Netflix brought movies to your house, and a Seattle-based startup named TRED would like to bring cars you’re interested in buying to your house for you to test-drive, to see how it fits in your garage, etc. This is fine! But is it really necessary? It seems to solve a non-problem, which is having to go to a dealership to test out a car and see if you like it, but I suppose if you don’t have a ride to get to a dealership in the first place, this could be your answer.

Job interviews are becoming more like first dates. The employment site Glassdoor has collected 285,000 questions asked by hiring managers, and the following four rank among 2012’s 50 most common, though they have little to do with work: What’s your favorite movie? What’s your favorite website? What’s the last book you read for fun? What makes you uncomfortable? Over the last couple of years, spokesman Scott Dobroski says, the site has found “a significant rise in questions asked about cultural fit.”

Bloomberg Businessweek has a recent piece looking at interview questions companies ask applicants in order to figure out whether or not someone will be “cultural fit” in their organization. From my own experience, cultural fit is something especially valued at startup companies, and can often be more important than actual experience:

“I once hired a woman who really didn’t have the right background or experience for the job, but who I hit it off with during the interview,” says Rebecca Grossman-Cohen, a marketing executive at News Corp. “And because we got along so well, I was able to train her easily, and she ended up doing great things for us.”

Thankfully, I’ve never been asked any of these “first date” sort of questions on any job interviews I’ve ever been on (in my case, employers just want to know if you can write and report, and see examples). What makes me uncomfortable? Employers asking me first date questions during a job interview.

My business partner, Steve Bristol, and I really used to put in major hours the first years of the company. We were working 80+ a week. After working ourselves to a point of being burned out we realized that if we put in 40 x 2 hours the company didn’t move forward 2x faster. In fact those extra 40 hour were less productive than the first 40 hours. The reality is you’ll never be “done” with your work, you’ll never finish all the tasks, build all the features and have the perfect design. At the end of the day, around 4 pm, we close our laptops and go home.

David Hauser, a founder of several startups, talked to other entrepreners about what they wished they knew before working at their first startup. The above advice by Nick Francis, the co-founder of Help Scout, is something I always need to remind myself to do, which is to make sure that any extra hours you put in are being used effectively. If they’re not, shut it all down, and do something better with your time, like sleep.

Fictive Kin (of gimme bar and teux duex) is a super cool company, and they just hit the super cool company jackpot by signing with betaworks.

Here’s how the Fictive Kin folks explain the deal (which is a contract for “a couple million,” according to TechCrunch):

It means we’re now working closely with betaworks on our future projects. Fictive Kin is still an independent entity, but the products we build will ultimately be taken on by betaworks and grown in to full-fledged companies. This allows us to focus ruthlessly on building products (something we know well) while entrusting betaworks with the work of growing those products into great teams and companies (one of the many things they do well).

The closest examples we can think of [for deals like this] are the various studio deals in Hollywood. We’ve been describing it as a sort of Disney / Pixar deal except it’s Disney when Walt was there, not Eisner.

So baaaaaasiicccalllly, they get to make cool stuff without worrying about raising funding or monetizing, because they already have the funding, and it will be betaworks’ job to further monetize the stuff.  This is cool. This is really cool. High fives for everyone.

• “the Zipcar for bikes”

• “the Zipcar for electric scooters” 

• “the Zipcar of primary healthcare” 

• “the Zipcar of European vacations” 

• “the Zipcar of the sea” 

Most of the icons of tech hacked phone lines, cracked game codes, and engaged in other border-line illicit behavior growing up. It’s that same belief that you aren’t bound by the normal rules and conventions of the world that enable people to become entrepreneurs to begin with. Without it we wouldn’t have Intel, Apple, PayPal, Facebook, or myriad other tech giants that have changed the world.

But this is also a place that’s held together by tenuous relationships of trust between those with millions of dollars and those with million-dollar ideas. Angel investing is the purest form of that. It’s one person who has made it and believes in you, putting his hard earned money behind your dream. As an entrepreneur and an advocate for entrepreneurs, I worry about anything that violates that trust, well meaning as the intentions may — or may not — be.

—PandoDaily’s Sarah Lacy explains how the Silicon Valley works as part of a larger and more complicated (to me) report on a new and possibly tricky trend in start-up funding.

Basically: There are venture capitalists and there are angel investors. VCs work at huge firms with partners and investors, and when they invest in a company, they’re all in, providing resources, guidance, oversight, and lots and lots of money. Angels are individuals who are investing smaller amounts of their own own money. A startup might have many angel investors at first, and then when they’re ready to launch, get VC funding. Lacy reports that there are some folks—”deal scouts”— who are posing as angels, but the money they’re investing is actually coming from VCs.

At least I think that is what she’s saying. (I don’t completely understand what happened in The Social Network, so, you know.) But it’s really important that we all learn this stuff so when it’s time to get investors for our sick startups, we know what’s up.

I know that I speak for many millions of Europeans when I express the hope that Starbucks will never make any profit in Europe and leave us alone. We see its intrusion into the heart of our culture not as a contribution that enriches it, but as a crude expression of marketing prowess that can only impoverish numerous small café operators.

Oh gosh, I love reading letters to the editors (hint: write me letters!), and this letter to the New York Times in response to this article about Starbucks, could basically come from Brooklyn, or Portland, or some other place where the young and hip live and prefer to get their coffee from their local cafés.

But I don’t mind Starbucks so much! I think their coffee is fine. There is a Starbucks next to the Awl offices, and that is where I grab a coffee before I start my morning blogging. There is actually a Stumptown located x blocks from the office, but I am too lazy to walk there! Stumptown coffee is good, but — a bit pricey? At my old job, I was going to an office where there was free coffee brewing in a pot next to the refrigerator that no one used to store their homemade lunches, because everyone just ate out all the time (the refrigerator mostly contained free soda and beers for everyone because startups like to provide perks like that). And now I’m spending $50 a month on coffee! That’s $50 I wasn’t spending before, which means there will have to be changes. To be continued…

Photo Credit: Dimitri N.