Six Apart acquires and shuts down Pownce | Hacker News Reader

Six Apart acquires and shuts down Pownce

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100 pointsjmorin007148 comments

Here's what really bugs me: 2 months ago, Leah was on the cover of Inc Magazine and part of their "cool, determined, under 30" feature. They quoted the NY Times assessment that Pownce is "one of the hottest start-ups in the valley".

Why is it so hard for the media (print and web) to cover technology start-ups and founders that are actually changing the world and/or making a profit?

Are you telling me that 3 months ago the Inc editors saw Pounce as some huge, valley juggernaut–and now it's shut down? Or did they just have that much trouble finding good under-30 entrepreneurs?

http://www.inc.com/magazine/20081001/

If you're connected, you get featured.

There are plenty of folks out there (even young folks, say 20-30) who are making millions each year from businesses they're not shouting about. They don't get the same sort of self-serving press these digital socialites get, but they're still raking in the dough and having real success.

Entrepreneurs have to make a decision. They can either be part of the in-set and get a constant ego boost from the press, or they can just get on with running their business. The smartest people choose the latter.

Yeah, I guess you're right. I'm actually in the latter camp myself (although I'm not < 30 anymore).

I'm honestly not bugged personally about any lack of press. Having a successful company with no press is much better than the opposite (like you said).

I think my main beef is with the press itself (not the companies). I enjoy reading Inc mag ... but I was suspect as soon as that issue dropped in my mailbox. I knew Pownce wasn't "hot" and that it probably wouldn't last. Aren't they worried about looking stupid when crap like this happens?

I wish a Inc (or someone) would send 1 good journalist and 1 good photographer together on a road trip to profile a dozen tech startups that (a) aren't in NYC or the Valley, (b) have substantial revenue or growth and (c) haven't set out to be the "Next [INSERT UNPROFITABLE SOCIAL NETWORK/UTILITY]" ... it would actually be an educational and interesting read.

There are a few problems. The first is that journalists are, on the whole, reasonably ignorant in terms of depth. Not in a malicious way, but keeping your finger on the pulse of an entire industry while having to meet deadlines is ridiculously tough - especially if you don't get the freedom to schmooze, put on events, travel, and what not (as, say, Michael Arrington does). They focus on breadth rather than depth in most cases.

Further, tech journalists are not known for taking risks to get stories (compare to photojournalists). They could travel to Duluth and profile a start-up there, one in Huntsville, one in San Luis Obispo, and wherever, but the risk is too high of not coming up with a solid story. In the Valley they can rely on their contacts (often well established entrepreneurs who are part of the digerati) to give them more of the same. Outside of the valley? Unless someone in the digerati knows you or you're making some really big waves, the risk of coming out to profile you is pretty high.

Hey, we started in San Luis Obispo :)

Woo, Cal Poly! SLO is my favorite city - sadly, it's a bit too expensive..

Wasn't that what happened when Web2.0 was first starting? IIRC, the poster children for early Web2.0 successes were:

* Flickr (Vancouver)

* LiveJournal (Seattle)

* Del.icio.us (NYC)

* 37signals (Chicago)

* Friendster (Silicon Valley)

* MySpace (Beverly Hills)

* FaceBook (initially Boston)

There's a pretty good geographic mix right there, even among unprofitable ad-supported startups.

It's Kevin Rose's Internet; we're just using it.

http://www.inc.com/magazine/20081101/keeevviin.html

1) I can't believe I clicked that link. 2) There is no way that guy is 6 feet tall.

The first time I met Kevin in person the first words out of my mouth were "wow, you're taller than I expected." He is 6 feet tall, and I'm not sure why he gives the impression of being shorter.

It is the round face, and the big head, that makes people think you are shorter (if they have seen you in pics only). I get this all the time too and I am a little bit taller than 6'.

I'm 6'7/6'8 - do I get bonus points?

I've been asking that for years and have had no success.

Random factoid. All of the people in those pictures are employees. That supports a totally different interpretation.

If you wonder about feature articles, read this: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

Professional PR gets you into Inc. But it also increases your burn rate.

Or social connections. Given Kevin Rose's involvement, it was next to impossible for Pownce not to get more press than it deserved.

Well, PR had a lot to do with Kevin's notoriety. Sure he had a good start from TechTV (though apparently not enough to keep him on the air there), but there was a well-orchestrated (and expensive) PR campaign there too. I should know.

Kevin's techtv personality aside, I associate a lot of Digg's early adoption to his participation on TWIT. When iTunes first started accepting Podcasts, TWIT was the #1 show with ~250k+ subscribers... as far as market demographics are concerned, this was a perfect fit for plugging his digg project -- which Kevin did a lot of for free!

Consequently, I really like Kevin and I wish he never left TWiT. It was the old TechTV re-united and with everything in their control... one-by-one it seemed each person left or became less involved as TWiT launched them into different careers. Can't blame them tho -- TechTV and TWiT were fantastic springboards for all those involved.

I never really associated TWiT with the success (nor afaik has anyone else). Diggnation was ranked pretty close in the early days of itunes podcasts.

