@satjot - can "they" detect what's installed on your smartphone? If yes, I can see how deep-linking would be a great feature for apps that have high value repeat purchases.
HN user
allantyoung
Founder of Runway http://runway.is
co-founder at LaunchHear YC W2010
participant at Seth Godin's SAMBA program
co-founder at MediaForge
venture capital investments at University Venture Fund
http://hnofficehours.com/profile/allantyoung/
Congrats Jon! What wonderful news. We still need to grab dim sum with our families!
Downtown Oakland is awesome. Lot's of good food around especially if you don't mind walking a few blocks to Chinatown and you love Chinese food. BART gets you to Berkeley, San Francisco or further east if you're looking for cheap housing.
If you're ever near the Oakland Tribune Tower, ping me and I'll buy coffee/beer.
I feel the same way about Oakland. It's a few minutes from a major university in Berkeley that cranks out research, technology, and talent. Bryan, if you're ever near the Oakland Tribune Tower, let me buy you coffee or beer.
Darius and I were in the same batch at YC and he was one of those guys you just thought would outshine everyone else.
My takeaway from this excellent post was that once you start fundraising, you need to be on the hunt 100% of the time. I see too many co-founders sharing fundraising duties and product development duties at the same time. The idea is that you should have already spent enough time building a product that is at least partially compelling and showing some traction. Once you set out to raise funding, you can't effectively skip between building product and talking to investors.
Care to elaborate? I just found your comment interesting but I'd like to know what you're talking about.
If this company can pull it off, it'll have something far more substantive than a resume or profile on LinkedIn. As an art, software engineering lends itself to opinions and kudos from the community. As a science, software engineering lends itself to measurable outcomes and approximations of difficulty and impact. I'd much rather look for talent through Geekli.st than through Monster, Craigslist, or LinkedIn.
Disclaimer: I know the founders and am crossing my fingers for their success.
Jessica - you always look like the happiest person in the world. It is infectious.
Where is there a current and crowd-updated list of accelerators? Does that exist?
Be the change you'd like to see.
It's unfortunate a few knuckleheads decided to "teach you a lesson." You can't please everyone.
Thank you for wanting to contribute to the community and giving a gift to people who were not confident of their CVs and resumes. I'm sure you were able to help at least one person drastically change their CV for the better.
Can you elaborate on your "edge" when you worked as a recruiter with a tech background?
Care to elaborate a bit? I think it would be very helpful for me and some others.
Inside investors (those who invested pre-IPO) cannot "dump hard on day 1." In all IPO cases, insiders have a lockup period, generally between 60-90 days before they can sell any stock whatsoever. The only stock being "dumped" is the block of stock being sold in the IPO.
Never mind - that statement referred to a startup in a recent batch while Wufoo was part of a much earlier batch.
Interesting to note that there are probably a few Wufoos in the total YC universe that reached meaningful profitability without having to raise more money.
Those are the ones worth emulating even though they don't get nearly the amount of attention as ones raising mega vc rounds.
My guess would be Wufoo.
While your advice makes a lot of sense, I think they can definitely get some traction with this idea.
Here is a wrinkle that I think could work. Limit it to everyone that got an interview but didn't get in.
Buffett may be a huge anomaly but he probably never had close to 50 positions in his stock portfolio at any one time.
Some of the best investors concentrate.
Can you point to any multi-cultural societies that are economically and socially balanced between ethnicities?
Would such a society be less prone to looting in the event of a disaster?
Hey this was a very entertaining writeup by misstatiana. I liked sort of running around with these guys from finance on Wall Street to China to cream puff franchises to YC. I got the sense that Eddy and Daishin are two guys who know how to have fun and kick butt at the same time.
No, it shouldn't count as revenue. The money owed to merchants is considered a liability and is probably treated as Accounts Payable.
I suppose that we'll have a revival in the way we measure employees. Not everything can be put into neat metrics but there are probably lot of factors and outputs we haven't even begun to put together in a systematic way.
Knowing who your "Guys Who Quietly Gets Things Done" are would be invaluable for any enterprise. Would they pay for a tool to help them identify and retain these quiet superstars? I think so.
This should really read "Gnip offers metered pricing for firehouse of tweets"
This is welcome news. Aside from search engines, no one wants to drink the entire firehose. Why doesn't Twitter just enter the monitoring business itself?
Except that Groupon is from Chicago.
I sometimes describe something as 'insightful' when it fundamentally changes my point of view or long-held beliefs.
But why do we need to fundamentally shake someone's core behavior or worldview? By definition, most startup ideas are not gamechangers. They're merely modest solutions that require a lot of hard work to produce.
I do agree that if you arrive at an unexpected psychological insight, you have an opportunity to change culture and create massive value. But that would be an unrealistic expectation for every startup to fulfill.
His firm already went out of business. He states that he will write a post-mortem at some point in the future.
I like the post-mortem meme sweeping startup world; I find them very enlightening.
Hasn't there been instances where two YC startups working in a related space end up merging or one acquiring the other?
Did you go down the route of hiring pros first and then just decided to go with friends for the voice talent?
One of the founders in the YC W2010 batch had a very similar idea before abandoning it for something else.
Your decision to build on top of Twilio makes a lot of sense.
There is only a limited amount of radio stations in this country. And most of them are owned by a handful of parent companies. This is a good and bad thing. Good because you can easily find the buyers. Bad because this could turn into a time consuming enterprise sales process. And this isn't something you sell on the web with a website.
Good luck! I'm thinking there could be tremendous data collection value in this business model if you add a few more features after you've successfully sold the MVP.
Can you link to this special one-time tax exclusion? It would help tremendously for startup founders to understand this potential incentive. If this one-time exclusion is set to expire, then startup founders will want to consider accelerating their fundraising plans.
Don't "they" know that the Appleseed family is very litigious?