Posts by alex

Congratulations!  You aced the phone screen, survived the (potentially grueling) interviews, and your offer letter is in the mail.  Awesome! You should absolutely go out to celebrate, but before you mail in your acceptance, you may want to figure out what if any strings are attached to the offer. I was too naive when I got my first job offer to think about things like employment agreements (or even to do a good job...

What do an irrational fear of rejection, the inability to talk to girls at a bar, and a startup in “stealth mode” all have in common?  I was riding the Orange Line en route to our Central Square offices last week, and I saw a sign advertising a study on Social Anxiety Disorder.  They asked if you worry too much about what other people think, worry that people might secretly think you’re stupid, and get more nervous than...

As Baydin has started, I’ve heard a number of different voices on how cheap a startup should be.  Those voices have almost universally concentrated toward the extremes – they advise either being incredibly, incredibly cheap (buy nothing, get furniture from the sidewalk when people throw it out, trade time for money always) or spending money like a sailor in port (buy everything, buy luxury, hire expensive service providers, trade...

A few posts back, we talked about why search on the desktop works a lot better than it did just a few years ago.  In this post, we’ll talk about how desktop search hasn’t kept up as the way we find and consume content on our computers has changed. As recently as 2000, the deluge of emails, files, podcasts, blog posts and everything else that we have to keep track of was more like a drizzle.  The average hard drive held about...

Desktop search has come a long way in the past few years.  In this post, we’ll explore how the technology behind all of the major desktop search options has changed based on web search innovations.  In the follow-up posts, we’ll talk a little bit about how desktop search is different from web search and how it has both succeeded and failed at making interacting with our computers better.  We’ll share a few tricks for...