Marcelo Calbucci

Glenn Kelman speech was triple shot of inspiration into entrepreneur's vein

Marcelo Calbucci — Tue, 12 May 2009 17:35:21 GMT

One of the highlights of the inaugural Seattle 2.0 Awards was Glenn Kelman opening speech. He was very good and inspiring. To many entrepreneurs, investors and startupers, this was exactly what they need on tough times like this.

Check it out Glenn Kelman's speech.

Office Space for Lease in Redmond

Marcelo Calbucci — Mon, 11 May 2009 21:57:41 GMT

We are moving to a new space and we are looking for a tenant to replace on our current lease.

Total square footage: 1,900 (1,400 of office and 500 of warehouse, a.k.a. the fun-room). It can comfortably accommodate 6-10 people.
Rent: $14.70 / sq ft / year
Location: Redmond, WA – walking distance to Bella Botega

If you are interested, please, feel free to contact me at marcelo-at-sampa.com

We are not looking for a real estate agent/broker to help us.

Try this: Keep It Simple, Stupid (MG Siegler is wrong)

Marcelo Calbucci — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 17:31:50 GMT

First of all, MG Siegler has joined TechCrunch a few weeks ago and he’s by far the best writer TC has ever had. He actually brought back my interest on reading TC after so many bad writers were ruin it (more on that on a future blog post). But MG has a piece on how startups must keep their product simple that I disagree on many levels.

I don’t disagree that simple is good, as long as it gets the job done. And this whole talk about KISS is much easier said than done.

When MG Siegler mentions Twitter, Atebits, Instapaper and others he’s talking about single purpose services. Same thing as Flickr, YouTube or Google search. Multi-purpose products like Facebook, Gmail, Outlook, Windows, etc., are much, much harder to keep it simple.

The “KISS” meme keeps coming back every 6 months or so because some blogger somewhere was presented with a new startup product that should have been simpler, but it’s not. Or he (or she) try to do something on a service they use and can’t figure out how. Then they pile on with examples of successful services that kept it simple (I’m surprised he didn’t mentioned 37Signals on his post).

Then, I come and talk about single-purpose (easy to make it simple) and multi-purpose (hard to make it simple) and I top it all off with a list of products that are not easy to use, not simple, yet they are huge winners, which includes: Windows, Office, MacOS, Linux, Ruby, C#, eBay, Facebook, MySpace, Photoshop, Typepad, etc.

Two feature requests: One for Facebook and one for GMail

Marcelo Calbucci — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 17:09:00 GMT

Dear Facebook, I don't mind so much the new redesign (I actually like it), but I'd like you to collapse all the updates from individuals into some kind of thread. The problem is that 2-3 of my 'friends' make 15 updates at a time and the ruin the experience for me because they are so much 'on my face'. I don't want to 'hide' them, since I do want to know what's going on on their lives, but I need a dial to slow it down. You can do it two ways: Only display 1 update per person (the latest) and have a "more from this person", or make each person a thread and list all the updates below him/her. The first updated being expanded and all consecutive updates collapsed.

Dear GMail, stop saving empty drafts. If there is no one on the TO/CC line, no subject line and no content on the body, feel free to discard that message automatically. For the record, spaces (whitespace) is the same as no content. You guys are smart. You can do that.

Thanks all.