HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

shivam14

185 karma · joined March 21, 2009

Associate at a Chicago early-stage VC firm, entrepreneur, hacker. Love talking to founders and helping out with anything I can. Currently investing in Delhi investing in Indian mobile startups. gmail: shivam14 - love to talk anytime!
submissionscomments
shivam14··on Q&A: Meet the 15-year-old who just sold his tech startup
I enjoyed reading the blog and how clearly he talks about his business and sells the benefits (not just features). I know MBAs who are not able to so clearly articulate their pricing and business models http://www.phenona.com/blog/phenona-business-model/
shivam14··on The Math of TechCrunch: Is TechCrunch Still About Startups?
Excellent analysis and something that well quantifies a general feeling that long-term TC readers have had.

The real takeaway for me though that you found a creative way to get your startup on Techcrunch and probably get a lot more eyeballs than just your press pitch may have received.

shivam14··on The Zipcar Prize proposal: enabling one-way car sharing trips
Car2Go (a Daimler company) is tackling this problem with the concept of an operating area. You can pick up and drop of your car from a car2go designated spot or any legal parking spot within this area. Here is an example of their operating area in Austin

http://www.car2go.com/portal/austin/page/mybookings/mapEnlar...

They are also innovative on other fronts such as charging by the minute and a feature-rich touchscreen in each car.

shivam14··on Why The Y Combinator Model Does Not Work In India
This assumes that for an Indian startup, the domain of potential users, investors and acquiring companies is limited to India. This is not true for most promising startups in India, especially web-based ones. The only pre-requisite for a YC-type model is a pool of talented potential founders, and that seems to be pretty big in India.
shivam14··on How the iPad fired my building Watchman
This has been an issue for many software companies as well. The Windows 95 launch was delayed because of this,

"Although this was a minor oversight on the part of the product group, which used United Nations maps not officially recognized by India, the Indian government was extremely upset that the region had been omitted and demanded that the problem be fixed before Windows 95 could be distributed in India." http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2000/Dec00/12-06...

shivam14··on Turns out, it is a river in Egypt
Looking at a composite night picture of the world, another river with a heavy relative concentration seems to be the Indus in Pakistan. http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/0011/earthlights2_dmsp_big.j...

In general, the picture provides a great insight into both the affluence and population density of various parts of the world.

shivam14··on Ask HN: How to decide what percentage each founder gets?
See the Founder's Pie Calculator as a reference, http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/fd0n/35%20Founders%20Pie%20Ca...
shivam14··on Ask HN: What's your favorite April Fools Joke today?
Cisco IOS QoS configuration guide - flesh tone recognition to classify and monitor suspect pornographic images

http://packetlife.net/media/blog/attachments/413/nbar_flesh_...

shivam14··on Think big with a gig: Our experimental fiber network
Thats from 2007. Sprint and Clearwire merged last year and Google is significantly invested in Clearwire's 4G network build-out.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clearwire

shivam14··on The Big Mac index: Value meal
For those interested in a more detailed view of PPP, see the world bank table (2005) below. It includes a breakdown by expenditures such as food, health, transportation, etc. Compare with the actual US$ exchange rate to get the PPP ratio.

http://siteresources.worldbank.org/ICPINT/Resources/icp-fina...

shivam14··on Ask HN: Where did the "little girl with moon ambitions" article go?
Probably. However, it was upvoted to number three (hopefully legitimately) and had a couple of interesting comments (including one on the work of Aldous Huxley). Aren't those two factors a major test of appropriatness for news.yc?
shivam14··on Couldn't sleep. Wrote some code to displays live feed of latest twitpics.
Would be nice to have a customizable update timer or a way to slow down the stream.

It appears that some users do not fully grasp the fact that twitter (and related apps) is much more "open" than facebook. Some of the pictures seem pretty private.

shivam14··on Bing Is Live
Wikipedia integration is slow to update (granted this example is with a rapidly evolving topic).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bing_(search_engine)

http://www.bing.com/reference/semhtml/Kumo_(search_engine)?q...

(looks like the May 27 version)