dmk23

I see the biggest problem with "startup advice" is the bias or an outright conflict of interest from most of these "advisors". They are usually trying to sell you something and anything they say has to be heavily discounted on that basis alone.

Incubators/accelerators are going to tell you that (surprise!) going through an incubator/accelerator is the best path to success (forget that most successes happen without incubators).

Angels are going to tell you they are the best source of seed capital (even though many won't do much beside writing one check).

VCs are going to tell you that you cannot scale without them (I am sure Microsoft, Oracle, Dell, etc really regret not being VC-funded).

Retired executives will tell you to do exactly what made them successful without bothering to check if that applies to your situation.

People who failed at something will try to convince you that you are going to fail at attacking the same field (never mind a totally different approach).

Engineers heavily invested in that open source project or the other will say that you are stupid not to use it.

Caveat Emptor! Beware geeks/investors bearing advice!

Any kind of Do Not Track mandate from the government would be a grotesque overreach.

Data collection and tracking is not infringing on anyone's rights and liberties by itself. If someone believes they have been hurt in a specific way they can go to court and make a case for damages - without any new legislation needed. This whole issue is just being used to score cheap political points by demonizing ad tech industry in the eyes of the ignorant public.

Free web services are supported by advertising. Perhaps the way to fight this ridiculous legislation would be by running site blackouts, just like in the SOPA fight. It is not that different really...

EDIT: Just because you are annoyed does not mean there needs to be a law about it. If you feel advertising annoys you just log off.

The post is missing the most important point.

Instagram would not be worth $1B to Facebook if it has not raised a large round. Without the resources to fuel the expansion, build out the product, develop an application platform, invest in revenue team and so on Instagram would be in no position to threaten Facebook. As soon as the funding closed Facebook was suddenly facing a viable threat in mobile vs. just another resource-starved startup hanging onto dear life.

So it is pretty questionable to assume that Instagram itself "pulled an Instagram". They raised Series B because that was the deal that could happen first. Once it happened the environment changed and Facebook saw the need to take Instagram off the table.

If anything, the point is to avoid trying to pull "uncertain multi-step transactions". Use various strategic alternatives to create urgency / better terms for other alternatives, choose between the options you can get and focus on optimizing your immediate next step.

This is a general problem with these "machine learning contests" for complex online learning systems.

There is no realistic way to translate all the complexity of ML production environment into a neatly packaged problem for contestants. You have to cut down dataset size, drops features, simplify targets and trivialize the implementation requirements (computational complexity, prediction latency, engineering cost). Not to mention that you have to expend significant effort to prepare / normalize / sanitize your dataset and even then you could still get hit with a privacy lawsuit, just like Netflix did.

The result of the contest at best is a set of "ideas" that you have to review/study before starting your own implementation / experimentation from scratch. Did Netflix prize pay for its cost? Perhaps the biggest benefit was generating publicity and helping with data scientist recruiting.

This kind of service, promoting mass single opt-in is tailor-made for abuse.

Something similar has been tried before and was shutdown as "spam support": http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8...

There is no excuse for promoting this malicious garbage.

This just goes to show that the most critical ingredient to success is determination and focus, not any specific training.

If you are committed to a goal, picking up any specific hands-on skills (coding included) is just the matter of sticking to it.

Something to keep in mind when hiring.

No, next they'll build nukes and ballistic missiles. Not just for isolationism but for attacking their neighbors and manipulating world's oil supply.

It is hard to see how a war with Iran can be avoided.

EDIT: Anyone who is downvoting, please post an actual reasoned response on what exactly you disagree with.

The fact of the matter we are all professionals and everyone's job is to protect their interests.

The CEO's job is to get the best deal for existing shareholders and optimize the growth. The investor's job is to buy in at the lowest price / strictest terms they can get away with. When a better deal comes along for the company and the investors cannot match it they start coming up with all sorts of phony excuses to buy in at the original lowball offer. If you feel strongly enough about the company don't be a cheapo and match the new offer. If "it does not fit the structure of your fund" then move on to the next deal.

Jeff Bezos walked away on the offer by Olympic Venture Partners (OVP) when Kleiner jumped in and outbid them big. I heard this in a talk by OVP partner who complained that John Doerr could make what he believed to be an "outrageous" offer because the fund already had Netscape IPO exit and could take much greater risk. Guess what, Jeff Bezos did the right thing for himself and his existing investors and employees.

VCs walk away on term sheets all the time and typical deal structures favor them anyways. The deal is done when the legal papers are signed and the check clears. Nobody should act as though they are entitled to anything, whether they are VCs or CEOs.

The fact of the matter is "the best" companies naturally have investors competing to get a piece.

