jaksmit

do you have a link to that? it sounds vaguely familiar. I know the guy that did a prank on his roommate using Facebook ads.

@will_brown + @WalterGR sorry that it was unclear. This was one ad-campaign targeting just Thomas (+ 6 randomers). I ran a number of other variations targeting investors that were connected to him and others in his network. These still didn't target too many people (I'd say <100); but still got a lot of attention.

I'm also guessing that some people might have just told him they'd seen his face on a LinkedIn ad. Not necessarily clicked through to it.

the evolution of my role at Vungle would be a bit of a longer story. I wouldn't describe it as being 'pushed out' exactly. But I feel that my business partner scaled with the company a lot better than I did personally. Me leaving certainly wasn't as dramatic/interesting as something like the Twitter founding story for example.

yep. They recently changed it to 1000. At the time, I found out that for whatever reason the minimum number was 7.

I'm pretty sure LinkedIn ads weren't intended to have a picture of the guy's face who you're targeting as the ad though!

I found this exploit a while back; when I checked more recently, the minimum number of people that you need to target in order for an ad to be accepted is closer to 1000. So it's harder to replicate.

similarly, with the facebook thing. I saw that Facebook is rolling back usage of the facebook.com email addresses, so I'm not sure how long that will keep working.

fair point. I mainly wanted to focus here on the aftermath of the linkedin campaign.

The sequence of events basically was: - Thursday saw the TC post, same day created Linkedin ad campaign - Friday got a call from Thomas - next week we got the final spot (on about a Thursday) - about 3 days later we were on a flight to san francisco to join Angelpad (+ $120k at this point) - about 10 weeks after moving to San Francisco we started raising our seed round. We ended up raising ~$2 mil led by Google Ventures - about a year later raised $6.5mil Series A - about a year after that raised $17m Series B - after that the company kept growing and has opened offices in various countries etc

for myself personally, I moved more towards advising a few different startups.

yep, his was a funny 'hack'

I also don't know if it would apply here. As these are "native" ads to LinkedIn. They don't really label them as ads much. I guess if the <div> mentions ads then it might be blocked.

I agree that we shouldn't celebrate raising money. Unfortunately that is just a standout metric that many companies are still judged on and was added at the start of the article to give some credibility.

it wouldn't have been as catchy if the title was "here's a tactic that helped me start a company that became profitable and delivering value" ;)

I think that it was especially relevant in this case as the guy running the incubator was on LinkedIn checking the profiles of all the people that were applying.

RE "The title is misleading, it lead to $120k in investment for his company, it did not 'make him 120k'"

I agree, semantically it's not a very accurate title. But actually, I'd say that in the long-run the chain of events that resulted from this hack (i.e. me moving to America and then my startup getting funded etc) has led to me personally benefiting much more than $120k. Essentially it was the main cause to making me millions of dollars. The $120k was just the most quantifiable from the initial hack.

yeah that's a cool article as well. I liked his similar approach.

yeah, it's been written about before, but I wanted to clarify the exact steps that I took, as the previous articles have been a bit hazy. Per the Pando article "Using a handful of techniques that he still seems to shy away from talking about" and as you highlight, an "adwords hack" is a very bad description.

I haven't read that article from PG, I'll definitely check it out!

I don't know. I was very shocked! perhaps it was just human error, or no one had actually gone through this process before to bother to find out?

@dsugarman: to clarify: that was just one of the ad-campaigns targeting Thomas specifically. There were a number of other campaigns targeting his investors etc

they increased their prices more than 75% a year ago, which signaled that they didn't have a sustainable model.

http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/25/homejoy-home-services/?fb_c...

Why don't you just name which "far larger" competitors you're thinking of, so that he can address that?

Especially in this climate, there are lots of startups fundraising all the time (indeed a few other startups announced their fundraising today), and I can imagine that from the outside it may often look easy to raise large sums of money. I can say without doubt first hand that this fundraise for Zesty is the result of just immense hardwork and relentless hustle from David and his team.

I have huge respect for 1) the aggressive growth and customer development; 2) the operational roll out (which, given each customer has Zesty workers onsite to set out the food, is a huge operational nightmare); 3) being humble enough to deviate and pivot the initial idea from a mobile app to a much more operations heavy b2b play

I'm not fully sure why someone would use this. Is it for donating stuff, or garbage disposal?

For my unwanted items, I donate them via https://givebackbox.com/ - which gives you a pre-paid UPS shipping label and lets you ship to Goodwill for free.

it's not just limited to Etsy Vendors. there's been a link for anyone to participate in this pre-ipo program in the footer of the Etsy website for weeks now.

It's a shame that they didn't go with LOYAL3, as discussed in the article - it's much less forms and paperwork than Morgan Stanley required.

for Instacart for example; the postage fee of $3, or whatever they advertise is more of a trojan horse. The company makes most of it's money through partnering with stores and also marking up the prices of items. i.e. the price that an item has on Instacart is not the same as the price the item is actually sold for if you go into a Safeway (or whatever) store.

"- Uber launches a package courier service" they already have one in NYC.

how's this different to iDoneThis?

define success. It's not necessarily a good formula for tens of billions $ ipo level success; see facebook, twitter, google

no. it's a company. It's valued on future potential. Same as Whatsapp can be valued at $19billion, despite only having $10 million in revenue. Many examples; there is future monetization potential, that they're already discussing.

"In this cycle we saw a +40% increase in the number of companies applying" — roughly how many applications were there? 1000? 10,000?

Also, how many teams make it to the interview stage?

another promising service getting destroyed by LinkedIn, like Rapportive.

How does copyright work in a situation like this then? You're taking a paywalled (expensive paywall at that) article and posting it elsewhere. How's it not copyright infringement?

the article doesn't actually mention how the tweet led to the company getting funding, or anything to do with what the tweet said!...

Even as a company founder, I don't keep half the stuff mentioned on here top of mind, so I doubt that any employee is going to have enough information to complete it correctly. e.g. to model what you "would have made" if you'd joined Uber at X stage, you'd have to know the pre-money valuation of each funding round they received, along with the investors' liquidation preferences etc and who knows, they may take on even more funding before going public, which would mean your shares would get diluted even further.

Overall, if anything, this just serves to illustrate all the complexities involved in trying to model how much a startup's equity offer is actually "worth" in the long-run and that trying to do calculations to model it against an offer at a big company is totally the wrong way to go about it.

It just validates what Mark Suster says here: http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2009/11/04/is-it-time-for...

don't join a startup because you could potentially make millions of $. Join if you want to learn; any money you make would be if you got really lucky and is a nice side bonus.