yubrew

Loss aversion is a large reason why many of my high school and college friends end up not doing start ups.

dapper.net

Yet another technology looking for a market application...

Heh, looks like you responded while I was still editing my post.

While search could be better, Google's results for text are good enough. How much better could text search get? Is it possible for someone to build a search experience so compelling that I would want to switch? And even if someone made a new, compelling search technology, could they get advertisers to switch over?

Adwords is good for testing out headlines and copy, but are you seeing much variation based solely on changing domain names?

If you believe in it, can't you refer it to someone else that does not have the same deal-breaking constraints as you do?

Or getting work experience outside of your area of academic study.

signal to noise ratio seems extremely low.

Learn some basic hacking in (insert functional language here). I'm not trying to start a programming language flame war.

The point of the statement is to do just enough so that you don't drive away potential technical cofounders. Basically make yourself more attractive as a cofounder by avoiding the traps that many other non-technical cofounders fall into.

This question has been asked plenty of times before. Look up variations of "business/idea guy needs hacker." But you should at least hack a bit with Ruby on Rails so at the least you won't piss off your technical co-founder. If you have deep domain knowledge, significant contacts, and a problem that is worth solving, then getting a hacker co-founder should be pretty straight forward.

It is my personal belief that the team composition depends on the type of opportunity and where the core competitive advantage will come from. If you are a lawyer, and you want to make a paperless solution for legal firms, you better believe you'll need a technology wiz. However, if the technology component is honestly only a small part of the overall problem, then you can perhaps look to getting an employee or contract out the tech work.

"Humans are very good at detecting patterns, but rather poor at detecting randomness." This is so true.

I see. How about creating a public API (like someone else suggested) so we can see what it does, and then have a couple guys shop it around for you as you get validation studies going?

Then you give people enough to get enticed, but don't give everything away. You can then pursue multiple applications with a parallel effort.

Subject matter expertise can be hired, as employees, or as advisors to your company. For this type of start up, you not only need a team to build out the product end users will ultimately use (an expensive endeavor in and of itself), but you also need to gain credibility from experts and get published before doctors will look at your stuff.

I am a tech commercialization consultant for some of the crazy stuff that comes out of the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program. Scientists and engineers make all this cool stuff, but they don't really know what to do with it, and how to package and sell it. That's where I come in.

E-mail me and maybe we can figure out what it would be good for. I'm thinking you should patent the technology, show proof of concept comparison tests, and shop application specific licenses around.

This is really interesting stuff. But I wonder, how much did this guy do? The 'machine' they talk about emits radiofrequency waves of a certin wavelength and strength, something that can be bought from a catalogue. Did he make the nanoparticles? Probably not, you can buy these nanoparticles from stores found via a simple online search. Did he find the radio frequency himself, or did he look up other studies that have been doing this since 2002, and just copy their procedures? Maybe I'm wrong, but I do not see anything novel from this article.

There is a lot of promise from respected academic institutions for using gold nanorods and nanoparticles for cancer therapeutics. On the other hand, few treatments ever get through clinical trials and are approved for use in mass populations.

For those interested, other universities that have been doing similar things include UCSF, Georgia Tech, and Purdue University.

Hi Hexayurt, we're looking at a couple different heathcare IT problems to solve, and creating expert systems for specific medical domains is one of the areas we are currently investigating.

Can I pick your brain a bit? Send me an e-mail, or let me know what your e-mail is.

haha, iamelgringo, you beat me to bring up these comments. let me add on a bit to what you've already said.

hospitals are not just run as businesses, but they also need to serve the public. as such, you also have ethical and social concerns. there are a several substantial problems with your idea:

-promotes inequality of care based on money. this will likely turn out to be a huge legal issue.

-the decision of something being life threatening should not be determined by patients, but by health professionals.

