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Scott Belsky Interview on Startups

Jason Tate

Business Insider:

Scott Belsky is an early investor in startups such as Uber, Pinterest, and Warby Parker who began his career at Goldman Sachs.

He realized quickly that Goldman wasn’t for him, so he spent the next four years saving $18,000. He used the money and some help from those close to him to quit and bootstrap a startup called Behance. Belsky didn’t take a paycheck for the next two years.

In the end, the hard work paid off. Adobe purchased Behance for a reported $150 million, and Belsky went out of his way to turn half of his employees into millionaires from the sale.

This was a really good interview.

Cool App: Streaks

Apps
Jason Tate

After reading the MacStories review of the Streaks app, I decided to give it a shot:

Streaks helps you set personal goals and stick to them using a combination of reminders and tracking. One of the hallmarks of the app, and what undoubtedly won it an Apple Design Award in 2016, is its obsessive attention to ease-of-use. By the very nature of its mission, Streaks is an app in which you shouldn’t spend a lot of time. Whether it’s in the main app, widget, or Apple Watch app, Streaks is designed to remove the friction of turning goals into habits by tracking tasks in a way that doesn’t become tedious, which makes it important to be able to mark items as completed quickly and easily.

I’ve only been using it for three days so far, but I think this will be something I stick with for a while. I like the idea of having a few (currently only four) streaks set up to help form some habits I’ve been having trouble with.

Reddit Valued at $1.8 Billion

Reddit
Jason Tate

Reddit is now valued at $1.8 billion after their latest round of funding. According to Recode, the company will be going on a hiring spree and redesigning their website:

Reddit has raised $200 million in new venture funding and is now valued at $1.8 billion, according to CEO Steve Huffman.

The new funding round, the company’s largest ever, should expedite a number of internal product and business efforts, including a redesign of its homepage and its first foray into user-uploaded video, Huffman added in an interview with Recode.

The money comes courtesy of a number of well-known Silicon Valley investors, including firms like Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital, and individual investors like Y Combinator President Sam Altman (also a board member) and SV Angel’s Ron Conway. It also includes money from the hedge fund Coatue, investment firm Vy Capital and mutual fund giant Fidelity.

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On Friday Bandcamp Will Donate Proceeds to Transgender Law Center

Bandcamp
Jason Tate

Bandcamp:

Bandcamp is a platform for artistic expression, and all manner of variance in experience and identity, including gender and sexuality, is welcome here. We support our LGBT+ users and staff, and we stand against any person or group that would see them further marginalized. This includes the current U.S. administration, and its recent capricious declaration that transgender troops will no longer be able to serve in the military. That this announcement was motivated in part to help fund the border wall exposes it as part of the administration’s cynical, discriminatory agenda.

In response, we will be donating 100% of our share of every sale on Friday, August 4th (from midnight to midnight Pacific Time) to the Transgender Law Center, a nonprofit organization that works tirelessly to change law, policy, and culture for the more equitable. TLC does critical policy advocacy and litigation on multiple fronts, fights for healthcare for trans veterans, defends incarcerated trans people from abuse in prisons and detention centers, supports trans immigrants, and helps trans youth tell their stories and build communities.

MTV to Bring Back TRL

MTV
Jason Tate

MTV will be bringing back TRL while they attempt to stay relevant:

Then in October, MTV will unveil the revival of “TRL.” The original iteration — which featured a countdown of music videos, a studio audience and frequent appearances from star musicians — was, in a way, a throwback itself, an updated version of “American Bandstand.”

The newer version of “TRL” will initially run an hour a day, and Mr. McCarthy said that might grow to two to three hours a day as the show developed. (There will also be unique daily content for Instagram, Snapchat and other social media channels.)

I remember watching TRL when I was younger. I watched it because there was a chance Blink-182, New Found Glory, or Sum 41 would make it onto the countdown and I’d get to see thirty seconds of their video. One of the main reasons I started AbsolutePunk.net was so that I could catalog music videos for bands I loved in a place where everyone could find them easily. Thankfully, YouTube ended up doing all that way better than I could have ever dreamed.

