I think this is a powerful concept - a fund where all founders backed by the fund share in the upside of the entire fund. A great way for founders to diversify a tiny bit beyond their own company's success. I'm a big fan of Kent and this concept
beautiful PR execution by the Oculus/FB teams. They knew this acquisition would anger members of the community, and they timed this hire/announcement so as to quiet the predicted backlash. Brilliant execution.
Not an explicit PR move, but Carmack is explicitly asking for people to blog about their concerns re FB/Oculus, says he'll read them. He's looking for coherent articulation of risks, not kneejerk negativity, of course.
I think it will do some good on the dev side of things (ie: maybe Notch reconsiders), but for gamers I don't think Abrash has the requisite cachet to overcome their distaste for FB.
That said, when the consumer Rift is released I'm sure they'll fall over themselves to go buy it so it's probably not a serious concern.
having been adam's co-founder (xobni) and having lived with him for many years - this article describes one of the things I most like & respect about adam. He is incredibly structured in his thinking about everything in life. I brought much more of the go with the flow skills, but highly respect & learned much from his structured approach. His Wiki of Structures for various fields of thinking is linked at the bottom and a must browse http://wikilogic.org/index.php/Home_Page
yo HN! Just for you guys - use the promo code: 'hn' in the settings area of the Sesame app to get $10 off a gift set. http://www.sincerely.com/sesame Send your pops a father's day gift! (limit 10 codes)
exactly. I know the founder. He originally had no plans of creating an alternative to kickstarter. He wanted to create great hardware products and use Kickstarter to fund the development. After running into Apple approval issues for POP, realizing how a less than honest company could ship a shitty product and keep the $140k that backers had provided, he realized just how bad kickstarter is for funding & creating hardware products. Not only is he giving the money back - this inspired him to create a better alternative for creating and backing products. It is a classic founding story.
I won't even think of building for Windows phone until I see them in the wild. I did see one at the cable car turn around in San Francisco - so I asked the guy using it... Yup, he worked for MSFT
We've done this twice so far at Sincerely. Once to Puerto Vallarta Mexico when our team was ~7 people. And once to Tahoe for a ski-cation when we were at ~9 people. Both were week-long trips and cost under $1k per person. We are doing Mexico again soon with our team of 14.
Quick thoughts:
- We like to ship stuff while on these trips. I find it unproductive to do brainstorming or planning on these trips. We plan before we go. We execute while we are away. And on drunken walks home from the club or sunburned strolls back from the beach, we come up with great ideas that we quickly turn into new realities for our users.
- The trips end up defining elements of company culture. It has been on these trips where we've started our board game culture, our exercise culture, etc
- For several of our employees, this was the first time they had left the country. Most of us do startups because they are challenging and an amazing learning environment. It is nice to extend that learning experience into other aspects of our human experience - like traveling abroad.
- I always dreamed about working at a company that did cool things like workcations to Mexico. And the best thing about running your own startup is that you can actually redefine the traditional work place. Be the change you want to see in the world. It feels really really good.
