Tweet I have blogged several times about my experience with advertising on Facebook versus Google. And Facebook only keeps getting better. Case in point: for my latest campaign, I experimented with the “sponsored stories” option. You know what those are, Facebook shows you an ad saying “your friends X, Y and Z like this page”. [...]

Tweet Do you live in Seattle and want to raise money for your startup? Enter the pitch competition at the Startup Conference, taking place on Feb 16th, 2012 in downtown Seattle. 10 startups will be selected to give a 1-minute elevator pitch in front of the whole audience. The best 3 pitches will then qualify [...]

Tweet One of the hottest stories of the year is the legal battle between Apple and Android. But you can’t have an intelligent discussion on that oh-so-hot topic, because the Internet troll police will smash you no matter what. Let’s be honest for a second and look objectively at the facts: 1) Yes, Samsung did [...]

Tweet Being knee-deep in reviewing pitches for the pitch competition of the upcoming Startup Conference Los Angeles, it forced me to address the key question: how do you actually win a pitch competition? Hint: it’s not about having the best idea. Case in point. What if Facebook pitched itself as a “social network where friends [...]

Tweet Startup valuation is a misunderstood and complex topic. You can spend a lot of hours trying to understand the mathematical models that attempt to give you an answer. But that’s not the right approach to understand how valuation works for your startup. It’s really not that complicated. Does this drawing makes more sense? Before [...]

Tweet Do you live in Los Angeles and want to raise money for your startup? Enter the pitch competition at the Startup Conference, taking place on Nov 15th, 2011 in Marina del Rey. 10 startups will be selected to give a 1-minute elevator pitch in front of the whole audience. The best 3 pitches will [...]

Tweet A story posted on Hacker News got my blood boiling again. Why is it that software interviews always have to include questions about the complexity O(n) of algorithms? In my 20 years of programming, I may have spent 1% of my time on complexity. Maybe 10% on optimizations. Granted, I don’t work at Google [...]

Tweet I’m what is called a verification engineer. My job is to test, verify and make sure that what the designers coded actually works. After college, my dream was to become a designer too. Not anymore. Allow me a video game analogy: coding is like playing Tetris; verification is World of Warcraft. There is simply [...]

Tweet Like most, I find CEO compensation mind-boggling. Can any one person really be worth 10 million dollars, or 100 million dollars? What kind of work can possibly deliver so much? Since when is each breath of anyone worth money? And then there is Steve Jobs. He is the one counter-example I use each time [...]

Tweet Imagine a company that measures how important people are by placing microphones in the subway: whoever speaks the loudest gets the highest score. Does that sound like a wise approach? Especially when the real important people drive around in limousines and never use the subway in the first place! Klout is a site that [...]