The Pinboard Investment Co-Prosperity Cloud
static.pinboard.in
static.pinboard.in
I don't have startup credentials. My last startup was 10 years ago; I built a hosting company and sold it to a consulting firm for a couple hundred grand. I'm still in IT, so I clearly haven't made enough to cash out yet (I'm an IT operations lead; paid well, but definitely not F-you money).
I'll offer something better though; come to me with an idea I believe in, something that is going to change the world for the better. I'll provide free room and board for six months while you build it (my wife and I aren't great cooks, but practice makes perfect). If you get huge, awesome. I don't want any equity, I just want you to succeed. If it doesn't work out, head on over to a code school in SF that guarantees you a high five figure salary after your time with them.
I can't offer credentials; I can offer to give what I can to help someone reach their goals/dreams. The startup scene needs an airbnb.com for founders who don't need cash, just time and a place to live, and for people who are willing to host said founders at no (or very little) cost to help with their goals.
startupbnb.com?
This much money, I mean... what would I do with it. I think I can build a sustainable business but I fear at this point that the sums involved are forcing me to give up too much control and to grow faster than will be sustainable. I have legitimate concerns that this will ultimately be bad for the company and that it's helping to fuel a salary bubble.
The going colo article a few months back is invaluable on it's own: http://blog.pinboard.in/2012/06/going_colo/
I'm confident that these six new Pinboard/Ptacek/A16Z companies will have excellent return on investment.
Humor aside, there are many smart founders but being brilliant and being money-minded are orthogonal.
Assuming that the recipient can keep a straight face?
EDIT: Perhaps having a16z as the only VC in your seed is a very bad idea. Chris Dixon (now a partner at a16z) cautions enterpreneurs against the risks of having a sole VC in your seed round:
http://cdixon.org/2012/04/02/revisited-big-vcs-investing-in-...
"I can think of about 15 founders I’ve spoken to recently who tried or are trying to raise Series As but are seriously hampered by the fact that a big VC invested in the seed round but isn’t participating in the Series A."
A large micro-investment portfolio.
Anything in this portfolio is sort of a tip of the hat from a16z, a micro-endorsement that messages: "we've got our eyes on this company."
Heck, I will wager $37 that submitting your startup idea to HN will get you more exposure than posting on Pinboard's blog.
That $50 would be converted into stock at the time of their next fundraising. Uncapped means there is no cap on the valuation at the time of the next round. So if one of the founders raised money at a $100,000 valuation later, the $50 investor would get 50/100,000th of the shares.
If it were capped, say at a $50k valuation - the investor would get 50/50,000th of the shares, regardless of the valuation.
A convertible note does not buy equity - thats what 'convertible' means - and 'note' means 'loan'. So it's a loan that can convert to equity based on certain conditions.
As I said, all of this is overly simplistic. It's just a 30,000 foot overview.
EDIT: Seeking technical co-founder to help build out idea. Must be prepared to sign NDA before equity can be discussed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_East_Asia_Co-Prosperity...
Not sure if this is part of a joke or not, but Japan's history of war-time brutality during World War 2 is pretty extreme.
It seems like the "Co-Prosperity Cloud" is a joke, but even if it is, it's a joke in poor taste considering the atrocities committed by Japan, and not even an especially clever one (annexation and abuse for profit is not really the same idea - I hope - that Pinboard is expressing).
In "jokes", people often state propositions that seem opposed to what we would hope they believe.
In any case, the above fails the first rule of jokes... they're supposed to be funny. I thought the post was funny enough. But the reference to a co-prosperity system didn't add much (any?) humor to it. Just pointing that out to the OP...
Personally I thought the co-prosperity added to the humour with an over-the-top name, and I detected a slight whiff of Eastern Bloc over-the-top naming, akin to Council for Mutual Economic Assistance or Polish–Soviet Friendship Society. But then my ethnic background is Polish and not an East/Southeast Asian one.
