For someone who lives in the startup world, this looks pretty silly.  But I’m sure I’d say a lot of silly things if I were getting in to the taxi business, too.  So I figured I’d point him to a simple explanation of why taxi companies (actually, services companies in general) aren’t appropriate for VC.  I did the Google thing for a bit to find a good article.  And no luck.

We start with the customer and work backwards. And, very importantly, we are willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time.

The only time when Free can really work for you is if you set your sights on having a specific outcome: acquisition. If you’re building technology, or a team, that is valuable to somebody else than you can afford to provide a free service and raise finance to fund that service until you’re in a position to be acquired.

Today, I run 37signals, a software and design firm that I co-founded in 1999. Sales have grown at double-digit rates every year for the past decade; so have profits. (Like many private companies, we don't disclose revenue.) How did I learn how to do this? I have a degree in finance, but I don't remember taking any classes that even remotely taught me how to make money. I've read plenty of business books. Same thing—lots of talk about money, but not much about how to actually make the stuff.

If getting venture capital is now optional for making a big, successful business, and lots of entrepreneurs might want to avoid it anyway, what are the other options? I've outlined a few other common options, including examples of companies that have made these options work, and some of the cons of each method that might explain why don't we hear about them as much as we hear about venture capital.

Some people insist that if we focus on "business fundamentals" and get "back to basics," all will return. Not so. The promise that you can get paid really well to do precisely what your boss instructs you to do is now a dream, no longer a reality.

Now, you’ve probably figured out I’m not actually talking about mining or farming: this is a metaphor for running a software company. You can either see founding a company as something you’re doing because you want to produce good software, or you can see it as something you do so you can sell your stock and make a killing and move on.

Why diverse companies outperform their less-diverse counterparts.

It's about 70 degrees, the sun is beating down, it smells like decay, and it's time for Coke to move some product. Annual per capita consumption of Coca-Cola (KO) in Kenya is 39 servings.

The secondary problem that all three encounter (right under building something useful) is generating some sort of scale. The chicken-and-egg situation is a central topic of many, many talks (it certainly was at Startup School) and for good reason: almost everyone has to deal with it at some extent.

Is this soup aspirational enough? Does it represent people as they are, or people as they want to be? “How are we measuring our soup analytics?” they ask.

If someone pirates Minecraft instead of buying it, it means I’ve lost some “potential” revenue. Not actual revenue, as I can never go into debt by people pirating the game too much, but I might’ve made even more if that person had bought the game instead.

Notes from creators of products that don't exist anymore reflecting on the problems they had.

The other one, I fear, is here forever. This is the recession of the industrial age, the receding wave of bounty that workers and businesses got as a result of rising productivity but imperfect market communication.

So, it really was a decision that I had to make for myself, and the framework I found which made the decision incredibly easy was what I called — which only a nerd would call — a “regret minimization framework.”

On September 1st, 2009 we announced that MailChimp was going freemium. On that day, we had 85,000 users. Now, slightly more than a year later, we have more than 450,000 users. We grew our user base five times in one year.

1. Determination

This has turned out to be the most important quality in startup founders. We thought when we started Y Combinator that the most important quality would be intelligence. That's the myth in the Valley. And certainly you don't want founders to be stupid. But as long as you're over a certain threshold of intelligence, what matters most is determination. You're going to hit a lot of obstacles. You can't be the sort of person who gets demoralized easily.

Sure, some customers will complain, and others might take their business elsewhere. But there’s a good chance you don’t want those kinds of customers, anyway.

For new initiatives a product manager typically starts by writing an internal press release announcing the finished product. The target audience for the press release are the new/updated product's customers, which can be retail customers or internal users of a tool or technology. Internal press releases are centered around the customer problem, how current solutions (internal or external) fail, and how the new product will blow away existing solutions.

It was in this moment of bleak desperation that I rediscovered myself—in a burst of insight, I realized that for these past two long, painful years I had been content to lie to myself, to tell myself that it was okay to grovel. I had been pretending that it was acceptable for me to humbly ask somebody to do me the favor of hiring me, then to silently move on after the inevitable rejection. But no more! It was time for me to be honest with myself. I drove home in a euphoric daze, my drive-through order secure inside a grease-drenched paper bag in the seat next to me. As the shock from my epiphany faded away, I realized that I now knew exactly what needed to be done. I pulled into my neighborhood, parked on the curb, flung open the front door, dove for my laptop, and began composing my reverse job application.

But “business” is no longer the same as “factory”. (Aside: Factories don't have to make stuff... they're any business that focuses on doing what it did yesterday, but cheaper and faster.) It turns out that factory thinking is part of a race to the bottom, to be the cheapest, the easiest place to pollute, the workforce that will take what it can get.

What happened? As usual, I have a theory: there are two App Stores.

Allen & Company, which is currently run by Herb Allen, nephew of the founder, generally shies away from publicity and does not maintain a website or issue press releases.