I tend to associate most of the success with Paris Hilton and Yahoo ;-) In case you weren't around in Feb. 2005, her cell phone got hacked and someone put up some pictures and contacts on their site and then submitted it to digg. It got indexed by yahoo and ended up as the no. 1 and no. 3 search results for "Paris Hilton Cell Phone." Once we got the site back up :-( we discovered our traffic had increased drastically.

That is true. It seems once you've put in enough to get onto the PR gravy train, however, paying for it becomes less than essential.

Leah Culver is hot. Problem solved.

I know Leah and she is also sick of comments like that.

Aside from being one of the lead engineers on Pownce she wrote parts of the OAuth spec as well as the standard Python implementation.

Why not comment on her engineering talents instead?

If you think physical attraction was a 0% factor, you are deluding yourself.

Right, but you didn't say "Leah being good lucking probably helps" you boiled her down to a single attribute which was looks.

Inc and the rest of the tech press have featured plenty of less attractive people who get a professional photoshoot and come out on top. They don't get reduced to being successful because they are "hot" because they aren't girls.

While I know her looks haven't hurt her career I see HN as a place where people make more rounded comments than yours. Just because you can say it that way, doesn't mean it's worth saying.

I know where you're coming from, but I think you're shooting the messenger. When it comes to tech press coverage, it's pretty clear that Leah Culver benefits from her gender and looks.

Quite - it's like Martha Lane Fox. Lastminute.com wasn't even a dotcom in the proper sense, but she got tons and tons of press... And then vanished. Regardless of anyone's stance on gender issues, the media believes women in tech are newsworthy in their own right (and the people who buy their magazines and click their links validate this belief).

Brevity is the soul of wit.

Brevity … is wit.

She is only hot by geek culture standards. She's a 6.5, 7 tops. Same thing with Sarah Lacey.

Terrible. The only thing worse than alienating a female developer by saying she's hot is coming along and criticizing her appearance.

I think the main problem for female science entrepreneurs is they're in the tiny sliver of the Venn diagram where Entrepreneurial women (a minority, but perhaps larger than the amount of male entrepreneurs) and women in science (a minority no matter how you slice it) meet. There are many self-employed women working as fashion designers, restauranteurs, Innkeepers, real-estate agents, and Yoga instructors. There are likewise millions (or at least hundreds of thousands) of women in the sciences and in engineering, but yaw, they're a minority. Finally, some of these entrepreneurial engineer women are attractive. But now you're getting into a minority among a minority among a minority, and it is unlikely any of these women would be noteworthy if compared to the richest entrepreneurs (Rockefeller, Vanderbilt), the most prominent scientists (Feynman, Newton), or the most beautiful people. For someone who is also a woman [1] to be notable in all three fields would be astronomically unlikely even if these fields were not somewhat incompatible [2]. If a woman is fairly good at all three fields, that's amazing, but it shouldn't come as a surprise that she is neither very attractive compared the most beautiful women or very talented compared to the best programmers.

[1] Notable women are presumably twice as scarce of notable people or either gender.

[2] One can only do so much with one's life, especially if one aims at being the best at something.

I respectfully disagree. It's a free country.

That's a strange response. I'm saying that what he said was inappropriate, not that he shouldn't have the right to say it.

Let's hope it wasn't for the programming talent...

http://leahculver.com/2008/11/25/couchdb-documents-python-ob...

http://leahculver.com/2007/04/19/star-ratings/

You're right, it was for the get-it-done talent that so few people actually have... developers are a dime a dozen. Stop glorifying yourself.

okay, i'm going to take the unpopular opinion here (based on the karma votes i see in this thread), and say that those two linked blog entries show a profound lack of programming ability. since when is it wrong to expect a programmer to be good at programming?

Judge talent at its best and character at its worst.

Naively posting about one or two topics says little about one's programming ability, and much more about one's willingness to be open. It would mean a lot more if Pownce wasn't any good. But it was featureful, it seemed to work well, and quite a few people liked it. Dissing Leah for posting a few silly things is just nastiness.

i agree in theory, but ... converting a float to a string to compute an average? that's too much.

and i don't see any evidence that leah had that much to do with pownce's features. if her blog is indicative of her code, my first guess is the other pownce people were doing all the work.

shrugs.

I've written a lot more code that's both more convoluted and didn't work. I'm not judged for this, because I don't often talk about it. But people should have the right to be occasionally mistaken on their own blog! I don't think the presence of such mistakes takes at all away from accomplishments.

Hers is basically a coded version of what you'd do manually, eyeballing past the decimal. She's more familiar with string conversion than ceil, floor and round. So? That merits public judgment of incompetence? Of being an impostor?

"Hers is basically a coded version of what you'd do manually, eyeballing past the decimal. She's more familiar with string conversion than ceil, floor and round. So? That merits public judgment of incompetence?"

Yes.

I am not trying to be nasty here, but code like that makes me cringe. And yes, if I saw code like that, I would make a strong presumption of programming incompetence.(which is all right. Not everyone has to be a good programmer. As pxlpusher notes above, "get it done" competence is often more valuable).

Since it was publicly posted code, I don't see a problem with "public judgment" either.

"Of being an impostor?"

