dhouston

a nice thought, but mit's actually put most if not all of its classes online through opencourseware (http://ocw.mit.edu ).

and (not to belabor the obvious) the learning doesn't come from reading one page cribsheets -- it's from writing them and fighting problem sets till sunrise :P

i don't know if 'old browsers' is the target market, unless there's some funny niche somewhere that can't upgrade their browser.

maybe a neighboring idea would be creating a proxy for low-bandwidth devices -- e.g. transparently compressing/downsampling images, CSS, JS, HTML so that browsing on EDGE is a little more bearable with an iphone or other mobile device. (this might already exist, but i haven't heard of anything like it)

although i guess that wouldn't really use your imagemap hack or screenshot tool :)

they also picked out the key influencers (a-list bloggers) in that community and either met them face to face (e.g. fred wilson @ demo day) and/or sent them personalized, polite emails asking them to try disqus. then it trickles down from there ("if it's good enough for fred wilson's blog, it's good enough for mine."). "the tipping point" by gladwell has other examples of this.

their product is inherently viral, too ("what are those cool threaded comments on your blog? powered by disqus?")

congrats matt, chad, john and russ!

or get your car robbed and laptops stolen, that's what we did :)

(followed by long islands and jager bombs. and yes, our data was protected by dropbox, we didn't lose a second of work ;))

check out cilk; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cilk . i'm not terribly familiar with it, but it extends c++ and adds a few keywords/abstractions to work with concurrency. it's been spun out of its original project at MIT into a startup as well (http://cilk.com/ )

ok, but how many online to-do lists does the world need? assuming you're a hacker, if your 'good, simple idea' is easy to develop, expect to get your ass kicked by someone smarter than you in business and marketing who can pay a few code monkeys to pump it out.

good hackers get leverage and sustainable competitive advantage by solving hard problems, or at least creating software that is difficult to write. saying it's not worth building anything that takes time doesn't make any sense.

float precision issues make me nervous (although it's probably ok here), not to mention log() is kind of expensive compared to bit shifting

why not just something like

def fn(n): ret=1; while ret < n: ret <<= 1; return ret

(news.yc/browsers mangle whitespace; proper formatting is left as an exercise to the reader)

well, how do you expect your customers to find you (or your competitors)? search? forums? trade shows? word of mouth?

then search, look on forums, go to trade shows and ask potential customers what they do to solve the problem you want to fix and how they would find you.

what if what you're doing takes more than a weekend to build?

there are more cost effective ways of seeing what the market thinks besides disappearing into a hole and coding.

it would be nice if it were a little more tangible -- you say you help gather and manage leads and make it easier to manage search marketing. but those are huge spaces and cover a universe of possible features/applications.

for example, maybe make the screenshots more legible so i could quickly get a feel for what specifically the thing does (ok, the 'create custom landing pages' and forms is clear enough, but the rest of the description is a lot fuzzier) and how i can use it.

the site itself looks gorgeous, though -- good luck!

any sample output?

well, for one, it's disingenuous for someone who sells it to couch its benefits in an "ask yc" post without any kind of disclosure (you'll probably edit your post now, but that's where the hostility came from)

could you please stop advertising (albeit usually indirectly or offhand) this shit on here?

the founders actually might not be rich -- VCs tend to structure deals that only make founders rich on a big (probably more than the 2x here) exit.

(for example, liquidation preferences and other terms can make the returns much uglier for founders/employees/other common stockholders - http://www.feld.com/blog/archives/2005/01/term_sheet_liqu.ht... )

fair warning: the business model

1. port useful web app to fbml 2. ??? 3. profit

hasn't worked very well. at least the top 50 or so apps seem designed solely to be viral and center around communication or self-expression. sugar, not vitamin.

clutterme appears more utilitarian and (imho) doesn't fit the mold of the typical viral facebook app. we came to the same conclusion for what we're doing and have made our facebook app strategy much lower priority -- and when we do facebook apps, they won't be straight ports of our main app. just something to think about.

word on the street is they're moving to python for some of the back-end (coupla friends work at okc.) and php for the front-end.

maybe i'm misunderstanding you, but the question is hypothetical and your response isn't shared anywhere outside the app. (i.e. you're not binding yourself to anything by claiming a particularly high or low valuation)

on another note, your company's valuation is determined by what people are willing to pay :)

why not something higher level (e.g. python)? just curious

i disagree. the interesting points aren't about food -- for example, it's a case study in how a lot of smart people, over a long period of time, can fool themselves -- in fact, the movements to improve software engineering have the same kind of faddishness as nutritionism.

another interesting point was how being "scientific", and looking at individual factors in isolation (e.g. vitamins) missed the forest for the trees, and did more harm than good.

another takeaway was the extent to which "studies" are pushed around/mediated by big political interests, e.g. the meat lobby and the marketing muscle (the suns, microsofts, and Extreme Programming vendors of the food world) that have a big interest in keeping the status quo.

i wouldn't bother trying to push the $5k+$5k*n . i think that precedent is pretty much set in stone. and even if you tried, the extra cash wouldn't matter much, and you'd more likely piss pg off than anything else.

in general, the median's around 6% and i think is also the most common, and i didn't encounter anyone who had negotiated it down. i don't think there's a formula. we had a working demo, and thousands of lines of code, but got the same deal as other groups who just had an idea.

unless the % seems way out of kilter, it's probably not worth optimizing this or cutting yc down (after all, they're making rapid fire phone calls down a list of people who would gladly take your spot. things like your option pool and follow on investments will be the dominating factors in your dilution anyway.) they definitely earn their chunk, and contribute _vastly_ more than the equity they take, even at the highest end.

looks great, guys. i would bet that your chances are very good.

if you can, get traction first -- your valuation will be much higher; investors pay a lot for momentum.

and start building the team early -- it's unlikely you'll get funded as an individual.

articulating your idea concisely (under the 120 word limit or whatever) and getting to the point quickly will be useful for yc and beyond (other investors or whomever else you need to sell.)

make it easy to parse what you're doing and why it's valuable. part of that is being focused, and brief.

what's a one or two sentence explanation that would get my little sister to use this? what value would she get within the first 2 minutes (assume early on, before you have a ton of people using it?)

ideas like this are tough because they're only really useful once an incredible amount of content has been submitted. what tricks can you do to make the site be sticky to the first 100 users, when nothing yet is submitted? what are the first concrete things the user sees, or does, when they arrive at the site?

i think that's why these recommendation sites are only successful in niches (e.g. travel (tripadvisor), food/entertainment (yelp), movies (netflix)).

this is good news :)

peter was making the point that moore's law won't, for example, make my round-trip latency from sf to boston much less than 90ms, so optimizing to reduce round-trip times (and to a lesser extent, bandwidth) will _always_ be necessary to design snappy interfaces on the web.

via a mutual friend at MIT who was also a yc founder. we lucked out in that it turned out to be a good fit.

find a cofounder! yc generally funds teams and isn't in the business of matchmaking.

("find a cofounder" is what pg will probably tell you; it's what he told me repeatedly before my interview. it was a big time investment to find the right one, but completely worthwhile. couldn't imagine going through this alone, and it only gets harder to get a cofounder the longer you put it off -- it no longer feels like 'their' idea.)