Curious About Everything
There is so much good stuff about how to run a business on the net, that it’s impractical to point out each and every resource here. But sometimes, you find something really inspiring, you feel obliged to do so. Here’s a blog post about “customer service surprises” in the Motto magazine (looks like I’m gonna like this mag, and I hope we get it in India soon) that caught my eye. Great work, Motto - keep up the good work! 
Well, there are times the c.l.l can be a pretty depressing place - people complaining on why Lisp cannot be used for production use, lack of libraries, blah blah blah - but there are times when it’s simply inspiring. As I am working more and more with lisp, and I really don’t see what’s wrong with it. I am coming more and more to the conclusion that I have been suspecting for a while - Lisp is a language for smart programmers, and very few will put in the efforts to learn it fully, as the learning curve is indeed steep, compared to say, Ruby. And those few, are worth hiring.
Here are a couple of recent c.l.l threads that make many points I agree with, and should be read for the great points they make. I can see Viamentis becoming a Lisp-heavy shop in the future - I am feeling more and more confident that it is indeed a great language to build large systems in. Sure, there are many libraries to be written, and it sounds like great fun to me :).
Some of you must’ve alredy read the latest Paul Graham missive where he lists out 18 mistakes that are deadly for startups. I don’t have enough experience to opine on all of them, but I do agree with most of them. They seem sensible enough. Except the very first one: Single Founder. Gee. Viamentis sure has one founder (and one employee, so far - he he). So that puts me in a precarious section, I guess.
I do have to agree with some points he makes. The stress is tremendous. And the temptation to quit or take easy routes is also quite incessant. But I don’t think it’s impossible. I don’t know about “startups” the way that PG defines them (he says only product companies can be called startups, which I think is silly), but if you look at other fields other than IT, there are lots of companies founded by a single person. Agreed, it’s much tougher to do it alone, but hardly not doable.
I can even list some of the advantages: no infighting between the founders. The company would have a single vision to drive it, so less looking over the shoulder, second guessing the others, and turf wars. Of course, PG sounds much more convincing with all his experience. Well, all I can say is: we will see.
It has happened!. After days of speculation starting last weekend, it finally turns out to be true. Google bought YouTube for $1.6 Bn. Sweet. David Drummond must be a millionaire now ;). Good for him. YouTube is a revolution, and he deserves the wealth.
Surprisingly, most people feel it’s a bad idea. Even Mark Cuban. Well, he has a say in it, because he’s the guy who started broadcast.com during the dotcom bubble which was supposed to be as big as YouTube - and suckered Yahoo into buying for a billion bucks, and is collecting basketball teams and startups now ;).
So what happens to the poor Google Video? I liked one feature - you can actually download all the videos in avi format. I hope they add that to GooTube soon. And I didn’t like that people can’t comment on the videos… and really hated that I couldn’t scroll down the page. I don’t know why, it felt constraining. Strange that big G didn’t do too much usability testing on that one.
Looking forward to the flava that G brings to its services. I just hope they don’t screw it up :).