No. Programming Incompetence != Being an impostor. Anyone can be genuine and incompetent in a particular skill.

Since it was publicly posted code, I don't see a problem with "public judgment" either.

So judge that code. There simply isn't enough information to presume programmer incompetence (let alone make a strong presumption).

In my experience, code reviews are humbling to one and all: Bear that in mind before you raise charges of incompetence.

"In my experience, code reviews are humbling to one and all: Bear that in mind before you raise charges of incompetence."

Sure, but as someone said above

"I agree in theory, but ... converting a float to a string to compute an average?"

We'll have to agree to disagree on whether code like this indicates programmer incompetence. To me, it does. YMMV.

She took computer science at a university. I would expect that she knows how to deal with different hashing functions for hash-tables, different types of trees and knows some graph theory among other things. To not be familiar with ceil, floor and round after taking computer science courses is very sad.

Six Apart seem to have voted with their pocketbook.

i agree in theory, but ... converting a float to a string to compute an average?

I like beautiful, elegant code as much as the next person. But I've done worse than this, often on purpose, in the name of just getting something working.

You should be ashamed of yourself! Dijkstra would not like it: http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2291/1591358554_0568182db3.jp...

I went back and read the star rating code again after reading this. I didn't get it the first time because I'm not familiar with Python and am a beginner, but when I realized what she did my brain hurt.

However, I can't say I haven't said embarrassingly stupid things from time to time...OK, at least not since treating ADD, but still...nobody's perfect. I would also like to point out that there is merit in the approach she took, in that she just got it done instead of hesitating and thinking over what the optimal solution would be. A good example of iterating on a functional original.

I concur. Cherry picking stupid mistakes form ones past does paint an accurate picture of talent. I have made several stupid coding mistakes at 2 am only to fix them in a minute or two when I start back up the next day, refreshed.

I disagree.

The CouchDB post is about someone writing something others might find useful, acknowledging that it might not be the best solution, and graciously accepting corrections from others. In short, everyone's a winner.

The rounding number post simply reflects that the days where a computing bachelors was taken under the Faculty of Science have long since past.

We've all written code that was stupid beyond all comprehension - even PG will cop to that - so never having written bone-headed code isn't a prerequisite for being a good programmer (edit: the opposite is probably true). You need to judge a body of work.

I wish I had downmod right now. Go back to reddit you comment troll.

Just goes to show that startups are more about making stuff people want than about technical ability.

Was Pounce really "stuff people want"? Without knowing the terms of the Pounce acquisition, it's hard to say whether this is closer to success or failure. SixApart certainly aren't buying Pounce because of the quality/popularity of their product.

I'm learning this very fast (and the hard way unfortunately). I launched two technically deep projects to no response. Then I spent a week putting together a hack and people started buying.

I'm not entirely surprised by that.

But think of it this way, your "hacks" will keep getting better and better and cleverer and cleverer.

I heard a (probably apocryphal) story about Picasso being asked to sketch something at a restaurant once. He obliged, and doodled some lines on a napkin. Then he asked for a lot of money for it. The lady balked and said "but it only took you a few seconds." His response? "It took me 40 years."

Decent blog post on the topic. http://www.ianlabs.com/2007/04/01/inherent-value-in-design/

You are right, but I don't see how that answers the GP posters' point. If Pownce was purchased just to be shut down, then I doubt very many people wanted it to make it economically viable.

Um, These 2 blog posts really aren't bad.

So she isn't the next guido van rossum, but if any of us ( maybe even guido ) posted our thoughts, code examples, and solutions on a blog there would be many examples of less than ideal or poor code.

I have some sympathy towards Leah, because I'm not an experienced coder myself, and I'm also working on a start-up.

While I thought Pownce was useless and never used it myself, it was a good-looking product and it had a nice layout. Six Apart would do well to learn from the Pownce team about making a pretty product.

I think that "good-looking" and nice layout were both courtesy of Daniel Burka, and he's not going to SA.

Oh? What does Leah do on the team, then? What's she responsible for?

Programming.

http://leahculver.com/about/

> I’m a founder and the lead developer of a social network, Pownce, that lets you send stuff to your friends online.

I'm not an experienced coder myself, and I'm also working on a start-up.

stop wasting the precious hours of your life

"Wasting?" I have a brilliant idea, I'm good with visuals, and I've got a cofounder. And I can't think of anything else I'd want to spend my freshman year on.

and I've got a cofounder

good god please bury this term, the yc fanboys have turned the "startup" lexicon into such a shallow cliche that its almost at the point of parody. you don't have a "cofounder", what you have is a guy down the hall in your dorm

I can't think of anything else I'd want to spend my freshman year on.

try your homework, it'll pay dividends unlike yet-another pointless website

When hiring, example projects are more important than grades.

only if your company is trucking in low-iq monkey work...which covers 99% of the "startups" today

Yeah? Why are grades that important? They show that you can do things after a professor tells you how to do it, and that you're good at busywork.

Project work shows initiative at the very least. But again: I'm not doing it for a resume. I'm going it because I have a good idea and I want to realize its potential.

