Peter Hagen

With nothing more than an idea and a passion for making things happen, I started a new group on meetup.com called We Make the Internet, and began promoting the first social event at one of my favorite Cleveland breweries, Noble Beast. It was clear that the community was hungry for this kind of thing: about 40 people showed up to that first event.

As all of this unfolded, I spoke twice with Substack’s co-founders. And while they asked that those conversations be off the record, my understanding from our conversations — based on material they had shared with me in writing — was that in the future they would regard explicitly Nazi and pro-Holocaust material to be a violation of their existing... See more

There is an all out war for search supremacy right now between two trillion dollar companies, with one having everything to win and the other everything to lose. In those circumstances a standard VC model of buying growth does not work even if you have a huge war chest, as you will be outspent no matter how big your investors are.

As a founder of a... See more

But with all the recent blather of technology companies changing the world, I’ve become a bit more jaded of late on the impact of business given folks are so quick and cavalier in how they define changing the world. Atlas reaffirmed for me the power of and the good that businesses can do in a community if it’s there long enough. There are several... See more

Fly.io has always run on its own hardware. There are fun, technical, “control your own destiny” reasons to rack hardware instead of layering on top of commodity clouds. But it’s really just economics. If you want to get people to build apps on your platform, you need a shot at being around 10 years from now. Hardware is what makes the margins work.

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I write games so ugly that I am showered with contempt, and yet I make money! I’ll have a full, lifelong career! If I can have so many flaws and still succeed, you can too!

Figure out what you are really good at doing. Sell that.

Make your dream real.

Get it out the door, whatever it takes, whatever corners you have to cut. If you’re better than me... See more

That split between the big audience on Facebook and the influential audience on Twitter was instantly obvious to anyone in any newsroom who ever cared to look. Sicha is right to note that Twitter never sent any amount of meaningful traffic to any website — it was Facebook traffic that warped most digital media executives into futile aspirations of... See more