Disqus - Latest Comments for ikirigin

Re: Facebook's Priorities

ikirigin — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 19:43:32 -0000

(IMHO) facebook connect is so much more important than anything on facebook.com

great post

Re: Fare Thee Well, reddit!

alexis — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 20:00:46 -0000

Thanks, Ivan! Sorry I missed your bday, but I hope it was grand.

Re: Fare Thee Well, reddit!

Spez9/11dosomefnresearch — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 18:41:08 -0000

9/11 TO: Dan Marcus and Steve Dunne
From: Kevin Scheid, Col. Larry Fenner, and Gordon Lederman
Date: October 2, 2003
RE: Executive Branch Minders’ Intimidation of Witnesses
During the course of Team 2’s and other teams’ interviews, we have observed three trends concerning the Executive Branch’s representatives (“minders”) at those interviews.
First, agencies lack a common understanding of the minders’ purpose in our interviews. Agencies’ perspectives include (1) minders as agency representatives, ensuring that Commission staff abide by the agreement between the Executive Branch and the Commission on the substantive scope of the Commission’s inquiry. (2) minders as participants in the interviews, answering questions directed at witnesses; (3) minders as agency monitors, reporting to their respective agencies on Commission staff’s lines of inquiry and witnesses’ verbatim responses.(4) minders as counselors, for witnesses to consult during interviews; and (5) minders as records of action-items generated during interviews, such as transmitting documents offered by witnesses to Commission staff. We suggest that Dan Levin give the agencies a common understanding of the purpose of minders’ presence at interviews.
Second, minders have on occasion answered questions directed to witnesses. Critical to our investigation is determining not just how the Intelligence Community is supposed to function pursuant to its policies and procedures but also how the Intelligence Community functions in actuality. When we have asked witnesses about certain roles and responsibilities within the Intelligence Community, minders have prompted witnesses’ responses by referencing formal polices and procedures. As a result, witnesses have not responded to our questions and have deprived us from understanding the Intelligence Community’s actual functioning and witnesses view of their roles and responsibilities.
Third, Minders have positioned themselves physically and have conducted themselves in a manner that we believe intimidates witnesses from giving full and candid responses to our questions. Minders generally have sat next to witnesses at the table and across from Commission staff, conveying to witnesses that minders are participants in interviews and are of equal status to witnesses. Moreover, minders take verbatim notes of witnesses statements, which we believe conveys to witnesses that their superiors will review their statements and may engage in retribution. We believe that the net effect of minders’ conduct, whether intentionally or not, is to intimidate witnesses and to interfere with witnesses providing full and candid responses. Moreover, the minders’ verbatim note taking facilitates agencies in alerting future witnesses to the Commissions lines of inquiry and permits agencies to prepare future witnesses either explicitly or implicitly.
We request that you raise the subject of minders’ conduct with the Executive Branch in order to prevent minders from imposing themselves in these ways in the future. Perhaps the attached statement of principles might help define minders roles and conduct. We look forward to your assistance. Thank you.

Re: Fare Thee Well, reddit!

ikirigin — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 11:45:48 -0000

Good luck!

Re: Copy Cats | Like Eating Glass by Tempera[mental] originally by...

ikirigin — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 11:31:39 -0000

This song is pretty horrible compared to the Ladytron Zapatista remix http://giantrobotlasers.com/post/219130686/auto...

Re: Donors Choose Blogger Challenge: Something's Wrong

ikirigin — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 11:37:13 -0000

Yeah, I missed the meeetup first time through. You should record it
and give access to donors. That might be kind of hard. The long tail
of donor management should be easy though - not hard.

Re: Donors Choose Blogger Challenge: Something's Wrong

fredwilson — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 10:33:30 -0000

good points Ivan

i give all the ad revenue from this blog to charity. that's about $30k/year. so there are other ways to generate money to charity from blogs.

and i am giving back something by doing an invite only meetup for donors. i realize that is not very attractive to out of towners.

Re: Donors Choose Blogger Challenge: Something's Wrong

daryn — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 12:59:16 -0000

FYI, DonorsChoose does offer a subscription plan, if you make a donation today, you can see the upsell at the end!

Or, you can click this link...

https://secure.donorschoose.org/donors/lastingI...

Re: Donors Choose Blogger Challenge: Something's Wrong

ikirigin — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 11:50:02 -0000

The constant asking for donations (not just on this site, but everywhere) is so fatiguing. People really hate it. At Tipjoy, we wanted to remove the friction from the transactions (and a big part of that is asking for a large amount), but had a lot more to do.

Why don't we see more subscriptions that are directed at non-profits? That seems like it could really help remove some of the thought from the process.

It would be great if you could just "connect" to some system in a widget, set the amount and period, and say "go". Then you would maybe be subscribed to first hand accounts of what the money went to. I really like the way Charity: Water did this, with live streams of well drilling but also a twitter stream of pictures
http://twitter.com/charitywater
http://twitpic.com/jvrsw

You should also try to give something back to those who donate. It would be great if they could see a post early, get an early RSS feed, or something like that.

