jagjit

The best thing you could do if you have really been reading carefully is to get started on building what your idea is. And VCs may not be what you need - if you really believe the products would sell you could try bank/credit card loans etc. It is not as if there was no entrepreneurship before VCs came into picture. With or without VCs, with or without certain degrees from certain schools, entrepreneurs will always be there and keep finding ways to chase opportunities they believe in.

appreciate the great advice about user/customer support. i especially liked when he talks about how to think about what the users want, relate to them, tell them what you can do for THEM - "nobody cares about you except you, people care about themselves" thanks

And a crazy apple fanboy wants to vote my opinion down - why dont people like me just get it already.

I guess these ads have an audience after all. But then it is a waste of the apple advertising dollar to preach to the choir.

These ads are getting more and more lame. As a fulltime programmer and xp and vista user - I never felt the need to use macs but for their unix base and cool design. Considered buying one recently but settled for a vista pc with much better configuration at half the price. It has been running great for me with not a single issue in past 6 months. For any need of unix system, I run ubuntu or freebsd vmware appliances on my vista.

If apple cannot convince a frugal programmer like me who would love to own a mac - I do not know how even these ads can help them much in the general pc market. I think they will remain limited only to folks who really appreciate their commitment to design and would pay so much extra just for that.

I am sure the scale of their applications demands optimizing as much as possible. I use yaml for this purpose. And find it very flexible and easy to use. It is also more readable than xml.

It is very interesting to learn that VCs also demonstrate herd mentality or group think when they invest. The same behaviour is also displayed by professional money/mutual fund managers.

I remember reading somewhere the statistics that VC funding during the dot-com bubble days was at its peak. So they were not any better than the individual investors in terms of assessing these dot-coms for their potential. And the common reason VCs gave for those investments was that they knew it was a bubble but they did not want to be left out of the deals.

Careful investors do not generally value companies based on revenues or earning potential in future - they first find the worth based on the current earnings or assets. But then again internet startups are not usually evaluated for their worth by careful investors.

EPV (Earning Power Value) is a good way to calculate the worth of the company based on the earnings. EPV = Earnings/cost of capital

So if the company can raise money at 10% interest, then the EPV will be 10x its earnings.

Please take the above with a grain of salt. You should value it as high as you can negotiate. It will help if you know what the buyer plans to do with your site - that is an important factor that raises the valuations of web startups. Youtube or facebook get such crazy valuations not for their profit potential in isolation but based on the plans of their acquirers.

Just updated. Thanks for the reminder.