antongm

I know that proverb via a popular Spanish version, and I do quote it in the book, though not in reference to Google Plus.

Yeah, I'm not speculating. This was the most popular query. No bigger implications meant to the observation.

Sure took a while to summarize all that fluff.

It's safe to say the target audience of this piece was not the Hacker News demographic. More product dev detail would have lost most people. Unfortunately.

It's actually in the courtyard they have HACK written, not the roof. You need some copy editing.

Only gag-inducing? You didn't actually puke? Disappoint.

Mostly the author, with possible editor override. In my case, my working title got changed, and it was certainly a net improvement. My original title was 'Pseudorandomness', by analogy with the computer science concept. Now, it's 'Chaos Monkeys' (by analogy with the software tool). Definitely an improvement.

Of course, the cash vs. equity exchange rate is a subject of curiosity. :)

Mine is too. Not sure what to do here. I use Uber a lot...I can't not have a rating.

Speed is a feature.

;)

You are absolutely right, and frankly we're wondering if we should do such a deal right now. I absolutely believe your point that such 'easy credit' will spur companies to spend more on lawyers than they should. We'd like to avoid that.

I'd be fine with it. I think later on when you've got dozens (or hundreds) of employees and a limited options pool, it might become unfeasible. But right now, I'd have no problem with paying an employee only equity. Even tiny companies like us have valuations that are, well, non-zero, so it's not like some employee can conspire to get founder equity status by simply not taking cash.

Why, know someone who will take only equity? Send him/her our way if so..;)

Well, in NYC you have a 1.5% income tax, rather than corporate tax, which is almost worse in a way.

Yes!

That's next on the queue. Stay tuned.

I'll let Trada's product speak for itself.

One basic difference is that from the advertiser's perspective, Trada is an agency in which you've essentially outsourced your marketing. However, AdGrok is a tool you can use to manage your own campaign. It can serve either as your stand-alone SEM tool, or as a complement to your existing SEM workflow.

Either way, you get an unparalleled view into what's going on inside your campaign and why.

We also have a managed service offering called GrokMe, in which we set up and manage your campaign for you. That's more in the agency vein, and from the user's perspective, similar to Trada's offering. Again though, even GrokMe users get our GrokBar and can see what's going on at all times.

The analogy here is that TurboTax takes a complicated thing (the 1040) and makes it into a very simple, intuitive process (basically, a managed clickflow that takes you from start to finish). The analogy is also in the market itself: most people don't need an accountant or fancy accounting software, TurboTax does what they need it to do.

Well, nowadays, marketing is almost as central a function as accounting to many small business. There's no 'TurboTax' out there to help get them online. The marketing space is still full of confusing and clunky tools that the average person can't really use. AdGrok hopes to remedy that by creating a similar tool.

Thanks. I am a non-rider, but know enough riders and have read enough biker blogs to know a thing or two.

Of course, this is the guy who got on a motorbike with a bicycle helmet because it's all he had. I should learn the basics instead of high-level theory maybe...

We'd consider anybody. We have one non-US citizen founder right now.

The headliner is an apocryphal quote from Ernest Shackleton, leader of a doomed but famous Antarctic expedition in 1914.

Nothing about the current state of tech was implied, nor about our desired employee pool. Obviously we welcome one and all.

Where did we meet?

AdGrok applied at the last minute. I happened to notice the 'apply now' message on the main Y Combinator page (I was trying to find one of PG's blog posts), which was a couple days before the deadline. We did the video literally at 1145pm on the last day.

What were we thinking? Get it out the door and done as quickly as possible. We were stil at our previous employer at the time and hadn't finalized an idea, so there was some doubt about applying. But once the momentum got underway, our only thought was submitting the best application possible, and fully sketching out our idea. I read the blog posts from other YC companies about the application process, and they were very helpful making us understand what was expected from YC, and what was coming in the application process.

Hey serverdude.

Happy to talk about it. antonio 'at' adgrok dot com should work. Cheers.

I won't comment on the love angle, other than to comment that our current notion of love is a 19th century European invention that doesn't really exist in most traditional societies. There's ways of getting along that don't involve long courtship, touching poems, or passionate romance.

And it's funny you mention Lewis. The mother gave me that book as a present last March. Great book. I should note, he didn't particularly love his children at all at first...until the child was stricken ill and he had to care for him.

Actually, it sure as hell did fill it up. I'm not big into digital media, so I can't quote the real specs, but my machine is a late model MacBook Pro using the stock camera, filmed with iMovie at what are probably default settings.

And the file limit was certainly 30GB, or in the neighborhood. Trust me. I was shitting bricks when it happened....waiting to upload a file, watch it bounce because it's too big...rinse, repeat.....

Hahahaha...

Really? I haven't had that happen, other than this one time. And this time it was weird, because both ex and I were sailors, and our boats happened to be next to each other in the yard...total fluke. And then of course Girlfriend showed up in the middle of it, making it even more comical.

Anyhow, didn't know it was a local trend.

You are SO right. The relationship with Mummy is about the only dicey thing right now. It's good right now, but there have been moments.

"You're constantly terrified that they're going to randomly die on you, but the rules for preventing that outcome are straightforward and hard to forget."

Amen, brother. Right again.

I agree. Indeed they're different things.

Trying to do both now. Babies and startups aren't unrelated though actually. Oh, I feel another blog post coming on...

Oh, God yes.

Thanks for reading the sailing blog.

And that's about the cheapest, smallest boat one could non-suicidally ponder a circumnavigation in, by the way. And even then owning it and sailing it is like taking a cold shower and tearing up $100 bills (to quote the old joke).

Eh, no.

I'll echo statistics 101: the mean of a distribution is pretty meaningless when it's a very skewed distribution you're talking about. Those average figures don't apply to me.

And I joined GS at precisely the wrong time. Right at the peak, going into the trough.

Mdda is right. What was perhaps intended as a cautionary tale instead became a recruiting anthem. After reading Liar's Poker, I wanted to be right there with the Human Piranha hearing him say 'the fing frogs are going to fing get f*cked!' The swaggering cowboy-ness of the whole thing was so tempting, as was the untrammeled greed. Who wouldn't want to be a Big Swinging Dick?

It seemed like such a different, more exciting world than the petty, effete, and monastic world of academia.

Incidentally, Lewis' column on Bloomberg is the best read on the terminal, in my opinion. His writing is among the best reading anywhere, in my opinion. My piece is obviously a riff on Liar's Poker. I'm only poking along on his well-trodden ground.

Now...you know what would be a unique? A Liar's Poker for startups. That hasn't really been written yet (that I know of). Hmm...there's an idea...;)

Actually, on second thought, Kaplan's 'Startup' might be that. I re-read it again recently, and it's starting to sound a bit dated though.