In one of the better founder interviews I’ve read recently, Farhad Manjoo of the New York Times asks Stewart Butterfield, “Is Slack Really Worth $2.8 Billion?”

Butterfield is the humorous and personable chief executive of Slack, a modern team communications tool that has quickly become the default messaging application for many businesses of every size, from small startups all the way to public corporations.

Started as a video game company that was going downhill, they used the remaining assets to work on an internal tool they used for messaging. It was reminiscent of past chat applications like AIM and IRC, but it’s leaps and bounds better than email. Slack has easily searchable archived interactions, fast and painless file attachments, and arguably most crucial for immediate adoption, it’s multiplatform thus there’s no installation overhead—anyone can be in Slack in literally...

Evelyn M. Rusli of the Wall Street Journal writes, “Tech Companies Struggle to Get World on Internet.” She profiles Indonesia, which only has 16% of it’s 250 million population who have access to the Internet, and the aspiration of tech giants to get more people online and show them the value of the Internet. However, despite the efforts of Google and Facebook to get more people connected (and ultimately monetize through these emerging markets overtime), per a joint report done by McKinsey and Facebook, growth of online world-wide Internet users is actually slowing down.

To much of the developed world, Internet access is practically akin to oxygen. It’s hard for us to imagine life without it. But in the opposite spectrum, people in underdeveloped countries who face very extreme challenges have to go through a lot before they can even recognize the upside of smartphones and online...

Quentin Hardy via The New York Times argues “Box, Provider of Cloud-Computing Services, Faces Make-or-Break Moment”:

For Box to compete, it has to get other people to build great things on what it has built in the same way Apple and Google got app makers to create tools that made their mobile software indispensable.

At a company conference this week, Box, which has so far focused on Internet data storage and collaboration technology, will explain how it plans to help other businesses build their own cloud services. The goal is to create a so-called ecosystem that ensures continued growth just as Microsoft did with PCs and Apple did with the iPhone.

If the plan does not work, it is doubtful that Box will survive as an independent company, and Mr. Levie, for all those high hopes, will become a footnote, someone with a great idea who could not quite turn it into a lasting business.

...

New York Times opinion columnist David Brooks, in a rather different style from his usual punditry, wrote a very warming and insightful piece in “The Moral Bucket List.” It’s supposed to be a glimpse into his thinking for his new book The Road to Character, an exploration of what he calls “eulogy virtues,” the character strengths that we will be remembered by, or in his words, the ones that “are talked about in your funeral.”

It’s a deep dive into what he considers are qualities of those who have found “inner light,” those who have endured personal confrontation and recognized that life is not always about our plans, but rather what life has planned for us. His proposed bucket list includes:

• The Humility Shift, or honesty and self-awareness in the age of self-centeredness
• Self-Defeat, or the ability to confront our weaknesses
• The Dependency Leap, or the reliance on deep...

On “I Want My Snapchat TV ,“ Bloomberg’s Sarah Frier and Lucas Shaw breaks down the ephemeral messaging service as having an ad model “that resembles TV and costs advertisers twice as much as Hulu or YouTube.”

They show a chart with a startling comparison of Snapchat’s demographics to that of other social media networks:

The question then remains: Relative to YouTube and Hulu, is it worth it to pay for Snapchat’s TV-like ad model, especially when faced with the challenge of having to tailor ads not only for the millennial demographic, but completely native to Snapchat’s mobile platform?

The issue for advertisers is that they, too, have to tailor ads specifically for Snapchat and make sure the ads and affiliated channels hold viewers’ attention, says Craig Atkinson, chief digital officer at PHD, an ad agency owned by marketing giant Omnicom Group. Because Snapchat users have to...

In “Dropbox Against The World”, J.J. McCorvey of Fast Company profiles Dropbox and its founder and CEO Drew Houston:

The stakes are clear: whomever controls your stuff may control the digital future. Over the last few years, storing and sharing data in the cloud has become an almost ubiquitous habit. Conventional wisdom had been that cloud-based storage was a commodity business, a digital file cabinet. But a better metaphor for the potential of cloud-based storage might be a portable office. “Your whole computing environment ought to follow you around,” explains Houston. “Your financial records, your health information, your music playlist … anything that’s ‘mine.’ It’s a pretty long list.” Better yet, you should eventually be able to interact seamlessly with everything in that portable office: work on documents with colleagues, send email, chronicle inventory. About storage, he says...

An old blog post from Netscape founder and now venture capitalist Marc Andreessen has recently resurfaced on Twitter. It’s about luck, specifically as it’s based on the four types of Chance from the book Chase, Chance, and Creativity by neurologist and philosopher Dr. James Austin. The entire post is really worth a read, but this was the basic synopsis from the book:

1. Chance I is completely impersonal; you can’t influence it.

2. Chance II favors those who have a persistent curiosity about many things coupled with an energetic willingness to experiment and explore.

3. Chance III favors those who have a sufficient background of sound knowledge plus special abilities in observing, remembering, recalling, and quickly forming significant new associations.

4. Chance IV favors those with distinctive, if not eccentric hobbies, personal lifestyles, and motor behaviors.

Andreessen emphasized what it...

Stewart Butterfield, founder and CEO of Slack, in a piece called “Rules of Business” from Issue 10 of Offscreen Magazine:

If you are just out to make money, god bless: I hope you make some money. If you just want awards or recognition or for others to think highly of you, I hope you get that too. But I don’t think anyone is really satisfied by fame or fortune. I find it incredibly satisfying (and gratifying, rewarding and pleasant) to honestly have done the best job I could have done on something and I believe that works for everyone else too. Being skillful and exercising your mastery is what you’re here to do. Doing anything less undermines the whole point of being alive.

That last point about mastery being the fundamental purpose of life is such a powerful idea. We are here to get better at what it is we set out to do.

Yasmina Reza, French playwright and author of the new novel Happy are the Happy, spoke about her book recently on The Atlantic series “By Heart,” in which authors discuss their favorite passages in literature.

The title of her new book was inspired by the last line of a Jorge Luis Borges poem “Fragments of an Apocryphal Gospel” which ends with:

Happy are those who are beloved, and those who love, and those who are without love.

Happy are the happy.

Her extraction of the passage is that happiness is not something achievable in the way most people think it is: it is not influenced by external forces, but rather it is “a disposition that you have inside of you.” And this notion, that happiness is not circumstantial but instead a being of the soul, can be applied to writing: mysterious, unconscious, and driven by moments encapsulated in time. She says (emphasis mine):

I think that...

Tom Tunguz, venture capitalist for Redpoint and one of the more informative writers on SaaS businesses, shared this post “The Importance Of Mindfulness When Managing A Startup” on his blog:

Crisis in startups is inevitable. Products break, deadlines are missed, legal issues arise, customers raise issue, employees quit, bad press circulates. To survive, founders and management teams have to respond well and quickly. In Managing The Unexpected, two University of Michigan Professors examine the characteristics and behaviors of great teams during crisis. Factory workers, miners, fire fighters, aircraft carrier flight deck hands, railroad operators and many others.

The authors call these teams HROs for High Reliability Organizations. HROs are distinguished by an ability to handle novel, risky situations. HROs combine distinct values and a certain type of leadership.

At their core, all of...