Hi, I'm Paul Stamatiou.

Developing a responsive, Retina-friendly site (Part 1)

Joining Twitter

Designing a responsive, Retina-friendly site

Twitter Review: New Gmail iPhone app

Google recently released a new iPhone app for Gmail this week to much fanfare. After the third blog post citing how "slick" it was, I gave it a go myself. I currently use Sparrow for email on my iPhone. After having it installed for 5 minutes, I asked the Twitterverse what they think:

New Gmail iPhone app: discuss. I think the font-weight is too light. I want to read my email, not frame it and put it in an art gallery.

Culture

I recently read Alex MacCaw's article, What it’s like to work for Stripe, while on a much needed vacation. Alex, whom I first discovered via his post on asynchronous UIs and then traveling the world, does a great job discussing how Stripe operates. I have gotten to know the Stripes over the last year and am impressed at how well they execute. As he states, culture can be hard to define so I'd like to share a bit about what it means to me. Continue Reading →

My TechCrunch Post for First-time Startup Entrepreneurs

In case you didn't catch it, I wrote my first TechCrunch guest post earlier this month. It's aptly named First-Time Startup Entrepreneurs: Stop Fucking Around and it's my take on how first-time startuppers should work and get things done. Take a look at it and let me know what you think! Continue Reading →

Browser sync is the killer app

"Slow. Doesn't use the V8 engine. Second-class citizen on the iPhone. 3x slower than Mobile Safari because it uses WebViews. No full screen, no gestures. Horrible."

My First Hackintosh

A year ago I wrote about how I wanted to build a Hackintosh. Oddly enough, exactly a year later, I ended up getting around to it.

My roommate/cofounder Akshay had a Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS3R motherboard and Core 2 Quad CPU lying around from his last hackintosh (he's since upgrade to Sandy Bridge). I ended up putting getting a display, Continue Reading →

The Life of a Startup in Commits

Here's a GitHub impact graph of every Skribit code commit. Starting from November 2007 during Startup Weekend (hence all the contributors initially), progressing through to when I began working full-time on Skribit in 2009, when we slowed things down in mid-2010 and then pulled it offline in April 2011. It was a great ride!

Click for full-res. I believe I had two computers at the time so a few of those colors are mine.

Inside Votizen

It's no surprise that I'm enthralled by startups of all types. I am particularly interested in how startups work, their internal processes and culture, rather than their external pitch and product features. It was this interest that lead me to catch up with Semil Shah and Jason Putorti from Votizen one sunny afternoon in in Mountain View, just a block or two from 500 Startups and a mile from Y Combinator.

Semil and Jason at Votizen HQ

On Keeping Busy and Staying Sane

This was originally going to be a blog post about Venmo and the difficulty of growing such payments services, but I decided that didn't really have much content (here's the draft — 100% boring and not proofread). So here I am on a 6.5 hour flight from JFK to OAK, connected to a lovely ad-hoc wifi network my cofounder created so we can collaborate over Bonjour on this Gogo-less flight. We both ended up with middle seats on the same row and failed to get adjacent seats despite our best efforts at persuading each of the other four folks in this row to swap with us.

Photo Hack Day 2 NYC — Alexis Ohanian of Reddit/Y Combinator and David Karp of Tumblr to the right

Mini Review: Jawbone Jambox Bluetooth Speaker

Over the past two weeks of traveling I have been using the Jawbone Jambox wireless bluetooth speaker extensively. I have concluded that it is quite possible the best thing ever created for frequent travelers¹. Great for filling up your hotel room with sound² or your playing your favorite beats while showering before that big meeting.

The Jambox playing music via bluetooth from my MacBook Air at the Downtown Atlanta Marriott (3/10 Stammys) — though I usually have it play from my iPhone.

Ad-hoc Wifi in the Sky

How do you collaborate on work when you and your cofounder are on a 6.5 hour wifi-less flight and couldn't get adjacent seats? Create an ad-hoc wifi network and use bonjour messaging in iChat. I'm pretty sure we annoyed some people next to us...

On Venmo and Payments

When was the last time you were so enthused about a product you actually wanted to pay your friends to get on it with you? Venmo is that magical service for me. It's a fantastic product (consider me a brand ambassador if you will, I tell everyone about it) but over the last few months I have become intimately aware at how hard it must be for them to acquire and onboard new users. Let me backtrack a bit. Continue Reading →

iPhone Picture Stats

I recently ran out of space on my iPhone 4S and did my yearly ritual of moving last year's photos off of my phone. Here's what my iPhone-taken photo and video stats look like: Continue Reading →

R.I.P. 1920x1200

I'm at home in Houston for the holidays and of course working on Picplum stuff when I'm not chasing my 18-month old nephew around. I'm used to working on my 27-inch Apple display so hacking away on the Air's native resolution took was not quite for me. Most importantly after a few days of working my back started hurting Continue Reading →

CoffeeScript

After months of hearing about CoffeeScript and having it on my to-do list week after week, I finally got around to really reading up on it during my flight from SFO to IAH. I tweeted that I was in the middle of moving Picplum over to CoffeeScript and got no less than 10 people asking me why. Continue Reading →

Startup Idea: User Retention as a Service

It was the middle of our Y Combinator batch this summer. Akshay and I had a decently functioning version of Picplum that we were continuing to test and polish up. At the end of our office hours that day, Paul Graham said our product was good enough and that we should stop coding and start selling & marketing. I think about this quite often.

Picplum at YC office hours in July. Photo Credit: Garry Tan

Talking Startups and Picplum on BBC News

After a gracious introduction to the BBC by Mr Amit Gupta, I appeared in a short BBC News segment about the Silicon Valley startup scene as compared to the NYC startup community. Click the screenshot below to watch the video!

On BBC News talking about Silicon Valley, startups and Picplum

DNSCrypt

Head over to OpenDNS and install DNSCrypt for Mac. DNSCrypt, in a nutshell, encrypts all DNS traffic between you and OpenDNS. If you've been reading my blog since the early days, you've already been up to date on what their primary product does Continue Reading →