Month: September 2010

When I first met David Karp he hadn’t yet launched Tumblr. He had a consulting company called Davidsville and Marco Arment became his co-pilot. They also built a bunch of cool things – they also created Tumblr back in 2007.

I started using the product right away and fell in love with it. At the time, Tumblr was inside of davidville. David and I spent a bunch of time together over the following months. And that’s when I met Marco. We decided to build a company around Tumblr. I believe the service had less than a 100k users at the time. 

Today, Tumblr is a very large web service. It’s a top 50 web site in the United States and now has 12 employees (and hiring!). But for most of Tumblr’s history it was just David and Marco. 

Yesterday Marco announced that he was leaving his full time role at Tumblr. I’m happy for him and he should be extremely proud of his work and accomplishments. And I am grateful for that work and for the opportunity of getting to know him personally. It was an absolute pleasure. 

Thank you Marco. 

I carry two phones. The iphone 4 is my primary phone and I carry a Verizon Blackberry when I need a reliable voice service in NYC and SF.  

I’m giving Android another try. My brother is a huge Android fan and he showed me a bunch of great stuff on Android this past weekend that I was inspired to give it another try. So the Blackberry is back in the desk drawer.

There is a lot to love about my new Android (i’ll save that for a future post). But there are some things that are confusing too – at least from a long time iphone users perspective. 

Here’s my current wish list for Android:

-can’t figure out how to easily select and copy text in the Gmail app. right now the only thing I could find was to hit the menu button, then press the more button, then tap “select text” then try to highlight the text I want to copy. But you get one shot at it. If you get it wrong you gotta do that whole set of steps all over again. That seems nuts.

-the guy at the verizon store wasn’t sure how much memory i could buy for the HTC Incredible. He said 16 gigs and then the other sales guy said 32 gigs. What’s the right answer? Can I store apps on the memory card? they didn’t know the answer to that one either. 

-is there a google app or 3rd party app that syncs with Google Tasks and provides offline access as well? 

-what’s the best way to get ringtones on the Android. I don’t really like any of the built in ones.

-how do i take a screen capture on Android? I do this all the time on the iPhone

-why did HTC put the USB connector on the left side. Makes it hard to hold or type while the phone is charging. 

-I use Google Voice. How do I set up a speed dial list like I have on the iPhone. I figured out how to create shortcuts on my home screens but the shortcut icons don’t distinguish from Lauren’s cell and Lauren home.

-search. i love voice search on android. it’s one of my favorite things. But I actually think that iPhone search is more powerful. on the iphone when I use search from the home screen (swipe right), and I search for “lauren sabet” it first searches the phone and shows Lauren’s info in my address book and then calendar entries and then mail.

if i search for “lauren sabet” from the home screen on Android, it will do a google web search for lauren. how do i get it to search the phone first?

-i find the keyboard on the Incredible to be a bit compressed. I can type much much faster on the iphone. I heard you can download alternative keyboards from the Android Marketplace. which one should I get?

My enthusiasm for Android is as high as ever. But it still has some more work to make it as good as iOS. But I’m rooting for them since iOS is getting heavier and less stable. 

Every so often I recieve an email from a student in high school or college asking me if they should drop out of school and start a company. I get a number of them every year and I just received another one this week. 

I understand the question. Many great entrepreneurs left school to start building things and school wasn’t a good fit. It’s well known that the Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg didn’t graduate from college.

We also have a number of amazing founders in our portfolio that never graduated from college. I can think of 7 of them off the top of my head as I write this post. 

But here’s the thing: asking a venture capitalist if you should drop out of school probably means that you aren’t ready. I can’t possibly imagine having any influence on any of the founders (in our portfolio) decision to drop out of school had I met them earlier in their lives. 

It’s just a different desire for different people. For some people college isn’t interesting compared to alternatives. For others, the college experience is one part education and all the experiences that come along with it. I chose the latter path. 

I think it’s about listening and being honest with yourself. That will lead you to the right answer.