-substantial change to hospital behavior. the act of creating and incorporating reservations to the ER system will likely be a shock that hospital administrators will not appreciate. (just look at how long it took for doctors to move from beepers to PDA's and cell phones, and also look at the adoption of electronic medical records which is still less than 18% of all doctors) making hospital staff jump through new hoops will increase the resistance of using your technology.

please do not take these comments the wrong way. your idea could work, if you tweaked the business model around hospital constraints, and nothing specific is popping up right now. perhaps other areas where waiting in line is a pain that people will pay for?

He does radio ads[0] and tv ads on shows like "The Bachelor"[1]

[0] http://onlinepersonalswatch.typepad.com/news/2006/01/plentyo... [1] See comment from Reddiance http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2006/12/29/yahoo-to-surge-...

Why do you say that? Sounds like you have some battle scars from first hand experience in health care. Care to share them?

It's whatever you guys decide is fair, and that depends. There are web businesses that rely on a strong sales team and you can actually hire an off-shore team, so the dev guy is not too important. There are businesses that rely on a technologically superior product, and a great dev with special background knowledge. It all really depends on what their competitive advantage is based on.

2% does seem to be on the low side though. Will you indefinitely make 2%, or will you eventually make a salary? Yet another way to look at it is comparing what you could be making at another start up, and dividing by 2% to get what should be the present value of the company. For instance, if you could be making $50k somewhere else, then $50k/.02 = $2.5 million. If it's just an idea, I suspect it is worth much less than $2.5 million.

If you really do believe in the idea, you can always ask them how they came up with the X% figure. Do this over the phone or in person, not e-mail. This way, you can see their real time reaction.

Asking and listening (imo) will not give you accurate reflections of their true traits. Test them like any other investor would test you for fund-worthiness.

Find out what else they've done to demonstrate they are entrepreneur material. Do a short trial project or two. Pay close attention to how they react to different circumstances during the projects. Challenge their ideas and see how they respond. Ask yourself if you could really work well with them, and if they really improve the odds of success enough to merit becoming a significant shareholder.

Full-time effort >> part-time effort. However, there are cases where part time is good enough.

It varies on how much (smart and well funded) competition there is, barriers to entry, your own personal ambitions. In general, larger and stupider the competition, the more likely you can do ok with part-time effort.

Joel's post on being a Ben and Jerry's vs. an Amazon can give some insight on this topic: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000056.html

It's not the start ups, but the investing circles that make the hub. Start ups can move pretty freely, but angels and VC's appear to be more set in one location. If you can convince gutsy angels to move from San Fran to Boston, or get Boston angels to be more bold with their investments, then Boston has a chance. Otherwise, it's not worth it for innovative start ups to stay in Boston.

Thanks! This will help keep track of the hundreds of new comments when pg posts a new essay.

It would be nice to have something that lists the monitored threads. For instance, if I wanted to track the progress of this thread, it would be a lot easier to have a list from YC Tracker bookmarklet than to remember and search for the title "YC News Tracker blah blah."

One of my friends working on this, http://www.peerdecision.com/

I know this is a repost, but with the upcoming YC application, and new visitors to Hacker News, I thought this would be helpful.

24 + B.S. Biomedical Engineering, Minor in CS, Accounting

Biotech in the US happens either in Boston or the Bay Area and to a lesser extent in the DC/MD/NOVA hub. I have heard that Boston is more an old boy network and that the Bay Area biotech start ups are more receptive to hiring younger people (not MD or PhD) as early employees. For starting your own biotech company, it will be very difficult to garnish credibility without a terminal degree or board of big name collaborators.

A good approach to starting a business in this space is to pick your target audience, and find out if your team can easily fix any of their biggest problems. If not, iterate to a different target audience until you find a good problem for your team.

In the medical device realm, I know of a couple groups of undergrads that have developed technologies that attracted VC attention. Titles and credentials are not deal breaking obstacles.

This is common practice in biotech and life sciences businesses, and probably in any other field where innovation happens at a rapid rate.