My Interview with Developer Analytics

Just did an interview with Developer Analytics — a rising player in the social application analytics space. I talked about my experiences building my company and some of the things I’ve learned about social applications. They’re building really cool stuff centered around an analytics platform for developers and a nice community for application developers to come to. One of the co-founders, Jing Chen, is a former Wharton graduate, so maybe I’m a bit biased. I expect big things from these guys and I think whoever can really nail the analytics behind social applications is going to profit big time. Should be interesting to see what they’re able to do.

New website up and rolling

Check our our new Sport Interactiva website: http://sportinteractiva.com/

I’m really proud of my company and what we’ve been able to do with just the 2 of us in only 8 months.  Here’s to many more good months !

Know your business. Don’t delude yourself.

My friend and I were discussing the idea of building a business using short term vs. long term strategy.  We hit upon the idea of building a business as a quick profit generating engine as opposed to a long term profitable business.  The former occurs in most cases with smaller scale businesses that exploit a particular opportunity and usually don’t scale into enormous companies.  The latter is more along the lines of a Google or Facebook type play where you build a high growth company that loses money in the short term with hopes of dominating a market which will allow you to earn above market profits in the long term.

Both types of companies can be a lot of fun and bring a lot of value to an entrepreneur, but we came to the conclusion that it’s important not to delude yourself into thinking you’re building one type of company when you’re really building the other.  It seems obvious, but we felt there were plenty of companies out there that don’t think this way. You don’t want to build a small business (known as a lifestyle business) for 3-5 years generating negative profits while telling yourself you’re building the next Google.  Similarly, you don’t want to try to build the next Google and get frustrated when your company is running on negative.

Think the bottom line here is to as always know your stuff.

Real time Super Tuesday

I think this is one of the coolest things I’ve seen in a long time: Google has teamed up with Twitter to show a Google Map filled with real time updates of people from across the world as pertaining to the voting on Super Tuesday.  Twitter lets people send out updates in real time up to 140 characters long.  Imagine Facebook status updates, but the whole site is just everyone’s status updates.  I never really got the utility of the site, as Twitter is mostly a communication tool used by VCs, tech geeks, entrepreneurs, etc.  None of my friends are on it.

But I have to say, this map is the coolest thing I’ve seen in a long time.

Check it out