diolpah

Brilliant judgement you've made of someone you don't know. I'm sure this particular instance of incivility will garner you plenty of upvotes, however.

My understanding of the "civility" standard is whether I would say it in person. My comments do pass this test.

This is Hacker News, where everything anointed by Larry and Sergei is to be revered and worshiped by all, forever and ever, amen.

Spot on. It's different this time.

Sure, it surprised us all when revenues and earnings turned out to actually matter in 2000, but it's 2011 now, man, and the future's so bright I've got to wear shades! The fact that I can download 14,511 apps that allow you to share photos of your cats is the only indication you need that we're living in the post-earnings era.

Making money is for squares. As long as you can line up that Series P round, the party's still on, man. Rock it, don't block it.

What exactly do you mean by "large customers"? We run several million dollars worth of credit card transactions per year( through cybersource and authorize.net right now ), and we pay at or near the wholesale interchange rate.

Even so, our accounting department still can't fully untangle the mess of foreign transfer and conversion fees, float-related costs, gateway fees, amex vs visa discount rate differentials, pci compliance service fees, and all the other horrible shit that Stripe eats for you, in order to give me a straight answer as to whether or not we currently pay more or less than 0.30 + 2.9%.

This is not a hit on our accountants, cybersource, stripe, or our merchant bank - just making the point that it's not so easy to state categorically that Stripe's fees will turn off somewhat larger volume customers.

"and really who isn't unhappy with the world right now?"

Most people who are capable of rationally evaluating the standards of living we currently enjoy versus that of any other point in human history usually aren't that unhappy with the world right now.

I say this in the general sense; of course at any given time, N individuals will be hitting the bottom of the barrel, but the barrel is getting shallower and shallower with each generation.

Edit: Thanks for the downvotes; apparently I'm factually incorrect, and the Global Human Development Index is actually declining?

I must be living in a different version of the United States than the author is. I don't think I've ever experienced the kind of false optimistic outlook referred to here. Is this a Silicon Valley thing?

Most people I talk to about our business are fairly realistic about the challenges we face, or progress thus far, etc.

It's been many years; We've been building this company fulltime since 2005, and on a part time basis since 2002. Bootstrapping is a slog, since you make expansionary investments from cash flow only.

Yes, I have a co-founder. In fact, he's the majority owner.

1000 years? That is a timeframe long enough to virtually guarantee the occurrence of the Singularity, so I would have to say Vinge/Kurzweil/Eliezer/Goertzel/De Garis, or whomever switches on the first self-modifying artificial general intelligence.

Ok, I will make a long story short, here.

My current business began as a side project many years ago. At first, I was building/managing the technical aspect of the business( website, integration, inventory systems, fulfillment systems, etc )remotely on an average basis of 20 hours per week. I say average because some weeks I did nothing, and other weeks I worked more than my "day job".

Growth was so strong that I ultimately made the decision to jump ship from my prior company and make my current company a fulltime endeavor. It was one of the most difficult decisions I've made in my life, as the cofounder of my prior company was very close.

During this time, we've grown from < $100k/y revenues to > $5mm ( making an effort to be vague here ), and still enjoying good growth. We are profitable and never took a dime of VC.

Hopefully this anecdote answers your question sufficiently.

I've been noticing this for about half a year now, particularly when googling for technical documentation.

Google is falling down on its core product, because they can..

kloncks is probably utilizing hyperbole in making comparisons with the great thinkers of western civilization.

That said, we do still talk about Edison, Carnegie, and Rockefeller, over a century later. A millennium? Probably not, but the point is valid, even if off by roughly half an order of magnitude.

While true, that doesn't really say much.

I'll take a wild guess, predicated on the fact that twitter is another social platform that's difficult to monetize: sponsored pinboards.

My company would pay to have "sponsored pinboards" all day long if the net ROI was positive. But that's a huge "if".

Yes, but with links. So it's definitely worth billions.

Edit: Now that I've actually looked at the site to ensure I wasn't speaking out of ignorance, I noticed that the external links are not rel="nofollow". This will be a brilliant breeding ground for SEO spam.

...you pitched a specific name but didn't register the domain names? This is smelling a little fishy now.

Well, I think the question of "who pays for it", while important, is orthogonal to this particular issue, which is about increasing the available supply.

