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Yesterday

While being interviewed on stage last night at the Churchill Club, mentioning how I hardly ever blog anymore because of Twitter, my wife texted me, saying: "You should blog more, it is what gathers your big ideas!"

She's right.

She then texted: "You really shouldn't check your phone while on stage."

Which is also true.

This is not a big-idea post. Just a story.

Starting a company is like landing on the shore of a deserted islandOctober 20

(Photo: Aaron Escobar)

You have a certain amount of provisions, which you have to make last until you find a way to make the island sustain lifeor convince someone to send you more.

You don't know how big the island is at first or what predators lie in wait.

There's always a chance someone else will raid your island if it looks fruitful, so you need to shore up your defenses.

Eventually, if you're successful, you'll be king of your own prosperous world. If not, you'll dieor, at least, have to go home.

Either way, it's a fun adventure (until you get eaten by a tiger).

October 17

Some companies say, What product should we build with this technology?

Some companies say, What technology do we need to build this product?

Some companies say, What product would this customer buy?

Further notes on my TechCrunch50 sessionSeptember 11

On Tuesday, I was one of the judges for two different sessions at TechCrunch50: Mobile and Language and Communication Tools. Doing the sessions was kinda fun, and I was glad to be a part—especially alongside Tim O'Reilly, Josh Kopelman, Om Malik, and Rafe Needleman, who co-judged the sessions I was on.

It was a little be strenuous both to see the presentations and hear them. It was also tricky to be insightful and provide meaningful feedback in such a short period of time. I find most of the implications of a product or company, if it's really interesting, aren't immediately obvious. You need to have some time to sit with it. If you have a really good presenter, he or she can help get those non-obvious implications across. But if the presentation is unpracticed or hard to understand, there could be a great idea hidden underneath that doesn't shine through—especially in this sort of rapid-fire environment.

For that reason, I'm writing up a few more notes on the companies I judged. I still haven't thought about them too much (too busy thinking about other stuff). But nonetheless...

MyTopia is not what it looks like from the web site. While it looks like a games/virtual world site, what the

The ProcessizerSeptember 3

Here's a half-baked web app idea I was talking about with Stirman over Thai food a while back. Please take it.

Think of any process that has multiple steps and that you do repeatedly. Say, deploying a new feature on your web app, bringing a new person on to your team, setting up a new server, or anything that you can imagine creating a checklist for. (I'm thinking mostly about those in the work context, but the same idea could apply to baking a cake or getting dressed -- if you have trouble remembering all the steps.)

There are lots of ways you can create a to-do list. But how about a templated to-do list? So, first you define a process and its steps. E.g.:

Design signoff
Brief support
Run tests
Etc....

Then you kick off a new instance of the process each time you need to, which gives you a new checklist. For each instance, you can modify the list as needed. Future versions would have assignments, notifications, and dependencies -- which starts to mirror sophisticated enterprise workflow apps (I imagine). But I'm not familiar with anything like this (and, preferably, clean, simple, and 37signally) on the web.

@ev me if I'm missing something.