What defines "the best" and what creates true competition is quite fickle. The private equity market, despite all recent changes, is still inherently inefficient. So I'd venture to say there are several dynamics going on:

1) Social Proof: Many investors are just lazy and won't look beyond who is introducing or vouching for the deal. Nothing wrong with that, it is a legitimate defense mechanism, but this limits what they actually pay attention to and creates frenzy around half-baked projects with "superstars" onboard. Think Color.

2) Right Fad: This is closely related to the previous point. If an investor has a theory that something "just like XYZ" is the next big thing, they might be willing to overlook a LOT of legitimate red flags. This could create a frenzy around a certain space or make them avoid another because "it is played out", which is often wrong.

3) Their Knowledge: On one hand this is what they legitimately understand about the space to make their own intelligent judgement of why there is an opportunity. That is the type of investor with the most potential to bring something useful if they can explain: "because I've done this and this, I can contribute this". Flip side, experience often means pre-conceived notions, with Exhibit #1 being YC's bias against solo founders.

4) Actual Metrics: If your numbers speak for themselves quite a few investors would want in just on this basis. The flip side it might be too late. Another flip side is investors might think a deal is overpriced or they cannot get enough control, etc. Best companies though are able to execute regardless of who invests or not invests. That's where you can have a legitimate competition on who is allowed to invest, based on what they offer.

5) Hidden Gems: Investors can often get the best deals by being early enough but that's where you have to find something new, that has a good chance of success, bring something to the table and get a better deal. But this requires to pay attention and do some actual work, so not everyone wants to do this vs. try to co-invest in the latest syndicate someone else is putting together.

If you are an entrepreneur you want to maximize your outcome, but if you focus all your time on jumping through the hoops of investors who do not actually understand what you do or have much to contribute you are being distracted from actual business. Note, I am not using the word "startup" here, because every successful startup is a business. Ignoring this simple fact is what gets people into trouble, leads to bad deals or puts them on the road to failure.

So yes, investors pitching to entrepreneurs could be a great idea but it works only if both parties bring the right mindset to the table and can articulate their value proposition.

PS: As entrepreneur you have to be extra careful with people who invest mainly based on social proof / fads. Do not expect them to do much for you, though their involvement might be a social proof for someone else who would make an actual contribution.

There are just a few very simple steps to decide whether or not you should "look for co-founder"

[1] Take a good look at what needs to be accomplished to build and scale your business

[2] Identify critical missing pieces you do not have expertise with or do not want to do

[3] Estimate how hard/easy it would be for you to manage these pieces yourself, with some hired help

[4] Weigh pros/cons of possible dilution / distraction / misfit vs. likelihood of acceleration / risk reduction / strength in numbers

[5] Make up your mind on what is the right way to go and GO FOR IT!

IMHO, saying "you always need a co-founder" is a cargo-cult-like mindset. There are plenty of successes and failures doing it with or without one.

The only thing that ACTUALLY matters is whether you can put together something that will make money. Whether or not you had any co-founders along the way is about as casually related as whether building an airstrip attracts cargo planes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult)

Just determine what you actually need and do not get distracted by people trying to mold you into their perception of the "ideal".

The findings make perfect sense if you re-interpret them as

  Stock Options Boost Company Performance ONLY when given to KEY INDIVIDUALS

In large public companies in most cases only senior executives are able to make an impact measurable enough to move the needle for the entire business. Therefore they are the ones you have to incentivize to make any kind of impact.

In startups a few early employees can make a tremendous contribution or sink the business. Therefore giving them incentives makes a lot of sense. As a startup grows and the impact of specific individuals becomes diluted the stock grants naturally shrink.

Do not forget non-US markets where employees often do not understand stock options at all and therefore have trouble getting excited about them as much as if you simply offer bonuses based on project completion.

All of this may seem unfair to quite a few people, but guess what life is unfair. Get on with it. People do what they are incentivized to do.

No doubt, it is sad for your friendly neighborhood restaurant to go out of business, but at the end of the day it is every owner / manager's responsibility to understand and own up to their pricing and discounting decisions. Of course if you'd offer to give up a dollar for a quarter (exact economics of a Groupon deal) you'll get swamped with takers and get ruined.

Groupon salesforce surely sold them stories on how great it is, but at the end of the day there is no excuse for not doing your own math. I suspect many "Groupon drove me out of business" stories are simply a way to blame someone for the overall business failure. Might as well say "it is due to economy" or "changing neighborhood demographics" or "to spend more time with family" or really anything.

EDIT: When I say "blame" I mean anything listed as a "reason". People often like to be indirect when they do the blaming.

I do not mean to discourage you, but the fact that you are posting here a day before your trip means you are already at a disadvantage.

The key to maximizing your chances in these meetings is preparation. Your story, your pitch, your funding request, your specific hooks for THE specific firm/partner and your strategy for setting the stage for negotiating the deal you can live with (should they want it at all).

