noelsequeira

There seems to be a fair amount cynicism around the business model (rather, the lack thereof) for these MOOC services. I personally believe that an interesting monetization model lies in examinations. EdX seems to be exploring proctored examinations with Pearson, but if someone can come up with a credible, non-game-able, non-proctored alternative, there's a lot of value to be created/captured.

Completing one of these courses along with the accompanying assignments only takes you so far. Grades in a rigorous examination, however, represent a credential, which in turn sets up much needed (by the candidates taking the course) signaling. Eventually, a lot of employers might end up becoming sensitive to this signaling. A crude example of this can be found here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3353543

If (and when) someone does crack this puzze and if employers in turn, react to this change, I see a lot of universities more than breaking a sweat. This latent potential is what, IMHO, most analysts / investors are really upbeat about.

This is an intriguing idea, but I see two fundamental problems:

1) Isolation through cliques can be a bit of a double-edged sword. While the prospect of being able to battle spam (and a wave of unsolicited mentions) is probably immensely appealing to the 1%, altering the fundamental contract on which the protocol is based is almost always a bad idea.

2) Even if this accounts for a non-trivial fraction of overall revenue, they aren't going to stop pursuing advertising dollars. Which means that they still need to own the stream. And that the third party client massacre will, therefore, continue unabated.

I'm not going to prognosticate about whether or not this service will take off. I really hope it does - the raison d'être seems genuine, or at the very least, passionately backed.

But that seems to be the very problem with it. In trying not to bury his lead, I believe Dalton Caldwell has let it take over the pitch. 95% "why" and 5% "what". 10 minutes in, I was still scratching my head wondering what the service will look like. And the name App.net certainly doesn't do the cause any favours. The first decent explanation finds itself relegated to question 2 of the FAQs.

This is an audacious attempt, and I laud that. But the pitch, in my opinion, needs an overhaul. Diaspora was also about the "why", but they addressed the "what" really early in their Kickstarter pitch.

I believe this advice applies to specific businesses / opportunities (most of them likely B2B).

B2C apps, especially those that rely on network effects to grow (Instapaper, Gumroad, Buffer) would do well to shrug off any concerns about clones, and continue to do what they do best: iterate on product and get more visiblity.

And while Instapaper and Gumroad might not have shared a detailed analysis of their journey in the "How I made $X in Y days on platform Z" format, their ability to succeed is in some ways tied to their perception as a successful business. In Instapaper's case, as a user, I'm building a repository of articles, and I wouldn't invest any effort if I felt the service wouldn't be around in a few months. A similar argument might be made for Gumroad - as a "paywall for everything", it just can't afford to seem small-and-under-the-radar, something that could easily be misconstrued as fly-by-night.

Eyercize is a very interesting resource to get started - http://www.eyercize.com/

1. Programmers often have an attitude of “I can code, you can’t, so I am defacto better than you.” This often comes out in Hacker News comments.

While this observation is somewhat anecdotal, I can sympathize with the sentiment. But the real reason that commenters on Hacker News might appear conceited or condescending is because they usually comment to disagree. If they do comment to express their agreement, they are encouraged to do so only when they have a non-trivial contribution to make. And this focus on a high signal-to-noise-ratio (even though it may consist of far more disagreement) on HN is not by happenstance, it is by design (achieved through guidelines, self-selection, and curation).

The comment thread on Google+ referred to by the OP, is largely an echo chamber of low-on-signal assent, with the odd nugget in the rough. And while this isn't a bad thing for a marketer trying to cultivate and engage a large audience, it would be toxic for Hacker News as a community.

While the most insightful commentary generally lies in a well reasoned, thoughtfully worded counterargument, it's always hard to deal with being judged or disagreed with; especially in public. This may be exacerbated when an argument is worded poorly (see http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html). Unfortunately, the odds of either happening on Hacker News, are far higher.

There's a superbly written piece by Xianhang Zhang on Quora, that talks about the same concept. It's titled "Disregard Ideas, Acquire Assets" and presents a really convincing case by citing examples of entrepreneurs that focused on building assets, until as he puts it "they couldn't not do a startup with them". (Leverage could qualify as one of the more important ones, or if you want to look at it another way, acquiring substantial assets equates to earning leverage).

http://www.quora.com/Xianhang-Zhang/Disregard-ideas-acquire-...

