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I've always admired people who get more done in less time. We're in hustle mode in our startup right now but I still try to block out time that feels wide open to keep an eye on where we're headed and wind down a little. No use in racing ahead if it's a dead end road.

To continue the vehicular metaphor, it feels like hustle culture advocates burying the needle in the red zone, even though that's the least efficient point on the power curve. And even though that's less a predictor of success than what direction you're headed in.

There are absolutely times when you and your team need to live in the red zone of your tach. But really that's a temporary solution to being caught in the wrong gear. Amazing opportunity, can't upshift = gotta floor it anyways. But curves ahead = can't floor it. All depends.

Hmm. That metaphor actually did OK.

Simple terms and pitch all over. Got it. Thanks!

Thanks a ton for this content. It's super helpful. The rapport that you have with Matt is definitely something we want with our Angels. If we could have only individual entrepreneur-angels who were investing because they believe in our vision, team and product that would be ideal for where we are right now.

The stuff you guys went over at the end regarding Angels vs VCs and VC fund sizes vs target exit sizes was very concise. It took me a lot of reading to learn all that stuff over the past year or so, and there it is all in one go :)

Thanks again.

Matt,

Thanks so much for putting this great podcast out with Patrick. I was just talking with my cofounders today and saying that, just like code, it's super helpful to have examples when trying to understand and make choices for your startup.

I'm an entrepreneur in Durham, NC. I've got a great team working hard on product and a growing list of gotta-have-it would-be users. We'll be raising seed capital soon and my question is about choosing your angels. I've met with a lot of investors who just don't get our business and I can confidently say we don't want their money. There are a few local angels who are really smart, though, love our idea and get that it is big. They've been advising us to stay away from "small fry" angels that they've seen kill other companies by trying to optimize fo the short term, safe vision. That said, I think there are enough smart ones for our round and definitely enough when we count silent ones.

So, questions:

- Tips on how to vet/chose angels? How did your sense of angels reflect their actual behavior?

- I'd really love to hear your advice on whether to try to pitch Valley (or elsewhere) angels even if we feel we can get the round done locally. I know it's so tied to who the investors are but it seems a time/money tradeoff with the possibility of getting talented smart investors from the Bay.

- Advice on terms, both on the gotta have em and definitely don't do this side? Seems like everyone has a story here and there seems to be a resurgence of advice to do a priced seed round over convertible notes.

I dig it. Store this data in the cloud and call it ViewHaven. An automatic and complete record of everything you've seen on the web.

> In fact our instructors are paid when students complete a task, not when students sign-up.

Interesting model. I like the thought of trying to align student and instructor motivations. Getting paid for engagement is a great way to do that.

I wonder, though, if it puts pressure on the difficulty of the tasks? Can instructors game this system (if they wanted to, as I'm sure most don't) by the types of tasks they assign, thereby potentially impacting the quality of your content?

Agreed. Like Diaspora for data? :)

The market cap isn't the stat to watch on BTC- the daily volume is. With volume at something in the low millions of dollars it'd be very easy for the currency to be manipulated by dollar-based traders. There's not much evidence that there are large deep pocketed investors who will toe som imaginary line in the wake of a retail investor sell-off. Until volumes pick up the daily price ont he various exchanges represents the valuations of a distressingly low number of traders.

That said, I think bitcoin is super exciting and want to see it succeed. But it needs to be much more heavily traded, regardless of its dollar exchange rate, for that to happen.

Interesting. I see you have a lot of courses on offer and are 'powered by DevelopMentor'. Are you affiliated with them or serving as a portal/add on to their existing content?

I could see posthaven turning into an API that any site could integrate with so that users knew their data was safe. Depending on the site and type of user data, this type of exportability/backupability could be a real differentiating feature.

An additional possibility would be measuring the background knowledge students have and are comfortable with so it can be better matched up with each course.

The thing is, all of these speculations bear empirical confirmation. We have to see what works best in the wild and there will be a coevolution of student behavior, teaching strategies, and companies in the space.

Oh, definitely. I think a TA role like this that would help customize delivery, answer questions, and motivate would be great. I'm not sure its happening.

But regardless, I think many profs would feel like marketing help of any kind would be more like spinning content to make it more attractive to students, and worry about the integrity of what they're teaching.

This is an interesting approach. I think if they paid more attention to where and when exactly people would engage with content they could increase retention. I also have more time for audio than video and would love lectures of some sort delivered to my mobile. This could create a sort of immersion experience when combined with video and exercises.

