"- People responded well to it. Your idea, which just got validated, is now also available for public consumption. This is troubling because the idea also has a stream of positive comments, making it that much more attractive."

You should add to that what REALLY happens when people respond to it. They start talking about it. They bury you in great ideas that never occurred to you. They sign up to be notified about your private beta. You are incredibly energized and motivated all of a sudden. You are no longer fearful that your idea will totally fall flat. Recruiting gets easier. Good developers who are interested in your problem/space seek you out. Investors (who know all of this) don't think you are a total noobcake. You don't have to invest time or money in stuff like NDAs or other secretive measures.

Stealth mode is 95% of the time totally ridiculous, with the risk of being out there totally eclipsed by the reward. There is the 5% case, I suppose, where you've truly invented something unique rather than just making something suck less.

I'm also absolutely FLOORED by your statement that the "...Nobody liked it. Your idea is probably unspectacular." scenario is not a good outcome. That's a spectacular outcome compared to pissing away months or years building something that you later realize nobody wants.

(IMO)

Apple has open source figured out. It's the prefect fusion: the core technologies (http://webkit.org) are open source, but they manage the UI like no one else can. Software with style, the way it should be. The WebKit team is absolutely fantastic too, I miss them.

It's pretty impressive that Apple can compete with open source. I forgot that was possible.

I actually thought that the most interesting comments were at the end of the interview.

"What the VCs created by not investing in entrepreneurs during the .COM winter, was they created a breed of super entrepreneur... That breed of entrepreneur didn't need money, they figured out how to make a business without a lot of money, and now they don't need the VC's any more and the VC's are freaking out."

He also mentioned that companies that take VC money are actually at a competitive disadvantage over those that do take money. The VCs force the startup to take a big exit, so the VC can make their 10x return on their investment in 5-7 years. But, if a company doesn't take money, they can be bought for a lot cheaper, and are a more likely target for acquisition. A VC backed company is going to be 10x more expensive than a non-VC backed company.

Thanks.

I hate clicking on a post only to find a video. I don't always have Flash available and even when I have flash I don't always have sound. It helps when someone summarizes the main point in a comment.

I don't know how this article made it up so high, but Google didn't beat AltaVista, it was gone long before that. Inktomi, which powered Yahoo! and HotBot's search for quite some time, displaced AltaVista primarily because it distributed searches across a network for faster results. Google, of course, displaced Inktomi with an entirely different algorithm.

The math is wrong and ultimately not even related to the point. Why include it? I would've preferred a post consisted of the 3rd and 2nd to last paragraphs.

I would hardly call Google's interface designers "tasteful."

It seems more likely that they knew they were bad designers so they just went with the simplest possible design.

Yahoo doesn't get enough credit. They are doing some pretty awesome and forward-looking stuff. The reason they're falling behind, I think, is because the "yahoo" brand is so large and complex that it's hard to find anything by going to their site. It probably doesn't help that AOL.com ripped off the design almost to the pixel (I'm extremely surprised there has not been a lawsuit there).

All good questions. The big wins for us at RescueTime (I imagine this would vary by situation) were:

1) We got crazy excited and worked our asses off and ultimately set aside great jobs to work on this full-time. I don't know if we could've sustained the energy if we didn't have our users (and potential users) dragging us along. 2) We applied to YC. I honestly don't know if we would've done this if we didn't have such a great response to our "this is what we're building... coming soon!" page.

3) We got accepted to YC. I dunno if it mattered, but it certainly is easier to say "we're building something people want" when we've got a line of thousands of people who have signed up for the beta, contributed ideas, blogged about us, etc. Showing "love letters" from users was huge, IMO. 4) the product is HUGELY better than the original vision IMO, because we've been buried in several thousand emails from people who want certain things that never occurred to us or didn't want things that we thought were important.

For VCs and for internal morale/energy, traction wins. There is simply no substitute for being able to say, "people LOVE us" and being able to prove it. There is nothing that keeps you working harder than users applauding your featureset and clamoring for enhancements. At least for me.

Regarding funding beyond YC, we currently aren't looking for investment but we might be eventually. We have been approached by several investors. Ask me in a few months. :-) Either way, I think being out-there helps on this front, and stealth would hurt us.

This is definitely true, the nightly builds of WebKit right now are incredibly fast. But, the shipping version of Safari is also much much faster than Firefox 2, and is still faster than Firefox 3 Beta. Safari has come a long way in a short time, it's an incredible browser.

Husband of a friend works in management over at Yahoo. She says the word is around the water cooler, that Yahoo's looking for around $36 a share, and then will sell.

Sounds like morale is pretty low, and sound like there's going to be a lot of engineers looking for new jobs soon. Or, a lot more startups rising for Yahoo's ashes.

Search != Display.

The real comparison is whether ads placed on social sites do worse than Google's display (AdSense) networks.

If they do (and it sounds like they do), it's likely because the majority of social sites don't show up in search engine result pages (SERPs). My understanding is that most/many of the clicks on AdSense come from people clicking search results, and then seeing an ad relevant to their on one of the pages they click through.

Display will never equal search; intent isn't there. The only real money to be made in display is a) via SERPs and b) branding/influence ads, whose effectiveness is not easy to measure, since it isn't about clickthroughs.

And the social sites will need to move either to brand ads or to truly social ad concepts (ala facebook fan pages) that become part of the app’s experience and don’t draw users offsite.