It’s a great time to not own things and to rent them instead. Cars with GetAround, rides with Lyft, houses with AirBnB, and recently, you can rent a motorcycle online with Twisted Road. — In a nutshell, Twisted Road is a website that lets you rent out your motorcycles to other riders, or rent a motorcycle from a fellow motorcyclist. The first reaction any of you might have to renting out your motorcycle to others is: NOT MY BABY! And with good reasons. …

What it took for us to reach what seemed like an impossible milestone — 100,000 monthly views. The hardest part has been overcoming ourselves. — I have a confession to make: I started writing this article on Hooshmand.net a long, long time ago, well before we reached even a tenth of our current traffic. …

My partner (in many things) Jo Hyun is launching a new business, called “ The Salon Startup”. I wanted to analyse her startup process to show what it takes to open a new business online. If you’re super keen to find out what the business is, Jo is going to…

There are lots of people out there selling “search engine optimisation” snake oil. They say “SEO doesn’t have to be hard” and sell you a big book of how to do it “easily”, with a ton of products, courses, or expensive consulting fees you should buy. — But SEO is really quite easy: it’s about thinking and communicating like a human. In this guide… SEO in one sentence Why the sentence holds true Your website has to be fast, so people wait for it to load

You might have heard people claim that even though people of a “certain country in Africa, Asia or the Caribbean” speak English as their main language, that they don’t speak it “well”. This is not just myopic and shallow — at best, it’s ignorant, and at worst, racist. — And if this is news to you, well, here’s a little colour for next time you visit somewhere like Singapore, Kenya, Nigeria, the Philippines, where English is both the primary official language and a social lingua franca, or even Uganda, China, India, where anyone who’s gone to school speaks English…

Being called a lao wai in China, agaanib in Egypt and wazungu in East Africa, and how it feels to finally be the same, but only as one of the “foreigners”. — On a private travel forum, there was a long thread in which women of varying ethnicity were talking about how difficult it is to travel while being black, Asian or some other ethnicity. …

Hiring for operations is just as hard as for engineering. Here’s my introductory guide on how to do it. — This is one thing everyone I’ve spoken to in the “marketplaces” industry agrees on: It’s really hard to hire operations talent. It’s also my own experience, after having worked for Lyft, Groupon and consulted to a few smaller companies in the space (like Wind, pictured above). I learned long ago…

There are informal economies filling gaps between reality and public or commercial services in every society. New York once had its black cabs to fill the void between people who needed jobs and those who couldn’t get a taxi. India has “tiffins”, a system of local women preparing and distributing…