Repurposing the stilted propaganda of long-ago times, or of clumsy tyrants, for subtly absurdist/ironic humor value, does not in any way lessen the original horrors. It celebrates the distance we've achieved, while also offering a teaching moment by contrast/reference.
See also: "we will bury you", "let a thousand flowers bloom", "we had to destroy the village in order to save it", "i have in my hands a list of hundreds of known Communists", "the war to end all wars", "the mother of all battles", "this blogger has been harmonized", etc.
OTOH, it's crazy that that guy got only 4 years. 10-20 would be more appropriate. Hopefully being convicted under Japanese law doesn't prevent additional action under UCMJ to run consecutively.
Good thing that in the brave new future world of 2013 labor and marketing are completely free of all costs, opportunity and otherwise.
First, you should never accept angel investment from non-accredited investors (i.e., individuals with a net worth of at least one million cents).
Second, the real value of the investors is their network. In this case, Maciej Cegłowski's network is a collection of links featured in an indexed, polished, simple-to-use product. Why accept money from him when his network is already available for free?
Third, seeking outside investment prior to building a prototype has been heralded as a path to madness. You should at least have some sort of Bootstrap-based splash page on a .io domain before you accept his sizable investment.
Are you serious or joking when you made this offer? Either you guys missed the point or you want to put your name on the meme of the day. Can you give me a compelling reason for me to accept the $37 from you?
Although, in the spirit of low friction, I would gladly honor any such requests for a discount.
"I just received an email that Buddy's Cannabis in San Jose is having a special. 27 different strains are on sale for $29.99 per 3.5 grams. I think I'll go for that, and give the remainder to the first homeless person I see."
In other words, I trust this guy with knowing how to execute (and to the point, probably recognize) successful minimally-viable products.
Just from memory for my startup (Authy.com), initial costs were:
Domain: $1000+
Design: $3000
Video: $3000
Hosting: $400
Depending on your skills this initial costs will vary. An although I agree you don't need external investment to cover them, you should at least plan to invest $10,000US to cover your initial costs.
What does it do exactly? I couldn't figure it out from the website and I churn through a lot of landing pages.
(PS I'm not affiliated with Authy, just trying to be helpful.)
Easier to snap these components together than roll your own.
Two-factor auth is a thing where when you log in to something, you also get a text message, or open an app on your smartphone, and type that into the app you're trying to log into. The purpose of this is that even if someone figures out your password, they can't get access to your account, because they don't have the 2nd form of auth (hence two-factor.)
Domain: or get something longer for $9. E.g., authyapp.com or getauthy.com
Design: http://themeforest.net/ $15-$25, or DIY (depends on how much design matters for your niche--for Pinboard it clearly doesn't)
Video: You don't need no stinkin' video
Hosting: Maciej is recommending http://prgmr.com/xen/ for $32 (but can you actually run a modern app stack on just 128 MB of RAM?) Anyway, even if you need a gig, that's $100.
C/Golang/Lua/Vala/SBCL/Ada/Pascal and an embedded datastore like bdb!
Why in my day we used to write little apps with C and bdb that used less than 5mb of memory! (Sqlite didn't exist yo.)
Heck these days you get (ENTERPRISE) choices like LevelDB and BangDB.
Edit: Who wants to have a datastore-backed c10k contest on prgmr machines? :D
I was trying to be lean.
Ruby users are quiche eaters anyway. Real programmers write their code in Fortran and persist to a hierarchical database on a mainframe.
You think real programmers need needles.
Or hands.
In my experience on Rackspace cloud 512MB instances are the minimum you should use for tiny production apps. Also, they're discontinuing 256MB on OpenStack - these were suitable for single-user dev instances, but I got more swap and or locking if ever attempting to run publicly with traffic. 512MB instances solved that issue.
Edit: Also I should mention I'm assuming you mean wanting to run a fairly standard stack, not a stack targeted toward tiny memory footprint.
