ajaymehta

Clearly, you should be skeptical of anyone offering a "surefire deal" on anything. Skepticism is healthy and good.

But suppose the founders of Airbnb came to you when they were raising angel money. I'm sure they were convinced at that time (maybe objectively irrationally) that investing in their company was a "surefire deal." They were passed on by Fred Wilson (the equivalent of your "rich person with hundreds of staff"), among countless others I'm sure.

By this point, their returns are certainly far more than 12-15%.

You might think many HN visitors are "foolishly naive," and I would respond no: HN is instead full of too many people who believe that they're somehow less naive than everyone else.

I'm not an experienced trader, but I know about the efficient-markets hypothesis and that analyses such as this one are often "priced-in" to a certain extent. But when the market opens on Tuesday, AAPL is going to go up or down. "Underpriced" is a measure that can only be fully assessed in retrospect -- if AAPL goes up on Tuesday, it was underpriced tonight.

You're right that there are tens of thousands of large players with billions, all trying to screw each other over. I believe that 100%. But there's still room in there for Joe Normal to buy some AAPL stock. If his hunch is correct, the stock will go up in value and he'll make money. Individual people still make money trading stocks, and it's "naive" to think it's solely based on luck.

Thanks. But do you think it'll gap up on Tuesday when markets open?

Fairly tempted to put in an order for some AAPL now...

First example that comes to mind (although not a tech company) is TechCrunch with Arrington running the editorial side and hiring a CEO. That seemed to work well for a while.

I haven't read all these comments, but this could not be a big deal at all.

We had a "sponsored" story written about FamilyLeaf for The Atlantic: http://www.theatlantic.com/sponsored/bank-of-america/archive...

I'm pretty sure the author was just a freelance writer that BofA was sponsoring to write about startups, and we didn't pay a cent or do anything weird to get the piece.

Just an update - should be fixed now! Thanks again.

Uh oh - thanks for the bug report. Looks like it works in Chrome and Safari but not Firefox. Will get on that soon, appreciate it.

Thanks for the suggestion. We do have an answer on our FAQ page: https://familyleaf.com/faq but it might be a little too hidden.

I think this is a really cynical perspective. Nowhere is the author claiming he's making something superior, or matches up to the best of "makers" in our society.

Look around at most of the people you interact with every day. Many of them are stuck in a cycle of not making things, and this guy worked hard enough to break that cycle for himself. He found his calling in writing code. That is inspirational, and something to be proud of.

Awesome idea - we've been considering a feature at FamilyLeaf that would have required building something like this, but this API would make it much more feasible. Looking forward to trying it out!

We're happy ZenPayroll users. It's my first time dealing with any sort of payroll, and I haven't had to worry about it once. And the service (online + offline) is amazing.

I wonder if this is a one-size-fits-all phenomenon. Is this "crunch" happening to every startup, or is it more concentrated on a specific type of company?

It reminded me of the Fred Wilson post a few days ago (http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2012/11/what-has-changed.html), which makes me think it might be more of a problem for consumer startups than enterprise/B2B.

I think this is wonderful... the expansion of VC office hours will be a huge help for future batches. Having investor allies is always a great thing for a young startup.

Hey Sean - thanks so much for the comment!

Good point about the current design inconsistency. That login page you linked to is an older one, and a user only gets there through emails now. But you're right, we should fix the look.

Have you had a chance to sign up and click around the app itself? Would love your feedback.

Wow, thank you Vlad! Much appreciated.

I encourage anyone who's doubtful about MinoMonsters to download it and give the iPhone to their kid, niece/nephew, little sibling, etc.

It's one of the few truly great (and great-looking) iOS games.

We feel alright! There's been a number of well-funded, well-run companies entering our space recently.

Thanks Sacha! Love your site, we got a ton of great leads.

We just had a similarly great experience with redesigning FamilyLeaf's homepage. We weren't sure exactly what we wanted except for the general style, and we picked an awesome illustrator and let him run free.

Folyo (http://folyo.me) was also a great resource that helped us find our designer Paddy (http://lefft.com).

Congrats to Art and the team! Well deserved.

When is Your Mechanic coming to SF?

Amazing news, Crowdtilt!

Excellent redesign of the home page! Huge improvement over your last version.

I always could tell that Michael had some sort of preternatural gift for great startup advice and just being a generally nice dude, but I had no idea that part of that was from starting a tech company back when he was 19.

Looking back, it makes total sense...

Where would be the best place to go view this in the Palo Alto area? (Total astronomy noob speaking.)

The UI on your home page is terrific! So well designed... did you do that in-house or contract it out?

Hey, no need for the vitriol.

Dan, Wesley and I all did wheremyfriends.be -- Wesley was the submitter of the post you linked to, and mentioned both of us in the product description. We worked together on a bunch of apps and over the summer, and Dan returned to school and continued to work on Airtime while Wesley and I just graduated from the latest YC class.

As far as I know, Dan has never misrepresented his work and has extremely high integrity and character.

Dan is a brilliant young dude and a great friend who totally deserves this recognition, whether he takes this offer or -- knowing him -- continues to work on making his own projects amazing.

You're definitely right that families are currently using email for this, but there is a huge opportunity to use newer technology to keep families even closer in touch. e.g. photos, videos, and up-to-date lists of contact information. Google Groups and email lists don't cut it.

This is actually what we're working on at FamilyLeaf: http://familyleaf.ocm

The younger generations don't use email, so you have to encourage them to share in different ways. But at the same time, you must make it dead simple for older people to share their photos and updates. On FamilyLeaf, we've solved that by using Chute (http://getchute.com) to allow people our age to selectively share from their photos on Facebook, Instagram, Flickr, etc.

And older people can just attach photos in a message to send@familyleaf.com - they're automatically emailed to the whole group and collected in your universal family album.

Found both of your comments here incredibly interesting. We're working on solving this problem with FamilyLeaf (YC W12): http://familyleaf.com

I'd love to have you try it out to help keep your family in touch, and maybe even talk further about your ideas around the problem. Please ping me at ajay[at]familyleaf.com