Since you are apparently going in less than 100% prepared, I highly recommend soft-pedaling the actual pitch. Last thing any investor wants is to be stalked by someone who they do not believe is ready for funding, but is asking for their money. If you do not have 100% bulletproof answers to all the questions raised in the comments here I would categorize you as "not ready" and recommend to use the following Plan B.

Instead of pitching and setting a hard marker (e.g. we are raising $X by month Y), say that you are simply focusing on your business (product development / sales) and is just starting to "explore the possibility" of raising funding and "open to advice" on the best way to approach it. This would put any VC at ease, you'll be able to present your story and if they feel it to be compelling enough, they would want to follow up, buying you more time to prepare. If they are not interested, nothing is lost because you have not been "pitching" but merely "asking for advice". You'll be able to re-approach them at a later time saying you are "finally ready".

Above all try to go in confident and relaxed. Be sure to look genuinely interested when "asking for feedback", because chances are you could put it to good use if they turn you down. Do not forget to ask for introductions too: "who do you think we should talk to about this".

If you do not get any real interest, remember nothing is lost. Just focus on your product / business and try funding when you have a stronger hand to play.

We are safe for now since no incubator has yet deigned to incubate incubators.

EDIT: Do you guys realize that "rebuttal" link is April Fools?

You should add MailGun to this comparison and the graphs

[1] http://mailgun.net

[2] http://documentation.mailgun.net/faqs.html

[3] http://mailgun.net/pricing

Here are the facts.

To have a chance of a successful exit everyone in any startup needs to work real hard. Simple as that.

If you are not interested in that, do not sign up for a startup, whether as a founder or employee. If you want to do startup, the deal is to work hard for a chance of a successful exit. Run your scenarios, estimate the chance of a successful exit, how much you can make realistically and decide if that kind of deal is for you. If not, there are plenty of larger companies hiring or you can bootstrap a slower-paced lifestyle business.

There is no real controversy here.

STATEMENT

  RIP Good Times! DOOOOM! GLOOOM! The Skies Are Falling!

TRANSLATION

  I Need an Excuse to Knock Down Your Valuations and Terms!

The problem with venturing into healthcare is dealing with highly regulated industry and wrong incentives for most of the players.

"Large networks of engaged users" do exist, but the ones who control real money (doctors, hospitals, insurers and pharmas / device makers) are highly suspicious of outsiders. Every one of them has the incentive to not share their data with the competition, even though they will all publicly pay lip service to doing this in the name of "improving patient care".

If you look at patients / consumers, you can roughly divide them into the healthy and the sick. The healthy ones generally speaking do not want to invest time and effort into their health, unless it overlaps with lifestyle / food / entertainment - well covered by ventures we do not normally put into "healthcare" category. If you look at the sick ones, they tend to skew to the older demographic with lower online literacy. Even when you pick out the ones active online who care enough about their conditions what you get at best is small niche communities like PatientsLikeMe.com that are at best able to function as support networks and clinical trial recruiting sites.

Did I forget to mention that pharmas and device makers are mortally scared of participating in social media because of FDA? They are in business where even acknowledging any adverse event could make them liable for billions. This is a great example of why for most of the healthcare industry social media is all downside and very little upside.

The title should be this -

"Scientists over the age of 40 take credit for most of the major breakthroughs"

What would help a lot is to provide some detail on if/how this toolkit could be used with web frameworks like Django.

It would be awesome to be able to keep using Django models and expose them through Muntjac-based templates.

Could this be feasible? If yes, would be great to see some examples. If no, why?

These days I see lots of links from all kinds of "social readers" in my Facebook feed.

A lot of them are actually interesting, but that does not mean I want to authorize the app and start broadcasting my every move online.

Here is what I do: copy / paste the headline into Google and find the article on lots of sites. The great benefit in addition to avoiding the Facebook Big Brother is to read comments from a variety of communities.

It is hard to eliminate Facebook from my routine completely, but I am surely not going to allow them to be more nosy than they already are.

PRO TIP: Install Facebook Disconnect to reduce the amount of tracking they can do

[1] http://disconnect.me/facebook

[2] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ejpepffjfmamnambag...

The bigger flaw is that there is lack of economic incentive to continue to donate computing power to keep the network running. At the current exchange rates and bitcoin mining yield it cannot even pay for the energy cost.

As it stands today just around $300K worth of hardware (I cannot quite recall the reference off top of my head) is needed to be able to "out-compute" the existing network and introduce a corrupted / compromised version of the block that everyone will accept as real.

That's not to mention that the transactions are not anonymous and just pseudonymous, which means if your identity is somehow disclosed (anytime in the future) all your bitcoin dealings are going to be completely public for anyone to see and use against you.

Distributed crypto-currencies may have a future, but it would require a lot of work to make them viable.

