dglassan

It flopped because you didn't make it into an incubator? C'mon.

I don't know what product you built but it sounds like it flopped because no one needs a better way to gather their friends. That doesn't sound like a problem (or a business) to me.

Oh, you want to 'refactor the internet'? Go ahead. I'll make some popcorn.

I've gone through one acquisition within the last year. Ours came about through a combination of us releasing a new feature and getting some pr that caught corporate dev's attention (they read techcrunch too you know), and we also tried to bring our acquirer on as a client around the same time so we were talking with people outside of corporate development as well.

If you're looking for design inspiration then check out the admin themes on themeforest.net, lots of great examples there if you filter by # of sales. Although it won't give you a lot of ideas as far as functionality goes

You collected the user's email addresses during signup right? You should send each one of them a reminder email, and maybe list the outstanding bugs they haven't closed yet.

You were able to convince 150 people to sign up for your app, you should remind them about it. I remember seeing a chart somewhere recently which showed that on average a person needs to be reminded of something about 4 times before it sticks in their memory.

Telemundo is in Spanish

AznHisoka had a great comment below...unless your plugin is bringing in serious revenue -- perhaps enough money to pay your living costs, it's a project, not a startup

Exactly. I wanted to be a startup CEO for a while until I worked at an 8 person startup and saw just how much effort they put into it. Now I'm not so sure, at least not right now in my life.

I have similar feelings to this guy. I've lived in the bay area my entire life, although I'm only 25 so I was young during the dot com bubble.

My feelings are that Zuckerberg made it "cool" to start a company again. People had such a bad taste after the dot com bust and starting a company was viewed as very risky from around 2000 to 2005. Then Zuckerberg came in with this amazing success story and now everyone wants to start a company again.

Sometimes it bothers me that people throw around the word "startup" so casually now. There's kids that are "doing a startup" but the only thing they're building is a gmail plugin or "a better to-do list that will change the world". We don't need any more of this crap. It seems like some people just want the founder title so they can broadcast to their LinkedIn network and impress people.

My opinion is that you're overthinking this way too much. Just because a single employee probably chose to link it to "opening ceremony london 2012" doesn't mean they're trying to avoid copyright infringement. It probably means nothing

Wasn't this Taco's idea from the TV series The League? NeckFlix?

There is an escrow service that we'd use for the deal. The quote price doesn't include escrow fees.

Great response. Thanks for your input. I think I'm going to set a max price and use that as my only counter offer. If they don't accept I'll keep looking.

But how can they justify such a high price? Besides them saying that they believe it's worth that much. There's no Alexa data on the domain and it doesn't have any history of back links or pagerank.

I'm wondering the same thing

I'd be taxed $9.00 per day just to get to and from work. There's no chance this thing is going to pass.

You're missing the most important point...you're not selling the used software...you're selling the used license, or the unique license key.

If I uninstall adobe photoshop and sell you my license key, you can install the same version and activate it using the key that I sold you. Now I cannot re-activate my copy of photoshop because my key no longer works, it's already being used by you. There's one copy of the key...it cannot be reproduced.

eBooks do not require license keys to read the book. You can essentially make a copy of the ebook and send it to me and we can both read the ebook (DRM issues can be a whole 'nother post here). The only way selling an ebook would work is if they required license keys that can be transfered around but not reproduced, and that would prevent me from reading my book after I've sold my license, my rights to read the book.

I've always wanted to start my own business...be the CEO...work towards my passion. But within the last year I've begun to question whether or not I'm really ready for the commitment.

I've worked at one startup and we ended up getting acquired by a big tech company that recently IPO'd...I've seen firsthand how much work really goes into building a successful business, and the more I think about leaving and founding my own company, the more I am unsure if that's what I really want. The commitment is just so huge and I know it's going to require every waking hour of my time. I guess I'm just scared to give up my comfortable pace of life right now. Does anyone else around here have similar feelings?

1. Pretty sure Facebook is the only one hitting Facebook levels. Facebook is an outlier, don't use this as an example to invalidate his entire point.

2. There are great PHP programmers...just because you're writing something in PHP doesn't mean your code sucks. There is a ton of crap PHP code, but not all. Ruby and python also have their fair share of terrible developers and shitty code.

I don't think Facebook, er...Zuckerberg, even had a plan in place when they acquired Instagram. I bet it will be a while before we see any kind of strategy since Facebook is probably still trying to figure out exactly what to do with Instagram, so they might stay separate for a while.

"Don't ever look backwards, it's a waste of time. Learn the lessons of your misses and take them with you."

Sometimes, for me at least, it takes months or years of reflecting on the past to learn from a mistake. Looking backwards can be healthy too.

So if it says this in my contract it's invalid? How?

Not $2 Billion. Pinterest is valuable because the site's users show interest in products by pinning or liking them. That's a marketing goldmine for brands and advertisers. Not to mention Pinterest is driving huge amounts of traffic to e-commerce sites.

Sure, Reddit get insane amounts of traffic but cat pictures and comics aren't nearly as monetizable.

Glad to see someone else with the same view. I've been meaning to write a post about this but you beat me to it :)

Frankly, I don't care about 'Why I left company X' or 'Why I decided to apply to YC' or 'Why I only code on Tuesday and Thursday nights.'

These kinds of posts seem to apply an 'It worked for me so it will work for everyone' mentality, but these kinda of posts don't seem to have much useful content if you ask me.

I'm getting tired of hearing people claim we're in a bubble, especially when people cite the Instagram deal. Instagram didn't have any revenues? So what. The value of a company is whatever someone is willing to pay for it.

Facebook's killer feature is their photo sharing. Given Instagram's surging popularity and mobile dominance, Zuckerburg saw Instagram as a threat, especially if Instagram fell into the hands of a competitor, like Twitter. So Zuck pulled out FB's wallet and scooped up Instagram.

I've been hearing people say we're in a bubble for at least 2-3 years now, yet venture firms are raising new funds every week. Acquisitions are happening every day, IPO's are ramping up again. Unlike the companies of the DotCom bubble, companies going public today have real business models, with real revenues, and most of them are already profitable. In 2000 there were companies going public that were still trying to figure out what their business model actually was. I guarantee you'd never see that today.

Sure, it may seem like it's easier to raise seed funding nowadays, but that's thanks to all the incubators that have popped up and the funding model pioneered by YC. That doesn't mean we're in a bubble. Angel Investors simply found a way to make seed funding scale in a way that reduces risk.

We're not in a bubble, and no, I have nothing to gain from saying that.

Good read, congrats and thanks for sharing! Did you guys come up with all of those resume designs yourself? Or did you have any outside help?

Could you talk about that last sentence a little more? Is there a reason that HTTP was designed to be stateless rather than stateful?

This has already been proved by themeforest.net years ago with their admin templates

"Rep. Lamar Smith, a SOPA-loving Texas Republican who's the chairman of the committee"

Didn't Lamar Smith write SOPA? And he's the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee overhearing this debate? How is this ok?

Why is this on the front page of Hacker News? I read it, it's interesting and relates to current events, but i don't think this belongs on HN