onwardly

I imagine that is a short term problem.

Ouch. I literally did this. Built a site to buy/sell textbooks. Moved abroad, learned the language. Built a business to teach travelers the local lingo. 10 years later, it was acquired (at a loss). Currently on (9).

Apparently you can survive about 40 seconds in a vacuum. One option would be for one pilot to enter (as quickly as possible!) then put the CMP into a spacesuit, then re-admit the other astronaut. No clue if they could enter and re-pressurize the capsule within 30 seconds- sounds like a long-shot.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20627561-700-maxed-ou...

They just changed that in response to the backlash of the article from the NYT.

When buying a wedding domain, you can buy domains like .party and .dance, which adds a nice touch I think.

The loans don't actually come from the school- they are often government-sponsored, though those typically cap out at $12k a year or something. The rest you have to get through private loans, and the school has no way to forgive them- unless they want to write a check to my loan provider.

Because they still want people that can afford to pay $50k/year to pay it. Lowering tuition lowers it for everyone. If your parents make $300k+/year, then you'll still be paying full tuition. But as their income is lower, currently you'll get some need-based financial aid. The problem is that this aid is a combination of "scholarship" and "loans". The goal here is to remove the loan component.

The problem still is that middle-class families get stuck in a gray zone. I went to Brown, and my parents made enough (~$110k) that I didn't get financial aid but they also couldn't pay $40k/year.

Funny comment from the blog post:

"I've been using vim for 10 years. I never could figure out how to quit."

I'm not affiliated with Docker in any way and I'm just speaking from my experience. My only connection to Steve Singh is just that my company still partners with Concur.

Concur became a behemoth in corporate travel, and companies that competed against them or didn't want to work with them eventually had to.[1]

It sounds like you don't know a lot about the corporate travel industry which is fine. I'm sure a lot of people would love to get "conquered" for $8B some day.

[1] http://www.businesstravelnews.com/Business-Travel-Agencies/I...

My company has been a partner of Concur for several years, starting back in 2012 when the original founders (Steve, Raj and Mike) were all still there.

Steve was easily the most-respected leader in the travel industry- even people that disliked Concur admired Steve. He was articulate, created a clear vision for Concur that they maintained even as they grew like wildfire, and he inspired trust and goodwill with Concur partners.

I get the "oh no, SAP executive" instinctual reaction, but Steve is clearly an entrepreneur at heart and considers himself an entrepreneur (it took them 20 years of grinding and ups and downs to build Concur what it is today).

There was also a comment about him leading the company to exit in 2-3 years. I seriously doubt it. Concur's stock symbol is CNQR which isn't a coincidence. They didn't build Concur to sell it, they built it to conquer, which they had basically done when SAP bought them. Plus after 20 years I imagine $8B sounded pretty good, but I don't think their approach was ever to try to "flip" the company and I doubt he would join Docker if that was the intention in any way.

Price was $110M + $15M in contingency payments.

From the LogMeIn investor release[1]

Under the terms of the transaction, LogMeIn will pay $110 million in cash upon close for all outstanding equity interests in LastPass, with up to an additional $15 million in cash payable in contingent payments which are expected to be paid to equity holders and key employees of LastPass upon the achievement of certain milestone and retention targets over the two-year period following the closing of the transaction.

1. https://investor.logmeininc.com/about-us/investors/news/pres...

Price was $110M + $15M in contingency payments.

From the LogMeIn investor release[1]

Under the terms of the transaction, LogMeIn will pay $110 million in cash upon close for all outstanding equity interests in LastPass, with up to an additional $15 million in cash payable in contingent payments which are expected to be paid to equity holders and key employees of LastPass upon the achievement of certain milestone and retention targets over the two-year period following the closing of the transaction.

1. (https://investor.logmeininc.com/about-us/investors/news/pres...

Another reason is that playing DraftKings or FanDuel does actually make watching football more interesting- you care about games you otherwise wouldn't care about. Many people will happily continue to lose $10/week for the benefit of enjoying watching the NFL more.

Online poker isn't as fun when you're consistently losing money- there's no "outside" benefit.

Yeah- not much to say but the silence is sad. It looked like it was going well too...

I agree that its not for nothing and does help cover legitimate expenses Apple incurs. That said- its not a one-way street. The app ecosystem is one of several key drivers for iPhone/iPad sales- that alone probably justifies the cost to Apple.

Also- the point of this pitch is that the extra revenue means much more to smaller developers than it does to Apple, and that Apple in fact wouldn't lose that much revenue from such a scheme.

The path forward, with benefits for restaurants and our entrepreneur here, is this: see if people are willing to pay for reservations at in-demand restaurants. If so- great. You clearly can't scale this without getting restaurants in on the game. So- partner with the restaurants. Charge $20 for a reservation. Give the restaurant $10. The restaurant made extra money, their no-show rate goes down, the diners already have skin in the game and are likely to spend more than average patrons, and our main man here makes some cash.

