Tony Wright dot com

Christian Anderson (a former colleague at Jobster) had an interesting (and well-researched) post on his blog called “How to Pitch Robert Scoble — HINT: No Direct Tweets“… , which led to a discussion on FriendFeed (with Robert himself weighing in) that was pretty interesting.
I had a contribution bouncing around in my head but held off […]

A lot of people are damn religious about bootrapping businesses. Especially nowadays when it’s so easy to start a software business– you just need a few hackers, Ruby on Rails, a cheap virtual server and you’re ready to roll, right?
Sure.
But just because it’s cheaper to start a software company, doesn’t mean that it’s that […]

One of the frustrating things about iterative software development is that you never get to do a heroic launch (a la Steve Jobs). Your software starts off to be barely good enough for someone to endure. The next week it’s better. Rinse, repeat. If you’re good, someday you wake up and […]

[edit: I should probably have made a stronger point that I am talking about early early early stage startups. 2-5 people, pre-funding. Carry on!]
There is a tremendous amount of venom loosed towards so called “business guys” or “idea guys” (as I’ve called ‘em) in the startup community. They can’t catch a […]

I think that common sense goes a long ways in UI design… But not all the way. It’s a learned skill like any other. I was reading up on calendar controls today (which I’m obsessed with, by the way) and caught a great post by the curmudgeonly Jakob Nielsen. Here’s the […]

Someone posted an interesting “Ask YC”, asking:
“How to start becoming an entrepreneur while still being an employee?”
Having done this twice (started a company that eventually turned into a full-time startup), I settled in to reply. Before long, it was clear that my response was long enough to justify a blog post.
I’ve done two part-time-to-full-time […]

Everyone with a fine liberal arts education should be familiar with Zeno’s Dichotomy Paradox (props to Steve Leroux for helping me remember his damn name).
“Suppose Homer wants to catch a stationary bus. Before he can get there, he must get halfway there. Before he can get halfway there, he must get a quarter of the […]

This Tuesday, I’m going to get a chance to meet Kevin Hale, who is the designer behind Wufoo and proprietor of ParticleTree. Kevin wrote a blog post last month that I think is one of the better summations of what it means to be a web designer. While I don’t want to dwell […]

Launching a big batch of new stuff is ALWAYS hard. It’s a lot of work and you’re generally making a substantial bet on some of your own instincts.
Since the launch (a few hours ago), feedback has been pouring in. Much of it is positive, but some is negative– which I think is par […]

A reader took the time to shoot me an email with a few questions about design and startups… His questions were interesting enough that I thought they might be worth blogging about. So here goes:
Question #1 - What is the priority balance between programming and design/UI?
In my opinion, it totally depends on your […]