So there are really a lot of new Web 2.0 startups flourishing these days.
Evan Williams (currently CEO of Odeo, Inc., previously co-founder and CEO of Pyra Labs, makers of Blogger which is by now part of Google), at the end of this Nov., made imho quite an interesting post about rules for web startups.
I somehow especially like his rule no. 5:
- “…User experience is everything. It always has been, but it’s still undervalued and under-invested in. If you don’t know user-centered design, study it. Hire people who know it. Obsess over it. Live and breathe it. Get your whole company on board. Better to iterate a hundred times to get the right feature right than to add a hundred more…”
Well, certainly, the whole text is (what I’d call) “somewhat Californian style”. Nevertheless, I think there are some good points in it.
Furthermore, I recently listened to an interview with Jason Calacanis (co-founder & CEO of Weblogs, Inc.), published by Web 2.0 Show podcasting (member of so-called Web 2.0 Workgroup).
Among other things, he mentions the in his point of view pretty absurd way many Web 2.0 startups focus only on features and don’t at all really care about making profits whereas their main “business model” is to be flipped (preferably by Google or Yahoo). Hmm, interesting… 