Why are grades that important? They show that you can do things after a professor tells you how to do it, and that you're good at busywork

why are you telling me this? just drop the fuck out now and save the money you are pissing away on tuition if you are convinced its all just a waste of time

but get used to being self-employed, because without that degree you won't even get through filter0 for any recruiter or hiring dept. hard to tell a cto how smart you are when the HR staffer shreds your resume because your last education is high school

I don't think any of the startups we've funded care whether someone finished their degree. We certainly don't ourselves.

This is not to say grades are entirely meaningless, though. I've definitely taken a few classes where getting an A took more than obedience.

I guess my "obedience" line appeals more to high school than it does to college. In college, I'm having to do thinks like design a portfolio just to let my professor see my assignments, and it's taking a lot of diverse skills. In high school, grades are much more focused around busywork: several very mediocre students were ranked highly because they would do what the teacher asked to the letter, and nothing more.

I still think that projects are more valuable on a resume (or, I'd look at them more if it was up to me), because with a project you can see exactly what work was done. I can see something somebody made and understand what they place emphasis on, what details they skim over, and - to some degree - what taste they have in certain subjects. It's not valuable just because it's on the paper, but because you can glean more from a project than you can from a grade point average.

it's the knowledge that matters, not the grades. i am more concerned that a project like this could make 'unalone' work more for the grade (or the degree) vs. for the knowledge.

there were also many cases where i've felt that getting a higher grade would mean i'd end up learning less - as in, i'd focus on completing projects/assignments/memorizing what's needed immediately for the test vs. focusing on truly understanding the material and how it would apply to the real world.

this quarter of graduate school i'm also taking twice my normal load while still working full time: reason is one of the courses i am taking is only offered once every few years. this could mean a lower grade, but i'd end up walking away with greater knowledge.

There are many ways to show that you have perseverance. Going through university/college is but one.

Also IMHO college/university has to be one of the best places to meet like minded people.

If your aim in life is to work at a company where you have to tick boxes and go through a hiring dept which hires you based on some grades, then sure - get the grades.

Personally I've never been at an interview where they care what grades I've got, they care what I've done, and what I've built.

I don't have a college degree and I've been gainfully employed and well-paid for many years now.

I'm the CTO for a 20 person startup. I only went to one year of college. Art school even.

Oh? I'd be interested in your story.

I was in the right place at the right time.

Went to an art school for their writing program (wanted to be a writer) and they cancelled it the year I got there. I sat in the computer lab (this is 1993) and taught myself everything I could about anything related to computers. I mean I literally hung out in the labs for 12-14 hours a day.

I learned to write software that year using SuperCard and writing extensions in Pascal. My college was the second college in Minnesota (the U of M being the other) to get internet access. No graphical web yet and you could only access it on NeXT boxes, of which we had an entire lab.

Wrote what I can safely say is the first graphical instant messenger application. Worked on the local LAN via AppleTalk. It didn't catch on, but when I saw ICQ several years later I kicked myself in the pants for not pursuing it.

I got kicked out of school for not going to classes but was offered a job in the labs by the dean right after he booted me. I turned it down.

Six months later, a professor tracked me down and hired me to work at his digital photography studio (one of the few to have the hasselblad $15K digital leif-back). Built my first website in 1995, three days after Netscape 2 was released.

Haven't looked back since.

Some people do need to go to college though. Some people don't. Timing is as important as the ability to teach yourself. Being OCD totally helps. Ambition, timing and a little luck are the most important things.

YMMV.

No. I've got a bright friend who's similarly looking to do something outside of college, who has abilities that I don't. We complement each other.

I'm maintaining straight A's, partly because I'm in a set of programming-intensive classes. I do both at once.

My site won't be pointless. It appeals to a niche that hasn't been appealed to yet, and we've got a non-community driven revenue plan. The goal is that even if our community doesn't start off strong, the technology driving the community will.

the comment is combative and in poor tone, but i'm upmoding it. there's more to your education than knowing how to make a dynamic web-site.

take something away from undergrad: if you want practical experience work on business-wise pointless but technically interesting projects (just for yourself) or open source projects. take the time to learn mathematics (calculus, calculus-based statistics), electrical engineering and physics: web fads come and go, but solid scientific knowledge stays with you.

I did something similar to what unalone is trying to do - worked on a fast-growing volunteer website in undergrad - and have no regrets. The time I spent working on FictionAlley was much more educational than anything else I did in college, and if I had to pick one, I'd say ditch college and build your project.

It's not just "knowing how to make a dynamic website", too; in fact, after I finished, I vowed never to use PHP again. The most valuable skills I got from FictionAlley were all soft skills. How to balance a dozen different feature requests and pick out a design that isn't what anyone suggested but satisfies them all. How to diffuse a massive PR disaster. How to deal with a completely unreasonable customer. How to make your life a living hell by promising features to users before they've been developed. How to (roughly) estimate the time a project will take (if you're just starting out, expect it to take roughly 10x as long as you expect). How to build things incrementally so you get to the finish line eventually.

I picked up a couple useful technical skills too; I learned all my UNIX, SQL and vi skills from that project, along with softer technical skills like how profiling, logging, optimizing, diagnosing performance problems, etc.

