374 karma · joined January 25, 2010
It's a deceptively focused/small offering to start with but they have the key components required to become a credentialing system outside of the university/college system.
It's easy to look at YC startups and say they aren't pursuing massive visions but the truth is many of them are just starting with some tiny subset of a big problem.
When you click on a piece of work on /browse/ it takes you directly into the "gallery view" for that piece, rather than to the artist's profile page. This is a bit jarring. I would consider taking users to the artist's profile first and letting them enter the gallery view from there.
The company executives all got bonuses, Bain made a ton of money and the workers got to keep their jobs. The company is still running today.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=core+inflation+from+200...
"It was Japanese management theory in the 1980s. A few weeks ago, before our collective attention shifted to the Facebook IPO, it was whatever Steve Jobs had done, from hallucinogens to yelling at your employees."
His link for Japanese management theory points to "theory x" but what it should point to is the toyota production method. Eric Reis's lean startup methodology is a repurposing of lean production methods pioneered by toyota. It's an extension of the same management theory, not just a random fad in business thinking.
I've always thought hipmunk was basically indistinguishable from ITA Matrix flight search (do a search and click "view time bars" to see what I mean) and ITA has been around forever.
I knew that if I just asked "how old are you?" it would come off as a snarky comment on the situation. That's why I also included "Not making a judgement, genuinely just wondering."
While I wasn't trying to tie age to the issue at hand, I would have to disagree with your assertion that physical age doesn't have anything to do with how people react to different situations. Maybe experience is the real driver but obviously that is closely related to age. Either way that's neither here nor there.
As for the rest of your comment, I'm not totally clear on what you were trying to get across or who you were responding to but it still doesn't seem like it deserved to be down voted.
The interviews all take place prior to the financial crisis and it's neat to see how they were thinking about the economy. It ranges from "we're in trouble" to "I'm confused about what is driving the CDS market so I am on the sidelines."
As for the story, I am totally apathetic. If you invest in a hedge fund you are well aware of the fee structure going in and you are a sophisticated investor. Ultimately these guys only make money if their clients make money.
Fflick, for example, was a really interesting idea and seemed to be getting some play - now it's gone. Dodgeball -> Foursquare, etc.
Edit: Whoops - I didn't read the OP closely. I thought you were only looking for ideas/ business models, but obviously this would not work for codebases.
One choice portion of the show was when the interviewer (who was lapping it up) asked what would be a good alternative to the stock market. He proposed bonds. He even went so far as to say that bonds would reduce the amount of volatility we see in the economy by reducing the impact of the "expectations market".
Yes. Replacing equity financing with debt sounds like a reasonable solution to reducing volatility.
What an absolute fraud.