To me it seems like an innocent-enough experiment. If he wants to scale it, he'll have to make it work for restaurants too. And if he does- great! Margin-stressed restaurants get an extra source of income.

As an entrepreneur in the travel space, my guess is that this move is primarily a PR move, and actual Bitcoin transactions aren't expected to move the needle in any substantial way.

If its primarily a PR move, the reason for starting with hotels is simple: Expedia, and all the OTAs (Online Travel Agency), make the VAST majority of their profit from hotel bookings* due to two factors:

1) Airlines pay extremely small commissions (starting with when Delta announced 15 years ago they wouldn't pay commissions on flights)

2) Hotels pay extremely high commissions, since unsold hotel rooms disappear as inventory the next day

Assuming the goal is PR, Expedia cares much more about getting consumers to think of Expedia as a place to book hotels than they do booking flights- thus they are "starting" with hotels.

*For example, in 2013 Priceline sold 270M hotel nights and 7M airline tickets. Of their $7B in revenue and $2B in profit, very very little came from airline ticket sales.

I'll just say that design quality of presentations, especially for startups who need credibility, is extremely important. Powerpoint- while it doesn't do it for you- is the easiest way to look credible without doing all of your slides in Adobe software.

For internal company presentations, perhaps it doesn't make sense to do fancy powerpoints. But if you can't make a presentation that looks credible, it betrays confidence in your ability to deliver on a product/service that is legitimate.

I didn't see the potential of this idea when I first heard of 42Floors.

Then I needed to find office space.

Looking forward to seeing this in Atlanta!

Sounds like a great network effect that boosts the usefulness of the site as more people join.

One inefficiency could be related to this point Paul makes:

We can afford to take at least 10x as much risk as Demo Day investors. And since risk is usually proportionate to reward, if you can afford to take more risk you should. What would it mean to take 10x more risk than Demo Day investors? We'd have to be willing to fund 10x more startups than they would. Which means that even if we're generous to ourselves and assume that YC can on average triple a startup's expected value, we'd be taking the right amount of risk if only 30% of the startups were able to raise significant funding after Demo Day.

So- if a VC can triple a startups expected value that's great, but you'd need to do a bunch of them. I think this is essentially what Dave McClure is doing- making lots of smaller bets to "hit singles" as he says.

Reminds me of my college days playing online poker. The best players would have a 20% ROI at the $55 10 person tournament tables, and each game would take an hour. If you just play one at a time, you'd make about $10/hr. That's why everyone played 10 tables at a time- we made 10 times as much.

The article also notes another reason why the arrival of the TSA coincided with an increase:

"The arrival of the TSA, which should have heightened security throughout airports, actually created an opportunity for petty thievery, he says. “When you have the TSA and local law enforcement watching for terrorists, this takes the priority off of thieves stealing luggage from the carousel.”

This move by Quora pissed me off, but the only reason I'm keeping my account is because they allowed me to turn it off.

Quite an effective way to destroy some goodwill they'd built up with me over the past couple of years.

This was a great post, thank you. Chock full of relevant figures, thanks for being so open about your stats.

This mirrors quite closely my own appstore experience, I'm looking forward to reading through the various post mortems you mentioned.

To keep this comment from just being a "thank you", a few stats of my own:

When reducing an app from $9.99 to $.99, downloads go up 10x. When reducing an app from $.99 to free, downloads go up ~10x-20x.

Being featured increases downloads by ~30x.

Its like the Stripe for screensharing , I love it.

As for monetization, I think a good strategy might be something like the first 3 are free, and then you pay $5 for 30 screenshares afterwards. Atleast for me, I'd be willing to pay that and it seems like a straightforward/fair way to price it.

Good luck!

Not a YC company, but we would do this in a heartbeat. Would love a unified message/homepage replacement that could be standardized. Count us in.

Thanks for the idea! Done.

I absolutely love this idea. Its easy to shrug something off when it doesn't affect you. Eating your own dogfood is an entirely different matter.

Having plans B, D, E ... ZZZ around is an incredible piece of advice from one who has experienced it. Stay alive, brother.

I did this when my textbook startup was sent a cease-and-desist by a major textbook player for B.S. copyright infringement. I immediately forwarded the letter to the Harvard Crimson (Harvard was our biggest market), and they promptly ran a front-page story about us being sued.

The cease-and-desist said we had 10 days to take down our data. I never took it down and never replied, and never heard back from the company again.

Not only did the press scare them away, but as you mentioned, gave us a front-page story we couldn't have gotten any other way.

That said, I was very confident that their case had no merit and that they wouldn't take it to trial (or maybe it was that we were on our last leg and had little to lose).

Funny story: my next startup and all-of-a-sudden we're currently partnering with the company that threatened to sue me. I'm assuming they don't know it was me behind both companies!