David Adewumi

"who cares if David wants to fund an iPhone app? thousands of iPhone apps, maybe tens of thousands, are being built by developers all over the world right now. venture capital is not a requirement to build an iPhone app. it's not even a requirement to build an amazing company. google could have easily gone without VC investment. craigslist did. the focus on VCs is all wrong. focus on the products. that's where the action is." - Fred Wilson

I'm not sure if Google could really have been in its current position without VC. They had 2 of the most influential & powerful VCs, & they were already running out of money while they were building their infrastructure. - siavash

"Figure out what the important things are, and spend lots time on those and little on the rest. Lots of startups work very hard, but on the wrong things. They still die an untimely death." - Paul Buchheit

Sam Altman is one smart boi! - Nenad Nikolic

From the comments: "Remember if you're not a Y C founder, be sure to spend all of your time working on patents." - Clare Dibble

Just another reason why I hate living south of the Mason Dixon line. It's really sad how many people are still racist / prejudiced / homophobic. It's quite disgusting. Hell, I get discriminated against because I'm a northerner. - ::Kristen::

This is what we need, a discussion about race. Until we talk about race, racism will always exist. - Gregory R

What I found most appealing about Obama was his trans-racialism -- he wasn't about race. He was about universal human and social issues. And that is why I recoiled in disgust when the Clinton campaign, in collusion with the Murdoch-dominated MSM, insisted on dragging race into the Obama discussion at every opportunity. - Sean McBride

Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie would certainly agree! - Tad - the Meme Maker

Funny you should mention him, Robert. I'm working with a website, and he's one of our celebs on it. The odd part, for me, is that we have all of these B+ list celebs, and I don't know any of them. - Bradley McSpinn

I put it to you that smart people talk about people rather than ideas - Jim Yiapanis

"The companies, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, have been hit hard by the mortgage foreclosure crisis. Their shares are plummeting and their borrowing costs are rising as investors worry that the companies will suffer losses far larger than the $11 billion they have already lost in recent months. Now, as housing prices decline further and foreclosures grow, the markets are worried that Fannie and Freddie themselves may default on their debt. Under a conservatorship, the shares of Fannie and Freddie would be worth little or nothing, and any losses on mortgages they own or guarantee — which could be staggering — would be paid by taxpayers. The government officials said that the administration had also considered calling for legislation that would offer an explicit government guarantee on the $5 trillion of debt owned or guaranteed by the companies. But that is a far less attractive option, they said, because it would effectively double the size of the public debt." - Paul Buchheit via Bookmarklet

@chriswhite why not to mix? trading commodity in mixed currency bag shares risks and leaves your moronic government with less power... - silpol

the picture tells the story. - Muthu Ramadoss

Several ex-googler startups have three people involved, sometimes two founders and one additional. Google itself had two founders and one extra person. - Amit Patel

The third person doesn't have to be a founder, but she or he can break ties or otherwise offer a way out of arguments. - Amit Patel

The 3rd person should be technically smart but not a developer. That way you get the "real person" perspective instead of just the engineering perspective. - Erica Baker

Twitter is NOT going to like this post! - Dan Delphin via twhirl

I don't see this working out. You lose everything that twitter has going for it. I'm going to have to write up a detailed response to this, but I think Dave Winer has a better idea than this decentralized solution. - Nick Malaguti

Come on! The one and only winner here is Saad. How convenient is to already have and be the owner of what he thinks may be the solution. And your support to all this theorical matter is just shocking Michael. Twitter the company should become a service provider and create the necessary infracstructure behind twitter the product to scale well. Nonetheless, nice and very smart move Saad, DIVIDE AND CONQUER! - Hernan Garcia

This is spot on: people are just barely getting the concept of myspace and facebook, now the early adopters are 2 to 3 steps ahead of them. (You won't see mainstream tweeting for at least another year, yet twitter is so passé already). It used to be that early adopters were just thinking of jumping ship when the mainstream caught on. - Mark Trapp via Alert Thingy

Early Adopter idea is limiting. Communities and personal styles are also important. FF might be mainstream for bloggers, yet early adopter for techies. Facebook is mainstream for college kids, but early-adopter for age 40-45 Harvard alumni (only 2-3%), and out-of-the-rader for general public. Out of my ~1200 Yahoo! Mail addresses, 93 on Facebook, 10 on Twitter, and 0 on FriendFeed. And Facebook seems to be post-mainstream (aka old news) for the bloggers here. Track early adopter/mainstream vs community. - Mitchell Tsai

I wrote a post about this very issue: http://davidadewumi.com/2008/0... just because a blogger wants something to be true (i.e. this product will succeed) does not make it so - David Adewumi

"If you’re not too concerned about the whole Jesus thing, and you don’t really care about the Packers, then Apple’s got a Macbook Pro for you." - bob