• Eugene Wei on the  important difference between minimalist and frictionless design :
  • Minimalist design  is about reducing the surface area of an experience.
  • Frictionless design  is about reducing the energy required by an experience.

• Leslie’s Law of asymmetric competition  is essentially a rehash of Clayton Christiansen’s low-end disruption theory .  Namely that when the big fish meet the little ones, contrary to belief based on the naturalistic observation, the behemoths almost always end up getting eaten by more smaller competitors in a broad continuum:

• Andrew Chen reflects on how in many ways we haven’t really moved on from the first dot com boom of 1999 and that the old and new patterns of development for mobile app propositions are remarkably similar in outcome and somewhat waterfall-like:

Today, seed stage startups can now get funded, release 1 or 2 versions of their app spread over 9 months, and then fail without making a peep.

• His most important advice is that mobile startups should not look to blow all their seed funding just to get to a v1 because it leaves nothing in the pot should it not work out:

“Don’t burn 1/2 of your funding to get to a v1”

• This FirstRound post describes how PlanetLabs turned its interns into company leaders with a bold internal initiative that basically treats them no differently from other tenured employees:

“The secret to a remarkably productive internship program is enlisting interns to work on mission-critical tasks, and then giving them as much trust, freedom, and information as they need to succeed.”