inmygarage

The course vi jobs list is, in my experience, the closest thing i've seen to "the pulse of the startup world" - because most startups with any money want MIT programmers. I have always wanted to see an analysis like this.

Surprising that "ninja" isn't as frequent as we all think (or maybe it's that those times it is used it's just particularly notable/gross).

I found his observations eloquent and for the most part very insightful. If nothing else, he does an excellent job of glamorizing why this market is so exciting:

"These people are optimistic not only because theirs is the last ascendant American industry but because implied in all those products is the idea that the human problem can be solved."

The name DID come from that event. Jason Gavris (co-founder) is an MIT DU.

MessageParty is location-based chat. You open the app and it gives you a list of nearby parties that have been created by others. It's useful for concerts, events, conferences, etc.

url shorteners are so 2009.

MG is one of the very few tech writers with both intellect, style, and sass, and it's this type of writing that differentiates TC from some tech-content-wasteland. He has a voice and a following, though maybe that following doesn't reside here on HN.

Saying that MG's writing is barely a step-up from content farms is like saying The Wire is barely a step-up from Cops.

oh cool! excited to read it when it's ready.

yeah agree re: lack of female-specific advice. seems to me you either do it or you don't.

interested to hear what people think about this question. i would say unequivocally yes, but i wrote the post.

Yep, the rejection part I agree with. I wanted to write something actionable instead of yet another theoretical musing on the dearth of women in technology. The "why" part of it is something that I think has been well-explored.

Yep, that's sort of the point - the advice is the same no matter your gender. I put that in the title because my theory about why more women don't apply is because they feel like they won't get in, and in general I have found (gross gender generalization coming) that women take rejection worse than men.

So the video was meant to be hyperbole - but it was really an exploration of how we interact already. Go to any bus station and you'll see that exact scene, except no one is interacting with the people around them. But they are definitely all on their phones. The idea is that the move "into our devices" is inevitable so why not admit that and try to create real-world interactions that support this behavior?

Hey there thanks for your comment. I am the founder. So I think we've all learned that socializing on the internet is acceptable (ie meeting people on online dating sites, or on message boards, etc.) and what we're trying to do is bring those sorts of interactions to the mobile device. While I admit it's a bit weird to think about now, seeing how the product worked at YC Demo Day was really interesting - we had 200 people in a room and it's hard to talk to all of them at once but the "backchannel" provided an interesting additional medium to interact with people.

As a female I would say unequivocally YES. I am dying to have someone ask me if I want to play PongVaders with them...

"Much of the stress comes from dealing with investors."

Disagree here. Dealing with investors is a source of stress, but there are many reasons why startups are stressful. A friend put it this way: "As a startup founder, every day you're eating glass and staring into the abyss."

There is the stress of product-market fit, dealing with the fact that no one knows who you are or cares, endless hours, etc.

But the best startup founders, I think, do it because they simply can't do anything else.

While I hope that fundraising becoming more efficient will help create more great startups - I think the battle against cushy jobs at established companies is at the very, very beginning.

I think as marijuana legalization becomes more of an inevitability, the stigma surrounding this very real market opportunity will disappear.

Kudos to you for getting in early.

Ya, I would never get anywhere near that. But it seems to me that trying to make 9000 (or 30) people really happy is a completely different goal than trying to get 3m page views.

engineers.

marc andreessen did a talk a few months ago at Stanford (get it at ecorner.stanford.edu) where he talks about how the mobile app market looks a lot like the early days of boxed software - a million half-decent attempts but nothing really amazing.

and then came microsoft.

the world of mobile apps seems at present to be an arms race and most of that $20m is likely going to be spent on the guns and bombs of the tech world: great engineers.

simple supply and demand issue that he's taking advantage of. the iphone is a fairly new platform and i'd say the number of true "platform experts" is very small so anything you can point to that differentiates is a reason to charge a crapton. haven't you seen all those crappy corporate apps? some companies will pay for a track record, and good for them/him.

"Be so good they can't ignore you- I first heard this quote from Marc Andreessen, but he stole it from Steve Martin."

I'm pretty sure this is also a reference to Ender's Game.

I think this article represents an extremely old-school view of hiring and job searches. Who writes cover letters any more? Granted, my view is completely biased toward tech companies, but believing that if you just have a "really good cover letter" that it will help you land your dream job I think is foolish.

All the people I know who have awesome jobs tried to meet as many people as they could from the company where they wanted to work (outside of the recruiting dept.) and made an impression by showing off actual skills - stuff they've worked on - as opposed to a great cover letter/resume.

This is a great talk - I planned to only watch the first 3 minutes and then ended up watching the entire thing.

What I admire about Fred Wilson is that he really does live and breathe entrepreneurship, which is very evident in this talk.

There's this generally misguided sense of what "intelligence" means - that spooks are different from you or me. I don't believe it. All sorts of people pass information back to the government in both formal and informal ways, paid and unpaid. Does this make them spies?

All this article is saying is that the vast majority of people are so out-to-lunch most of the time that they don't even notice when sketchy stuff is happening right around them. And the very reason this happens has been proved out in the comments - because people don't want to think of themselves as "paranoid loons" or crazy conspiracy theorists.

While tech intel is a bit different than the so-called "situational awareness" described in the article, I think we all participate in the intel process in some way (though maybe not directly by talking to the government, but remember how there's no more privacy on the internets?)

what these sorts of schemes ignore is how much time it takes to clip, sort and strategize. how much is an hour of your time worth? if it's more than what you'd save by doing the extra work then to me the savings aren't really worth it (shortened version: opportunity cost matters).

These jobs are more prevalent and easier to snag than you think. I lived in Beijing when I was 21 and after 2 months and with the Chinese proficiency of a 2 year-old, I was working directly with the president of what is now a publicly-traded (NASDAQ) company as a "consultant". Paid my rent for a year.

I would like the ability to see the homepage from a specific date - a "time machine" feature where you can enter a date and it shows you the home page from that date. TechMeme has this feature and I use it regularly (archives box, right column, bottom).

The winner of the MIT $100K this year was a PhD student who has created a new type of cement. If organizations like the $100K didn't exist, what would be the options for this team? Sure they could try and find some advisors through academic connections, but the absence of a third-party organization that you know isn't going to screw you out of your IP is a huge advantage.

Business Plan Contests are not for every team or every startup. However, at a place like MIT startups are competing vigorously for exposure with companies like Google and Microsoft who are throwing around cash (and free pizza) to hire students. Creating a bit of fanfare and excitement around startups seems to me to be a win/win.

I disagree. For Kickstarter, I think this is what the "Paris Hilton cell phone hack" was for Digg. It has proved their model and their platform and will mainstream their service. Only good things for them - I actually think Kickstarter is the big winner in this entire situation, Diaspora is now saddled with sadly unreasonable expectations.

disagree. i think few people write as persuasively as Calacanis - his ability to make a case for something and to articulate it is, despite the tasteless self-promotion, admirable.

"Didn't anyone read "Tom Sawyer"? We're whitewashing Zuckerberg's fence."

There are over 100 million televisions in the U.S. - so while this is a great indicator (and I'm a huge fan of abandoning TV and am one of the 800K) there's still a while to go before TV becomes a truly irrelevant screen.

while i know that HN is not an events board and hope it never turns into one - I think this particular gathering is notable because so few events are ever focused on failure as a learning experience.

typically what you get is some uber-successful entrepreneur using their failures as a way to add drama and depth to their story as a smashing success. shouldn't we give a little credit to failure on its own? i think so.