Agreed. $150K is basically enough for you to move to the Bay Area (or pay rent) for 3 months + salaries + expenses, possibly hire some folks, while you're going through the program. The way I read it, it's bridge financing until Demo Day.
Starting something from nothing and running it yourself, this agency, is a reason in itself to start something. I think it shouldn't be understated that many of us start things because we want to, not because we want to become billionaires of have convenient lifestyles.
We host a smallish (12 large node) cluster ourselves on AWS, and it's been nothing but SUPER SOLID for us. Literally 0 issues in the year. We use it for analytics, aggregations and the like, as well as domain-specific search, for which it's a great fit.
This is great advice. I run a B2B SaaS and we were lucky enough to run bizdev and product dev paths in parallel, so we weren't stuck with the wrong product and no customers, instead, we had the customers to iterate on the wrong product to get to a better fit.
@nate curious why you're leaving Highrise? You mentioned it's making millions for Basecamp, and it sounds like it's not shutting down -- were you looking for more substantial revenue/growth in order to stick around?
Thanks for sharing this. I'm by no means successful in SaaS, but I've been running a niche healthcare SaaS for a few years, and our experience is similar. Especially when you're talking about higher-priced SaaS offerings - the buyer sophistication goes up and ability to bullshit goes down.
1. PG specifically writes this in his Startup FAQ (www.paulgraham.com/startupfaq.html)
"Most successful startups have more than one founder, and usually the founders seem to have been friends for at least a year before starting the company."
This doesn't address the massive bloat that ads add to the website. I don't mind seeing ads when I browse the internet. I do mind having websites load for 10 seconds because 20 different ad networks are loading their iframes.
Pivoting with same indications can be done, but I agree, if you have a Class II or god forbid Class III device, and you change your indications, you've got to redo much of your 21CFR11 documentation. I built a Class I device that eventually became a Class II device, and it was a tough slog to get the QSR and CFR docs in order, however, we were a team of 15, with not nearly $400m in funding.
There is an air on incompetence about this whole thing, and Holmes isn't doing herself any favors battling with poor evidence against WSJ in public.
outsourcing works when you and your devs are aligned, you have a tech owner on the client side and regular checkins from all parties. What doesn't work, and never worked, is throwing loose specs over the wall and expecting the next Instagram.
Moreover, people who manage remote, outsourced, teams for a living (I used to be one of them) have known this for years. The ones who don't know this are the non-technical founders who think the idea is the hardest part. Alas, that has been an issue for years before outsourcing became popular.
I chose what I wanted out of life, and moved to a place that had the most of that (great food, good weather, reasonable cost of living and a growing startup ecosystem). I lived in SV for a few years (2007-2009). It was great. I live in Portland now, and it's better in many ways (lifestyle, cost of living, ability to get out of the city) but it's def not the startup hub that is SV. On the other hand, you can be a bigger fish in a smaller pond here, vs. SV, where you're swimming with sharks. Both have place, but, for me, moving away was a good choice.
we currently use 9.4 beta, and it's been rock solid for us. We chose it because of the jsonb data type. JSONB has been a great fit for the type of work that we needed it to do.
Maybe anecdotal, but I think many who use google apps for domains use a native email client -- mail.app, outlook, maybe even thunderbird. Certainly very few on iOS use the gmail ui, apps or not. Certainly I do, and most people I work with.
collaboration in radiology requires at least a viewer, up to this point they partnered with companies like DICOM Grid to provide that functionality. The other thing you'd need is to reach into the infrastructure, behind the firewall and get the images off the legacy PACS (Picture Archive and Communication Systems). This is done via the DICOM protocol. Box didn't have this part, instead, they asked doctors to UPLOAD images to Box to view them. In the above press release, Levie specifically talks up legacy integration. This is what he's talking about. Being able to reach in and get the images, most of the time automatically, view them in the web, add to that already existing collab features Box has been building (documents, notes, etc), and you've got what could become the next-gen radiology platform - at least a more effective medical image exchange.
Disclosure, I was chief architect at DICOM Grid and built similar functionality there.
MedXT is not a viewer. It's an exchange product with a viewer. Large COs like GE (Siemens), Fuji, McKesson, are not even close to having the exchange capabilities like MedXT. It's a super strategic move for Box to buy them, Radiology is slowly moving into collaboration, and Box is now the largest vendor of collaborative Radiology.