When you buy something cheap and bad, the best you’re going to feel about it is when you buy it. When you buy something expensive and good, the worst you’re going to feel about it is when you buy it.

It is our stated goal as a company to live in harmony with the web, by only doing things that we believe make the internet better, at least in some small way. No, seriously. It's in writing and everything, I swear! We're not here to subvert or own anyone or anything. We just love community, and we love getting great answers to our questions. So if something gets in our way while doing that, well, we're not gonna fight you. We'll just turn. And keep going forward, really fast. Which is why those clones better move quick if they want to keep up with us.

FORTUNE -- Apple's retail stores aren't the only place where lines form these days. It's 7:30 on a July morning, and already a crowd has gathered for the opening of Trader Joe's newest outpost, in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood. The waiting shoppers chat about their favorite Trader Joe's foods, and a woman in line launches into a monologue comparing the retailer's West Coast and East Coast locations. Another customer suggests that the chain will be good for Chelsea, even though the area is already brimming with places to buy groceries, including Whole Foods and several upscale food boutiques.

After all, who is likely to be the more productive contributor to the company, and to the world — the person who is healthy, rested, well-balanced, full of energy, and clear of mind, or the sleep-deprived, overweight, heart-attack-waiting-to-happen, psychologically unexamined, self-critical maniac? Who is more likely to be present enough to see the next breakthrough? Who is more likely to analyze problems clearly, for what they really are, instead of what they are assumed to be?

I don't think that many businesspeople start their business with the idea that they can make a lot of money. Most people feel that they can create something that is going to make a difference to other people's lives – that is how they start their businesses.

My team currently has two openings, a Web Developer and Junior Designer, and we just hired a Project Manager. I’ve been spending ~15% of my workdays lately sorting through portfolios, reading and sending emails, and following up with potential applicants. I think most people in Director/Principle/HR-type roles are too busy to explain why an applicant gets rejected, but I want to throw some ideas out there that I think might help you if you’re a design/developer on the job hunt.

To be uncharacteristically serious for half a nanosecond, yes, Woot has signed an agreement to be acquired by Amazon. It shouldn't change anything much for us or you after the deal closes, we just figured you’d like to know a few details. You see, when two companies meet over drinks and some light jazz and decide they'd like to get to know each other better… You know what? Our CEO said it best in his letter to us employees...

I don't care how much you pay me, you'll never be able to recreate the incredibly satisfying feeling I get when demonstrating mastery within my community of peers. That's what we do on Stack Overflow: have fun, while making the internet one infinitesimally tiny bit better every day.

Currently, Apple's stock is at an all time high. A share today is worth over 40 times its value seven years ago. So, how much would you have today if you purchased stock instead of an Apple product? See for yourself in the table below. A huge thanks to everymac.com for the original prices and release dates. All values are calculated using Apple's current stock price according to http://brivierestockquotes.appspot.com.

It’s not enough that Warren Buffett has become one of the richest men in the world. He’s also a world-class storyteller – and nowhere does this gift go on public display more than in his annual letter to shareholders.

His latest  letter on the Berkshire Hathaway Web site offers terrific lessons for startup ventures in shaping their communications.

People at the top don’t work harder than you. They work MUCH MUCH harder.
—Malcolm Gladwell

You know that old saw about a plane flying from California to Hawaii being off course 99% of the time—but constantly correcting? The same is true of successful startups—except they may start out heading toward Alaska.

This is not to say that rewards in a motivational game are verboten, but step away from the money and think about achievements. One of the best trophies I’ve awarded was a horrifically ugly ceramic blue rhino the size of a pit bull. The winner proudly displayed the rhino achievement in his office for years.

It’s not a game. Just because I’m using the word game all over this article doesn’t mean it’s trivial, simple, or something not to be taken seriously. Your geeks will treat the game as a motivational tool as seriously as you choose to treat it in building and rolling it out — because they want to win.

The bottom line is this: your paycheck doesn't make you a professional, your character does.

Not just good for programmers. Great thoughts on how to hire anyone.

I have no desire to scale up or get bigger. My desire is to produce the best food in the world. And if in doing so, more people come to our corner and want stuff, then heaven help me figure out how to meet the need without compromising the integrity.
As soon as you grasp for that growth, you’re gonna view your customer differently, you’re gonna view your product differently, you’re gonna view your business differently. Everything that is the most important – you’re going to view that differently.

Sorry. It's just a fact. You can't just be awesome and make money (despite what several tech start ups are doing these days). The model simply does not effectively merit a payout. You need to have a clear need in order to be successful, not just wishful thinking.

Here's a rule that's so inevitable that it's almost a law: As an organization grows and succeeds, it sows the seeds of its own demise by getting boring. With more to lose and more people to lose it, meetings and policies become more about avoiding risk than providing joy.

A reaction to Dustin Curtis' afore-bookmarked American Airlines article. Sharp and challenging.

The sad, sad story of a corporation missing the boat.