On Wave, every misspelling, half-formed sentence, and ill-advised stab at sarcasm is transmitted instantly to the other person. This behavior is so corrosive to normal conversation that you'd think it was some kind of bug. In fact, it's a feature—indeed, it's one of the Wave team's proudest accomplishments.
The new Christmas Carol movie heavily falls under uncanny valley. Come on guys. Watching CG humans is creepy as hell.
Penenberg: Certainly, besides a nice chunk of change, Flickr has brought you a level of fame.
Fake: I design Web sites, its not like I'm Angelina Jolie. I think you need to tune that stuff out, otherwise you're never going to be able to build stuff, be an entrepreneur, take risks, fail. That's part of entrepreneurialism, being able to launch a stupid IM client. The hardest part about Flickr being successful is wanting to do it again. I think there's a benefit to being one of six people that no one knew. No VCs would return our calls and we were broke and bootstrapping it and operating under the radar so we could focus on the most important things: the product, the users, what we were building. There's all this noise, the tech-crunch, which you have to tune out if you want to build good product. None of that stuff is additive; it all takes away from building a product. You try a lot of things and you don't know what the hell you're doing. If you're actually inventing something you shouldn't know what you're doing.
I would skip the networking events and spend your time building your reputation through hard (and brilliant) work. Work at an important Silicon Valley technology company doing interesting things, work on important open source projects, or create something new on your own time from scratch to build your reputation.
Really interesting take on networking in the Valley. This has proven mostly to be true. In the words of my cofounder Sachin Agarwal, there are too many talkers. This is especially true at networking events.
Be a do-er.
This is our customer service approach:
1. Answer ALL emails and tweets.
2. Build a support site that is SEO’d and contains all the questions people ask (support.gymu.com).
3. Find our evangelists and love them.
4. Find our haters and love them more than our own mothers.
5. Do whatever it takes to fix a customer’s problem, even if that means meeting them to give them pre-release code!
We try to do the same at Posterous. When you can't even get a response from other services, we'll try to get back to you within 12 hours or less.