The $100K Taxi Ride, One Year Later

http://baydin.com/blog/2011/09/the-100k-taxi-rideone-year-later/

by craigkerstiens • 15 years ago

118 28 15 years ago

acangiano• 15 years ago

What's wrong with East Coast VCs? Do they lack money, vision, or both? It's not the first time I hear people with great ideas complaining about their inability to get funded, only to receive decent investments the moment they move to Silicon Valley.

acgourley• 15 years ago

To be fair, without proof that those investments have paid off you could use those datapoints to ask whats wrong with SV VC's

abbasmehdi3• 15 years ago

"without proof that those investments have paid off" <-- Are you serious? You cannot think of SV VC funded companies that have paid off?

kloncks• 15 years ago

Faced similar situation.

My thoughts (based on my very limited experience) are that East Coast VCs seem to be more risk-averse.

Which makes sense. It's easier to be more risky when you know investors down the street who have made 1000x with the who's who of the Internet.

wisty• 15 years ago

Maybe they are worse at assessing value. If a VC has no real idea what the value of a company is, they have to make a conservative valuation, to avoid being conned. They will also take longer to do the due diligence. A good VC may be able to make a good guess whether a company is worth investing in just by speaking to the founders for a few hours. A less skilled VC might take weeks, and still have no idea, so they can only offer a lowball bid.

vaksel• 15 years ago

East coast VCs tend to invest in finance and drug companies

zackattack• 15 years ago

I suspect they lack vision and knowledge of how scrappy technology hacks can provide massive value. They have no idea how every most developers on Hacker News are capable of inventing "simple machines" with <5kloc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_machine

rbritton2• 15 years ago

Server seems a bit overloaded. Cache: http://baydin.com.nyud.net/blog/2011/09/the-100k-taxi-rideon...

kylek• 15 years ago

A for effort! But this one is timing out for me too :/

Edit: working now!

rbritton2• 15 years ago

There's one inline image it hasn't managed to get through to grab yet, but it seems to have snagged the rest.

moah2• 15 years ago

Here is a Google cached version. Sorry about this guys.

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

kapilkale• 15 years ago

Withdrawn. That was the old article.

moah2• 15 years ago

It's resolved now. Thanks for posting the cached links guys.

bryanallen22• 15 years ago

Site text can be read here: http://viewtext.org/article?url=http://baydin.com/blog/2011/...

mathattack• 15 years ago

Good to see he hasn't let it get to his head. Still eating ramen suggests they're scrappy, and his post is about customers rather than an exit.

lionhearted• 15 years ago

Boomerang for Gmail is a really nice product - I recommend trying it if you haven't yet.

It give you a "Send Later" option in email, which helps if you want to write a reply but don't want it to go out yet - for instance, if you want to say "The blog post is live now," but the post won't be live for another three hours.

It's pretty cool. You wouldn't even realize how useful it is until you try it. Check it out.

Edit: http://www.boomeranggmail.com

bostonvaulter2• 15 years ago

Wow, I've wanted something nearly exactly like this for a long time. But for me "Send Later" is one of the lowest value functions (I think gmail already has a lab that does this). Instead I like an email re-appearing in my inbox if no-one has responded to it in a few days so that I can then follow up on it. Their email game seems pretty nice too, although I wish it had keyboard shortcuts as well.

pardo• 15 years ago

It's not exactly the same as the function you define, but using Google Apps Script you can get a Snooze function pretty easily: http://googleappsdeveloper.blogspot.com/2011/07/gmail-snooze...

With less than an hour of work, I bet you can modify the script to make exactly what you want. Actually, it seems that most of Boomerang's functionalities could be substituted for free with a couple of Google Apps Scripts.

nicksergeant• 15 years ago

I think you're looking for http://www.followupthen.com/

gmazzotti• 15 years ago

You have a really good product!

iamelgringo• 15 years ago

I love what Dave has been doing from an investment perspective, and the accelerator program that 500 startups has set up is top notch.

I haven't heard a bad thing about him from any of the startups that he's invested in... aside from the fact that he's really, really hard to get a hold of.

For all the talk of the Silicon Valley Bubble in the NYT, and the Economist, etc..... the majority of "silly" fundings you read about in the main stream press end up having a back story like this... revenue, serious traction, founders that have been working their asses off eating ramen noodles for years, etc...

happyfeet• 15 years ago

Fantastic product. Along with rapportive, I find this to be the best product that compliments gmail. Thanks mate.

abbasmehdi3• 15 years ago

My goodness!! I so need this!! I saw it's just $29 for a license. Just spoke with my boss and she said lets buy for the team. I’m looking for a group license (not every employee will use a CC for a license). By the way, she and I are both shocked by how cheap this is. We would have even paid you more than twice that much for each license. Also, we would want to pay once, and then use for many, for example, we would need 7 or 8 licenses and make it available to 6 people so they can, if they so choose, use the service.

This is corporate America speaking btw.

trocker• 15 years ago

Its really pretty unbelievable that life takes such turns.These happen every once in a while. Steve Jobs says - you cant connect the dots looking forward,it is only possible looking backwards.What if a person just believed in his destiny and went off with only one belief that dots are going to connect for sure someday, and then they don't? Many must have tried to connect the dots but were unsuccessful. For all the entrepreneurs in the world,I think,it all boils down to this: 'Is it worth it, if the dots don't connect? Will they not complain that they should've taken the safe route?'. If the answer for both the questions are 'yes' for once,never think again - its only going to waste valuable time.

iag• 15 years ago

Congrats baydin team!

The $100K Taxi Ride, One Year Later

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