heyamberrae:

marsbot:

2/9/11 foursquare HQ

Almost a year ago we were working crazy hours; late nights and weekend, all in preparation for SXSW 2010. The iphone app was getting its first visual overhaul, which was a pretty big deal. We had less than half a million users. There were fewer of us then, in fact I wasn’t even a full time employee yet (I was an art director at Hard Candy Shell). That didn’t happen until March 1st and I didn’t move desks until much later. One Saturday I brought my SLR into the office. It was almost 10pm and I snapped a picture of the guys working and posted it on Flickr. 

What followed was a stream of documentation. From late nights, working on the weekends, hand cutting tattoos, being too big for the 5th floor, Tie Tuesdays and our eventual move to the 6th floor. But then something happened. I stopped. As our employees grew  and the material on our walls became more sensitive I stopped snapping photos. 

This week I decided to start again. 

beautiful moment of reflection. 

ENTREP + TECH: “A decade ago, four young men changed the way the world works. They did this not with laws or guns or money but with software: they had radical, disruptive ideas, which they turned into code, which they released on the Internet for free. These four men, not one of whom finished college, laid the foundations for much of the digital-media environment we currently inhabit. Then, for all intents and purposes, they vanished…”

zachklein:

Dear Mom and Dad,

I know you have hard time explaining what I do to our family friends (I should call more often). Here’s my biennial update to make it a bit easier:

For the 15 months I’ve been working on a project called Boxee. My colleagues and I make software in response to a few problems:

• Cable TV bills are increasingly expensive; Consumers pay for a lot content they never watch, making what they do watch disproportionately overpriced.
• The content that’s accessible through our TVs doesn’t include most of the things we actually want to watch. I, for example, watch just as much user-generated content (stuff made by my friends and people I admire) as I watch Hollywood stuff — and the Hollywood stuff I do watch is usually through Netflix or Hulu.
• In general, there’s an overwhelming amount of content to choose from and it’s paralyzing to decide what to watch.

Enter Boxee. It’s software for your TV and it allows you to watch what you want to watch when you want to watch it — including many big budget shows and movies plus Vimeo, YouTube and hundreds of relatively smaller and independent sources — and when you don’t know what to watch, we make it easy for you to see what your friends and family have recently loved.

Basically, it’s the interface that TV has been missing for a decade.

Since day one, our software has been available on the Internet for free. People could install it on a spare computer to hook up to their TV. This, however, requires some technical experience, so about a year ago we pursued partnerships with device manufacturers hoping that one day people will be able to buy TVs with Boxee already installed on them.

We were thrilled when this big company called D-Link (you guys own a D-Link Wi-Fi router) decided to build the first device powered by our software. This means that instead of having to ‘build’ your own Boxee, you can now buy a device specialized to use our software, and it also comes with the cable and remote you need to use it with your TV. It’s called the Boxee Box and it costs $200 and doesn’t require a monthly fee.

For all these months I’ve been working with a team to design the Box and its remote control, and everything in between to get it to the market.

Today, I’m proud to announce that the Boxee Box is available to buy in over 30 countries (Tell them it’s even available on Amazon!). We’re having a big party tonight in New York to celebrate. Wish you could be here with us.

Anyway, hope this helps, expect your own Box to arrive in the mail soon.

Love,
Zach

CC: The Internet. Some folks are out there are scratching their heads, too.

At 19, Sean Parker helped create Napster. At 24, he was founding president of Facebook. At 30, he’s the hard-partying, press-shy genius of social networking, a budding billionaire, and about to be famous—played by Justin Timberlake in David Fincher’s new film, The Social Network.

Sean Parker was sitting in World Civilization class at his Virginia high school when someone brought him a note. His father, it read, was waiting to take him to an orthodontist appointment. A chill ran down Parker’s spine. He didn’t have an orthodontist. When he got outside, his father angrily whisked him into the family minivan. When they arrived at their modest suburban house, a team of F.B.I. agents was toting papers and a desktop computer out of Sean’s room.

NYC & ENTREP - Launched by Jonathan Wegener, me and the crew after 54 hours of Startup Weekend lockdown!

Want to donate your NYC couch to a hacker?  You can!