zoya: Here’s a 20-year old Anthony, fixing something on The Hype Machine when we were supposed to be watching a movie. What I love about our site is that it didn’t start out as a company looking to make a product. Anthony made it for himself, by himself, because he wanted to find album reviews from people he could trust, and he thought other people might find that useful, too. It was a subdomain on his personal site, which was otherwise just GYBE! photos and articles on “Booting FreeBSD 5.0 on a Sun Machine Over the Network.” He made the back end, and he made the front end, and drew the first logo, and he answered every single email that first year. This is why I take the attacks on us personally, and why I run the risk of being serious on the internet when I talk about HM. Because it’s my friend’s site, and he made it for all the right reasons: because he genuinely loves music, and he loves reading what other music fans have to say, and he knew that technology could make all of this easier. Have you ever known a person who just lives for music, and he’s got all these friends he’s met at shows or on music message boards, and they tip each other off about awesome new bands, and he just wants to make sure that everyone else can have this opportunity to fall in love with sound? That’s Anthony, and that’s why The Hype Machine exists.

zoya:

Here’s a 20-year old Anthony, fixing something on The Hype Machine when we were supposed to be watching a movie.

What I love about our site is that it didn’t start out as a company looking to make a product. Anthony made it for himself, by himself, because he wanted to find album reviews from people he could trust, and he thought other people might find that useful, too. It was a subdomain on his personal site, which was otherwise just GYBE! photos and articles on “Booting FreeBSD 5.0 on a Sun Machine Over the Network.” He made the back end, and he made the front end, and drew the first logo, and he answered every single email that first year.

This is why I take the attacks on us personally, and why I run the risk of being serious on the internet when I talk about HM. Because it’s my friend’s site, and he made it for all the right reasons: because he genuinely loves music, and he loves reading what other music fans have to say, and he knew that technology could make all of this easier. Have you ever known a person who just lives for music, and he’s got all these friends he’s met at shows or on music message boards, and they tip each other off about awesome new bands, and he just wants to make sure that everyone else can have this opportunity to fall in love with sound? That’s Anthony, and that’s why The Hype Machine exists.

“There are two types of startup ideas: those that grow organically out of your own life, and those that you decide, from afar, are going to be necessary to some class of users other than you. Apple was the first type. Apple happened because Steve Wozniak wanted a computer. Unlike most people who wanted computers, he could design one, so he did. And since lots of other people wanted the same thing, Apple was able to sell enough of them to get the company rolling. They still rely on this principle today, incidentally. The iPhone is the phone Steve Jobs wants”
Paul Graham - Organic Startup Ideas (via bijan)
Stop What You Are Doing & Install This Plug-In: Rapportive: Cambridge UK startup Rapportive has released a Firefox and Chrome extension that will replace the ads in your Gmail with photos, biographic data and social media links, including a live display of recent Tweets, for whoever you’re corresponding with by email. It’s fantastic and takes about 2 minutes to set up.

Stop What You Are Doing & Install This Plug-In: Rapportive:

Cambridge UK startup Rapportive has released a Firefox and Chrome extension that will replace the ads in your Gmail with photos, biographic data and social media links, including a live display of recent Tweets, for whoever you’re corresponding with by email. It’s fantastic and takes about 2 minutes to set up.