April 2012
6 posts
Holy Philanthropy! Andreessen Horowitz GPs Pledge... →
Wow.
French City Implements Virtual Currency to Avoid... →
French City Implements Virtual Currency to Avoid Financial Ruin - rock on Nantes.
You can play tetris in the favicon. The world is finally complete.
http://favris.info/
Virtual Goods Monetization Meetup - May 9th →
We just announced our next Betable meetup for May 9th. We’re going to have 3 extremely interesting talks on virtual goods and virtual currencies monetization.
YuChiang Cheng, Founder of WGT - “Leveraging Branded Virtual Goods”
Josh Burns, Associate Director, Products at 6Waves - “Tactics for Maximizing Your Virtual Goods Revenue”
Max Skibinsky, Founder of Hive7...
3 tags
March 2012
4 posts
The Geode →
I hate it when people are smarter than me. Take all my money now.
Download any SoundCloud song →
pretty sweet bookmarklet that lets you download any song on Soundcloud. They will probably block this pretty soon.
February 2012
6 posts
4 tags
How to send mail asynchronously with Sorcery and...
I’m developing a Rails 3.2 app and being fed up with devise, I decided I’d be switching to the awesome sorcery gem for user authentication. Sorcery has a ton of features while staying minimal (you still have to write all your models, controllers and views) and that is just what I need. Those devise controllers where driving me mad.
Anyways, after implementing it and testing the app,...
Node.js on Rails →
1 tag
A great idea executed awesomely - Newsle
When I see certain products I think that making a startup is not that hard at all. Newsle makes it look really easy. Smart idea + great execution. How hard can it be, right?
Wrong. Then I start watching all the hard decisions that have been made in order for the product to be where it is now and I go: “wow”.
The idea is a very smart one: keep track of news that mention your friends....
1 tag
ACE - Sinatra for Node →
AWESOME.
The Joy of Sinatra
Sunday morning I woke up with a weird API idea, and decided to spend the morning building it.
I unconsciously headed to http://www.sinatrarb.com and 20 minutes later I had a complete API returning awesome JSON and performing a few operations in the backend.
It’s just amazing what you can achieve with Sinatra and the power of Rubygems:
The joy is in the simplicity, control, flexibility and...
January 2012
3 posts
1 tag
December 2011
1 post
October 2011
9 posts
If you can't remember why onions are in there,... →
Remove the inessential from your thinking framework.
Someone sent me a free copy of “The Lean Startup” by Eric Ries. Don’t really know who. But thanks.
A sneak peek to Iubenda's completely new design... →
Union Square Ventures is Hiring →
USV is hiring an analyst. Apply if you want to get in the best VC fund in New York.
Billing with Stripe - RailsCasts →
Ryan Bates explains how to integrate Stripe in your webapp. There was no need as it’s incredibly simple, but take a look for yourself and checkout how amazing Stripe is.
Thanks Steve. 1955 – Forever. →
Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they…
I wonder when people will have the guts to admit that what we call “democracy” has failed as a political and social system.
In Brazil, Towns Cash In With Their Own Currencies... →
Get ready for this all around the world.
September 2011
9 posts
Future of US Dollar: How to Prepare for When Money... →
“Obama talking about economics is like the blind leading the doubly dismembered.”
“You can never cross the ocean unless you have the courage to lose sight of the...”
– Christopher Columbus
Laura Trice: Dr. Ron Paul's 11-Point Plan That... →
“It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and...”
– Henry Ford
Find the problem. →
August 2011
7 posts
1 tag
#foodstartups
Today everything was very calm here at 500startups. Companies are hard at work on their pitches (they have to be ready by 12pm tomorrow) and everyone was immersed in doing what they couldn’t do in the last crazy days.
Myself, I’ve been working hard on something super-secret I might be showing you at the end of these two weeks. Stay tuned.
But today another big thing was going on,...
Second day: DemoDays Dry-Run!
Today I got the chance to sit in on the Dry-Run of the demo days! Dry Run means that there’s no alcohol involved in the pitching process. It really changes a lot the situation. This session was reserved for 500startups mentors and is considered by everyone the semi-final “test”.
Entrepreneurs have been here till very late yesterday to polish their pitches and a lot of them have...
First day as Dave McClure's shadow
I’ll be reporting about my 2 weeks shadowing Dave McClure here. Hope you can all get at least half as much as I’m getting out of it.
This post was written on Monday (so tomorrow = Tuesday)
7am - Wake up, shower, breakfast with my lovely Fiance, put bike in the car.
8 am - Drive to Menlo Park, say bye to my Fiance who’s going to play tennis at Menlo High School. Get bike out...
Facebook Launches Standalone iPhone/Android... →
This company is perfect.
Free Product Marketing Tip
If you’re announcing a new feature for your product on a blog or press release, include a fucking link to it. WTF.
Mashery Open Sources their I/O API Documentation!
This is just awesome.
https://github.com/mashery/iodocs
June 2011
2 posts
“If I was Facebook, I’d buy Groupon today just to have them not mess up the...”
2 tags
My first angel investment - the Creative Commons...
I’m really excited as today I can announce my first (mini) angel investment. It’s on Iubenda, a company that will solve the privacy policy problem for website owners. The CEO is 21 and rocks really hard.
The investment is part of a $100.000 round led by Digital Investment SCA SICAR (advised by dPixel, with Gianluca Dettori), Andrea Di Camillo (Vitaminic, Banzai) and Marco Magnocavallo...
May 2011
3 posts
Italy slumbers: United in apathy | The Economist →
sad but true.
Turkish Peak Games grabs $5m from Earlybird →
Peak Games, the flourishing emerging markets social gaming company, today announced a $5 million Series-A investment to foster continued growth in some of the…
3 tags
Shadow Dave McClure
So, I recently applied for the awesome “Shadow Dave McClure” position over at InternMatch, one of Dave’s 500startups portfolio companies, thinking that there would be some rolling positions during the summer.
Little did I know that we applied in more than 300, for only one position!
Luckily, I was selected together with other 14 extremely cool guys as a semi-finalist. I now had...