Articles
Co-founder search: How did a business guy score me?
Maybe it’s just me noticing that now, but there is a lot more chat on the blogosphere, twittersphere, hackernewsphere, and on Google Groups about this specie called “Business Guy” who are looking for this other specie called “Tech Guys” to [...]
Training for a Half-Marathon: From Zero to 13.1 Miles
I’m not a person who likes to exercise. I usually go to the gym once a quarter. I tried many things on the past, but I can’t stick to any particular exercise routine. Most of my exercise comes from playing [...]
A thing or two about becoming a tech entrepreneur
Last year I organized the StartupDay conference, focusing on what someone like me would liked to have learned before I left Microsoft to do my own startup (and ultimately failing). You can’t learn everything in a single day, but what [...]
It’s time for the Seattle 2.0 Awards (behind the scenes tidbits)
Once more I’m organizing the Seattle 2.0 Awards. I have not written much about it on this blog, since most of the posts are going to the Seattle 2.0 blog, but I thought I’d save a few behind-the-scenes tidbits here. [...]
12 Years In the USA, 12 Reasons I Love Here
Last Saturday was my 12-year anniversary of moving to the US. Microsoft brought me here. Contrary to a lot of immigrants, while in Brazil, I never felt the need to move to the US. It actually never crossed my mind [...]
Don’t Hire Entrepreneurs!
This blog post is an unfinished thought on why you should not hire entrepreneurs to work at your startup. I’m sure it will come back to haunt me if I’m ever looking for a job at a startup. It was [...]
What If You Don’t Have Any Ideas?
It’s pretty amazing the number of people who say they’re not good with ideas for new products or businesses. Over the last week or so I had several conversations about this many times during lunches, dinners and other meetings. I [...]
Selling a Web Service (TweepML story — part 4 of 4)
[Read part 1, part 2 and part 3] I never sold a business or a website before so everything about selling TweepML would be a new thing for me. I was determined to sell it through an auction website, but [...]
How not to run a service (TweepML story — part 3 of 4)
[Read part 1 and part 2] You certainly need some context to understand where I’m coming from. In September of 2009 it was just a few weeks after my last day of work at Sampa. Life wasn’t great and the [...]
The Press and Twitterati love for TweepML (part 2 of 4)
[Read part 1 here] I’ve learned how to do PR on my previous startup, Sampa. We had a few PR hits, a few PR misses, but the more PR we did, the better we became at understanding how to do [...]
How did I come up with TweepML? (part 1 of 4)
The Seattle 2.0 has always been known as a great place to find things related to startup. We had a list of startups and sites, a list of bloggers, a list of events, so it became obvious that we should [...]
Two quick thoughts on TweepML launch amp; OAuth
Thought 1: Never announce your product at 4PM Pacific Time. I sent email to bloggers at around 4PM and to friends shortly after. The first few blog posts started to roll in around 4:30 (Brier Dudley of Seattle Times was [...]
TweepML: A simpler way to follow interesting Twitter users
Today I’m announcing the launching of TweepML.org. See a simple explanation at TweepML Blog. A simple explanation: TweepML is a format to share groups of Twitter users. TweepML.org is a service that allows you to create and manage your lists, [...]
My last post on Sampa
On Monday night, August 17, 2009 I’ll be shutting down Sampa’s servers forever. So I felt I should do just one last post on this platform that served me and my family well since May 19, 2006 (public beta launch). [...]
Part 8: Would I Do Sampa Again?
First of all, the original Sampa was meant to be a website builder solution primarily for small business. I even considered being a white-label solution for hosting companies. I think the small business solution for website is still somewhat broken. [...]
Part 7: The Little Secret of Web Startups
The part 7 of my series of 8 posts about Sampa just got published on TechCrunch. Check it out. [...]
Anything and Everything About Sampa, from business to personal.
The week we were announcing Sampa closing I wrote and published a blog post telling the story from a personal point of view, meaning, how it affected my life. One thing to keep in mind when reading my blog posts, [...]
Part 6: Things I Won’t Miss At Sampa
There are lots of good things I’ll miss at Sampa. Even my own family website which we used intensively for 3+ years (Site id 15, where the first 12 sites didn’t exist, 13 was Sampa’s blog, 14 was my personal [...]
Part 5: Advice to Family amp; Baby Sites
It’s the story stupid! If I had just four words to describe about a strategy or vision for a family website, “It’s the story stupid” is how I would characterize it. First and foremost, people create a family or baby [...]
Part 4: Things We Did Right
This is a series of 8 blog posts that will describe more about my experiences building Sampa, my mistakes and what would I have done differently. Sampa failed, but it didn’t fail because we did everything wrong. Some things we [...]