This notion runs contrary to the standard approach that most early stage entrepreneurs adopt, namely the "build a laundry list of ideas and filter the top ones out using a combination of a heuristic, common sense and (eventually) customer validation and keep at it until you have traction with a concept that matters" approach.

I'm going to stick my neck out here, and recommend the approach that Zhang proposes - "focus relentlessly on acquiring interesting assets and then execute on the startups that naturally fall out of them". This means you might be pursuing something for the longest time that doesn't remotely resemble a startup. I'd qualify this with one caveat - make sure whatever it is, it's something you love doing.

And I think this is an interesting way to go about becoming an entrepreneur. Maybe you shouldn't dive in the deep end straight away (if you haven't built sufficient leverage / assets). Maybe that's another way deferring gratification, what with how cool just 'being an entrepreneur' has recently become.

The don't-sweat-it-you'll-be-able-to-connect-the-dots-in-hindsight approach to life is both forgiving and encouraging in an almost avuncular way, especially when you're going through a period of intense personal turmoil that accompanies rejection. But then again, it suffers from a heady dose of survivorship bias.

And so the question begs, how do you know that you're on the periphery of a cul de sac, and all you need do is retrace your steps and begin with a clean slate? (This would definitely not have augured well for, say, an Airbnb. Then again, languishing in mediocrity or persisting in a stagnating job is like a slow death.)

If I've understood #1 correctly, this year's node knockout winner does exactly this. http://observer.no.de/features

The demo appears to be buggy, but they seem to have something substantial in the works. From the website:

Please note that Observer was build during the Node Knock Out, a 48 hour coding competition. The commercial version currently in developement, this free service will stay online as long as there are resources to support it.

update: ClickTale does this perfectly, down creating playable videos. http://www.clicktale.com/

This is such an incredible article on so many counts. I stumbled upon Ian Bogost when we were in the throes of the (then acerbic) "gamification" debate, and Foursquare was the undisputed toast of the interwebs. I've been following him since, and have found myself quite intrigued by the Cow Clicker story.

For me, the takeaway from the article isn't so ironic when you look at Game Development as any of the arts. And bear with the cliche, but save the odd exception, an artists' life is almost always a compromise between staying true to one's principles and courting mainstream appeal. Steven Wilson of Porcupine Tree, "perhaps the biggest rock band most people have never heard of", will certainly attest to this.

This new flavor could end up being the sweet spot between the Delicious we've come to know and the interesting but relatively niche TrailMeme (http://trailmeme.com/). I can see some interesting hacker focused stacks emerge that aggregate quality links around, say, getting started with a new technology or maybe fund raising.

The challenge with "stacks" though, as with any list curation web app, is 1) maintaining the quality of content and 2) surfacing higher quality collections as you scale and become more and more inclusive. And these are hard problems to tackle without having humans sift through thousands of stacks to pick the diamonds in the rough (Visit http://www.imdb.com/lists/ to see what I mean).

@il: Thank you, this is really insightful content.

I might be digressing here, but since you've offered to answer a few questions, here goes - I'd love to know what categories / sites I want to be looking at if my product's a small business CRM (like Highrise). To be more specific, it's a CRM tool that integrates deeply with Google Apps.

Maybe it's just me, but identifying a list of target categories that fits your audience well seems just as hard as optimizing the spend, especially when the audience isn't exactly niche.

All other things being equal, does how early (or late) you fill up the application form have any bearing on whether or not you make the grade? (I hope not)

You might think that this initial bias wouldn't help much in the end because the buyer would proceed to evaluate both startups and pick the one they thought was better. However, the bias isn't easily severable.

Again, I don't have any evidence beyond the anecdotal, but it's not even funny how critical a role this seemingly tenuous bias can play in large enterprise sales (where competing vendors offer nearly identical products / services). Makes a solid case (if you buy into the intuition, that is) for backing up an aggressive sales strategy with a well rounded marketing effort.

While the envolve plugin is extremely interesting, the HN implementation would probably be far more useful if you scraped the HN username for logged-in users and displayed it. Anonymity seems to kill the utility of chat. For those that wish to participate anonymously, you can always offer the option to opt out.

Using jQuery, this should be trivial:

$(".pagetop").children('a[href*="user?id="]').attr("href").split('=')[1];

Here's mine.

