I noticed the sun was setting, so i grabbed my camera, ran up to the roof of my building for this photo and got the last glimpse of the sun for today.
(Leica M9 | 35mm, f/2.0, 1/2000sec, ISO 160)
Month: November 2012
Digging my new white Nike Fuelband
“How many teeth have you lost?”
Why we invested in Picturelife
Our personal media & content are so valuable to us. They are our dearest shoebox. They are contain all our memories. They are our time machine.
A few days ago Fred wrote about disaster and the cloud. He shared a very personal experience about how important the cloud is in his life. That’s exactly right. We all want to our content safe and beautifully available.
Earlier this year, my partner Nabeel started scouring the planet in search of a solution to manage all of our digital photographs. Not just the ones we want to share publicly. All of them. We talked about it on one of our earliest podcasts.
The sinking feeling was that our photographs aren’t all in one place and beautifully available.
For example, my wife takes tons of photos on her iPhone but they have been stuck there. I’m guessing there at least 1k photos on her phone that haven’t made it to Facebook or Twitter. They are just stuck and not in our family collection.
In our view Picturelife is the most promising and exciting attempt to solve this problem.
I’ve been using Picturelife for several months and it’s very comforting to know all of our photos are safe and available across all my mobile devices.
Nabeel led the investment for us and wrote a great post about our investment in Picturelife. TechCrunch also covered the investment as well.
I’m thrilled that we are working with Charles again along with a Nate, Jacob and their mighty fine team.
Speaking of personal, old & important photos, here’s one of me, Charles and David Karp from early 2008.
Last night, Lauren and I went to see Ben Gibbard play an unplugged set at the Sommerville Theatre. I love that venue. Great show.
Are you happy with your product?
I was in a board meeting yesterday that was extremely interesting.
The founder came to the meeting with a number of ideas on how to improve growth. The ideas ranged from stuff that he personally wanted to see fixed & improved combined with a number of ideas that came from the user data they had collected since launch.
These days there is a lot of talk about “growth hacking”. It’s a natural desire to be interested in that stuff. We all want to see numbers going up and to the right every week and every month. And paying attention to the data provides a seductive way of optimizing the product to see the charts move.
But the thing to keep front and center is recall the reason why this product and company exist in the first place.
Why are we building what we building? Why are we doing what we are doing?
The answer is typically from the founder who started the company for a reason. They wanted to see their vision exist in the world. And the early team that decided to throw caution to the wind and join the founder, had a shared belief in that vision and that founder.
Yes, it’s easy to be drawn to growth hacking, improving optimization, a/b testing, improving on boarding, improving registration flows, adding viral hooks, etc. Yet I think it’s useful to find a quiet place and each day put away the board deck, put the spreadsheets face down, hide the dashboard window, and ask yourself one simple question.
Are you happy with your product?
Pay attention to the answer. It’s the soul of your product talking.
Park Bench. Dolores Park, San Francisco.
When I step into the voting booth, I think about the world I want to leave my two daughters, and the values that are required to guide us there. The two parties’ nominees for president offer different visions of where they want to lead America.
One believes a woman’s right to choose should be protected for future generations; one does not. That difference, given the likelihood of Supreme Court vacancies, weighs heavily on my decision.
One recognizes marriage equality as consistent with America’s march of freedom; one does not. I want our president to be on the right side of history.
Michael Bloomberg just endorsed Obama. (via theatlantic)
Can I get an amen
The roads in our town are still a mess from Hurricane Sandy and they officially delayed Halloween until Friday. So we took the kids to Boston and went trick or treating around the South End. It was a lot of fun seeing everyone out.