What TRL did well was become a destination for any artist starting their album cycle. If you wanted a shot at breaking out, you had to appear on the show and do an interview/video debut/live performance. This worked great when MTV was one of the only gatekeepers for the music industry. New album information for a select group of artists could break on TRL. Now, with access to more video (and news) content for bands than I could ever consume in a lifetime on the internet, I wonder what the hook will be for TRL that makes it worth watching. As someone that barely watches any live TV, I’m skeptical about the demand for these kinds of shows. Finding the small communities, video channels, and/or podcasts that are tailored to your specific listening habits just seems more interesting to me.

Tesla Unveil the Model 3 Sedan

Tesla
Jason Tate

Tesla have unveiled the first of their new Model 3 sedans:

In a ceremony at Tesla’s factory complex near San Francisco, the company’s chief executive, Elon Musk, delivered the initial Model 3s off the assembly line to 30 employees chosen to be the model’s first owners.

It was a pivotal moment in Tesla’s evolution from a manufacturer of luxury electric vehicles into a producer of mass-market cars.

The company has yet to specify when it will begin selling the Model 3, priced at $35,000, to the half-million prospective buyers who have reserved cars with $1,000 deposits.

Ars Technica has a deeper look:

The $35,000 electric vehicle’s interior is more spartan than the Model S or Model X. Air ducts are hidden and there’s no instrument cluster directly in front of the driver. All the information you need about the car is found on a single, horizontal screen mounted in the center of the dashboard. The side mirrors and steering column are adjusted with two marble-sized trackballs where your thumbs might rest on the steering wheel.

The NJPP Archives

Headphones
Jason Tate

The NJPP Archives are attempting to archive a bunch of music, videos, and flyers from a specific era of “New Jersey Pop Punk.” There’s some really interesting stuff on here worth looking at, including:

And quite a bit more. It’s pretty nuts scrolling through this list and seeing so many great bands.

Dave Grohl Talks With Rolling Stone

Foo Fighters
Jason Tate

Dave Grohl of Foo Fighters sat down with Rolling Stone:

To write the lyrics, Grohl rented an AirBnB in Ojai, California. “I brought a case of wine and sat there in my underwear with a microphone for about five days, just writing,” he says. “It happened at the perfect time. I was inspired by what was going on with our country – politically, personally, as a father, an American and a musician. There was a lot to write about.”

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Ben Gibbard Talks With Stereogum

Death Cab for Cutiie
Jason Tate

Ben Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie sat down with Stereogum:

We’ve been demoing some songs here and there with Dave [Depper] and Zack [Rae], who are gonna be a part of this next record, people who are members of the band now. I feel like they know our band better than we do, because they were outside of it for so long. Their aesthetic take on the material is so valuable because they were fans of the band before they were in the band, so they could say like, “I want what you think you’re doing with this song, but you’re not pulling it off.”

Jeff Bezos Becomes World’s Richest Person

Jeff Bezos
Jason Tate

The New York Times:

A 1 percent pop in the shares of Amazon.com — the internet company Mr. Bezos founded, which accounts for the vast majority of his wealth — was enough to bump him over the wealth of Mr. Gates, the philanthropist and Microsoft co-founder, according to a real-time list of billionaires by Forbes.com, which has tallied the fortunes of the uber-rich for decades.

Forbes now estimates the wealth of Mr. Bezos, currently Amazon’s chief executive, at about $90.6 billion, compared with $90 billion for Mr. Gates.

Gerard Way Talks to Nerdist

Gerard Way
Jason Tate

Gerard Way sat down with the Nerdist, he spoke a little about the influence Chester Bennington had on his life:

His band and bringing us on tour, that changed my life. I met my wife. We have an amazing life now and a daughter. My memories of that period and meeting Linds again are tied into Chester and his band. It’s so sad. I think a lot about mental health and it’s something I’ve always wanted to address in Doom Patrol, so I definitely think we’ll see a lot more of that now. I’ve been through depression, dark times, and therapy. I can really apply that stuff to these characters.

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Adobe to Discontinue Flash in 2020

Jason Tate

Frederic Lardinois, writing for TechCrunch:

Adobe today announced that Flash, the once-ubiquitous plugin that allowed you to play your first Justin Bieber video on YouTube and Dolphin Olympics 2 on Kongregate, will be phased out by the end of 2020. At that point, Adobe will stop updating and distributing Flash. Until then, Adobe will still partner with the likes of Apple, Mozilla, Microsoft and Google to offer security updates for Flash in their browsers and support new versions of them, but beyond that, Adobe will not offer any new Flash features.

Good riddance.

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