Mahout is a great platform, but the real challenge is defining your learning problems, preparing data sets and choosing right algorithms.

Once you are clear as to what you actually want to accomplish chances are you are going to need some kind of significantly modified or hybrid algorithm. Packages like Mahout could help get started, but it is kinda funny that even quite a few examples in this article do not demonstrate actually good algorithm performance, like this one -

  Correctly Classified Instances : 41523 61.9219%
  Incorrectly Classified Instances : 25534 38.0781%
  Total Classified Instances : 67057
  =======================================================
  Confusion Matrix
  -------------------------------------------------------
  a b c d e f ><--Classified as
  190440 12 1069 0 0 | 20125 a= cocoon_apache_org_dev
  2066 0 1 477 0 0 | 2544 b= cocoon_apache_org_docs
  165480 2370 704 0 0 | 19622 c= cocoon_apache_org_users
  58 0 0 201090 0 | 20167 d= commons_apache_org_dev
  147 0 1 4451 0 0 | 4599 e= commons_apache_org_user

The offer sounds suspiciously similar to this one: http://teddziuba.com/2011/07/the-craigslist-reverse-programm...

If you are real, could you tell us more about your background and where you are located? Links to your Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn/blog/etc would help.

Do you do anything besides Ruby/Rails?

I use the cheapest and the best tool available: EXPLAIN EXTENDED

You cannot do any better than have the DB tell you exactly what it is going to do with your query. Then you can experiment with changing / adding / removing clauses and see how it would affect the query plan produced by EXPLAIN.

For example if EXPLAIN says the query would generate a temp table you could often achieve improvement by managing the same temp tables explicitly. Many times you can get a huge performance lift by using a "group by index". You could identify and rewrite un-indexed table scans too.

I've found lots of other "unobvious" optimizations that cut down queries that ran for days or hours to minutes or seconds.

Here are a few references to get started-

1) http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/execution-plan-inform...

2) http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2006/07/24/extended-expl...

3) http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2010/06/15/explain-exten...

  "Why The MongoDB Hate?"

Very simple, because the product appears to be severely overhyped and underdelivered.

Your primary datastore is not something you want to be taking risks with. If you are looking for a toy you can use any DB you like, including Mongo. If reliability is important to you why would you want to serve as a guinea pig for some seriously buggy product?

NoSQL has its place where you have a very specific use case to be solved, but your primary datastore of record is rarely one of those. Mongo specifically is being positioned as a general-purpose datastore and because of that (for me at least) it fails to demonstrate any value whatsoever. Every time I ask any Mongo advocate for why it is a good choice the most compelling thing I hear is "schema-less DB" and "speed of development". Guess what, maybe if your database forces you to think about your schema, data layout and the query load you are going to have to develop a more reliable application. Having to think through your schemas in advance actually forces you to be disciplined and prevents you from making errors.

Once you are ready to confront the reliability issues SQL databases that had years of hardening against all sorts of risks look like a safe harbor. MySQL is not too bad for Facebook and Quora, what prevents you from properly tuning it to work for you?

Lower cost is just one part of the equation.

Perhaps the biggest benefit is not having your talent constantly exposed to being poached in the Silicon Valley.

That is exactly what Mark Zuckerberg was talking about when he said he'd rather start a company in Boston.

Hide your hackers!

If scoring of YC applications is anything like upvoting/downvoting of HN comments I do not think anyone should link their self-worth to getting rejected.

My impression from talking with various YC partners at the Open House / Startup School was that the ones most qualified to evaluate my application have not seen it. But at the scale YC is operating now this sort of thing seems inevitable.

Moral of the story: never put all eggs in one basket, have Plan B, C, D, E ... ZZZ, preferably around being able to fund yourself with revenue, while still scaling your product business.

Just like us :)

In my opinion, Marc's segment was the most interesting because his perspective / experience cannot be found in any other living human being:

1) Being in the Internet business longer than anyone else (1994 or 1993)

2) Being a hacker, who turned into co-founder, who turned into CEO / executive chairman

3) Inventing some of the most foundational components of the Internet infrastructure

4) Co-founding and co-managing one of the biggest hypergrowth stories ever (Netscape, where baking the cake metaphor comes from)

5) Becoming a serial entrepreneur (OpsWare, Ning)

6) Becoming an independent board member of major technology companies (HP, Facebook)

7) Starting a VC firm that is on track to become one of the biggest disruptors of Silicon Valley investor business model

What I especially enjoyed are some of Marc's speculations of what could have happened IF Netscape would have added things like payment or social features they have not pursued. Small decisions we make today could have enormous implications on what becomes our future.

Any startup would benefit from thinking of itself as a business.

In fact most startups that are not businesses do not have a very good prognosis, though quite a few still get acquired for technology or team.