Note: Google was kind enough to invite me to give a short talk at their Zeitgeist conference earlier this week. It was a really interesting conference and I got a chance to meet a lot of people I admire. For my talk, I decided to use material from some of my blog posts over the years that I thought might appeal to a broader audience. startups MORE >>

Many of the today’s most successful informational sites such as Yelp, Wikipedia and TripAdvisor relied heavily on SEO for their initial growth. This led to a virtuous cycle where SEO drew more users, leading to more contributors and more inbound links, leading to more SEO, and so on. Much of this revenue comes from traffic that comes from SEO. MORE >>

Here are some things I’ve learned over the years about recruiting programmers to startups. This is a big topic: many of the points I make briefly here could warrant their own blog posts, and I’m sure I’ve omitted a lot. The most important thing to understand is what motivates programmers. This is demoralizing and counterproductive. MORE >>

Every week a “we are in a tech bubble” article seems to come out in a major newspaper or blog. People who argue we aren’t in a bubble are casually dismissed as promoting their own interests. 2) Instagram seems to be the case study du jour for people arguing we are in a bubble. 5) No one can predict macro trends. startups MORE >>

If you are starting a company and wondering why nothing good seems to happen unless you force it to happen, that’s because the world wants to stay the way it is. Customers, partners, and most of all incumbents don’t want to think hard, try new things, or change in any way. My friend said: “Wow, this company is going under.” MORE >>