Corporate ownership and X-Box [3] demonstrates to me the developers have left, and marketroids are bleating the 'marketing & business' advantages, where in the past it would have been technical advantages. [4] '... Defaults. Microsoft will design Windows so as to enable computer manufacturers and users to set non-Microsoft programs to operate by default in key categories, such as Web browsing and media playback, in lieu of corresponding end-user functionality in Windows ...' [5] And as for Microsoft being benevolent,…

I think the mental test could have been framed better using the IMHO far more intuitive framing used by Don Dodge in his 2008 article about how to assess a fresh batch of YC startups. Is your product a vitamin (nice to have) or a pain killer (a must have to improve quality of life)? https://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2008/03/does-your-star…

You should read Microsoft's reply to the essay [0] which contains your arguments and PG's reply to it [1]. It's interesting to review claims from years ago and I think PG was largely right. Microsoft is not completely irrelevant (yet?) but they definitely lost the cultural war and moves like open sourcing .NET show that they want to join the old opponent's positions. I'll add that I'm not sure if Microsoft's historical influence was evil. They prevented fragmentation and created a unified environment and probably enabled PC revolution. [0] http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2007/04/since_when_does… [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/cliffsnotes.html

Google is one well-known example that used to require a minimum GPA, even for people with years of experience: http://jobs.aol.com/articles/2011/03/27/i-interviewed-at-google/ http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2010/09/how-to-get-a-jo… That's why the recent announcement that they've found zero correlation between GPA and job success was such a big deal: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-hunting-big-data-ma…

Its an analogy, not a comparison. Different workplaces have different cultures and different standards of behavior. Startups in particular are known for having unique work environments, and how well you fit into the culture of any business is an important part of determining if you should be hired there. e.g. http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2010/09/how-to-get-a-jo…

Sure. This is the most informative public document I've found on the Google hiring process, it contains the 35% and 25% estimation: http://www.qqtm.info/Interview/Google_Guide.pdf The 0.5% (in fact less than 0.5%) comes from Google itself, from Don Dodge's blog: http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2010/09/how-to-get-a-jo… I've researched this because I was on an onsite interview at Google on Tuesday and I am waiting for their answer right now...

Check out BizSpark http://bizspark.com for a Microsoft marketing program that gets startups access to the stack for zero upfront costs (yes that's carefully worded). Microsoft has a history of acquisitions, but they tend to be based on talent, shared customers, market access or defensible technologies. Don Dodge covered this a while ago http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2005/10/microsoft_will_… You bring up a good question about the risk tolerance of potential hires. No opinion on it.

In the US we graduate about 100k engineering students each year(http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2008/11/50-of-us-engine… So even if we hired every engineering graduate from US schools every year, we wouldn't fill the gap, by a long shot. My point is that for a population this huge you're not going to be able to backfill for any reasonable dollar amount or you have to significantly lower your standards, in which case you're probably hiring people that will largely fall into that same bottom 10% next year.

Don Dodge put together some interesting numbers on the search market before in a post, albeit three years ago: http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2007/05/why_1_of_search…

I like this comment from Don Dodge at http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2011/01/facebook-twitte… : "Critics point to Twitter raising $200M at a $3.7B valuation, and Facebook being valued at $35 Billion, or Groupon at $6B valuation just 6 months after raising a $135M round at a $1.35B valuation as evidence of a bubble. Bubbles don't typically start with the market leaders. Bubbles happen when investors extrapolate market leader valuations onto 3rd tier players. Sound the bubble alarm when you see this happening."

I strangely feel the same way about most of Mark's posts. I get about 2 or 3 paragraphs in and I'm already thinking "got it, move onto the next point". Sorry Mark, but I think you should maybe take some of your own advice on this one and apply it to your blog posts. You write well, but I wish I had the Coles Notes. By comparison, look at Don Dodge's writing vs Mark's http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2010/01/how-google-sets… much more concise and to the point. Probably fits most of the readers of HN better.

I assume it means that some features are "good for you," while others are opiates; and possibly that this is a bad thing because opiates mask pain, and graphing pain is a crucial part of iterating a design, so the more opiates a design has, the more confounding factors there will be to evolving a good core product. (That's not to say that I agree that on-site search is an opiate, but an argument could be made for it.) EDIT: Oh, wait, I screwed that up completely. It's from here: http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2008/03/does-your-start… Apparently, painkillers are the good things. Goes to show how weak analogies won't actually carry your message.

Linkjacked: http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2010/03/what-you-should…

Android is pretty slick and the Nexus One is a nice phone, but there will always be employee bias. I can't imagine an Apple employee publicly stating they prefer BlackBerry to iPhone. Or a Microsoftie admitting to having "iPhone envy" (see http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2009/11/thanks-microsof… And, as I mentioned, Jeff is the author of two books dedicated to iPhone software development. What else would his blog be called? And no, he's not neutral, no one is. But Jeff isn't a Google employee.

This reminded me of the Don Dodge GOOG/MSFT transition post. Maybe it was the displays of platform loyalties, or their perceived backwardness of the technology habits? http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2009/11/thanks-microsof…

Same as this one in different language, interesting that people keep rediscovering this. http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2006/03/is_your_product…

Facebook took 2 years. The company was founded in 2004 and by 2006 they were generating an estimated 1M per week. Source: http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2006/04/facebook_revenu…

According to these sources: http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2007/08/boston-vcs-gets… http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/08/16/y-combinator-demo-day-the-summer-… There were only 10 companies launched out of 19 for the summer 2007 round in boston. So it doesn't seem too out of the ordinary for this batch.

Don Dodge from Microsoft had this post a long time ago: http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2007/05/freemium_free_t… Money quote: "The average is less than 3% conversion."

I guess you didn't read this one where I rip a Microsoft lawyer for dumping on Google? http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2007/03/microsoft_lawye… I have been in the software business for 25 years and been on the management teams of 5 startups. I have been at Microsoft less than 3 years and haven't drank the Kool-Aid. However, I don't buy the Microsoft is evil argument either. I rarely write about Microsoft. In fact I write about Google and lots of startups about 80% of the time. That said, if you want to disagree with my point of view anytime...that is fine. It is a free country. Don

Clicking through to the cited posts: 1. http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2006/12/options_on_goog… - Most of this post is praising Google for their TSO program. Microsoft is mentioned almost as an afterthought, to show that they also have good employee benefits (not exactly a secret). 2. http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2005/11/google_data_cen… - This was written in 2005, and is pretty much exactly in line with the predominant sentiment of that time. It's hard to make the case even today that Google has yet really attacked MS directly (no desktop OS, a much lighter office suite, etc). 3. http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2006/10/office_20_free_… - Again, mostly in praise of Google, talking specifically about how online office suites are a potentially disruptive technology that MS is scrambling to get a slice of like everyone else. And, feature-for-feature, um, of course MS Office wins. But if you don't care about feature count, so what? 4. http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2007/12/google-vs-micro… - He specifically says Google is to today's MS as Toyota was to Ford or MS was to IBM 30 years ago. The whimper about MS having smart folks who have played disruptor themselves doesn't exactly equate to "Google won't disrupt MS". 5. http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2007/02/google_apps_tak… - Alright, Fake Steve has this one pretty spot on. 6. …