Designers: How to Get Hired
We just hired two amazing people at Carsonified (original job post here) and I wanted to share with you how our new designer got my attention and ended up getting hired. We received 46 applications for the design job of which 10+ had registered new domains and designed brand new websites to get our attention like dearcarsonified.com, carsonify.me and others. It’s hard to stand out from a big crowd like that so I thought I’d share how our new designer did it.
John Sculley: The Secrets of Steve Jobs’ Success [Exclusive Interview]
John Sculley, Apple's ex-CEO, talks for the first time about Steve Jobs. Illustration by Matthew Phelan.
In 1983, Steve Jobs wooed Pepsi executive John Sculley to Apple with one of the most famous lines in business: “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?”
Read more on John Sculley: The Secrets of Steve Jobs’ Success [Exclusive Interview]…
John Sculley On Steve Jobs, The Full Interview Transcript
Steve Jobs and John Sculley, the former CEO of Apple. The pair were dubbed the "dynamic duo."
Here’s a full transcript of the interview with John Sculley on the subject of Steve Jobs.
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The Story So Far
For this week’s iDevBlogADay post, I’m going to take a detailed look at the history of Trainyard, from its humble beginnings to its current position high up the App Store charts. Yes, there will be sales data. This’ll be a long one, so settle down and enjoy 
The Update, The Vent, and The Disaster
Business is noisy.
Business is full of people worrying loudly about projects, process, and other people. These people have opinions and they share them all over the place — all the time. This collective chatter is part of the daily regimen of a healthy business, but this chatter will bury the individual voice unless someone pays attention.
The Right Way to Lay People Off
Shortly after we sold Opsware to Hewlett-Packard, I had a conversation with the legendary venture capitalist Doug Leone of Sequoia Capital. He wanted to hear the story of how we went from doomed in the eyes of the world to a $1.6B outcome with no recapitalization. After I took him through the details including several near bankruptcies, a stock price of $0.35/share, unlimited bad press and 3 separate layoffs where we lost a total 400 employees, he was most amazed by the layoffs. He said that during his over 20 years in the venture capital business, he’d never seen a company recover from consecutive layoffs and achieve a billion dollar plus outcome. He said that he’d bet against that every time and wanted to know how I did it. Since my only experience was the great exception, I needed more information. I asked him why all the other startups failed. He replied that the layoffs inevitably broke the company’s culture. After seeing their friends laid off, employees were no longer willing to make the requisite sacrifices needed to build a company. He said that although it was possible to survive an isolated layoff, it was hugely unlikely that a company would experience great success. He added that building a highly valuable business after 3 consecutive giant lay offs accompanied by horrible prominent press coverage (we got taken apart with cover stories in both the Wall Street Journal and Business Week) was a complete violation of the laws of venture capital physics. Naturally, he wanted to know how we did it. After thinking about it for the last couple of years, here’s my answer Doug.
‘Worry Isn’t Work’
Convicting piece by Dan Pallotta:
Worry isn’t work. Being stressed out isn’t work. Anxiety isn’t work. Entertaining a sense of impending doom isn’t work. Incessant internal verbal punishment isn’t work. Indulging the great unknown fear in your own mind isn’t work. Hating yourself isn’t work.