Great analysis. Very interesting.

This is a big idea.

🤔 ✨

I was raised on a farm in Nebraska. Obviously from the picture above, we were a John Deere family, not an International family. (Farm folks will understand.)

Several years ago, my wife and I found a shoebox full of old prints and negatives in the house I grew up in. She had them all digitized and put on CD-ROMs, which she gifted the family. There were hundreds of pictures, many I’d never seen before. It was a trip.

I’ve still never organized them all, but thanks to Google Photos I can now find myself and any family members in them…

Jason Fried on change:

“When you’ve been around 20 years, you’ve been through change. You’re used to it, and comfortable with it. These changes are part of a continuum in the experiment of independence that is Basecamp (and 37signals before that). We’ll eventually run headlong into big change again. This is what we’ve done, and this is what we’ll do — time guarantees it.”

“We tried to be tasteful and collaborative and diligent and mindful of craft and the rest in all the things we did, all the time. Everything counts. No detail is too small.”

— Ken Kocienda, Creative Selection

I’m happy to announce that Mariam Naficy will be joining Medium’s board of directors for an 18-month appointment.

Mariam brings a wealth of company-building experience, having started the first major online retailer of cosmetics (eve.com) back in 1998, and having founded Minted in 2008, where she is still CEO. She has also served on the boards of Yelp and Polyvore and is currently on the board of the non-profit Every Mother Counts.

I’ve known Mariam for the last few years and have grown to highly respect her creativity, insight, and leadership. It was while talking to her about what she’s…

I remember distinctly the first time I saw Google Earth, which was called Keyhole at the time (pre acquisition). It was 2004, and I was in a conference room with Larry, Sergey, Eric, and other Google execs. Megan Smith was trying to make the Picasa acquisition happen, which I was a supporter of. It had been a few weeks without giving them a definitive offer, and we were feeling some urgency to get approval.

In the middle of that meeting, Sergey brought up Keyhole on the projector and said something like "I think for about the same amount of money…