> What she found was that the course was way more difficult than the description suggested, and proved to be well above what she could understand with her current background. She watched the first video and found that it was going to take way more time than the course description predicted, because she would have to try to fill in a tremendous amount of background knowledge that the teachers presumed.

It's quite possible that this is a function of having so little open content out there right now. I can imagine a future where the background your wife needed would be easy to get from the platform itself, so that the profs' demanding teaching could serve audiences both with and without that background. Right now many of these courses must feel like skyhooks but once they're embedded in a web of knowledge (an earlier commenter called these 'nodes') they'll be more accessible i think.

There's still a huge problem of collecting and sequencing these nodes and I think many students will need direct contact with instructors of some sort to do this.

> I think Coursera and EdX can do much better at using their design and content marketing talent to make these classes more accessible and successful.

There's an interesting balance here. Professors I've talked to bemoan the lack of 'support' from Coursera (usually the universities provide a pot of money for profs to use themselves). But at the same time they would balk at some marketing guru coming in an 'spinning' their course. Profs are used to large amounts of freedom in their courses and aren't used to incorporating feedback from the outside into their plans.

It's a tough line to walk I think: freedom vs accessibility.

tl;dr: What's at stake here is the proper roles of ed tech in education. MOOCs are media, only one part of the ecosystem that is developing here, and I think that finding a central role for great educators is key.

Coursera and other MOOCs are media properties that monetize viewership (thorugh certificates rather than ads). As media properties, michaelochurch and others are right that the synchronous model isn't really going to work in the long term.

I think ed tech should be about connecting teachers with the content they need to teach (and I'd include self-educators amongst 'teachers' here). Students need synchronous access to teachers, but those teachers don't necessarily have to have created that content just now. This suggests that online education might look more like a 1:100 teacher-student ratio rather than 1:100k. Nothing's more motivating and engaging than a human being.

Personally, my best experiences have come from two sources: self-study from great materials and guided study from great teachers. This suggests that a role for ed tech might be connecting great teacher with great content rather than broadcasting teacher-as-content. Personalization, engagement, motivation, etc all come for free if we empower great teachers rather than seek to replace them.

It's misguided to think that some professor from a great school can best deliver the content to all audiences. Imagine great open content accessible to every teacher for use in their own classrooms. With an inverted model of teaching, the lets them push content out to the students for self-study and then have synchronous classes where they, the teacher, can motivate and customize the delivery of tough concepts for their particular group of students.

"..but first a bit about how the Internet works"

My favorite part of a Cloudflare post.

> The premise of this system is invalid: it relies on people being rational and logical when debating issues that they are passionate about - people are neither rational nor logical in these situations.

You're right that we can't rely on logic in debate. But I would contend that the premise of the system is that structure will be salubrious for debate. There's nothing about the system that would prevent me from developing a totally irrational series of arguments on it and, crucially, the system itself doesn't reason about things. Instead, it keeps track of my reactions to claims and evidence, reactions that will differ from yours. This pluralism is a great strength, and the one he identifies out of Github.

The reddit-style populism you identify is a possible problem with the system.

The question is how _could_ this work in practice? I think there are users who would be motivated to structure arguments this way but I cant think of who they might be.

Guys, I think you're spot on with critiques of the product and the presentation. But the interesting thing about what reasonwell is trying to do here is its scope. He's trying to map human thought. I for one want to try to help the guy instead of saying why it won't work.

Models of natural argument are a really fascinating area of AI. Check out the Argumentation lab at University of Dundee for some of this work: http://www.arg.dundee.ac.uk/?page_id=96

The tradeoff in knowledge representation is specificity vs usability. How do you structure a machine-readable argument that represents what you think in an acceptable way but that isn't onerous to create? What is the schema of an argument? Are they all the same?

There's some basic research to be done here that's empirical, not theoretical. I hope that Reasonwell narrows down to facilitating a credible use case rather than presenting yet another grand platform. Here's my line of thought for the guy: Who s currently making structured arguments on the web? The Dundee guys have found plenty of natural language argument (it's everywhere, just like in this post) but haven't been able to get many to actually mark up their thoughts. How could you get people to do this? Perhaps an Intrade like platform for predictions, where people could get extra points for being right for the right reasons. It's a big problem and you'll have to tack into the wind I think.

This is a good and interesting question.

Since YCombinator depends on finding Dropbox and AirBnB scale startups, I imagine one of the most important metrics to them is whether they've rejected a business that went on to achieve that scale.

