gdp's Comments

Feld Thoughts : The House Advantage

Mon, 27 Sep 2010 14:53:24 +0000

So I finally had a long enough flight to read and finish the book. I must say that you get a lot out of it, the way he presented statistics really fascinated me, but I must also say that it bored me to death. The author repeats himself thousand of times in a chapter and constantly goes into detail about mostly useless stuff. There's an entire chapter debating wether to go for it or not (and I still haven't understood what it means). Lovely core messages, with some awesome real-life scenes from his blackjack career but really needed some pro editing imho.

Feld Thoughts : Where's My Jetpack

Mon, 12 Jul 2010 16:15:24 +0000

Brad, how do you manage to read a book a day? Do you use any speed-reading techniques or stuff like that? You have most certainly a busier schedule than mine, and still I read way less than you. Even though it's not my primary language, I consider myself fairly proficient in English, but it takes me way too much to read a book and I can't remember reading one cover-to-cover in the same "session". Also, what's the ratio between books and blog articles in your reading? I sometimes think I read way too many online articles and should just ignore my unread rss count..

Feld Thoughts : Swimming At Night

Thu, 17 Jun 2010 14:38:38 +0000

I found that every kind of sport done at night makes me sleep better. With swimming you have the body-temperature effect that might have done the trick in your case, but when I was doing Thai Boxing and coming back home at 10:30pm, I can assure you that after a quick shower I slept like a baby every single night. The most important thing is to find something close to you as every benefit would get cancelled by having to drive 15mins to get home. I wish someone would finally make some usable waterproof gear in order to listen to ebooks while swimming!

TechCrunch : And The Winner Of TechCrunch Disrupt Is... Soluto!

Thu, 27 May 2010 01:34:32 +0000

This was the only thing I didn't like about Techcrunch Disrupt. How could it be a fair competition? This company raised $8 Millions, while uJam, the other finalist, just some seed capital. Also I don't see many people using this by choice. It's all in the partnerships. 0 disruption.

TechCrunch : Groupon Invades Europe With Acquisition Of Citydeal

Mon, 17 May 2010 12:23:56 +0000

how's Groupon a Vente Privee clone? O_o

TechCrunch : Groupon Invades Europe With Acquisition Of Citydeal

Sun, 16 May 2010 21:07:28 +0000

That was easily predictable. CityDeal was the only one covering most of Europe. Now good luck to other ones trying to clone it.

TechStars Blog : Announcing our Global Affiliate program

Mon, 10 May 2010 22:01:20 +0000

Congrats to Tom for the first affiliate and to the Startupbootcamp guys for being the firsts in Europe :)

Don Dodge on The Next Big Thing : Techcrunch Disrupt 2010 NYC - May 24 - 26

Thu, 6 May 2010 16:19:49 +0000

I'll be there too! Would be great to meet up.

Feld Thoughts : Learning To Program

Tue, 13 Apr 2010 16:27:59 +0000

Ken, I'd suggest going tohttp://railstutorial.org/ It's a very well written, and easy tutorial. You might also want to see the Agile Web Development with Rails book, keep in mind that rails 3 just shipped so it's gonna be hard to find some good content about it for a few months. You should also check out Peepcode.com, they have a series on rails from scratch which is interesting (and loads of other awesome tutorials).

Feld Thoughts : Learning To Program

Sun, 11 Apr 2010 11:29:15 +0000

This is an awesome post that tackles a VERY real problem. Working in an early stage fund, I see WAY TO MANY founders (or complete teams) that have no clue how to implement their vision and that will rely exclusively on HIRED programmers or, way worse, OUTSOURCED development. I majored in Computer Engineering, had quite a lot programming courses, but feel I didn't learn anything useful there. The major learning part happened at home when I was trying to build the stuff I wanted. I started fixing sites and scripts in PHP and then moved on to learn Ruby on Rails. Being able to craft your vision into a tangible prototype gives you an awesome feeling, and it's a great starting point for a full fledged development process. I would prefer 10 times a philosophy major that spent all his evenings learning how to code than a CS major that isn't curious enough to dig down into something and understand how it works. DO NOT CONSTANTLY TRY TO FIND A TECH COFOUNDER. Every founder should be technical, the difference should be in personality, passion and prior experience with a good balace of coding, marketing and operations.