Holler “We Want Prenup”

One of my professors for legal studies sent me an interesting article about what happens when you don’t sign a prenuptial agreement. After reading stuff like that and hearing about some pretty bad divorce stories, I’m making a huge mental note to get a prenup — Kanye West style. I think my favorite quote from the article is:

“So why didn’t McCartney insist on a prenup? Mills says she offered to sign one but her beau declined on the grounds they were madly in love. “

And in case you forgot about Kanye, here he is.

Why is Facebook hesitating?

So now they’ve decided to pull back their Beacon program.  All that after an over hyped launch and feelings of disappointment when Zuckerberg made the SocialAds and Beacon announcement.

I’d like to say though that I’m not sure why Facebook hasn’t rolled out an ad system that lets 3rd party websites use your cookie info/profile data outside of Facebook.  Everyone on the tech blogs seems to be pushing for it — surely Facebook is aware of this.

What is stopping them? What are they waiting for?

No new e-mail

That’s been my goal lately.  E-mail comes in and a reply goes out the moment I read it — usually this allows me response times of anywhere from a couple of minutes to an hour (mobile e-mail rocks).  Saves me a ton of time and gets everything done quicker/more efficiently.  No more e-mail procrastination.  Plus, I’d like to think people are more likely to reciprocate timely and lightning fast turnaround times.

Someone needs to make a color coded organizer of e-mail (maybe it exists already?) so I can classify the e-mails I get as URGENT, Very Important, Important, etc.   Maybe GMail can allow for different colored stars.

All I know is it feels great having an empty inbox and prompt replies.

Don’t undersell yourself for being young

I’ve been asked questions many times regarding still being a student at Wharton and I always come to the same conclusion: Why let your age deter you from establishing yourself in a particular area?

Don’t undersell yourself. Period.

Look at it as an advantage: you’re young, smart, sharp, and easily adaptable.  Plus you can relate to other young people.

Position your age as an advantage and so it shall be.

Philadelphia Tech Community Has Potential

A couple of days ago, I got the chance to attend Facebook’s Philadelphia Garage where I met lots of cool people and gave a presentation on building applications around communities and creating value for users.

I really hope the tech community on the east coast can grow and be vibrant, as it seems like everyone wants to leave to the sunny land of California. Having events like the Facebook Garage is a great step in building a good tech community
here in Philadelphia. I had several people e-mail me about putting up my slides from the Facebook Developer Garage in Philadelphia, so here they are.

Why it helps to be a college entrepreneur on Facebook

As I commented on Fred Wilson’s post:

“I don’t use Facebook because it has applications — I use Facebook because every single person I know is on it. I use the applications as a byproduct of being on Facebook. People are getting caught up in the hype of this OpenSocial idea and forgetting that at the end of the day, Facebook does and will continue to dominate.

Maybe it’s because I am in college, where everyone is on Facebook, but MySpace was what you were on when you were in high school and couldn’t get on the closed college only Facebook network.

The end users won’t really care about OpenSocial — the only people getting excited here are the tech and web people.

For my company, I’m excited to get more reach to users, but I will still prioritize my Facebook user base over any other user base until something indicates differently.”

Josh Catone for the most part agrees and sums it up pretty well.

This is why my company gets Facebook and why we’ve found success — we use it everyday as a natural part of our life and all of our friends use it.

Lesson learned: be the end user of your product, love what you make, and know your customers. The same way Peter Lynch suggests you invest in stocks (i.e. companies you know of and are familiar with) I believe you can make companies grow successfully.

My generation’s General Electric?

Looking over Business Week’s Top 100 Brand list, something really caught my eye. The company jumping up to #20 with 44% growth in brand value from last year is none other than Google. As Google continues its impressive growth in search and expansion of services across the web, I can’t help but look at Google as the GE of my generation. Google has already shown that it can expand into areas beyond search, and although that is the core of its business, it feels like Google can slap it’s brand on pretty much anything! And with rumors of things like the GPhone coming out, it’s easy to see why this stock is soaring.

Despite all this growth, I can’t help but be reminded of a Shakespeare quote from Romeo and Juliet: These violent delights have violent ends, And in their triumph die; like fire and powder. While I doubt Google’s stock is going to come crashing down tomorrow, I can’t help but look at this explosive growth without some sort of questions in mind.

What do you guys think about Google’s meteoric rise?

1:19 AM and the Police are out in full force

Was about to shut down my computer when I see 14 police cars in a span of 2 minutes speed down the street one after another.  The only breakup in the sound was 1 ambulance speeding by — the pitch was a bit different.

And 3 minutes later, number 15 just rolled by down Spruce Street.

I wonder what the morning headlines will read.

Facebook making its first potentially stupid move

There are reports that Facebook is going to pursue it’s own application based brand advertising systems.  All I have to say is that at a time when Google is pushing forth its Open Social program, the WORST possible decision Facebook could make would be to drive away developers.  We’re not going to take it — we’ll go to where we are appreciated.  This is a platform war and we developers are essentially the soldiers.  Whoever pays the highest price gets us and this news seems to indicate that Facebook will no longer be the highest bidder.