avichal

I assumed they were doing it not for the donors, but for potential recipients. For example, suppose someone you know needs a kidney. You could look and see which of your friends would be willing to donate one, or ask them to post a message to their friends and see which of your friends-of-friends could donate. It's probably a lot more efficient and people are probably far more likely to donate to someone they know personally. And for the recipient it's probably a much faster and easier process than having to wait on a donor list.

Eventually I could see the same with bone marrow and blood type where it's a donation that you can make and keep living, but where millions of people die because there aren't enough donors.

P.S. Go register to be a bone marrow donor: http://marrow.org/Home.aspx

This seems like the wrong thing to brag about...if I lived near a nuclear power plant, I would want it to have been built in a way that maximizes safety, not minimizes cost.

Left in 2007. Started an online education company, built a highly profitable business, scaled to 20 full time employees, sold it in 2011. Started Spool (www.getspool.com) with a friend from college. We're now at 7 people full time and on a very nice growth trajectory.

Many other Xooglers have had similar paths...start a company and try to change the world.

Can you share any more details?

Where in SoMa your office is located? Rough intersection should be ok.

What time did the robberies happen?

What ethnicity is he?

That's very interesting. Nice find. Definitely a step in the right direction

Transferring an H1B to a company that the government thinks is legitimate is very straightforward. I was just hoping to outline the steps to getting a company considered legitimate. So if you can get your company off the ground and considered legitimate (the hard part) then you can have your visa transferred to that company (the easy part).

There are certainly employment contract issues -- moonlighting clauses, non-solicitation, and non-compete agreements. But those all apply to anyone building something on the side while employed full-time.

Background: I've hired many many people on H1B and helped friends on visas start businesses.

TL;DR - In practice, this is very difficult to pull off. There are some chicken and egg issues that make it very difficult and the government is a pain in the ass about it too.

The rule of thumbs are that you cannot control the business that is giving you a visa (you can be fired from the job), the company has to demonstrate significant financial resources to employ you, and you have to do the transfer in a way that doesn't raise red flags with the government. Let's break these down.

1 - you cannot have a controlling interest in the business. This means you need a cofounder or cofounders so that your share of the business is less than 50%. Finding cofounders is tough. Especially cofounders who want to run the risk of you being deported during the next 4 years. Yes, there are ways to do it so that you own 49% and your cofounder owns 51%, but then you better be really sure that you want to give up board control and company control to this other person. This also means that your cofounder has to be a citizen or green card holder. Lots of constraints...

2 - financial resources either means you're putting up a million dollars of your own money or you've gotten an investor to give you $500k. But why is an investor going to give you $500k without a product or cofounder ready to go, and with a chance that you may run into visa issues and not be able to run the business? And therein is the chicken-and-egg situation. You can't stay without a financially sound company. But no one will give you money if you can't stay. So most people wait till they have a green card or build something on the side until they can get some traction or get some clients so they can show enough traction to raise funding.

3 - we almost got screwed with one of our employees at Spool because the government thought we didn't exist. Pre-launch we didn't have a website, our address was a UPS box, and though we were funded and clearly real, the USCIS basically rejected the visa transfer for one of our employees because they thought we were a shell company setup just for this guy to stay in the US without working.

Ultimately, there are people in an office at USCIS that make these decisions. These people will reject applications if something smells fishy, will reject it if they think this is a shell corporation just so you can stay in the US, or if they don't understand that startups get started and hire employees in month 1 of existence. Keep in mind that this transfer has to happen quickly. Your previous employer has something like 30 days to report that you don't work there any more. And your new employer gets to keep you in the country as long as the visa transfer is in process, but if you get rejected you're out of the country. So the transfer needs to happen quickly...and often your company just got started, has no other employees, has no website or product in the marketplace yet, and various other red flags as far as USCIS is concerned. The sequencing of all of these events in practice is difficult.

===== The best option ===== There are lots of "clever" options. I don't endorse any of them and you try them at your own risk. The safest option is to try and start something on the side, get enough traction to be able to pull together a seed round, and then have that new company sponsor your h1b. Lots of investors will give you money if you demonstrate the beginnings of a real business. This is extremely difficult though...you will basically need to work two full time jobs until you can raise a seed round.

I really wish it weren't this way but unfortunately the US government's rules were built in a manufacturing era and make no sense in our modern information age.

Disclaimer: This is not legal advice. Go talk to an immigration lawyer for real legal advice.