Most of this, you simply can't get in college. The projects are not of sufficient scope. You'll never have an unreasonable customer for a homework assignment, no matter how much you hate your professor. ;-) You probably won't have to maintain code that you wrote 3 years ago and can't stand now.

Heck, most people don't get to deal with that at work until they're in their late twenties, or even well into their thirties. I have older alum friends that graduated before I matriculated, and they're just now getting into positions where they have to balance competing tradeoffs between different groups.

I actually risked my degree a whole lot more than unalone is doing - I was a physics major, and it's a lot harder to do dynamic web programming + upper-level physics than it is to do dynamic web programming + CS. It ended up working out for me (after a really nerve-wracking last semester) and I got the degree, the fundamental math/physics/CS knowledge, and the experience of working on a fast-growing website. But if I had to drop one, I'd say drop the degree, get the fundamental knowledge from textbooks, and do the project.

Wow! I didn't know anybody from FictionAlley was on Hacker News. That's incredibly cool.

Your interface was one of my favorite FF ones. I liked how you sorted by author name rather than genre: it put the emphasis on the writers, which was really neat.

Yeah, I was the tech lead for FictionAlley from 2002-2005. I wrote about 90% of the code in the current system, and did most of the design and project management (though of course it was a consensus effort, and lots of people contributed). I've been mostly-retired for almost 3 years now, but I still get called on for occasional bugfixes.

It's funny, in the "When will you consider yourself a success?" thread, I was thinking that my answer would be "When random people I meet say, 'Wow, you built X! I use that all the time' where X is some project I've done." It's really gratifying to hear someone using it.

I can imagine. I only ever wrote one fanfiction piece, so that wasn't up my alley, but at the governor's school I attended, we'd read HP fanfiction aloud at night (this was right before Deathly Hallows), and FictionAlley was one of the big ones.

That is so cool.

I've had that a few times. It is very cool. But eating is cool too. Balancing the two is important. ;)

This semester I've been really focusing on web development. We want to apply to YCombinator over the summer, and I want to make sure that I'm more than capable of handling the aspects of the site I'm running.

My co-founder (apparently that term's inappropriate now) is very much a math-and-science person. I'm not averse to them - I took calculus in my junior year of high school - but at the same time, that's not what interests me. I'm much more an arts person: writing, music, theatre. It's a good combination, because we look at what we're developing in different ways.

At the same time, I'm learning how to program, I'm in a digital arts course, and next semester I'm taking an upperclassmen programming course. I'm not planning to throw my life away on a project. But if I've got a good idea, I'm going to try to implement it. I'm young: I can risk failure.

> But if I've got a good idea, I'm going to try to implement it. I'm young: I can risk failure.

Sure but don't risk your undergrad. Graduate school is a much better time for this. And to quote DHH, don't treat your life like a planned waterfall project: "I want to do web development, so I will do X, then I will do Y."

Worst comes to worst, I leave college for a year or two, and come back after I've tried everything a bit older and a bit wiser.

I don't think that web development is my big thing. I'm interested in the web, but I'd hate to have to work on ideas I don't love. My current project is something for writers, so it has practical uses for myself as well. And YCombinator summer happens in Boston, which happens to be the place I want to go, so I told my cofounder and we agreed we'd give it a good try.

Crabapple is obviously trolling, but (s)he's got a point: it's a really bad idea to drop of out of college to pursue anything less than an instant success. You'll have plenty of time to chase rainbows once you've finished your degree. I realize that this isn't popular advice amongst the "school is for luzers" crowd that camps out on this site, but every good developer I know had the maturity and perseverance to finish college. It isn't that hard.

Important corollary: you'll never have more free time to pursue personal projects than you do in college. You don't need to quit school to find the time to make a popular website (just ask Rob Malda).

right. it's not even about a degree or the knowledge. more than anything, as this acquisition shows, start-ups aren't about technology or knowledge: they're about executing on an idea and tons of PR and marketing.

but one way to increase your chances of winning (that is, drive a start-up to profitability or a home-run exit) is to get a body of knowledge that makes you stand out from others.

i certainly agree that college is the time to pursue personal projects: but personals means exactly this, personal. work on projects that will teach you the most vs. the projects that seem to be the best from business perspective. you have rest of your life to spend worrying about making a profit.

for 2 years out of my undergrad career i did contract systems administration / internal web app development. however, i've learned a lot more about systems administration. in retrospect, it'd have been better spent otherwise. trying to have personal projects while working full-time and doing a part-time masters is a great luxury.

work on projects that will teach you the most vs. the projects that seem to be the best from business perspective

I think that the best metric is a third thing: "work on projects that you like the most."

I think that the start-up I'm working on will teach me a lot. And it's got more than enough potential to earn me a living, too. But more than that, it's an idea that I love. The fact that I think I can sustain myself with it is an added side effect.

I mean, I won't drop out of college just for the heck of it. My co-founder and I are applying to seed investors, though, and that means we'll spend time on leave from college working on the idea. If we get accepted, we'll work on the project full-time for as long as we can. But if we don't, then it'll continue to be a side project and we'll launch it from college.

