aberman

Nobody is requiring people to offer working unpaid

Like I said, these are students looking to fill positions that don't exist. I'm not going to offer you a job, let alone pay you, for something that I don't really want you to do in the first place. Did you read the post? I'm suggesting that if these students really want to work for a startup despite the fact that startups don't want to hire them, then they should basically break down the door and remove any possible objections.

You are assuming that unpaid interns would otherwise take the jobs of paid employees. In this regard, you are categorically wrong. Read my post: we don't want to hire anybody. From the post: It's a position "that doesn't exist." Offering to work unpaid is a hack that get's you in the door.

That being said, if we (and other startups) don't want to hire you because you are inexperienced, offering to work unpaid may make it easier to get some experience. If, for some crazy reason, you really want to work for a startup, you should do what it takes to break into that community.

That's what I did in college, and for a year after college. No way I would have been able to found WePay without those experiences.

To the extent this information can be parsed and digested, you have a pretty valuable business. Not only does blippy create a foundation for conversation about these things, it actually is the conversation in a lot of ways.

I was equally skeptical. Then I started using it, and I quickly discovered it's value.

Bill had walked away from a very lucrative job in finance, and I left a pretty prestigious scholarship at NYU law.

We were far from conception stage when we brought Karl on board. When he agreed to work for us, he knew he was going to learn a lot, get the YC experience, make some good connections, and see what it was like to work for an early-stage startup without having to make a life-changing commitment. If the company went belly-up, he could just go back to school in the fall. In fact, he did go back to school at the end of the summer.

If we went belly up, Bill and I would have been shit out of luck. Karl only came back after we raised money and offered him a salary.

There is no way we would have hired Karl had we not had the opportunity to work with him over the summer. But he did choose to work with us, and he was rewarded with a position that he would have had no chance of getting otherwise. He still has the option to go back to school, but if he does, he will have a head start on most of his peers.

Karl has been an incredible part of our team, and I am thrilled we have him. That being said, we did not need Karl to get where we are, which I think is the one prerequisite for giving anybody founder status (and the commensurate equity).

I worked for a startup (poverty level wages) right out of college. It was one of the best experiences I have had, and without it, there is no way I would have started this company. I wasn't doing it in the hopes that one day I would be anointed a founder.

Seriously, though. I promise to take you to all the YC events (they usually welcome alums), so you'll get that experience.

We are still a 5 person team, so you will get the startup experience.

We will pay you, but you can still eat Ramen if you'd like.

See more details here: http://wepay.theresumator.com/apply/waxuor/

Raising money in silicon valley is hard to do without being part of the silicon valley in-crowd.

Raising money in Boston is hard to do in general, but I don't think it's impossible (although I wouldn't know). I don't think we were ready to raise money when we were still in Boston, and I certainly don't blame investors for not throwing money our way at the time. We were a very different company in Boston than we were after YCombinator.

I'm just saying that "knowing" something will be hard, and experiencing something that is hard are two very different things. And to the extent that you can prepare yourself for what's about to come, it will be much easier for you to resist the urge to quit.

And yet, I would still bet on airbnb...

If anything, I would guess it's a UI/design issue, rather than malicious intent on their part.

"It's Not Rocket Surgery" is entirely about usability testing, whereas his first book only dedicates 1-2 chapters to it.

So the average college campus has much more than one outbreak of HIV? Somehow I doubt that...

The problem is when I go to bed really late and/or need to wake up earlier than I would naturally. As it turns out, I am more affected by when I wake up in my sleep cycle than I am by how long I sleep. If I need to wake up at 7:30am for a call with east coast people, the wakemate would wake me up at "around" 7:30 (you can set a hard stop), during the point in my sleep cycle in which I am most amenable to being woken up. It's the difference between feeling like shit, and feeling like I woke up naturally.

I didn't get to use one of the new, super sleek, production quality ones. I used an early prototype that slipped inside a wrist band (like tennis players wear). It was actually still pretty comfortable to sleep with - I didnt even feel it after the first night.

It definitely woke me up at the optimal time in my sleep cycle. The alarm app was a really simple web app, and the bluetooth was simple. It was cool to see my sleep analyzed with all our different metrics and quality rated. The sleep analytics software was pretty simple, but definitely did the trick.

I don't know, but that makes a lot of sense to me...

It was heartbreaking.