michaelrlitt

The governments of more and more countries are forcing people to start using Tails. If you have a problem with censorship in your country (because for example you're living in United Kingdom), check out this operating system!

Thx for the feedback - consider it on the roadmap!

To follow up on Omar's comment - there are some YC startups operating in Canada ;)

Some of those startups know lots of silicon valley companies looking to vet through the crowd of international talent. Working somewhere local is a great place to start.

You're right - I did lack perspective and empathy.

I never thought I'd be the busy guy without time or energy to filter through and respond to every application we get.

The problem that I've encountered is that at < 15 employees, the best hires are generally people we pursue. Literally 90% of people we've spoken to who apply through standard means are ill-fitted for the role.

This post is designed to open the perspective of myself, the "busy startup guy" as well as Amar, the "I want to be a part of a startup guy".

The idea is that everyone should go above and beyond to get noticed. Most people don't. If you don't really really really think you can make an impact in my business (and haven't shown me so via initiative) how can I really know that you're not just another tire-kicker?

Remember, a seed-stage startup is on an egg-timer. Every minute needs to be productive and every conversation needs to create value. We need to pick and choose our battles wisely.

You're experience is certainly common but might be changing. When did you graduate?

Yes, Maybe, Yes. Great Engineers tend to be focused on solving interesting problems with great people over warm-weather that they'll rarely enjoy.

Thanks - they're actually long socks :P

Everyone should experience Silicon Valley. Vidyard's investors and network of influence are SV based. I'll never negate that.

Reasons I'm in Waterloo = Availability of Talent, Retention of Talent, Cost of living, Quality of Life

We've never had an issue with young, technical talent and I firmly believe that we have the best. That's more that can be said for our Californa based batch-mates.

Some people like the snow ;).

It's great perspective. To be completely honest - 101GB is loose. Since we leverage RTMP streaming and most viewers don't watch the entire video, we end up serving less bandwidth.

We're pretty focused on avoiding commoditization by bandwidth. As you mentioned, we're about integrations, analytics and call to action - significant value adds that vanilla hosting platforms don't and won't provide.

That's a fair argument - we built the player to match a popular style that our customers were requesting.

We've also built 9 other player's from scratch. There's not much you can tweak and re-design - we've done our best to hit the product market fit for what our customers and their viewers want.

Glad to hear - reach out anytime if you have questions!

First: AH!

Second: True Story, I'll dig for some more detail on other start-ips

Third: Thanks, we have some cool stuff planned for this!

Fourth: I think we all have different browsing habits ~72% of the people that hit the site clicked the video.

We were looking at ~2500 visitors/month. It approached 5000 pre-launch.

Great questions re: price and margins. The unlimited videos is achievable both through the scale with the number of videos we host; along with scaling of the file-size post-encoding.

2) Captions are currently not supported - would you be looking for transcriptions on the videos, or time-coded captions based on the point in the video? We're working on some cool features for time-coded commenting that probably covers what you're looking for.

3) Data can definitely be exported - but unfortunately it's not something we've implemented into the tool quite yet. Would be happy to manually support in the meantime.

4) A Player API (for custom controls), Wizard API (for player setup and design), and Content API (for uploading) are in the works. Assuming from the question it's a player controls API you'd need.

Sounds awesome. Thanks to both you and Ray for the positive comments, etc. E-mail re: beers is en route to your inbox.

Thanks for the insight - we'll definitely change it, we just thought it was something fun for launch :)

Good feedback. We needed some way to refer to the plans on calls, this was an easy solution.

That's a good solution for devs.

Many of our customers aren't technical and like having a customized player + instant detailed analytics + landing page creation + chaptering, etc.

Will do! Thanks for the positive feedback.

We funnel all of our encoding through ZenCoder (it's an awesome service). Our focus is on the simplicity of putting video online.

It's part of the product - customers are using it to transition from YouTube to a more professional (no outbound link, real-time data, customization, etc.) video platform (us).

We do HTML5 fall back for iOS/Android devices.

Our focus is on consolidating your web video. Many companies leverage YouTube, that makes sense. We help them kill the outbound link created by the YouTube embed on their site. You can host with us or YouTube and your video players will all look the same.

It's directly competitive. We've bundled in more features (chaptering, real-time analytics, player customization, etc.) that should make it much more compelling. We're also an easy implementation of YouTube Chromeless + analytics.

Thanks (I'm a founder). We're super glad you're getting value!

It's a single video.

send me a note - michaelrlitt at gmail dot com

Completely agree. For some reason raising money can be less scary then getting users?

Blows my mind.

We hire 1 intern every term, but just finalized 2 offers on full-time employees (not previously known).

I'm all about the culture fit - my founders care about the technical capabilities.

I ask the following two questions:

1a) You have 8 balls and a fulcrum scale. Each ball looks, tastes and smells the same. One ball is slightly heavier then the rest. Find it using the scale only twice.

If the candidate blows through this one I ask the following.

1b) If I gave you 3 uses of the scale and one heavy ball, what is the largest number of balls you could weigh?

I find this question shows that they can problem solve. Most developers try a 4x4 split - which doesn't work. It's great to witness their problem solving technique.

2a) How do you put an elephant in a fridge? 2b) How do you put a giraffe in the fridge? 2c) If the king of the jungle has a meeting with all of the animals, who is missing? 2d) How would you cross a river that is known to be full of alligators?

This question helps bring out the candidates sense of humour due to it's sheer ridiculousness. We tend to be very informal, it's very important we can shoot the shit with our employees.

We're working on a product that will be able to give you this data regardless of number of views. Ping me if you'd like more info or an early access account!

Been following the blog - currently using "word-clock". This watch face is the best conversation piece I've ever worn.

This watch totally revitalized my BlackBerry experience.

Why would they issue such a broad patent? They've essentially patented video content distribution. What are providers like YouTube, Vidyard, Vimeo, Ooyala, 23Video, etc. going to do?

Software patent law needs to give it's head a shake. This is going to cause nothing but grief for the semi-competitive landscape.