Of course being in YCombinator can increase a venture's chance of hitting that type of success, so keeping track of who they rejected is just a proxy for how well their applications strategy is. They may have rejected a company that _could have become_ AirBnB or Dropbox. But this is less important since in this case that would indicate that this ability lies with YC, not the startup, and so it's less important which companies they pick. If true, this would run counter to the founder-centric model they profess, so I'm skeptical it's how they feel.

This question of who to let in reminds me of the tradeoff of precision and recall in IR. A large class can reasonably be termed higher recall, while a class where they actively exclude companies with predictors of failure increases the precision. THe two metrics are inversely related, but it's possible to have high precision and recall if you're only looking for a very few number of things and you pick them all.

It seems to me that culling out likely failures would only make sense if the partners had determined that the presence of these likely-to-fail companies negatively impacted their ability to help other companies reach their potential. This seems a likely rationale to me based on PG's comments about how dying startups take up so much of their time.

So what it really seems to represent is a vote of confidence in the partners' ability to help startups increase their chance of massive growth. And/or a recognition that likely-to-fail startups have deleterious effects on the rest of their batch that outweigh the likelihood that they'll be successful outliers. Either way it doesn't seem to have much impact on companies that apply.

It will be interesting to see if PG writes a How Not to Apply essay. Such an essay might destroy the predictive value of these behaviors, but if it stops the behaviors and they were causally linked to bad outcomes then it's a net gain.

Note that this is the world's least dense material, not the world's lightest. They mention the density measurements but conflate it with weight in the title and elsewhere.

Sigh, journalism. Sigh.

This is an interesting approach, and I've had several engaging conversations with OP John Duhring. But I think that MOOCs are media and I'm just not sure that media is the way forward. John's focus on educators is spot on but, unfortunately so is his comparison to collegiate football. At UNC this hits home due to recent academic scandals and the increasing autonomy of the athletic department. If there were to be a MOOC department at our school, could we really be confident that it could stay aligned with the mission of the university?

I think the way forward has to be thru open content, and for this we should look towards open source software for inspiration, not broadcast-style media. Even though the monitization of this new media is through certification rather than advertisement I'm not sure how the industry's interests stay aligned with those of profs and students.

Thanks for the quick response. I think, though, that my suggestion was a bad one. It seems you should select the highest rated thread for a a link with mutlitple submissions.

For instance, this article shows the more recent thread with little/no comments, while there's a great set of comments I'd prefer to see listed with it: http://www.forbes.com/sites/morganhartley/2013/03/19/how-a-y...

Good comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5402301

No Comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5400599

Both stories submitted 4 days ago.

This use case seems more common than the google.com one. It's possible you'd want to treat bare domains differently, or treat top web sites differently, etc. Depends on how much work you'd like to put into this project. I for one will keep using it if you keep working on it :)

Filed under feature requests? :)

Thanks for the quick fix. The extension is pretty useful.

One thing I'd say is to default to the most recent thread for common sites like google.com. There are often rando 300 day old threads that show up for them.

Very excited to see this coming out. Data provenance interchange will be crucial to all sorts of security stuff, but I think the recursive provenance represented by 'bundles' is the most exciting. It could represent a semantic annotation framework that is natively subjective and agnostic. The take it or leave it architecture of current metadata schemes really aren't compatible with the heterogenous nature of the Web in my opinion.

Also, doesn't pop up on, e.g. this site: http://jshakespeare.com/the-dire-state-of-wordpress/ which is on the front page right now. I was wondering how you knew when to pop out the sidebar. Looks like it's got some blind spots.

Great concept, though, and very unobtrusive when it works. It'd be neat if the little side tab could tell me implicitly that someone else submitted a story I stumble upon so I don't have to worry about duping.

I'm not thrilled that it opens a new window when I submit a comment. Ideally it'd handle it in the sidebar.

Writing this comment from your App. Will let you know how it goes.

Transactions like this are the beginning of regulators getting interested in Bitcoin. If the entire transaction was done in Bitcoin instead of Canadian dollars, how could the government tax it? They could I suppose call it a barter and tax it under barter tax laws. In North Carolina property can be exchanged for "any valuable consideration" and a tax is due to the state according to the value of the consideration exchanged. Lot of interesting issues here.

But I agree with TorKlingberg that the fact that he didn't price it in Bitcoin is a little disappointing. Though I believe the value of the house would be a distressingly high percentage of total daily volume of Bitcoin exchanges.