Mic Just Laid Off The Majority Of Its Over 100 Person Staff

By Peter Kafka
Recode

Mic raised more than $60 million to build a millennial-focused news company but couldn’t find a business model to support its costs, which include a one-floor office in Manhattan’s World Trade Center (an earlier version of this story incorrectly reported the size of Mic’s office).

Read more at Recode.

(THL) A lesson in this for entrepreneurs and startups. Keep your startup lean. Don't waste a penny on the trappings of success. Don't you dare go out and lease a Lexus your first big year.

Stay conservative in your hiring decisions. Keep your team small and mighty. Pick fewer employees who you can be responsible for and who will be responsible for you.

Instead of a shiny, new office, it's better to have an affordable one and the extra cash to fight another day. Cash is King. When you run out of cash it's Game Over.

Better to have a tiny, solid ball of steel and grow it slowly, than a ball the size of the Earth, if it's only a bubble after all.

Mic paid me to write a few articles for it when the company first got started back in 2013 (when it was still named PolicyMic). Sorry it didn't work out for everybody. That's a tough lesson to learn the hard way. Good luck, everybody. You'll land on your feet.

Obama keeps pushing the bipartisan religion of interventionism

Michael Scheuer is deadly accurate - foreign interventionism is a bipartisan religion (or disease, whichever you prefer). Too often, I believe, Americans think about Washington’s interventionism only as the actual physical intervention of U.S. military forces abroad in places where no U.S. interest is at risk. That activity certainly is intervention, but President Obama’s despicable decision last week to have his administration leak intelligence claiming that Israel has concluded an agreement with the government of Azerbaijan to allow its use of Azeri airfields for an air strike on Iran is just as much an unwarranted intervention by the United States government. Readers of this blog will know that I carry no brief for Israel, that I believe it is a state that is irrelevant to U.S. national interests, and one whose U.S.-citizen supporters are disloyal to America and involved in activities that compromise U.S. security and corrupt the U.S. political system. That said, Israel — l...

How Thorough a Brainwashing

Saw this on Facebook: Left this comment: It's more thorough of a wash job than that. They don't just believe they are not brainwashed, the question has never occurred to them and as long as they keep reading TIME and watching MTV, it's *impossible* for the question to occur to them. Oh brave new world, that has such people in it. EDIT: And one more thing-- don't ever stop considering what questions it is currently impossible to occur to you . This is what I've been thinking about a lot lately and I'm worried just how large and numerous my own blindspots are. The only solution is to be as intellectually curious as possible. To learn voraciously. To read things that challenge us. To read things that are hard for us to understand and then try to understand them. To expose ourselves to ideas far removed from our present culture and place on the timeline. Read old books. Read foreign books. Turn off the TV. You have already absorbed its biases and blindspots. ...

How To Gain More Twitter Followers

Earlier today, I wrote : "My goal is to write a book before the end of March. My goal is to spend no more than a week from start to publication, spending as much time as I need in order to get it done during that week. My goal is to give it away to you for free here on HumbleLibertarian.com. What's a goal you have? Something you may have been putting off for years? Something you could accomplish in one month if you were determined? If it's near-term enough of a goal, and specific enough of a goal, and you share it in the comments below, feel free to tell me how I can help you and I'll do whatever I can. If it's a libertarian / news / politics-related goal, my manner of help would be easy to determine. I could promote it, introduce you to someone via email, (etc.). If it's something apolitical like quit smoking cigarettes, start exercising, learn guitar, start a business, gain more Twitter followers, learn another language, eat a paleo diet, or...

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