A good read, but the article makes it sound like Seth was some kid who hadn't the slightest idea of anything business, kept trying, and finally hit jackpot with Meebo, when in fact, his CrunchBase profile says he "worked in IBM’s mergers and acquisitions department, while also working on corporate strategy and venture capital initiatives prior to starting Meebo." That's not to invalidate his advice, but that seems like a hell of a lot of advantage to have, on top of a great founding team, when heading into a startup.
"I think I just really feared working for the Man."<p>vs.<p>"worked in IBM’s mergers and acquisitions department..."<p>How much more of <i>the man</i> can you work for?
"When I point out that they’re all business people, and wonder who’s going to build the product, they almost always fall back on “we’ll get a couple of undergrads to do it,” or, “we’ll outsource it.” If I hear either one of those, I know the startup’s already dead."<p>God, ain't that the truth. It's an unrecoverable error. Learned that one the hard way.
From <i>nothing</i> to something? Are you kidding me?<p>His entire product is just an HTML front-end to libpurple, which is 99% of his codebase. And that is FAR from "nothing"<p>And libpurple isn't even mentioned in the article, yet a ton of space is wasted on how he kept thinking about a "next great thing". What an asshole.<p>At least Pidgin folks openly say "we are GTK+ front-end to libpurple". Will it kill these SV types to admit building HTML front-ends to open source products?<p>There was something very right about Zed Shaw's rant regarding open source licenses.
its easier to preach than actually do, you ALWAYS start thinking, "man I need more content" or "this one extra feature will REALLY make us take off."<p>same thing goes for the servers, everyone starts out thinking that they need some server farm, just in case they hit some success. Here is a dirty little secret, don't expect overnight success, you'll have plenty of time to grow into needing that big server, but there is no point in wasting money on something you don't need.
Good read. When should founders start to incorporate a company? Can founders just release a Web application without worrying about things like incorporation?
<i>The best composition is probably one engineer whose passion lies in the pixels on the screen and another engineer whose passion is making bits fly really fast through servers.</i><p>Best 2 people to do a start-up?<p>A programmer and a business guy? No.<p>A programmer and a designer? No.<p>2 programmers. Yes.<p>Classic.