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rwebb

282 karma · joined August 17, 2007

http://robwebb2k.com
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rwebb··on Hack: Create a market for your shares (includes quote from Adam of Xobni)
that's a good read. he doesn't get into it too much, but the danger in declaring fund-raising season and going for broke is that if you blow your wad on the 6 VCs you know in 3 weeks and none of them bite, you just cashed in all your connections. of course you should continue the dialog with them and ask what you they would like to see over the next period for them to be interested...but then you have a wish list from 6 vcs who might not know what's best for your business.

the ultimate marketing making move i have heard of is this: 1. give 3 firms your materials, including the amount of money you want to raise and the valuation you want to raise it at; 2. tell each fund that you have given the same materials to 2 other funds and that you are going to only take on the 2 funds that respond first.

this can work very well. the upside is that you create leverage and massively cut down on negotiations if it works. downside is that it can blow up in your face. if your company isn't as great as you think it is, VCs could get pissed and tell you to screw, putting you back at square 1 with some potentially burned connections.

rwebb··on Readr -- my latest site. Feedback is appreciated.
i'm not sure if i agree with you or if i think the exact opposite is true (i.e. if it integrates with facebook i'm not sure anyone outside of the TC50K would use it)...

cool idea though. the massive images on the first page are a little strange. and the second page would be better if it fit w/in one screen.

rwebb··on Did YC News increase the awareness of Y Combinator Funding?
My impression is that techcrunch et al. have increased the awareness of YC lately...unclear if YC pr is responsible for the increased coverage or if it is viral/result of YC companies doing well...

How is YC not a fund? No LPs?

rwebb··on Dangerous Ideas: Sorry Paul Graham, I Think it Does Matter Where You Went to College
haven't you seen good will hunting?!

seriously though, one dedicated teacher at bhcc might give you way more than all the TAs you get at harvard. of course the same student that gets a lot out of bhcc would probably soak even more out of harvard. who knows

rwebb··on Dangerous Ideas: Sorry Paul Graham, I Think it Does Matter Where You Went to College
in my experience, the school you go to has a huge impact on what jobs you can apply/get recruited for - i definitely could see it having little impact on startup success...also doubt it has much impact on people who go into sales. both are sink or swim scenarios. but, the education you receive at harvard or mit might be no different from what you get at bunker hill cc, and if you go launch a company you may be no worse off coming out of bhcc, but if you are going into the mainstream workforce, the average MIT/Harvard/Stanford grad has a massively better shot at getting a job at NASA, Goldman, Citadel, Google, etc. Not because the students are necessarily better at those schools (although many would argue that they are) but simply because the alumni base is already embedded in those institutions. i think it is under emphasized for undergrad, but in large part matriculation choice is a decision of what alumni base you want to "buy into".
rwebb··on What is the average startup entrepreneur age? ie your age (I am 26 almost)
28
rwebb··on We wanted it, so we built it...feedback?
what about digg? ;)
rwebb··on We wanted it, so we built it...feedback?
good call...tough to squeeze them in there since we're putting a premium on # of stories per view though...
rwebb··on We wanted it, so we built it...feedback?
toned down
rwebb··on We wanted it, so we built it...feedback?
fixed now...
rwebb··on We wanted it, so we built it...feedback?
ah i see - yes i was referring to hotness ratings and he was referring to numerical ordering. interesting ideas - i definitely think numbers help "parse" the text...
rwebb··on We wanted it, so we built it...feedback?
advice: taken

we increased the line spacing, toned down some of the colors to make them easier on the eyes, and fixed the job board iframe headers.

thanks for all the great feedback!

rwebb··on screencast suggestions?
wow - awesome resources. thanks very much. that second one is legit!
rwebb··on We wanted it, so we built it...feedback?
bloomberg doesn't like changing things because their biggest and best users are old men. changing the background would be a big dice roll.
rwebb··on We wanted it, so we built it...feedback?
thanks! digstock really is focusing on stock specific news though. our focus is on private finance news.
rwebb··on We wanted it, so we built it...feedback?
yup...
rwebb··on We wanted it, so we built it...feedback?
i would sign up too :)
rwebb··on We wanted it, so we built it...feedback?
search feature is linked to on the right side in the "this site" box...

someone above wants stock news too...not something we want to get even close to though :) toooooo much info!

rwebb··on We wanted it, so we built it...feedback?
that's an interesting idea, but we're really focusing on "industry" news for the private finance world. specific company news is a huge box we don't want to get even remotely close to. the only reason there are specific companies mentioned in our news is because there is some sort of private finance move going on in relation to them. the goal is for the site to be a place where pe, m&a, hedge, and vc folks can keep track on the buzz in their industries.
rwebb··on We wanted it, so we built it...feedback?
that's an interesting idea. the one line + variying lengths + static lengths produces some issues for sure.
rwebb··on We wanted it, so we built it...feedback?
thanks very much for the feedback! it has been an interesting exercise for us: balancing what users what, what users actually DO on the site, and "good" design all at the same time. We've ended up going after the first two more aggressively at the cost of the third...simply because good design alone in a forest is worthless :)
rwebb··on We wanted it, so we built it...feedback?
yeah we're not getting huge traffic, but i doubt anyone is not looking at us because we have some ads...and if we can get any but closer to breaking even, i'll take it!
rwebb··on We wanted it, so we built it...feedback?
ha! maybe we should tone it down then...
rwebb··on We wanted it, so we built it...feedback?
good idea...
rwebb··on We wanted it, so we built it...feedback?
yeah - there is tons of content every day that we want on the site, so we tried to get as much on as we could :) not great from a design perspective, but our users like it way more so far.
rwebb··on We wanted it, so we built it...feedback?
ha - yeah that's jacked up! we weren't going for the purple borders...
rwebb··on We wanted it, so we built it...feedback?
why?
rwebb··on My Web 2.0 Application. Feedback wanted
ahh...that wasn't clear...very cool. maybe have some similar lightbox/iframe feature that brings up a cursor in search when you hit "g" with nothing selected?
rwebb··on We wanted it, so we built it...feedback?
we opted for a letter based ranking system (derived from moody's debt ranking system) because it relays relative value like a numeric ranking does, but avoids the issue of the user "let down" when they see everything has 0 - 20 votes. there are no +1000 point posts on anything other than digg and reddit...no need to use their system...
rwebb··on We wanted it, so we built it...feedback?
thanks! you probably have a nice monitor? we tried making things more mellow, but a lot of our readers have crappy monitors so the dark stuff ends up being black on black...which is tough to see...
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