plamb

Well for one, you shouldn't have issues like the app crashing when someone tries to take a photo. 27 employees means you have plenty of QA and a testing environment. Two guys in a house means you maybe have one iPhone version to test on and no time to do thorough QA.

And they should. There's a big difference between two guys renting a house and living of their savings accounts pre-launch and 41 million dollars and 27 employees pre-launch.

What I meant by 'public, open application process' is that anyone can apply and get their ideas reviewed by very smart people whereas many VC's/Angels won't even glance at you until you're referred by someone they know.

PG has openly stated that the overwhelming majority of the time, it's not that you have a bad startup idea where he can just list of a bunch of reasons why you didn't make it, but rather that other people just simply had better startup ideas. I'm pretty sure the companies they invest in are made publicly available, so it would be easy to see what better ideas are out there.

Entrepreneurship is about both things. Typically the second route is one that is going to take longer, cost more, and require a lot more explaining. As such it is generally a bit riskier (ideas 'ahead of their time' can take years to mature).

If you don't have a outside responsibilities like a family, you should leave your job to pursue your idea. Entrepreneurs unwilling to take the risk of leaving their job to follow their dream send a bad signal to investors-- you should be passionate enough and believe enough in your idea that you're certain it will succeed.

One of the nice things about YC is that they're willing to have an open, public application process. I'm sure you can imagine that supporting that means they personally waste tons of their own time reading applications that don't come close to cutting it. For new entrepreneurs that don't have great connections to investor communities, this is one of the few avenues for getting their ideas vetted by an experienced group of people.

Wanted to thank you for this post; some of your quotes about co-founders describe the trials and tribulations we've already been through in the 6 months we've been working full time on our startup. Great read!

The fact that they're changing policies without much community discussion is certainly scary to any twitter-based company. Luckily, it appears that they're primarily opposed to clients, which is only one of the many possible applications people can build on top of Twitter.

Hi SoWink, what OS/Browser are you using?

We just got a nice little Mac Mini so we will be testing/fixing the bugs on OSX.

Thank you goo-- we've had a number of complaints about the speed of the web app and we're definitely focused on speeding that up. What has been holding back that development is that all the buzz we've gotten thus far has been around the mobile apps, so we've been working on making those valuable and bug free. We will be moving up the priority of speeding up the web app.

Spreading our focus across three products and 50 cities so early on was probably a mistake, but we will make up for it.

Great feedback, I like some of these ideas thanks codeslush!

Great to hear, thanks lhorie

Very weird. Thank you for the info, we will look at this.

Do you potentially have a plugin that blocks tweets from being loaded?

Really? That just executes a couple lines of CSS. Should that work on an iPad?

Here is the direct link to Boston: http://bos.barbird.com

That's very odd; it works great on Chrome/FF4, works decently on Safari and IE8+; anything less than IE8 doesn't work. Which browser were you using?

We've toyed with taglines at the top and once the iPhone app/Android app were done we wanted to use that space to advertise. We definitely need to work something short back in there.

We have a few different ideas for monetization; the most obvious one is auctioning off that 'hot tweet' area on a nightly basis; that is seen by every web/mobile user. I like it because these are advertisements our users would actually want to see.