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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

Yea, kind of bizarre, especially as point #1. How would a VC even know you're working on a start-up? I also don't get random E-mails from VCs asking me whether I am working on a start-up and if so would I like to drink a beverage. Is this really a common problem for people?

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She's a lot more popular than your average person, and more tied into SV than most. Her resume includes Google, Youtube, Twitter, and Postmates before founding her own company, plus she's got 35K followers on Twitter and had a TechCrunch article written about the startup. I think a lot of what she wrote is applicable but she also moves in spheres the average person doesn't.

Thank you for the clarification. It makes more sense in this context.

So looks like this article applies mostly to people like her.

"0. Spend your free time building your network before you don't have free time anymore."

-1 be born in USA or get a green card.

Still to be fair are we expecting a single article knocked up in an hour to apply everyone's situation? Not even a book could be that.

I assume that the author already had funding when she decided talking to VCs was a waste of time. It makes sense; at some point you need to stop networking and just do the work.

Also, I assume that well connected female founders in an untapped market really get a lot more calls than average.

Not saying the advice is right or wrong but VCs that "send invitations to drink a coffee" are usually lower level employees with little to no decision making power. Job titles at VC firms are a bit misleading too (e.g. "Principals / Associates" are relatively low level employees and rarely have a vote in deals). It might be common knowledge but I was surprised by this when I initially found out.

Not sure how common but I worked on a side project at the Launch Hackathon in Feb then slowly made progress from prototype to real thing. In July I put up a website for it so people could sign up but I keep falling behind in actually launching the damn thing (and believe me I want to launch ASAP, warts and all, just need everything working first).

I have gotten emails / tweets from two VCs regarding my project and another from a group wanting me to apply to their start-up incubator. I sorta solicited one as he was tweeting "hey what's your idea and I'll give you feedback" so I mentioned it, pointed him to my website and he seemed interested in wanting to help when I was ready.

So I'm not sure. It probably depends on if a VC happens to come across it somehow and it's probably pretty rare. The 2 + incubator that contacted me, hell, they may never invest anything. I did setup a twitter account so I tried tweeting during my hackathon but after that was one it's pretty rare for me to tweet on it.

Fyi my side project is www.simex.io (yeah I know the date is wrong but I am still working on it and I did have a real working prototype; I _will_ launch but it'll likely be in January at this rate).

She had an article written about her on TechCrunch. That would likely put her on a lot of VC's radar.

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