Needed: A multi-select that lets me decide what Circles serve as default sources for my Stream.

tl;dr To let me cut out the noise without the fear of missing out.

Why: My "Following" Stream is essentially a Twitter echo chamber, and most of the folks that post here are really prolific. This drowns out any posts from friends & family, and I have to make an explicit click to view each of these streams. For instance, right now, Robert Scoble is hogging most my Stream real estate.

I'd like to select "Friends" + "Family" + "Acquaintances" as the default sources for my Stream. I don't mind clicking on the "Following" filter to peruse this specific Stream every now and then, just like I dip into Twitter. I don't want these posts, however, to dominate my default Stream. And I don't want to have to delete my "Following" Circle to make this happen.

This will be my last response in this thread - I don't wish to troll / waste my resources on an argument that doesn't deserve them.

>why the bitterness

Because I'm yet to see a more primed-for-PR CSR initiative. At least from a startup. Much as I'd like to perceive it as being well-intentioned, it smacks of being the brainchild of a PR agency ("snapdeal.com Nagar" anyone?), which is all kinds of wrong. I'd have been just as indignant if it were Groupon or Facebook that pulled this off.

>their action is "unexpected" and perhaps more newsworthy as a result

There's a not-so-fine-line between innovative PR and inappropriate opportunism, and a responsible company would know better than to cross it. And that's the beauty of this issue - you're damned if you take a stand against it, because "they did help a poor village after all". If, as a business, you really wish to be an ameliorating influence, do it quietly - don't pimp poverty for PR. There are always other ways to grab eyeballs.

>as a fellow Indian (Indian-American), I always find it curious and somewhat unfortunate that there is a contingent of "the tribe" that can't just be happy when others in the "the tribe" do well.

That I'm afraid, is the classic ad hominem. Please read the parent comment once again and point out one instance where I've expressed disdain or envy for the company / the founder's success. As I've already said, I'd have been just as enraged had this been any other company from any other country. That you would confuse indignation at a dodgy PR stunt with envy for a fellow Indian baffles me.

At the risk of sounding like a complete cynic, isn't this nothing more than a shameless PR plug? And I think the bigger villain here isn't said company or their PR agency, it's CNN for carrying this crocodile-tear-jerking piece.

And if you're considering the "every little step counts and must be lauded" counter-argument, spare a thought for every faceless, deserving non-profit that's doing genuine, sustainable, long-term grassroots work and doesn't receive a shred of credit / support, let alone a mention from the mainstream media.

To quote from the article:

Story Highlights: The residents of Shiv Nagar changed the village name to SnapDeal.com Nagar / They wanted to show their gratitude to the online coupon company / SnapDeal installed 15 water pumps so that villagers could have potable water / SnapDeal's founder was tossed from the United States after his visa expired

"Tossed"? Really? Yes, immigration laws suck (I should know, I'm Indian), but I'm certain it's a lot less dramatic when your visa expires. Let's not trivialize the effort to improve the immigration status quo by dangling insinuations that extol pseudo-philanthropy.

What hurts me most, though, is that this hit the front page of HN.

</rant>

Installed. Quite ironically, this is more or less what I thought Notifo would aim to be the first time I stumbled upon your website.

While I'm not particularly crazy about receiving notifications from most blogs I read, what I'm really looking for (from a notification aggregator) is the ability to receive notifications from the sources that I care about (essentially, social networks + email + blogs) in one place.

What this means is, I can disable popups (alerts) and enjoy a zen-like experience. And when I do take a break, there's one app that lets me know about everything I've potentially missed out on and need to be updated about. Push notifications create this insatiable itch and the cognitive cost of context switching ensures that life goes downhill once more than a couple of apps have been allowed to notify me.

This is something I'd be happy to pay for (and I admit, I might be alone). I think Boxcar comes closest to scratching my itch, but their implementation still leaves a lot to be desired, so I guess there's an opportunity there.

Here's wishing you all the best on this latest leg of a journey we've so enjoyed reading about.

Singapore is 3 hours from India

You must visit way more often - you now have no excuse not to.

Interesting aside: I'm pretty sure your intention was jest, but lolling isn't as modern a word as the internet generation would have you believe (and has an entirely different meaning).