Depends on what you call modern.
I think fitting nginx / embedded lua / redis should be possible (considering your dataset fits into 32 megs).
Actually, that sounds like an interesting challenge!
* Domain: $9 * Design: $50 (Themeforest) * Video: $5 (Fiverr) * Hosting: $0 (Pick your choice)
I've been thinking semi-seriously about this & I came to the conclusion that with $37 you can actually get a LOT done.
Seriously, why over complicate things?
When Y combinator started the amount of money was also ridicule.
What you get with his funding is visibility and this is rapidly growing in value because everybody will now look with high curiosity what are the 6 selected projects.
It looks like he is attempting to undercut Y combinator and might succeed. Look how he targets a niche market that is discarded by Y combinator : single founder projet. He applies all the advises given by PG himself.
I'm looking forward to see how he will execute, but this is already a very good start.
If I had a close to finished project and no traction because of no visibility I would apply. Because the visibility will be much bigger than with an article in techcruch.
> Participants receive almost no money, and are expected to do everything themselves.
So not really all that different than many (most?) incubators.
It is not a joke.
> I have no understanding of the concept of humor...
So it is a joke.. Or at the very least tongue in cheek. (With some exceptions,) I doubt hosting is what most VC funding is spent on.
Edit: as he said, "The biggest obstacle to creating something useful is finding the time to build it and attracting an initial pool of paying customers." If you have access to those you probably have $37. I get that he is trying to say technical costs can be negligible for startups. I fail to see how Investment Co-Prosperity Cloud helps anyone in anyway. And thus, I think it's a joke (even if the funding is real).
You might be surprised.
I doubt that was the point.
I will feature the six successful applicants on the Pinboard blog, and give them whatever additional help I can in making contacts in computerland and attracting an initial pool of customers."
His point is that a lot of money isn't needed, but publicity is (and a cool service of course).
You've managed to recapitulate his point while simultaneously missing it.
As you say, costs are negligible. Time to build something is hard to find, but nobody can help you find it.
Attention is what's really valuable and really hard to get, as a startup. Maciej is highlighting this by making an offer to startups that puts what's really valuable for building a sustainable business (I'll drive attention your way) front-and-center, while mocking the valley's mentality of take-huge-wads-of-funding-cash-and-bet-it-all-on-winning-the-growth-lottery approach to business creation with his "I'll throw in $37" offer.
($1.12 won't even cover the minimum BART or Muni or VTA fares now, I think, unless you're a child or senior or disabled or something)
We don't have any funding yet, so we can't make any specific promises, but I hear the dumpsters behind Denny's have a wide variety of semi-rotten food available for "Tuesday dinners".
(1) requires additional investment criteria to be fulfilled, left to our descretion
From Webpop we'll offer a free project and a startup template (http://app.webpop.com/themes/startup) for anybody accepted into the program.
For some people this might be enough to completely skip the Linode and buy one more beer.
Wrote a poem about it on the Collaborative Poetry app that I just launched. http://poe3.com/38
I got excited when I read that book the first time since I'd decided at about age 15 or so that 37 was "the most random number" and used it everywhere I could as some sort of odd prank.
More abstractly, what if this sponsorship enables an IT project to build a new kind of internet, that then enables Compassion International to work much more efficiently such that they are able to sponsor 200% more children on the same donations they currently receive?
I apply I make it "big"
Does pin board owns any of my company because they invested $37 a month and provided exposure?
I really don't understand who doesn't have $37 a month to be self-funded but I'm interested on exposure.
If I understood the discussion elsewhere in this thread, he states that the investment is a form that gets converted to $37 worth of shares at the next fundraising valuation.
So if you raised venture capital at a million dollars valuation, he would own $37 worth of shares, which later if the company was sold for a billion would give the investor a cool $37,000.
Basically he is trying to make a point rather than make big profits.
We all flounder sometimes, but it's good to admit upfront that it's your full time (pre)occupation.