I've tracked them for a long time. They do a an amazing job of PR. Their product did not deliver anything for years but with the massive amount of cash they have, it was bound to get somewhere eventually. Today it's way beyond where it was when they were just delivering lessons over Adobe Connect a few years ago. The problem is that the entire time they've been talking the same talk. So it's hard to gauge at this point how good of a system they really have because when it was non-existant they talked about it the same way they talk about it now, $50 million in funding later. I do wish them luck and applaud them for having a big vision but it's hard to tell if the smoke and mirrors were ever replaced with anything meaningful.

High level advice: - If you want a place that's walking distance, stick to the lowered number streets in that area. The Mid-Market area (5th and Market to 9th and Market) is not so great at night. That's why SF has given tax breaks for companies to move there.

- SoMa is not too far a walk from there. It's all newer developments, so they tend to be more expensive, especially as you move closer to the Caltrain station. But they're nicer apartments with amenities like an in building gym and if you're near Caltrain you can get down to San Mateo or Palo Alto on a train. Palo Alto + Stanford may be a fun day trip.

- You're very close to bart and muni there, so really the entire city and east bay are only a 15 minute commute away. If you're in the city for a summer, the Mission and Dolores Park area are awesome if you can snag a place. Great character, cheap food, some higher end food, and a neighborhood feel to lots of it.

Great link. Not surprising actually, considering the demographics of iOS users and that iOS includes iPod Touch and iPad.

Google usually talks Android numbers vs. iPhone. Apple usually talks about total iOS devices and often emphasizes the install base since they were out first and built a 100 million device install base before Android even launched. In this case, it's in Google's interest to talk about total iOS install base so that's what they did, even though they don't really compete with the iPod Touch directly.

It's not dumping because it's not Amazon doing predatory pricing across geographies. It's subsidization. They're subsidizing the cost of the hardware to drive sales on Amazon.com

Amazon needs an icon on the Kindle Fire that says "store." They want to use this as a gateway to get you to go to Amazon.com and buy all sorts of other things besides apps. Google is making a push in music and video (through YouTube), which is starting to tred on Amazon's territory and core businesses. Amazon can't cede the entry point to the store to someone else. They want to own that entry point, and that will be an icon on your tablet's home screen that says "store."

Thanks for taking the time to respond.

Android 4.0 and beyond is designed to run on both tablets and phones. From Google’s perspective they are gateways to search so it’s completely reasonable to compare them to each other. From Amazon’s perspective the user behavior around commerce is very different, which is why they’re going after tablets first. There are rumors they will build a phone later as well.

I’m not applying the overall search numbers to Android. I’m saying that the amount of money they make off of Android pales in comparison to what they make off search today and what they will make off of mobile search in the future. App sales are going to be tiny compared to mobile search revenue (especially if Google believes that the web will win out in the long run).

Yes, Amazon would love to sell more digital content — apps included. The gross margins would be awesome for a retailer, so it’s clearly enticing for them. But most of the transaction volume flowing through tablets is not going to be in apps. It’s going to be in traditional e-commerce. As I said in the post, the apps will be an awesome secondary revenue source for them. But what they really want are all of the e-commerce transactions for electronics, movies, ebooks, clothing, jewelry, and everything else that Amazon sells.

Put it this way -- getting you to buy 1 item of jewelry through Amazon.com will be more profit than they'll get from all of the apps you buy over the life of the Fire.

Amazon will do very well on digital goods sales. But apps are actually a small chunk of dollars in the grand scheme of things -- especially on tablets.

Amazon is going to recoup their costs through additional commerce on Amazon.com. That's what people use tablets for and it's a massive market that Amazon actually has leverage in. It's a very calculated move to build a tablet first and not a phone. The real target is driving more sales on Amazon.com

I do understand the points being made. I'm saying those points are not really the points that matter. Positioning Amazon's moves as having deep ramifications on developers misses the real implications of Amazon's moves.

Everything you've outlined are concerns for developers, not for Google or Amazon. And as painful as it may be for small, independent developers...we're not what really matters in these ecosystems. Regardless of who owns the app store, we're going to stay irrelevant.

The real dollars are in commerce, search, and the gateway to these is going to be mobile. That's the real implication -- not a few hundred thousand developers getting yanked around and having to go through 4 app store approvals processes instead of 2.

Apps are easy to replace, the web is not. Google thrives in a massively fragmented world because that's where search matters. Google dies in a single platform world owned by Apple.

Fragmentation makes developers' lives more difficult, makes users' lives more makes difficult, but drives people to the web as a unifying platform. Google's cost of customer acquisition may go up in the short term, but Google still makes all of the money from search at the end of the day.

Unfortunately third party developers will have to play in whichever app store ends up winning on a platform. The only real leverage we have is en masse, and that kind of growth/death in a developer ecosystem tends to take a long time to play out.