From the etymology of loll (http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=loll):

mid-14c., lollen "to lounge idly, hang loosely," perhaps related to M.Du. lollen "to doze, mumble," or somehow imitative of rocking or swinging. Specifically of the tongue from 1610s.

My chief gripe with sweeping analogies like this one is that they glorify the irreverent, "disruptive" entrepreneur. It's probably the evocative nature of the word "disruptive" that serves to create and perpetuate this fallacy. And while there's something to be said for seeing opportunity where no one else can, I'm not sure asking entrepreneurs to be "bulldozers" (proverbial or otherwise) makes for great advice.

While the concept of "naughtiness" or that "gleam in your eye" itself is quite subjective and open to much debate on where the line is to be drawn, it would augur well for the community if we tempered our effusive praise for the brash, maverick stereotype with words of caution. Every gatecrasher hasn't had the good fortune of staying until the party was over.

I don't mean to come across as hostile or undermine the effort that's been invested, but I can't help but be a tad skeptical about these visualizations, especially given the fact that the author (in what might be construed as cavalier fashion) presents seemingly nebulous metrics like they are absolute matter-of-fact ("Anxiety/Confidence Ratio", "Hostility/Compassion Ratio", "Depression/Happiness Ratio").

It would certainly help if the algorithm used to compute these metrics were shared and dissected. I tend to believe that sentiment analysis is much more art than science, given how tricky and profound context can be.

To conclude, I'm not going to end this comment on a negative note. I'd much rather reserve my vitriol and caustic criticism for another thread and day and abstain from calling this an attempt at gaming HN to promote a startup.

I do this not out of a lack of indignation towards what I've just read, but because I'd like to end this seemingly hateful comment on a note that isn't bitter or negative but is instead quite the opposite (without using a single word that would help the OP's algorithm figure this out).

And with that, I throw down the gauntlet. Analyze this!

There's no doubt you've sharpened your saw with the projects you've worked on. It could've been way worse - I've been through the blues / in the doldrums, and couldn't get myself to do anything for weeks on end.

I happened to navigate to Paul's article on fundraising, and further, to Alexis' one on keeping calm and carrying on (http://alexisohanian.com/keep-calm-carry-on-what-you-didnt-k...) and I was blown away. There's no way I could've survived something like that. You're in great company.

I'm looking forward to what you come up with. Here's to a great couple of years ahead.

While the entire post is both cathartic and poignant, one line stood out for me because of its brutal honesty.

Am I jealous of other companies' success? I would be lying if I said no.

Thank you for saying this. I've always wanted to, but feared I'd be called out for it. In public. In fact, I think it's part of what keeps the fire burning inside - that constant hunger to try and figure out why some folks are plain better / more successful at the game, and then trying and internalizing / applying those lessons.

And it can get frustrating when you can't replicate / emulate what others have achieved seemingly easily. As a corollary, this is probably why Jack Dorsey and Dennis Crowley are enigmas unto themselves.

An important aside: Chad, I'm someone who has tracked (and may I add envied) the Notifo story. And I admire the work you've done, from fanout.js, to snagging Paul for a co-founder, to HN for Android, to PicAFight, to GramFrame, to Vorepad........I've found myself in awe of how prolific you've been (and you don't even know me).

It's possible you've been doing one thing too many (because you love APIs and can't keep from tinkering with them). What I'm convinced of, is that you have the talent, the work ethic and an incredible co-founder. All the best, I'm hoping I have to transition back into pure envy real soon.

I'm going to buck the general trend here and recommend bringing the guy on board, but note that what I say (as with all advice) isn't free from the odd concomitant caveat.

The million-dollar question: "Am I selling to a market that I lack access to / lack the means to access?"

If the answer is yes, then you need this guy. And bad. You're likely a lamb heading to the slaughter without someone like him. Enterprise software is one such (arcane to an outsider) market. For instance, it's incredibly hard to sell to CIOs / IT departments without a solid channel of motivated System Integrators. It's even harder for a startup with little credibility to build such a channel of System Integrators who aggressively push your product without the leverage of strong relationships (built over a non-trivial period of time, usually years or decades).

I speak from personal experience - we added a Vice President of Sales from a Fortune 500 to our team, and it was the catalyst that our business so desperately needed. Within the space of six months, we were able to close over 10 channel partners and consequently access decision makers at hundreds of IT departments.

