suking

I'm so sick of these DDG stories. The truth is no one uses them, 99.9999% of people outside SV have never heard of them and currently there is no reason to switch to them.

Offline ads for direct response are easily measurable with tracking numbers. Branding ads - well - I have no clue how they track any of that - but then again how do you track a CPM media buy just designed to increase brand awareness online... (note: I come from the DM world).

hype based

Bingo, 99.99999% of people on the street would not know what DDG is - maybe even a higher % outside of SV.

Because Digg was enormous and now it's worthless?

I've never used turntable, thought it was dumb, but did it ever make $? Did they ever even have a plan to make $? Seemed like a giant fad to me and can't believe they raised $ successfully - especially with having to deal with music licensing.

Who didn't see this coming... Hype... funding... doa.

Only way I can see them fitting into $100bn valuation is if they come out with an AdSense competitor that not only is contextual, but if you are signed into FB also based on your likes/social graph.

I don't get how there is even 1 company that manage to survive doing something so simple. I've argued this before - recurring billing is super simple, no need to pay someone to manage it. Can be programmed in hours.

Maybe b/c pando is a total bust and he doesn't need to be a part of it. Even the site design makes it hard to read. I figure if there's something ever good on there I can read it here.

Cool - thanks.

I'm not criticizing, I'm wondering what their returns are. We know YC has had some huge hits... has 500?

Because you can't do the due diligence a VC firm does when you invest in 250 companies.

I'd love to know how their spray and pray is working in terms of returns.

which site to scrape for occupation - linkedin I guess would work to get decent matches.

No occupation or it would be pretty good, but that's mainly what I want. Does LinkedIn have an API that this would work with?

I wish there was an API where I could input as much info as I had array("firstName"=>"John","lastName"=>"Doe","zip"=>"12345") for example and it returns info on as many matches that go with the input and includes occupation, birth date, relatives, etc. That would be awesome...

What - call centers??? R&D? What are they researching - how store 140 characters?

Why does twitter need so many employees? I could see like 50... Nothing has changed in years there, they have 1 product which is posting 140 characters. Everything else is pretty basic, just big scale. I don't get the need for thousands of employees.

You can find leasable spaces on loop for sure.

Well with visual.ly's launch on HN - one of the worst launches I've ever seen by the way - I think it's almost over.

An entrepreneur works full time at an idea. He gave up, managed a meager sell of the domain out of pure luck.

He also could have only spent $150 on hosting and been fine - wasted a lot of $. I imagine since he didn't work on it, sales were declining as well.

It could have probably been run off a VPS for $20/mo or a dedi for $100/mo.

Ummmm, congrats, but it sold for $3,500 - that's not really an exit imo. It's like selling a decent domain name.

That's a huge opportunity... software to make infographics... lol. What are VC's thinking and what were YOU thinking. How Not To Launch 101. Site is unusable, 15 seconds are up.

You built it up over 6 yrs... if you went from $1k/mo to $1k/day fairly quickly, say even in the first year, you would have had to do some explaining.

No doubt. How any VC thinks this type of company would sell for $1-2mm+ is beyond me. This is a profit type of company run out of a basement, not a VC investment. Yet somehow they got some top tier angels... Sometimes it's more about who you know.

I second all this. How a company like this raises VC is just dumbfounding. Why the F do graphic designers need to raise VC to pump out more infographics. Isn't that fad over with anyways?

I feel like Business Insider is doing the same crap. Top 10 XYZ regurgitated 10 ways and split testing headlines to get more pageviews. No quality whatsoever.