tom

I just engaged a local class company who’s Yelp reviews were atrocious. The reason was, 3 of the 4 were reviews of the guy’s driving, not his skills at changing a windshield. I went to FB, and saw reviews with pics of work and overwhelmingly positive scores. Gave him my business. Though, I did think about it a bit before hand. Also thought about Yelp’s relevance and the value of the very recent reviews that were all not for his work, but his driving.

$9 isn't the new black, variable pricing is. Happy to spend (and write off) more to learn some new stuff and support projects like this. I'd love to see a blog post about the pricing in a few weeks / months.

I hope this signals the end of folks walking on egg shells around Arrington. He's no longer a "newsman". He's no longer going to make or break every startup that ends up on AOLCrunch. He's just an investor hoping for deal flow. An investor who's proven he's probably not the guy you'd want to work with, probably not the guy you'd want to partner with, probably not the guy who will ever be on anyone's side but his own. Kudos to Zawinski for calling him out.

While not the case in this instance, it is completely normal for raising a round to take six months. The "check that day" folks are very, very, very outside the norm. Fundraising is almost always a slow slog.

This is a great example of 2 keys to success for startupts. 1. Hustle. Many people told Alex no before he got that first check, but he kept at it. Hit this milestone, get these sales, blah, blah, blah. He kept improving, kept serving customers and kept hustling. 2. He did what he had to do to get his co to the next step. When it was evident that SF was the place they had to be, the picked up and moved - and fast!

Boomerang rocks. It's the simple functionality that I've wanted in my inbox for YEARS. I get a cubic butt-load of email and the problem with it, is it's all on the schedule of someone else. I need to deal with things, but not right now, but if I don't, it gets lost below the fold. I've tried special labels (and compound special labels). I've tried starring things (and plus labels and compound special labels). I've tried reminders outside of email. I've failed at all of them. Inbox 1, Tom 0 - though it's more like Inbox 365, Tom 0. Failing at this is VERY bad for a bootstrapping startup founder. You cannot afford to drop these balls.

Boomerang started as a get stuff in your inbox when it's relevant tool and that's been the biggest win for me. But the scheduled sending is quickly rooting itself into my email workflow. I am almost always heads down coding late at night and will often take breaks to wade through some email. Replying to everything at 3am is not ideal as I then get caught in the 4 - 8am slam of crap email that fills everyone's inbox. Choosing to have my stuff hit an inbox at 10 or 11am, so I'm after the crap and before lunch rocks. Wait, did I just give up one of my super secret competitive advantages over all the rest of you startup folks?

Anyway, I've been using Boomerang since early in their alpha. I've also know the Baydin team really well (we went through TS together in 2009) for a while. Good guys working really hard to solve real problems and make email not suck.

Is it perfect? Not yet. It requires a new version of FF, the Boomerang button is on the left of the Save Now button when you're composing (change this please Alex!), and it can't reply to my email for me, but so far it's pretty freaking awesome. Inbox 0, Tom 1.

We've been users of Mogotest since they first launched their beta. Amazing time saver (especially if you dev on a Mac). I run automated tests across three sites as well as on demand after major pushes. It's especially helpful for our IE 6/7/8 testing. I used to keep VMWare open to test IE stuff and it killed my poor MB and was still a pita to have multiple IE versions happy in my test XP image. Haven't opened it in months ... don't miss it at all.

Big props to them on their launch.

Hiring? Does that imply a salary? Cause yeah, we don't have that quite yet, but we're working on it.

What do we have? Small, fast, potential insane team going after the temporary staffing / contracting match-making market. It was $86B in revenue last year, a down year, and it's almost entirely offline. It's time to shake things up!

We're in Boston and you need to be to. We code primarily in Rails. The right person will be co-founder with significant equity. We're changing peoples lives. Come build a great company with us.

We're a TechStars 09 company. Have GREAT advisers with deep industry knowledge and major entrepreneurial success under their belts (seriously, rock stars).

Oh, and as this says (http://www.startuply.com/Jobs/Technical_Co_Founder_Rails_153...) I'm not another biz guy looking for someone to do the work. Career developer, 4 startups under my belt, looking to turn my focus more towards the fund raising and growing the biz. That's where you come in. Ping me. My email is in my profile.

I think this is an interesting concept, but man, making a mentorship match is HARD. You have to really hit it off with the person, on more of a personal level than anything at first. Then the rest works out. I'll be interested to hear some real feedback once you've made some matches. Please do give us a followup in a few months.

Do you know how many of these have been awarded in the last six months - especially with the stimulus package? Seriously, this is intractable. Find folks who are doing work that interests you, and then try and find their grants and their papers.

What you're describing is the life I left to start my latest co. I worked at a big research university having not had bio since college .. years ago. The key is to find ways you can help, find someone who needs what you have to offer, and work like crazy to get them to like you. Not that I did this, I kinda fell into it, but I watched others do it with much success. That said, as others have mentioned, statistics, statistics, and then when you need break, some more statistics. Learn Python and bioPython, learn NCBI Blast, and WU BLAST inside and out (read the papers), know some bio basics, and prepare to take a pay cut.

Also, if you find a group you're interested in, who's work you like and can get to interview, or at least a meeting / talk with anyone, read every paper to come out of their lab since the dawn of time. These papers can be hard to grok, and down right painful to read. Read them, and read them again. Show interest in their work and they will like you. It's ok to not get it all. It's ok, to not truly understand what they're trying to do. Trust me, some reviewers don't seem to read the entire papers either ...

If you have any further q's, you can derive my email quite easily from my profile. Ping me. Also, where do you live? If you're in the Boston area, we can talk in person. I know a LOT of people in this space and we were always looking for great software engineers who had a thirst for biology.

Also, just because you have no chance of winning, doesn't mean you can't have a very large impact on the outcome of the game ...

Here's a hint, don't sink your wife - even if she totally deserved it. :)

Holy cow that's a big ask at the end of the Michael Prichard pitch, but man, best of the bunch. He told us what the problem was. He personalized. Why HE had to solve it. He ate his own dog food (literally). Explained how it would change lives / the size of the market / competition. And then finished with his ask. Not that he was actually asking, but that is a better pitch than all the rest.

One thing that got me about a lot of the others, they just didn't feel practiced. If they were, it was not enough. Practice, practice and practice some more and when you think you've nailed it ... do it again ... twice. :)

It's a shame it was edited though. As it's hard to really get a feel for the flow due to the weird cuts. Of course, it might have been too long without it. :)

What was really successful about his pitch though was his tone. He is VERY believable. He comes off as so true. Add to that the fact that he told us that we was only going to cover three things and then nailed them, and man, that's a nice pitch.

You're drawing conclusions where they don't exist.

The "startup life", the life of a startup founder is in fact, hard. Building a product is hard. Building a company is hard. Building anything of value is hard. It has nothing to do with a trendy crowd or a decidedly non-trendy crowd, it has entirely to do with folks who are having, have recently, or will have a lot of the same challenges as you. I'm not sure why it's hard to understand having friends who've been there, done that, or are doing it is very, very helpful. I'm glad you're able to do it all on your own, but some of us either aren't, or have realized it's a waste of time to. Being a martyr will help you much less than having the smarts to ask folks who can help you not waste time on the things that don't actually move your business forward, but can only impede progress - there's your value. Man, this kool aid is yummy ... it tastes like improving my odds ... and that tastes great!

Interestingly enough, many of the folks I met remarked that they had 1. mentors who helped them get their first, second, nth company off the ground deal with problems, and just plain succeed, and 2. had sought out others doing the same thing. Oh, and these are folks who are the entrepreneurs of the last couple of decades. Guess what, they are the investors and mentors of today. Regarding the feedback of other startup folks, this isn't about going it your own way, far from it, it's about the things that are similar that are a waste of your most value resource - time, the contact you don't have and the intros that can be made, the things you haven't seen that can sink you, but aren't what make your business your business. Why waste time on that crap?

While I don't agree, I'll admit that you may be right, but this is impossible to know.

But why make all the same mistakes? Why have to figure it all out on your own? Why reinvent every wheel that's already been built and can't get any more round? Why wouldn't you want a group of folks who will always give you the most critical feedback, but who will also sell you to potential customers, investors, and partners like no one else could? Trust me, your friends who haven't done this, can't help you nearly as much as your friends who are doing it right now. Sure, you can still be successful, and many have without organized seed programs around them, but why not take every advantage you can get?

It's not news, or hacking, but something that's as important to the success of a startup - the startup life. It's an acknowledgment, or maybe an admission that doing this is hard, that there are definite commonalities among those who pull it off, that it's easier to go it with a community around you.

Running a startup, creating a startup, living a startup is freakin hard. I've done it multiple times before my trip through TechStars, and man, now that I've experienced (and continue to experience it, as not a day goes by that I don't talk to at least one other founder, a mentor, or an advisor) this way, I'm sold and happy I'll never have to go it alone again.

He sees it too. I hope for your benefit that if you're doing this, if you're trying to really start something (not just read YC) that you seek out others who are doing the same. It could mean the difference between your success or failure.

I didn't take that from this article. The key question was : “Is getting an office space going to help grow my business?”. Sure seems like David's saying that if you never answer a firm yes, you never need one.

We love Unfuddle! Not too complicated, no too simple. Pleasantly integrated.

My in-laws gave me Monopoly: the .com Edition when I started at my first startup. We get a game going about once a year. The best part is that the denominations are HUGE. That's a part of the bubble they really captured well and leads to tons of unintentional humor during each game: bloated values of nothing companies bought with play money.

You can show it - you should always have access to your app, whether locally on your pres machine or remotely via the hosts internet, but never, never, leave the presentation demo up to chance. There are enough risks in this process, why add one more huge one?

And yes, you've been VERY lucky. :)

Screencasts are just plain smart when you have your demo, your single shot, your company, on the line. Don't count on the internet working anywhere (especially not a VC's conference room), or EC2 staying up, or your server on your laptop staying up. Give a well paced talk over a perfect screencast and nail it. It's not worth the risk - ever.

NDA's just aren't going to happen. And you're going to expose yourself as a noob if you ask for one. No VC (at least here in the US) will sign one. If you really have something that special, get your IP in order first. Provisionals at least. Then, you have some measure of protection. In any case, engage a real IP lawyer. No someone who plays on on HN ... That said, 10 other people have had your idea and might have already pitched these very same VCs. You need to be the best of the 10.

Required reading: askthevc.com

the middle column, scroll down a bit for the categories list. A goldmine.

Jason and Brad have done a huge service to the community with this site.

This list is worth more than spending $5K with these folks (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=861767). Seriously.

I'm pretty tapped into the Boston scene and I had no idea there were this many great opportunities.

Thanks Don!

Ok, I'm going to be unusually harsh for me, but here goes.

If this is really going to be quarterly, that's just shy of $800K in fees per year and 392 startups pre-paying for "services" and 10% (!!!) of your co. Yeah, no thanks.

Anyone in Boston is better off hitting the crowded myriad of events (Web Inno, Open Coffee, etc.) and spending the rest of their money on lottery tickets. At least with Web Inno and Open Coffee you can meet folks who actually matter in this scene, unlike their list of "advisers".

Have you launched something yet? Paid service? Free? Freemium? Without launching and looking at real, initial numbers just assume you'll be like 99% of the startups out there and get none. That's what your potential jnvestors will do until they see some real numbers.

Seriously, get something real, prove you're on to something, and THEN talk numbers with investors. You've got a bigtime uphill battle without at least one solid proof point. Get that, and then hockeystick that sucker up!

Why not just rsync -auvz?

Avoiding a small bit of initial frustration in setting up Capistrano, SSH keys etc, in order to have what feels like an easier deploy is a wonderful case of penny wise and pound foolish.

Take the time, do it right, get the benefits of a real deployment. It's worth it.

Interesting to actually look at this.

6:20am - One year old wakes up. Grudgingly, I do to.

6:25am - Change diaper, PJs if they're wet, make a bottle, feed the boy, try to keep eyes open.

6:40am - Catch up on email on the iPhone while the boy plays on the family room floor. Can't use the MacBook because he'll want to play with it.

7:20am - Make coffee, clean the boy's bottles, change his diaper.

8:20am - Wake up wife so I get to shower. Shower.

8:45am - Send replies that were too long for iPhone. Review where last night left us. Review what I want to get done today. Start working.

10:30am - motivate to the subway to go to the office. Pleasure read on the train.

11:15am - get to the office. Talk to office mates. Get situated, try to get back into the groove. Put off lunch as long as possible.

Lunch - try to find something cheap. Generally fail.

Rest of the day - work, have sessions with our mentors. Maybe get some dinner.

9:45pm - head home. Pass out on the subway.

10:30pm - Catch up with wife until she goes to bed.

11:00pm - 1:30am - Work.

Rinse, lather repeat and never second guess giving up that good 4 day a week job I used to have to start my own business.