During the day I am an ops sys-admin. During the night I am a husband, father of two, and a CEO of a bootstrapped start-up. After launch, my first project was to schedule regular backups of user data and archive off-site. My goal was to create backups but never need …

1. Write everyday. Build a blog for the project and write about milestones, progress, and hurdles. Also keep a personal blog and write about hobbies. Read some theory about "copy writing" and search engine optimization. Write personalized email responses to customers. Great communication skills will have the most impact on …

I spent the weekend fretting because one of my servers was basically being DOS'd by paying customers. During the outage I started thinking about the best way to scale and how I could make the code-base more efficient.

Linux top reported high load, in the 20's. Eventually I figured out …

How did you hear about us?

I first answered this question when joining Linode. I remember thinking "Wow, this is a great time to ask me!" because the real answer was still in my short term memory.

When I launched LinkPeek I applied this technique. After an amazing launch (thank …

Today I lost a customer.

I added some new code to LinkPeek to accept coupons and I didn't think of an edge case. This ended up creating an uncaught exception in my server side code which ultimatly served the newly subscribing customer an HTTP 500 error page.

The damage was …

• acquire users
• support my users well
• scale in a timely manner
• react quickly to feedback
• monetize the application

But most of all I'm scared that nobody will like me. I'm scared of failure.

Now that I got …