Most decent colleges will let you take an indefinite "leave of absence" to pursue other stuff, and come back whenever you're ready without reapplying and without having lost your credit. Technically, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerburg, and Larry & Sergey aren't dropouts, they're just still on leave and haven't bothered to come back yet. Wozniak did go back, after his plane crash, and finished his degree.

And I found it wasn't time that was the limiting factor, it was attention. I found it really difficult to have spare attention to devote to personal projects when I was a physics major, learning CS fundamentals (mostly on my own, but I took some upper-level electives and ended up finishing the major), doing sailing & orchestra, and trying to have a semblance of a social life. Might be easier in a less-demanding major with fewer activities, but I found it a lot easier to do personal programming once I got a job.

Those are potentially misleading examples:

* Bill Gates had the resources of an extremely well-connected and wealthy family to hedge his risk. He has also repeatedly and publically advised young people to stay in college, and not follow his path.

* Mark Zuckerburg didn't leave college until Facebook was growing so quickly that he had to make the choice.

* Larry and Sergey were grad students; they were trying to get their doctorates, not their BS degrees.

Ignoring all of that, there's some serious selection bias going on: for every Bill Gates, there are ten thousand droupouts who are flipping burgers.

Not really an argument, just pointing out that there's a 3rd option besides "drop out" and "stay in school". And it sounded like that was the one unalone was considering.

True...but he'll just be trading off the cost of homework, for the cost of supporting himself. Personally, I'd kill for the kind of free time I had in college....

> Personally, I'd kill for the kind of free time I had in college....

When I see all the posts telling you "what would you tell your younger self", that's what I think (at the age of 25, working full-time while attending graduate school part-time and dating somebody an hour's drive away).

When you're a full time student... you don't know how great being a full time student is in many ways: not a worry in the world, you just manage your course load; you select the time of your courses, deadlines are reasonable and set ahead of time. On top of that if that there are smart and inspiring people for you and plenty of courses that you can take just for the hell of it (I really miss taking history and philosophy courses).

Of course it's easy for me to wax nostalgic about the great college days when I just drove home (to an 830 sq ft apt all to myself!) in a sports car I purchased new, after dinner at an upscale Indian place -- I am tempted at times to just take a leave of absence from work and do graduate school full time -- but once you're used to a certain lifestyle it's not easy to go back and cut your spending drastically.

Perhaps I'm young, but right now I can't imagine not having free time. I mean, no matter what I do, I want to make sure that I'm doing it by choice. The only thing I don't like is being put on rails and made to do things that I don't see the point of.

Right now, I'm learning Processing in one class. I'm not learning anything new about language: I already know Java. Processing isn't used as much, and from what I've seen it's not doing anything that I want to do. We learned Scratch, which is a childish language, and ActionScript, which I've already worked with. I love learning new things; what I don't love is being in a place where I'm not learning and have to do busywork, while I have an idea and think I can mess with it. If that goes wrong, I'll know enough to find a program that teaches me exactly the thing that I go wrong with, and next time I'll be more prepared.

Not to sound too condescending, but part of the goal of higher education is to expose you to things for which you can't see an immediate application. Your perspective is small; your professors' perspective is much larger. They're trying to teach you concepts, not languages.

That's not to say everything that you study will be meaningful and exciting. There's tons of busywork in college (especially in the first few quarters, when they're bringing the slow kids up to speed), but that's life! If you think you're going to escape busywork by starting a company, you're being naive.

More to the point, if the stuff you're studying is so boring and unrewarding that it makes you want to quit, then you've got plenty of time to work on side projects while things get more interesting. That's where the free time comes from!

Back when I took my intro to CS class, it was taught in Scheme. I hated this at the time -- and bitched about it constantly. "When am I ever going to need this language that isn't used for anything, and that has such a fucked up syntax))))))?"

Looking back on it now (and having had to implement many of the algorithms we learned about in that class in C, Java and other languages that are less suited for it), I wouldn't have been able to grasp many of the sorting, binary tree or hashing algorithms nearly as easily in another language.

To my own surprise, one of the things that I now consider most valuable about my undergrad degree was that it forced me to at least grasp Scheme and Smalltalk.

Not condescending at all! This is why I love Hacker News: there are so many people worth listening to and they take their time to talk.

I almost took a leave of absence when I was in college to go to work and study in china for a year (learning chinese and working as a developper for a year) but in the end I didn't do it (partly because of money and because of sars)...

Looking back I regret not having pushed ahead and taken that leave of absence because working even for one year in a company makes one appreciate the subjects of the classes in college much more... And I feel part of the classes of college were wasted on me because I lacked the experience to appreciate them

It's not a matter of perseverance, though. I know I can finish college. I'm only a semester in, but I like classes, I can stand the people, and I'm good at this.

It's more that I'd rather take risks early. If I try this and succeed, I have more of a vantage point. Perhaps I'll end up at a better college, at a better program. If I stay in college for four years before doing this, my idea might have been taken, and if my idea doesn't work I'll have to hunt for an alternative venue. Right now, I've got the ability to leave for a little while, then come back, and I don't see why I shouldn't at least try.