If a poor but healthy south asian immigrant wants startup capital to open a restaurant, and Amit wants a long and fruitful life, a legal market that allowed such a transaction would dramatically increase the supply of available materials. And it may even be possible that this increased supply would drive the end cost of living tissue down.

Now to be clear, I don't want to detract from Amit's immediate issue - this thread should be about helping him, not lead off a discussion that has nothing do to with his immediate problem( nobody here is going to change the legal framework within a month ). But I would like to at least understand the downsides to allowing markets in living tissue.

Here's an unpopular thought, but one that may not be on the list of "things too taboo to think about" for HN readers.

What if marrow donation was a for-profit industry, or at the very least a nonprofit or government-run industry that allowed people to sell their marrow at market prices? Would Amit and thousands of others in his position be resorting to begging for access to life-saving treatments, or being put on waiting lists that are far too long relative to their prognosis?

My guess is no, with the exception of people too poor to afford access to such materials - which are already so cost prohibitive that this is already a problem. I've never understood why the notion of making a market in organs and other medical materials is such taboo.

Internet white knights are far more prevalent than you realize.

Well, it doesn't produce the correct result for us, where bandwidth costs are more than 7 times storage costs, so we get our warning far too late.

Spot on. And in 2007, the subprime housing crisis was "contained". Totally unreasonable to suspect that debt default contagion actually happens. Carry on, nothing to see here.

It wasn't. The "tea party" was kicked off inadvertently by Rick Santelli on CNBC, of all places. He never intended it, but it was his words that got the ball rolling.

I don't agree with cpercival's comments, and I am quite saddened by the loss of Steve - more so than I would have expected.

But it should be pointed out that the comments in no way reflect poorly on Tarsnap. It's a fantastic product.

(other than the fact that the account balance alerts only consider storage used, not traffic charges. Grr.)

edit: Downvoted already? For being a satisfied customer? Really?

I understand the direction you're going in, and in order to scale, it's inevitable. I don't begrudge you that.

But my understanding is that in the past, you guys made something of an implicit guarantee that you would look at all submissions and be the point of introduction for great companies who don't yet already have an introduction. The necessary shift you are now making will eliminate this opening.

You mention that there is a community of gatekeepers and scouts, but I really don't see it this way. One cannot, by policy, contact anyone on the site without already having a "follower" relationship with them.

It would be nice to see a handful of angels/vcs take upon this mantle of being the go-to talent scout for great but unconnected businesses. There's no reason these people couldn't use AngelList as the platform on which to do it, of course.

Aggressively investing? That wording suggests to me that VCs are actively cold-calling or spamming companies with indications of interest. I assume you don't actually mean this.

"Its pre-mature reputation optimization. You want to build your rep after you've proven delivering value to customers.. the product should speak for itself."

There's another side to this story. Once you've built the product, have the customers, cash flow, and earnings, you're left with a vacuum in the social sphere. You don't know anybody other than your customers and vendors.

And if you try to raise money at that point( expansion, growth, acquisition, etc ), you can't get so much as a single introduction because you don't know anybody. The reality is that product does not speak for itself.

This effort to close the remaining 30% will make the primacy of social proof and popularity over team/product/traction/revenue/earnings even more powerful on AngelList.

It sounds like there is a fantastic opening here for other people in the angel/vc community to take on the task of being a gatekeeper or "talent scout" of sorts for excellent businesses who don't already have the requisite social proof.

Thanks for the story, and congratulations on your success. You helped give me a better picture of how one goes about building social proof with the investor class.

We don't actually need funding, as we have successfully bootstrapped our business and are quite profitable. But we set up a profile on AL anyway, in case we ever do decide to shake the money tree to accelerate growth beyond what our cash flow permits, in the future. Naturally, we have 0 followers.

Interestingly, 42 Floors (http://angel.co/42-floors) has done the same thing, and they have managed 112 followers despite not seeking funding.

Case in point. Your social proof enabled you to "be seen" on AngelList. Hundreds of other startups go entirely unseen and unnoticed on AngelList because of their low follower count and nonexistent social proof, regardless of team, idea, product, traction, revenue, or earnings.

YMMV indeed. AngelList only works for those companies who already have preexisting connections to the angel/VC community. For companies with little or no existing social proof, AngelList is shockingly ineffective.