My advice would be this: keep compensation low, as low as you possibly can. If the guy balks at this, that's a red flag. A true VP of Sales will take it as a personal affront if he doesn't have to prove his mettle through results. I can't emphasize this enough, vest equity solely on performance (revenues realized) and set a reasonable, realistic cliff (a year can sometimes be a bit too short). Give him the authority to incentivize reps adequately. There's a great example from a company called Verdiem in this TechCrunch article (http://techcrunch.com/2010/01/06/0-to-20-million-ten-hand-to...)

Verdiem’s Jim Flatley taught me this at Plumtree: he fought to get early reps 15% of every sale, but after we made our numbers for the first time ever, nobody wanted to pay them less. Even after the bubble burst and every other technology company took a blood-bath, Jim kept delivering results.

Another article that you just can't afford to overlook is by Mark Suster (http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/05/the-excuse-department-is-cl...), and he sums up succinctly in one line what I've been trying to convey through all this verbiage:

(Sales people) are more mercenaries than missionaries.

This applies to their leader, the VP of sales in equal measure and the moment you internalize this (and make peace with this fact), you'll find this decision quite easy and understand how to approach the entire exercise.

All the best!

Students of entrepreneurship should learn the art of persuasion in all its forms, including psychology, sales, marketing, negotiating, statistics and even design.

Scott Adams just shared with us the ideal framework for an entrepreneurial curriculum. But more importantly, the article reinforces the fact that the whole is far greater than the sum of these parts, especially in the context of an entrepreneur.

I succeeded as a cartoonist with negligible art talent, some basic writing skills, an ordinary sense of humor and a bit of experience in the business world. The "Dilbert" comic is a combination of all four skills. The world has plenty of better artists, smarter writers, funnier humorists and more experienced business people. The rare part is that each of those modest skills is collected in one person. That's how value is created.

As an aside, this makes a compelling case for the pursuit of a co-founder with complementary skills.

I'm extremely grateful to entrepreneurs like Paras who've been in the trenches (and stumbled several times, only to pick themselves up and dust themselves off each time), lay their cards on the table and share tidbits of actionable insight (Non-esoteric, actionable insight being the operative words here).

I think this extends PG's classic words, "Make something people want" to something that sounds like:

Make something people want that

1) they're ready to pay for / you can monetize

2) is in an expanding / sufficiently large market

3) has precedents / incumbents that validate the need

4) you're sufficiently well leveraged to execute on

5) you and your team are passionate about

While there will always be outliers / exceptions to the rule, I'm convinced this is an excellent heuristic to filter the several hundreds of ideas that course through the average entrepeneur's mind in any given year.

Kudos on your success and a well written article, but to be very frank, this is incredibly hard to emulate. An analogy would be the Envato network discussing the success of a new sister site and attributing the initial traction to their already well established network. Not that there's anything wrong with that - just that there's not too much for me to learn.

If there's one takeaway, it's that leverage can be a wonderful thing and can make a tremendous difference to the outcome of a startup. There's a superb post on Quora that articulates this really well: http://www.quora.com/Xianhang-Zhang/Disregard-ideas-acquire-...

That said, (and please correct me if I'm wrong) I think this represents minimal value in terms of actionable insight for the reader, so I'm intrigued as to how this hit the top of HN. My theory is a lot of users chose to upvote this post without actually bothering to click through and read the article.

Breaking down the vision:

This website will serve as a zero-cost alternative to those that lack the resources to attend traditional brick-and-mortar institutions

I completely agree with the observation that the duct-taping of a few, loosely connected resources to construct an authoritative syllabus / disrupt the existing education system through an online network of autodidacts and mentors is flawed in its very premise. I'm inclined to believe, though, that we're looking at an an early iteration and that the Saylor Foundation's initiative will evolve as feedback pours in.

and, if they are willing, a complement to mainstream education providers.

This seems to be the more practical component of the vision. My personal take: education will not be disrupted by applications that seek to uproot the brick and mortar educational establishment. Rather, platforms will emerge to augment the existing teaching / learning process and help students seek guidance when they need it.

I think the Khan Academy has pretty much set the bar for what an online 'education augmentation platform', if you were, should start out looking like, and the Saylor Foundation would do well to emulate them.

That said, the world really needs a central, well maintained repository for educational content at the college level, so I hope this initiative succeeds.