Tag Archives: Paul Graham

Don’t Ignore Customer Complaints

Posted on November 20, 2014 by John Hunter

I find Paul Graham’s ideas very useful. I disagree with his recent tweet though. Update: See note at bottom of the post – Paul tweeted that his original tweet was wrong. Base your assessment of the merit of an idea on the actual merit of the idea, not the category you place the person in that is expressing the idea. His reply tweet addresses the problem with the first one in a very specific case. But you have “bugs” that … Continue reading →

Posted in Customer focus | Tagged , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Interruptions Can Severely Damage Performance

Posted on May 12, 2010 by John Hunter

Interruptions can severely degrade your performance. The type of work you are doing impacts the cost greatly. I have spent some of my time programming web applications. When I am doing that interruptions are a huge drain on my performance (for me the costs of interruptions while programming are far higher than any other type of work I have done – many times higher). If the interruption disrupts my flow (an interruption needn’t necessarily disrupt it I found, instant messages … Continue reading →

Posted in Creativity, Management, Psychology, quote, Respect, Software Development, Systems thinking | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 7 Comments

Some Good IT Business Ideas

Posted on July 22, 2008 by John Hunter

Paul Graham has some excellent ideas. I have written about some of them previously: Innovation Strategy, What Business Can Learn from Open Source and Google and Paul Graham’s Latest Essay. Y Combinator, which he founded, provides seed funding. Here are some ideas they would like to fund: Outsourced IT. In most companies the IT department is an expensive bottleneck. Getting them to make you a simple web form could take months. Enter Wufoo. Now if the marketing department wants to … Continue reading →

Posted in Creativity, Innovation, IT, Software Development | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Innovation Strategy

Posted on February 18, 2008 by John Hunter

Six Principles for Making New Things by Paul Graham The answer, I realized, is that my m.o. for all four has been the same. Here it is: I like to find (a) simple solutions (b) to overlooked problems (c) that actually need to be solved, and (d) deliver them as informally as possible, (e) starting with a very crude version 1, then (f) iterating rapidly. Great advice. Similar to the evidence Clayton Christensen documents in the Innovators Solution on how … Continue reading →

Posted in Creativity, Innovation, Management | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

Google and Acquiring Tiny Companies

Posted on May 12, 2005 by John Hunter

I like Google and enjoy reading about the company. Even so I find the number of articles about the minor moves they make strange. At some point this fascination with the minor moves Google makes will stop but for now it is hard to miss stories about Google anywhere I look. The post on John Battelle’s Searchblog (a great bog) about Google buying Dodgeball was a great example. The entire post: News is here. What is Dodgeball? I dunno, but … Continue reading →

Posted in Google, Investing, Management | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments