sorent

I find these recommendations useful, and more importantly, I think it shows how the authors of the guide (who are partners at V1) think about building scalable startups. I wish all funds were this transparent!

Anyone considering taking investments from V1 should read this guide because it shows that:

1. They will point founders to the best external advice the team has come across (including most of the solid references pointed out by ignoramous below). This means they won't come up with a bunch of BS that is not best practice.

2. That the V1 team cares about its founders! If you see the section "Invest in yourself", it's clear that they care about YOU as a founder! I love this human approach - that's NOT the case for every investor out there!

Disclaimer: Version One Ventures is 1 of 33 investors on our captable - and they stand (very positively) out!

VyprVPN. I can choose different locations around the world, it's fast and reliable, and it automatically connects when I am ion untrusted public wifi. Does come at a subscription cost though

For bioinformatics I read Genomeweb, but I am interested in other good outlets under the same theme

Not true.

Co-founder Ray Kurtzweil has a personal belief on that, which he wrote a book about (How to Create a Mind). In it, he describes his Pattern Recognition Theory of Mind, the theory that the neocortex is a hierarchical system of pattern recognizers, and argues that emulating this architecture in machines could lead to an artificial superintelligence. I believe he now works to bring natural language understanding to Google, hired personally by CEO

With a startup founded at SU (in 2014), and as a YC company (W2016) I would like to add some color to this discussion.

The Bloomberg article has one goal; discredit SU! Statements such as 'Google pulled their funding from GSP' is just plain wrong. According to SU, THEY decided to pause GSP. Google, therefore, moved their support towards the SU Startup program.

The article talks about bad sexual behavior from a former employee back in 2013. When I was at SU in 2014, I thought it was almost cringing to hear how everyone was instructed NOT to engage romanticly with anyone. I was like, c'mon, we're grownups!! To say that they didn't learn from the 2013 incident is not true. And.. the 'financial fraud argument' is ridiculous - any company can experience a bad employee. Fired and out - whats more could they do?

Here is my SU experience. In summer 2014 my co-founder and I attended the GSP program:

- We were 80 students with different domain expertise from 36 countries. We spent 10 weeks at SU's campus at NASA Ames in Mountain View.

- We were briefed about a broad range of technologies, so we had a general understanding of which direction tech is moving.

- The worlds most pressing problems were presented. Think shortage of food, clean water, energy crisis, access to health, etc.

- The 'homework' was now to come up with moonshots that could impact +1b people positively in 10 years.

Was that experience valuable? Yes. Though none of the SU companies have hit the 1b person impact mark, it has seeded a wide range of projects - our own company is one.

One of the hype machines of this world is Peter Diamandis, the co-founder of SU. He might be too much of a capitalist for my taste, but his consistent launch of moonshots is wild and he is an extraordinary entrepreneur... Have you guys seen X-prize, Planetary Resources, and Human Longevity? Just yesterday he launched 'Celularity', and raised $250m in funding for using 'waste placentas' to develop new stem cell therapies. SU was founded to create similar moonshots.

SU used to be a non-profit but switched to a for-profit model to expand their reach. That's how conferences came about. I too ask myself if it's sustainable? Maybe. Change is happening quickly, and big corps are used to pay big bucks for the consultants of the world. In that world, SU's brand on 'exponential thinking' is fragile, but they are trying to expand their offering. The risk in their business model is how hard they ride their brand, where articles like this one are straight out poisonous.

I would take a look at who is promoting this article. Who would benefit from the SU slandering? There is a lot of money in conferences, and SU just announced $32m to address that market.

My thinking on SU is that it's an organization educating people on technology development, with a goal of framing it into positive human development. The world needs more of that!

At least for us, that thinking helped us frame a solution, with a very large potential for positive impact. Later, YC was the perfect segway into creating a scale-able company.

Anyway, wanted to share my two cents..

Mickey, thanks for the quick reply! I cant wait to try this out. I see you guys are also planning a Kickstarter - can you say anything about when that will go live?

Amazing product - just what I was waiting for! Can I also save my workouts, so I can compete against my-self on a workout-to-workout basis? It would also be great if the app could give me recommendations such as "you should step it up a notch - you seem to have the strength".

And more importantly; can I compare myself against others? competitive fitness here;)

We need to shine more light on the executors.. theese days all the focus tend to go to the founders