I'm all for taking risks early -- smart risks. But it's not really that smart to quit college to pursue a business that has no traction. Nobody is going to steal your idea if you don't drop out, and nothing is stopping you from working on it now. And if it does turn out that your idea takes off, you can always quit then. Staying in school is a smart hedge against failure that most entrepreneurs don't have.

Ignoring, for the moment, that a college degree lends you business credibility that's difficult to obtain otherwise, it's important to realize that quitting school right now probably won't give you a strategic advantage. Quit school, and you've got to feed yourself, house yourself, pay the bills and do a million other things just to manage your life. Stay in school, and you've got to do some homework. Otherwise, you're surrounded by smart people, free resources, subsidized housing and food. It doesn't get any easier!

Assuming that you're not going to some ridiculously expensive private school (and paying for it out-of-pocket), I can hardly think of a better place to start a business than a University. I've never had more free time than I did as an undergrad, and I think that others would tell you the same.

Nah. I'm going to public school. But - I said this before - the problem I'm having is that I don't see the purpose to the specifics of the things I'm doing. It saps me of some motivation when I'm doing things that not only aren't productive but aren't learning.

Most of what you do in a company -- startup or otherwise -- is boring schlep work. If you don't have the tenacity to put up with the relatively small amount of tedium that a university doles out, you're going to be in for a shock when you enter the business world.

> Worst comes to worst, I leave college for a year or two, and come back after I've tried everything a bit older and a bit wiser.

Before you make this decision, you should talk to people who tried. However, as I've said, life isn't a planned waterfall project. You seem bright, focused and most importantly confident.

I guess what I mean to say, don't come away from this knowing _nothing but_ web development (whether with a degree or not).

When I was an undergraduate, systems administration was all I wanted to do. Then all I wanted to do was backend web-development. Now I've realized that both of these are just narrow technical skills that anyone could do, but I am no longer nineteen (yet luckily, I'm also not 30 yet).

That's sound advice. Thanks!

Yeah aside from the programming "talent", I'm quite perplexed as to the reason of this acquisition. Last I checked, Pownce wasn't competing with any SixApart services.

I don't think you can judge a person's ability based on a couple minor things like these. I applaud her honesty and willingness to put herself out there and the fact that she got things out the door. A lot of developers I know would rather chew off their left leg before admitting to a mistake or flaw in their coding much less have the balls to publish it.

http://www.linkrap.com/teddyquote

Ouch, what a burn. Just curious, what companies have you built and sold?

I tried to check your profile but it was empty.

That's just lousy. Can't someone say the soup tastes like shit in some restaurant when all he can do in the kitchen himself is boil some water?

yes they can, but then they'd open themselves up to criticism...not sure what's 'fair game' here, but seems to me like complaining/criticizing others is indirectly saying "I can do better". Prove it.

Very few games reviewers can develop games. Very few people who review music are successful musicians.

Reviewers - except when on industry-formed panels - are rarely any good at producing what they're reviewing.. that's why they're reviewers.

His wasn't a review; it was a personal dig towards specific programmer's ability. Even professional critics usually have to make a sound argument, not just point to blunders on a blog.

It was a cheap shot and an unfair dig, but ultimately I still believe you don't necessarily need to be skilled in something to be able to criticize its proponents whether you're tactful or not. In as much as it was a criticism, it was a review of sorts.

Democracy relies on this concept of making crude judgements. The "Bush sucks" and "Liberals are socialists" nonsense is crass and often wrong, but people do think that way when voting. If we had to understand politics, economics, and government to a truly informed level, turnout would be in the single digit percentages ;-)

Thankfully, he got voted down to oblivion - so it seems like the majority believe it was a cheap shot and not worth paying attention to. Doesn't mean he was any less qualified to express the opinion though.

that's actually not even the case:

this is like a fast-food franchise owner who consistently serves poor quality food saying an expert chef (who, however, only works in a gourmet restaurant but has never run a restaurant himself) has no right to criticize their food quality because he isn't running a business.

that's a non-sequitir. the original parent was talking technical talent (or lack thereof), not ability to build/flip a website.

the parent is disputing whether the acquisition for "the talent" in this case makes sense: your rebuttal here seems to be circular "6a acquired pownce because pownce founders are talented. pownce founders are talented, because they made something that got acquired by 6a".

Just wanted to point out that I've seen the karma point of this post bounce up and down from 3points to negative 2 and, as of this writing, is sitting at 1 point. Obviously, this post is a lot more interesting than other 1pointers who haven't received any votes in either direction. It would be interesting to show a total number of votes for the comment.

Sure, Pownce is no localeater.com or Mobile Drudge Report, but cut her some slack, huh?

What was wrong with the CouchDBObject?

FYI, she updated the code linked in her post after some comments. You can find some bites of the original code in the comments though.

It used exec instead of setattr/getattr.

Will be interesting to see what six apart does after this transaction. Seems like Pownce was always a "me too" web app that got some hype from being an idea of Kevin Rose. Its still a cool and useful app, just never had the critical mass to overtake twitter or become a real force in the micro blogging space. Despite this Pownce was a solid django web app, and its always good to see those out there.

