Coghead Grinds To A Halt, Heads To The Deadpool | Hacker News Reader

Coghead Grinds To A Halt, Heads To The Deadpool

techcrunch.com

Talk about technology risk. This is a clear barrier for adoption of enterprise apps, one day they are here the next they they are gone.

The burn rate for a lot of the startups are amazingly high. Is it really necessary to have such a high burn rate? What's considered a healthy burn rate?

these days it seems a lot of the burn rate is in sky-high salaries. employees seem to be treating the fund as a piggy bank. i've been speaking to a lot of VC-backed small ventures in the bay area and even in these times, $150k starting salary is not being balked at or even questioned. $150k seems to be the floor for negotiation with many. and thats for engineering...god only knows what the "ceo" is earning, likely $250k or more.

Wow... thanks for the insight.

Aren't bigger salaries an offset to the risk? I mean, startups are riskier than 'solid companies' (well, not that much these days, but that's the premise), so it makes sense to offer more money for someone to 'jump in'... That or equity - but I suppose with current trend of companies going broke, equity doesn't seem like a good deal for most people...

This was a Guy Kawasaki/Garage.com funded company if I remember right. I've got mixed feelings about some of the companies he's funded/promoted/started, though his books are interesting.

Yes it was. Kawasaki has had a long long list of misses since the first bubble..

Coghead raised a lot of money, in the order of $12M+. in the end, they didn't have a whole lot to show considering how crowded this space is and that they had raised more money than anybody else.

Could have funded 20-30 companies with those funds and probably found 2-3 winners.

They did spend a lot on PR/marketing - I know because their people were hitting me up all the time.

Who are the competitors?

Guy is the Robert Kiyosaki of IT...

my ex-roommate worked at coghead. he says the company hadn't been doing well for a while (funding issues) and him and few of the originals had been running it on their own time.

Wonder if they would consider open sourcing their engine?

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