Articles
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 [...]
Part 3: The Market Noise amp; Facebook
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. I already talked about on Part 2: Early Mistakes at Sampa about being 12-months [...]
Part 2: Early Mistakes At Sampa
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. About half-way through Sampa existence I’ve made a blog post named Top 7 Mistakes [...]
Part 1: You Don’t Learn This At Microsoft
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. I already wrote from a personal point of view and now I’m writing from [...]
Sampa: My first failed startup
It’s pretty hard to distinguish a founder from his startup. Oh, wait. Let me take that back. It’s not hard at all. It’s hard for the founders to detach themselves from their startup. It’s the “baby syndrome”. The way they [...]
Sampa: From Birth to Death
[If you don’t have time for the long version read the short version] Sampa was first conceived on my mind around 2001. The story is one of those “personal pains” kind of story. I’ve been building websites for family and [...]
Try this: Keep It Simple, Stupid (MG Siegler is wrong)
First of all, MG Siegler has joined TechCrunch a few weeks ago and he’s by far the best writer TC has ever had. He actually brought back my interest on reading TC after so many bad writers were ruin it [...]
The misleading AB Test
I have many addictions, including a very common kind of addiction amongst entrepreneurs: data-analyctites. We do a lot of AB Tests at Sampa and last Friday we just wrapped up test number 902 and are ready to start 903 (903 [...]
Lessons about Creating an Event and Human Nature
I hope you all saw about the Seattle 2.0 Awards that the team at Seattle 2.0 is putting together. I learned a lot on the last two weeks about many people that I’ve come to know for years, about human [...]
The Biggest Seattle Startup Event in History
After months preparing for this, I’m happy to announce the Seattle 2.0 Awards. An Award to recognize the top of the top from the Seattle startup scene. This is the first award of its kind in Seattle. Not only the [...]
The difference between resilience and stubbornness
A few weeks ago I saw a talk about one of those success stories after a lot of business near-death experience. For the n-th time I heard they just kept going and believing on their business, survived the downturn and [...]
Myth: Complex Problem with Complex Solution Equals Great Value
If you come to a technical background, you are more likely to think that customer only value things that you did that are very complex. For example, if you create a calculator application, people might not value as much as [...]
9 rules of thumb to detect BS on financial projections and assumptions
I’ll spare you the long story of my life and how I’ve got to be above average when detecting BS on projections and assumptions (financial or not). But there are a few rules of thumbs that you can use to [...]
Bad advice for entrepreneurs
I write this on my twitter: EU: Just heard some of the worst advices someone can give a tech startup founder. And within minutes had a dozen people asking me what did he say. Well, it’s not a single thing, [...]
The big milestones of a startup
I’ve started Sampa in February of 2005. Like on people’s life, startup’s life is also marked by a few big milestones. The first employee, the first investor, the first customer, the beta launch, etc. Today, I’m very excited to announce [...]
The Launch of the new Seattle 2.0
Seattle 2.0 was created about 18 months ago and at the time I knew it would be a resources for entrepreneur, because I couldn’t find resources for myself like that on the web. I guessed there would be more people [...]
You don’t control your Brand
A few days ago while having a distribution channel discussion, the topic of brand dilution came up if you don’t sell directly to the customer and somebody said “you lose control of your brand”… And an automatic trigger fired on [...]
The new look of Seattle 2.0
I’ve been working for the last several weeks on the new look of the Seattle 2.0 blog. First of all, Seattle 2.0 is being moved out of the Sampa platform. Sampa is a family-oriented sharing service, so it made no [...]
How to not become old
For me, a clear sign that you are an old person is when you start avoiding or preventing change. I have this belief since my early twenties when I joined the workforce and saw some very pathetic examples of co-workers [...]
Seattle Magazine: Web 2.0 or bust
Great news. Sampa and yours truly have been featured on the Seattle Magazine on an article about Seattle (of course) and Web 2.0. Please, buy a copy instead of reading it online. :) Anyway, it tells a bit about all the [...]