That seems pretty inconsistent with how most companies and founders talk about their business. Amazon started with Bezos wanting to build the biggest e-commerce platform in the world. Apple wanted to put a computer on every desk. Larry Page at Google when he was doing his first round of financing told John Doerr that he thought search was a $10 billion revenue business. These guys may not have realized what that would entail exactly but once they had the earliest inkling of product-market fit they committed to it.

You don't get big by thinking small. World changing tech companies tend to have a big vision from the beginning. Manufacturing, mining, or other industries may be different. But you rarely see tech companies that touch 100 million lives without wanting to do that from the beginning.

Facebook, Twitter, etc. also have to build something that their users want to use and this follows the same paradigm. Google could build something to make every advertiser happy but if it pissed off all of their users it would kill their business. They have to solve this problem on both sides -- they have to build something users want to use and they have to build something advertisers will pay for. Both halves of it have to answer the Why Now

I actually had almost exactly this in the original version of the article. I changed it because there are lots of products/solutions that don't require people to pay for them but where the same framework still applies -- Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn are three examples.

No - I state in the post that you can't know this looking forward. You can take educated guesses based on observed patterns though.

Ships don't float around the ocean randomly. They have captains and crews. If they hit an iceberg, there's usually a good reason for it. In the startup world you can track down and talk with founders, CEOs, and investors and pick their brains to understand why something didn't work.

It's very hard to know if something will succeed looking forward. It's easier to know why something succeed looking backwards. To the people who built the business, it's usually pretty obvious why something failed.

The pattern you see in anomalously successful companies is absolutely one of violating conventional wisdom; By definition these companies are outliers because they are successful. But there's always a reason for it. Picking something that people have an aversion to is a great place to start. Figuring out what has changed about the ecosystem or opportunity that may enable it to succeed today where it had previously failed is the critical question to answer.

Spot on. I'm a big fan of the "Why me" as well

@steventruong It's not just about building. How you build and what you build are dramatically different on the spectrum from small/lifestyle to massive/global. There's a big difference between Google or Apple and 37Signals. The way a company gets financing, thinks about scaling a business, thinks about selling a business, thinks about hiring, etc. These are all core to how a business grows, how it scales, how to think about the value in the business (cash vs equity). In technology businesses, those sorts of decisions are usually made very early in a company's formation and baked into the DNA. The types of founders that want to build a massive company are usually pretty different from the types of founders that don't.

Entrepreneurship is an art form and a means of self expression. Not everyone needs to be a paint, write, draw, sing...but painters gotta paint.

Agreed. I think thinking about "Why now?" is essential to picking a good problem

Thanks much :)

(Obviously) I don't think asking why now is the right time for your idea is premature. I think it's orthogonal to the product building piece. I think a lot of YC companies could avoid a lot of pain if they asked this question early on, because it would lead them to talk to others who have worked in the space. Often they will quickly discover that the fundamental dynamics of an industry haven't changed yet and no matter how much time they spend building it's not worth their time yet. At the very least they should be able to point to why the other, previous attempts weren't quite right and why the time is now for this idea to take hold. But all too often companies just start building without understanding why the previous attempts have failed.

That's the point of the post. There's lots of money out there. But it gets spent in ways that are different from what the typical entrepreneur and VC expect it to be spent on. The dynamics of how purchasing decisions are made are around cost, not quality.

Let's talk data. How many students spend money on educational services? 15% of students take SAT or ACT prep outside of school. By the time a student is 16 and has some discretionary spend and has some influence of a parent's spend. If students took their spending power/influence and prioritized educational spend you would have a lot more than 15% of students getting test prep outside of the school.

Consumer spending is huge. Consumer spending on education is large. Consumer spending on education where the primary driver is quality is much smaller.

Khan Academy - I point out the demographics in my post. It supports my point. Also note that it's free and a nonprofit, not a VC backed company.

Wireless Generation - They have been around for 10 years and were not profitable at the time of sale. http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2010/11/23/news-corp-deal-for...

Zinch - didn't really get off the ground. I know the founder and others on the team. Really great folks doing some great work. Part of the reason they sold is that getting any serious traction and turning it into a large business is going to take many many more years.

Put it another way. In the same amount of time that Wireless Generation was founded the rest of the Internet got: Facebook, iOS, YouTube, Wikipedia, DropBox, and much more.

There is a big difference between an industry being nascent (as the PC industry was in the 70s) and the fundamental dynamics in the industry creating certain types of companies (as is the case with education and some other industries).

Google is normally not outwardly competitor focused. Makes me think there are acquisition discussions going on behind the scenes and this is part of the diligence.

Unfortunately students have the same mentality and have no buying power on their own. Khan Academy has built a great brand but is free. The demographic analysis in the article supports the thesis -- in my unbiased opinion ;-)