This is related to the recent thoughts I've had that blogs should be more like web apps. You should have a single sign on, subscriptions, and features built into each post that only subscribers can see.

Re: The new economy

cdixon — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 11:57:33 -0000

Yep, I've paid for guitar hero songs.

Re: The new economy

ikirigin — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 11:56:19 -0000

Not all people paying are taking offers. Huge gaming platforms like X Box have thriving virtual goods businesses based on storing and processing credit cards. Those paying aren't necessarily young.

Most people who own rockband or guitar hero are going through the same process. It is not a fault of Zynga that advertising can be effectively utilized to bring people in game. It's a benefit. Harmonix would love it if you could see an ad on facebook, and be a few clicks away from giving them money while playing their game.

That said, I think offers are quite ugly. They offer a poor user experience. I'd prefer people just become banked at a younger age, or use some sort of game card system.

Re: A Great Systems Engineer Job/Challenge In NYC

fredwilson — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 14:01:25 -0000

for a long time, marco did it all, now he has help, but not much. i'd bet it is multiple millions per engineer.

Re: A Great Systems Engineer Job/Challenge In NYC

ikirigin — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 10:25:17 -0000

Wow, those stats, for their size, are amazing. Facebook is an amazingly leveraged environment. It's more than 1M users per engineer, which you can rarely find. But Tumblr must be higher with 2-3M per engineer, right?

Facebook is a bit different because it doesn't have the writer / reader split userbase. I doubt Tumblr does even 0.5M writers per engineer, right? Also, you can work on something that greatly impacts the whole userbase at any company...

But these stats alone should give people an idea of how good a job will be. Feeling utilized is pretty much the primary metric good engineers use to judge a job, perhaps second to having interesting technical challenges.

Re: The SUL as a tool to control news (Scripting News)

ikirigin — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 10:14:39 -0000

Is this surprising at all? Is it any different than, say, a charity they like being featured? It is to a great degree editorial. Taking @techcrunch off the list is a delightful way to get back at them for posting stolen docs.

It would have been far worse had they done it in response to a negative story, like an editorial saying twitter isn't worth their recent valuation.

Re: The Best Deal In Startup Land

ikirigin — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 16:56:59 -0000

I'd give YC the same amount of stock just to be advisors. Do people even need to know more?It isn't about the money.

It's just bad journalism to ignore the non-monetary components.

Re: The inevitable showdown between Twitter and Twitter apps

cdixon — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 20:08:45 -0000

They might get this now, but this isn't craigslist - they've taken a lot of VC money at hundreds of millions of dollar valuations. There will eventually be extreme pressure and even possibly management changes if they don't justify those valuations.

Re: The inevitable showdown between Twitter and Twitter apps

ikirigin — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 19:27:23 -0000

Twitter is a company that understands the value of an API and development community. In that sense, it is optimizing both its own revenue, and that of the developer community.

It might be a local win to get the revenue from a popular app, but a global loss in increasing the disincentive to make apps for their platform. I think they get this.

There is a balance between functionality that is core to twitter and that which will always be outside Twitter Inc.

The question for each app maker is where you are in that spectrum (and for how long).

Re: The inevitable showdown between Twitter and Twitter apps

twitter-2529971 — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 16:01:43 -0000

If it depends on the Twitter API and makes significant money, Twitter will have an incentive to compete against it. So I mean any product, service, website that meets those criteria (I updated the post to note this).

Re: The inevitable showdown between Twitter and Twitter apps

ikirigin — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 15:57:30 -0000

I think you're using "apps" when you mean "clients". There isn't an inevitable clash between twitter and a twitter dating app, or something else that isn't the view into the stream.

Re: Failure

evanrud — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 17:11:27 -0000

Ivan,

Everybody has their own definition of winning. For some it's taking a company public and making lots of money, and for others it's having the freedom to spend more time with their kids.

Since I cannot judge other people by my personal standards, I can only judge them by their attitude and by the way they present themselves. My point was that to help myself be successful, I want to spend time with people who feel successful themselves or who are excited by the pursuit of success. That makes them winners to me.

Best wishes,
Evan

Re: Failure

ikirigin — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 12:59:04 -0000

Great post. Interesting contrast and some comments: http://giantrobotlasers.com/post/183766525/push...

Re: Failure

ikirigin — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 12:58:23 -0000

That is dangerously close to the infantilizing trend of calling everyone a winner just for playing. You're more likely to win with a winning attitude - that is certainly true and important. You're not a winner if you didn't, you know, win.

Re: Founder Liquidity

fredwilson — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 12:53:12 -0000

I agree

Re: Founder Liquidity

ShanaC — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 01:53:54 -0000

I agree, so what are good reasons, beyond passion and ideas (since lots of people have that) to start a company.

Re: Founder Liquidity

Jerry Vandesic — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 00:43:31 -0000

I agree, and based on their actions, so do most VCs. Otherwise a VC would never back a (successful) serial entrapreneur in the second venture. If the founder got enough out of their first company, why would they be hungry for success again?