liquimoon

YC is producing lots of fluffy content lately.

I was very disappointed with the How to Build the Future series. Particularly, the interview with Elon Musk. The quality of the questions was mediocre at best.

And the podcasts are just about showcasing YC companies. As an entrepreneur, I basically got zero value from these.

PG should write more essays. Whenever one of them came out, I dropped whatever I was doing to read them.

Hmm, looks like the toolbelt website (https://toolbelt.heroku.com/) is not for the latest toolbelt?!

I updated using gem update and got the latest 3.35.1.

But then when I updated heroku gem, I got the deprecation warning... ! The `heroku` gem has been deprecated and replaced with the Heroku Toolbelt. ! Download and install from: https://toolbelt.heroku.com ! For API access, see: https://github.com/heroku/heroku.rb

Following the instruction for "heroku plugins:install heroku-docker" and got

Installing heroku-docker... failed ! Could not install heroku-docker. Please check the URL and try again.

I've already upgraded to the latest Toolbelt. Thoughts?

I had also tried Twitter. No reply there too. To be honest, for a YC company, I found you guys surprisingly poor at customer service.

This is called "loyalty capital". See this Clayton Christensen interview video for more detail https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYVdf5xyD8I (starts around 23:40)

Just downloaded the book! Thanks for making it free. You are very generous! I am looking to build a quick and dirty prototype for Tinder for X, and this is a great starting point for me. Thanks Nick!

Founder of ContentDJ (http://a.contentdj.com/1nrbICq) here.

I am curious to see how you guys decided to go after this space. For me, I started ContentDJ through an attempt at growth hacking on Twitter. Through a script I developed back in 2011, I was able to retweet trending content and grow my followers by about 1K per month. It turned into a viable growth channel for the startup I was working on at the time. So, I made the pivot and build ContentDJ (http://a.contentdj.com/1nrbICq).

As an interesting anecdote, last year, two product managers from Buddy Media signed up. Through Mixpanel, I found that they were particularly interested in my social media editorial calendar feature (http://a.contentdj.com/1lOiRWD). Surely enough, just last month, Salesforce announced their Marketing Cloud with a very similar content calendar in it. Unfortunately we now live in a world where multi-billion dollar public company steals from a one-man bootstrapped startup...

BTW, Harley Finkelstein works for Shopify not Spotify.

Here is the BBC coverage of the tool: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-23822086

Looks like it's done using D3.

Thanks for sharing.

The philosophy has been mostly to create a profitable company, in the more traditional sense-- consistent revenue that can employ people. - I share with this philosophy exactly.

The thing I am pointing out is that because of the VC gap, startups are dealing with the lack of cash infusion to really hit a homerun. As a result, Canadian tech companies stall after growing to a certain size. The options were taking VC money with bad terms or getting bought by US companies.

US companies are buying profitable Canadian businesses at a bargain price, reaping all the benefits of job creation and ambitious business goals.

Actually, I was not even raising money. I just had coffee with one of them without knowing they were investors. I haven't talked to any investors other than that. Just been focusing on building the startup. I will take on your offer for later though. My email is jerry-at-contentdj-dot-com. What's a good way to reach you?

- In this scenario, the company slowly accumulates B and C players who drag down the company's reputation: death by a thousand paper cuts. The company doesn't _die_ outright, but everyone just thinks, "Oh, not a Silicon Valley level company."

Interestingly, you just described what happened to RIM.

- There is a lot going on there that should make it more open to tech companies, but it has always been more of media than a tech town.

It's slowly changing now. Facebook, Twitter, Amazon and Microsoft all have their offices here.

Exactly! And it's this cycle of successes that's harder to duplicate everywhere else.

Thanks for sharing Patrick!

Reaping* - sorry for the typo. Thanks for the joke. :)

"A startup in Canada means going for profitability very quickly, and being doomed to a slow-growth strategy, as large chunks of cash are nowhere to be found." - This is dead on! That's for sharing!

Had Google been sold to Yahoo through licensing, they would not have become a multi-billion dollar company. That was my point.

Completely agreed! Thanks for sharing the insight.

If you think about the technology adoption lifecycle, you not only need a concentration of people, but more importantly a concentration of early adopters. So, from that perspective, you can see why a lot of B2C apps come out of Silicon Valley. People live and breath new things there. But that's just one aspect of what makes Silicon Valley unique.

When it comes to B2B, you don't really need a concentration of early adopters to make this work. You need to solve problems for businesses (doesn't really matter where they are). More importantly, you can see revenue right away if you ARE solving a real problem. I think that's why it's relatively easier to build a B2B startup outside of the valley.

Don't get me wrong. Vancouver is a much better city to live in. I love it here, and it's where I will eventually settle down.

My point is on the investors' side. Investors play a big role in the tech startup ecosystem.

When you have investors who don't get tech and who just want to get rich quickly, you run into serious problems on the road to build the next billion dollar company.

But the concentration is what counts here. After all, Silicon Valley is merely a region. You cannot compare it to the rest of the world.

So, my startup is actually ramen profitable at the moment. I spoke with some local investors. The deal was to owe 30% equity in exchange for 10 enterprise clients (around $100/month)! Guess what, these are investors coming out of mining industry... Unfortunately, they don't care about the company, they care about their piece of the pie.

It's a pity.

Except a big portion of the oil is owned by foreign companies. So, it's not like we are ripping all the benefits either.

I mean when your company fails, you are not personally liable to pay off the debt.

In some countries, this is not the case, and it creates a big legal barrier for being entrepreneurial.

I think you will need a passport though. Visa no.

That's a pity. Surprisingly, a lot of what makes innovation work has to do with the law.

Bankruptcy law for example really plays a big role when it comes to innovation.

I think technology should be distributed to leverage the economy of scale. But here, I am talking about the startup ecosystem. If you look at the big Internet companies, you will be amazed to see how many of them come out of the valley. That's why the rest of the world is trying to jumpstart this. The problem is it's not as simple as copying what's working at the surface.

Hey Jeff! Jerry here.

Sorry to hear that. Should catch up soon!

Thanks for commenting. Did you know about the Startup Visa? http://www.techvibes.com/blog/foreign-startup-visa-program-2...