We're in the process of converting NewsCred to Django. We thought we'd be joining Pownce as one of the few larger-ish startups using Django, but looks like we'll be going at it alone. I was surprised to see the biggest team of Django developers was 10!

Disqus is Django. Don't lose the faith.

Absolutely - we're happy to be in their company!

I always thought Pownce was a solid product. Design, UI/UX, the site copy and marketing - overall I thought it was really well done. If it wasn't for the overwhelming success of Twitter or how easily Facebook launched the same features, things could have turned out much differently for them.

It wouldn't surprise me if within 3-6 months, Six Apart launches a rebranded version of Pownce geared towards companies and enterprise to compete with Yammer. As much as it pains me to agree with Arrington and Calacanis, I'll admit that Yammer has a good business model. And I can't imagine that it would take a tremendous amount of development time to make Pownce ready for those types of customers.

Any one know if Pownce was profitable? They've had ads from the very beginning and there are pro accounts, it would be interesting to know how effective these revenue streams were.

Almost certainly not. 200k uniques per month (from Compete.com). Call it 3 page views per person (average). 600k page views. They charge $3/CPM for ads (that's $3/1000 views). Say they average showing 2 ads on every page view (I doubt they have that much paid inventory, but pretend they do). That's $6 earned for every 1000 page views, or $3600 per month. Double or triple any of the numbers in the formula and I still think you aren't in the ballpark.

These are pure wag #s, of course.

On the cost side, say that 1 fully loaded dev on starvation wages in the Valley costs $10k/mo (taxes, benefits, costs on top of an $80k/yr salary). Hard to tell with their about page, but it looks like they have 3ish FTEs. Add in office (dunno), servers (?), contract folks (legal, accounting, etc), and I bet you have a burn rate of $30k-70k/mo. If they are getting paid market rate, on the high side of that.

The male median income in Santa Clara County is $56,240. 42% above median is "starvation wages"? Even the median income in Palo Alto is only about $90k.

Yaw, that was hyperbole-- starvation wages for a dev (i.e. way below market value) was what I meant.

Generally you calculate a FTE at 1.5 - 2.5x their salary in terms of fully loaded cost (taxes, benefits, minimal overhead). In this cast, I was thinking $80. Do you think that team (or any funded startup team) earns less in San Francisco?

What are you calculating as dev costs?

I've found that good healthcare + FICA + SECA + 401k costs about 15%-20% overhead on salary, not anywhere near 50%. ($120k/$80k = 1.5)

In any case, I agree with the general analysis.

Yaw I was rolling in stuff like phone costs, parking costs, etc. Really, you ought to include every single expense associated with that employee for a proper analysis, but yaw-- it's probably a touch heavy.

I'd be interested in a general sale price.

Judging from their traffic, any revenues must have been negligible.

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/pownce.com

Alexa has never been a good measure of traffic.

My blog has a much higher Alexa rank than pownce but has half the unique hits (based on numbers given above). I skewed my rank myself using the SearchStatus plugin for Firefox.

Quantcast is better often, but there isn't enough data on pownce to show up anything on quantcast. That's generally a bad sign.

Anyone have any insight on how exactly Six Part benefits by closing down Pownce? If Twitter bought Pownce to kill it, I'd understand... but what's in this for Six Apart?

They get the people. Stopping Pownce means those new hires won't be working on Pownce and they can be doing whatever 6A wants.

Personally, I think this "acquisition" is a hiring technique. Instead of making Pownce look like a failure, 6A acquires it and shuts it down - the creators then look like heroes. If 6A had got them to shut it down and then hired them, they'd look like quitters running away to cushy jobs instead of being devoted to their startup. An acquisition makes it look a lot nicer in PR terms for both parties.

Aquisitions for people to put them to work on something completely different rarely make sense, unless you know for a fact up front that the key players are just as bought into the acquirers idea as they are into their own.

They get to pretend to be relevant again.

They get shiny PR-magnet people as employees, halfheartedly using Vox.

I'd bet they had investors in common (Ron Conway?) who put pressure on SA to let them save some of their balance sheet and some of their face.

As an ancient example, that's how it went with Philip Greenspun's ars Digita and their asset sale to Redhat.

Looking at the comments, I have only one thought: Pownce was thrown to the sharks!

To restate the obvious, its definitely a great thing that they got acquired, so congrats to the pownce team.

However, my brief experience with the app was to create an account, login 2-3 times afterward and then never touch it again. I was surprised, like a lot of other people, about the amount of press they were getting for such a mediocre app.

oh, there goes another twitter-killer.

shutdowns like this are going to be common. 90% of existing websites have no viable chance of being self-sustaining by ads or subscriptions...but this shouldn't surprise anyone, at some point, a near-frictionless model coupled with strong winner-take-all economics is bound to result in a few dominant players choking off nearly everything else

I disagree. Creating a website/webapp is ridiculously cheap IF you do it well. There's no barrier for entry. Anyone in their bedroom could be the next twitter on a shoestring.

Creating a website teaches you a lot, and is a lot of fun.

Yeap twitter doesn't make any profit.

A model worthy of emulation indeed.

Yes twitter doesn't make a profit, but they have a massive userbase to sell to. I think they'll probably work out a business model if they put their mind to it.

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