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It was Zlio not Zilo (Yep, I know it was a poor name)

Wix and Zlio: We had the same investor. Mangrove. They discovered Wix when they came to Israel for a Zlio Board. They know own 25% of Wix.

We don't think Google did something intentionally We worked a lot with them.

They posted that on their Adsense blog 1 month before the blacklisting : http://adsense.blogspot.com/2007/08/adsense-api-on-e-commerc...

We had no SEO team before the blacklisting.

We gave to all of our members/stores owners the possibility to customize their store template.

Right. We negociated that the day after. They wanted to buy the 1 year old company (3 people) for $10M

Thanks ;-)

The guy who founded this company is the guy who invented oauth ;-)

I want it now!! But I bought a Sony E-Reader before a Kindle 5 years ago. Their customer service was very bad :(

I love it! ;) Just afraid that many trolls will use it...

Do you mean that only bankers can afford a watch ? ;-)

It was a nice idea but I think Swatch made a big mistake by taking their headquarters as the base to calculate it.

It needed to be an independant concept to bring other companies/competitors on board.

We sold Sparrow to Google with this model and the founders are now millionnaires. but this is not what I'm saying. You're reaching profitability first and you're building a big company just after. Market Size is the most important but it's not because your market size is big that you have to take risk and hit the wall without enough cash to survive. Profitability/Breakeven is giving you the time to raise as much money you need/want

Not in our case, we love startups reaching profitability by just raising a seed round. It's most of the time the best way to confirm that the business model is right.

It's also easier to raise a big round after that, invest a lot and grow.

1/ For next rounds, we are almost all the time leaving our seat to the new investor (if it's a good/great one. Not if it's a shark VC) More than 50% of our 2010/ 2011/2012 investments raised a Series A, Series B and more. So nope, you're not right. We have excellent reputation in the ecosystem.

We invested in 220 startups. Had this right to join board everywhere and never used it until now but I still prefer to keep this right.

2/ Discordance between cofounders (in case they are not sharing the same strategy) is not always a startup implosion. Sometimes we just need to come and become the 3rd vote who can decide which founder strategy we will choose.

As far as I know, it's $50K for 5% not $100K

So exactly the same postmoney valuation.

No investment in Brazil yet but some in Argentina. The country can count but we are investing everywhere and Brazil is an enormous market.

About the 5 days, we will do our best to give an answer in 5 days. If not, it means that we are not doing our job well ;-)

Agree with you, it's certainly better to be at the same place, but there are hundreds of counterexamples of huge successes with VCs not living near the companies. In Europe, Israel, Russia, we have plenty of them.

We are also investing with a lot of local investors and they are sometimes managing the local relationship (or mostly making things worse :-()

Last but not least, many of our companies are targeting a local market (China, India, Pakistan, Switzerland, France, Argentina, UK, Germany...). They have nothing to do in the Silicon Valley.

The YC model is awesome. No doubt on that. but there is room for many other models. (and thanks God, we invested in Rapportive before they went to YC ;-)).

Check also what my partner is building : 1000Startups, the biggest incubator in the world in the center of Paris http://1000startups.fr/en/

Nope . It depends where you are. but really, it's very easy to find online.

Yep and we love IOT startups! Check some of our investments http://petnet.io http//www.greenboxhq.com

Payroll is obligatory for tax reasons...

Check the SLA on the homepage: "-request the right to a board seat (2 founders, 1 investor) but we do not take the seat unless required to solve founder conflicts and have no intention to tell you how to run your company."

1) - Never borrow from your family when you're launching a company. You have more chance to fail and will never be able to reimburse. - You need to have a rich family if you want to do that. Did you already borrowed 150K to your family to launch your startup?

2) -We are investing in team when at least one founder is a developer if not all... So $150K is not to hire people. -All developers are not in the Silicon Valley. You can find developers at much lower price in many countries and we are investing everywhere.

About weekly updates, I think it's critical for founders to have to write a 3 lines weekly update but not only for us, investors, but also for their team , cofounders and themselves. It's helping focusing on the right thing each week and increase performance.

Some of our founders are sending an update every 48 hours...

I think we invested in 60 US companies ;-) No problem to discuss with them. We don't always need to do that in real time. Email is good for 99% of subjects.

All the projects submitted to Kima15 since the launch 3 hours ago are more than a prototype. Real products with customers already...

One of our companies FormLabs raised $19M after our seed round ;-) You can imagine the kind of valuation they got... Pret d'Union, French Lending Club clone raised $5M Sparrow has been acquired by Google

Very difficult to compare both programs and it's not the goal to compete against anyone.

Oups, for your second question.

Kima15 is not dedicated to fund prototype only. Some companies with V1 are also great targets for it. All the projects we received since the launch 3 hours ago are all startups with a real product.

If the startup is at a later stage, we will be happy to check it through Kima Ventures. It can take just a little longer.

AirBnb & Dropbox were very risky projects like any other projects in this planet. There are many hidden awesome companies on this planet and we are targetting this one.

I'm sure we will invest in a future AirBnb or Dropbox. We just need a little time ;-)

Ah ah ;-) I love HN.

I'm not sleeping enough and have 10 children ;-)

All our startups are discussing with me by email all day. Not sure will be able to answer to everyone when we will have 800 startups but for the moment, that's ok because working exclusively by email.

We are not board member but are here to help all the time not only during boards ;-)

Nope, we need a lawyer everywhere to issue shares certificate and doing many other things.

Hello Paul

Great numbers, we really admire a lot what you're doing at YC but not all companies want to join an accelerator or relocate and not all companies are accepted by YC ;-)

We see Kima15 as a different offer for different founders all over the world who want to raise funding quickly and when they need it.