Texas Startup Blog

The guy's older article is just as interesting for the confusion. (http://www.texasstartupblog.com/2007/08/09/timothy-ferriss-ruining-lives-four-hours-at-a-time/)

He takes the example of one person who has ruined his life. Ruined how? The guy is no longer a customer. He hides from the people he is working with. Therefore, he disvalues building lasting relationship.

Unfortunately, he assumes that a professional life necessarily encompasses a personal life. He seems to be implying that if your professional life tanks, then you no longer have a personal life ... whereas the main thing I get out of Tim Ferris's book is giving priority to your personal life. Since the blog post author only knows his example by through his professional life, he has no way of knowing if his former client has ruined his personal life.

I keep seeing so much hate in those comments. I saw the hate in the reviews on Amazon. Particularly, people keep coming back to the idea that if everyone follows Ferris's strategy, no one would be left to do the work. Why are people waving that around as if they were waving a flag to make a last stand against a charging horde of barbarians?

It seems to me that this blog author reacts violently to the idea that a person can benefit from someone else's "hard honest work", to the point that he may be taking it personally: reacting unconsciously to the idea of "Tim Ferris is taking advantage of MY hard honest work." It is as if Ferris's ideas threatens all those years…

I've lived in Dallas for 9 years and Austin for 4 years. I've been a part of 2 consulting startups and 1 product startup, and most recently raised a Series A for my company. I know of many startup companies in Dallas, but the scene is very different from Seattle and the Valley. VC money is non-existent, with a few exceptions.

While many companies are started in Dallas every year, most of them are focused on non-software industries. On the software side, here are a few current ones I know about:
1) Swarmforce is a content system using swarm AI
2) Roov is a social network for the faith community
3) MileMeter sells auto insurance buy the mile
4) Viewzi provides view-based search

A list of some others can be found at http://www.texasstartupblog.com/2007/12/17/founders-in-dallas/

A good way to get involved in the Dallas software startup community is to visit Refresh Dallas, Dallas BarCamp, and Dallas.rb Reading texasstartupblog occasionally provides insight to a new local company.

Hey, I'm in Dallas... currently a senior at SMU. Dallas has plenty of resources depending on what you want to do. Of course it's nothing compared to the valley, but just off the top of my head, http://viewzi.com, http://www.texasstartupblog.com/, http://www.biggu.com/, http://woot.com, http://match.com, http://theplanet.com, http://Godtube.com, and other randoms are all based here. I would argue that there are definitely worse places to be.

I'm pretty good at front-end design with CSS, XHTML, JavaScript (mootools/jQuery). Our skills might compliment each other?

I'd be down to grab a beer with you sometime to plot the dethroning of Google for YC summer '09 or something. jfornear[at]smu[dot]edu or jessefornear[at]gmail[dot]com

No, it wasn't. One of the investors has said so in quite clear terms, besides that there are plenty of people quoting 'sources' saying that that was a nonsense story.

http://www.businessinsider.com/mintcom-founder-wanted-to-sell-vc-conspiracy-wrong-2009-9

http://www.texasstartupblog.com/2009/09/18/jason-time-to-get-out-of-the-tub/

http://blog.josephnet.org/?p=96

He should have simply not made that call without the evidence to back it up.