zmitri

You're right, it is very unclear. My concern (and what seems to be Snowden's concern as well) is that business is going to keep going on as usual and everyone will let this slide.

I don't think its your duty to do something more unless you really want to change things. That being said, doing something to really stand out, like boycotting those PRISM companies until they change their policies, wouldn't be in the fiduciary interests of your investors.

It's a tough position to be in I think, and that's why I think it's bitter sweet. Mo money, mo problems.

This touches on a lot of the no-nonsense reasons why a VC would say no if you have some traction, but not explosive traction.

As someone who has gone through the process of bootstrapping, getting traction, and trying to raise money for the first time in a "consumer unfriendly environment," I think he touches quite eloquently and precisely on a lot of important points. Most VCs don't lay it out as nicely as this either.

It's nice seeing people like Fred stand up for privacy/human rights, but at the same time, it's little a bittersweet because speaking out directly against PRISM companies could affect business -- as companies he invests in are sometimes purchased by PRISM companies. That might hamper abilities to speak out more directly if he really wanted to make a difference.

For example, Fred mentions he is proud that Twitter wasn't in PRISM, http://fredwilson.vc/post/52346663032/the-list-of-technology... but at the same time uses the fuckyeah tumblr meme to end the post. Tumblr was recently sold to PRISM-involved Yahoo.

I'm not saying it's wrong, or bad, but it is very bittersweet.

I've spoken with younger engineers who work on internal systems at Google in NYC and they mentioned working on systems that help the legal department find problems, etc. I wouldn't be surprised if it was under such a guise that these things can be retrieved.

It happens all the time.

A couple things I've noticed with most app teams/indie developers:

1) Get it in early. Either on new apis, or new hardware. Apple tends to feature apps that feature their new apis nicely. One of the reasons Instagram was promoted to heavily was that it was released at the perfect time -- the iPhone 4 came out and had a fantastic camera. Instagram drove iPhone sales, so Apple did what they could to promote it even more. I also know someone who made a good, solid iPad app at release and now they make a lot of money off it without needing any real support.

2) Know someone at Apple Developer Relations and help get your app noticed. I've heard stories of seed funds and VCs having connections with the developer relations team at Apple. They can help put it on the front page, which will bring you a lot of downloads. It won't make you a king, but it's a big deal.

Amazon referrals are too good that there is no reason to use referly. If anyone clicks on an Amazon referral link, and ends up buying something else on the site -- not just the item you blogged about -- you still get the money and leave the hard part to what amazon is best at -- suggesting things you might like and getting people to checkout.

I very much agree. Photojournalism was it at peak in that era. There were tons of photoessay magazines around but they couldn't compete for ads with other forms of media and most of them shut down.

Being young, having very strong referrals from someone who works there and demonstrating building things outside of work or above and beyond what you are supposed to be doing.

I met one of the founders around 6 or 7 months ago.

Honestly I felt like he was the first founder I'd met in NYC that wasn't a bullshitter. He was straight forward, and actually helpful.

Those guys have been working on Rap Genius for years and years -- before anyone in the tech industry had heard of it. They made it because they wanted it, and the site grew with the community.

They silently built an internet empire and didn't care about PR stunts or hype until they had REAL traction (because that's the only thing that really matters)... Which is a lot more than I can say for most NYC startups.

Honestly, I think there's so much potential in the idea -- it's a rocketship. If you're an engineer in NYC looking for a job, you should hit them up.

Author here. We are still going.

The point of this article was to communicate to younger people that it is possible to go off and build something on your own. Many don't think about it or know it's possible.

If you're interested, about a week after this post, the app hit top 100 free apps in the store -- 88 I think was the peak -- and national news sources started using it to scoop stories from.

Either way, I've learned a lot, things I would never had learned had I not gone out on my own. I've also had a lot of interesting experiences -- some good, some bad.

Feel free to email me if you'd like to hear more.

I was referring to actual images used or featured in the table cell, not tiled backgrounds via UIColor colorWithPatternImage like you mentioning. But yes, it is important to do that as well.

I've suspected this was the case but never quantified it, so very cool.

A couple of things I've found work very well are:

1) not creating deep view hierarchies in your table cells - ie. keep those very flat.'

2) Make your images as small as possible in terms of file size. Do background processing to make them smaller and lower the quality if you don't need it. This is by far the easiest way to increase speed if you aren't doing it already.

I think this is even more advantageous for the entrepreneurs than it is for Dalton. He is an absolute legend. He's been fed more crap, and has been on the cusp of more trends than most other entrepreneurs I can think of, and still has a kick ass attitude. Awesome work YC.

Same. A lot of people don't update ever unfortunately.

Here's my semi-educated guess on what's going on. I could be off, but I have some sense of app store ebbs and flows by now:

1) Viddy is hurting bad in terms of users -- You'll see that JJ has tens of millions of followers but the interactions and view counts on his videos are very, very low in comparison. It makes sense to give it back because their growth is probably very, very, low. If they are around 40-50th in Photo and Video they are definitely doing less than 10k downloads a day.

2) Viddy actually has quite a good app. They have a pretty solid team, and can ship quite quickly.

3) Apple is promoting the shit out of video applications. Even though no one is really using them* -- things like Vyclone, etc. Either they are hoping for one of these to really take off and cause iPhone sales in the same way Instagram did, or are about to introduce new technology which makes video-capturing much better/easier/etc in the same way that Instagram came at the perfect time for the iPhone 4's camera enhancement.

Since Socialcam's sale, Viddy is definitely in the best position in terms of Instagram-like video apps, so if there are new advancements in the iPhone 5+ that do make video more appealing somehow, they will be the go to app. That being said, video is hard, and no one like to watch shitty videos which is why I'm bearish on video apps in general.

*Vine is up there, but it's still an unproven quantity I would argue. Is it's current success tied to it's insane distribution network? Time will tell.

I'm from NYC and just went to SF for a week. Have to say that most people and knowledge are way more accessible there because there are just so many more startups and so much more talent. Guys like Zuck are hard to reach sure, but within a week we were able to get meetings with a couple well known folks and they actually had interesting things to say. In NYC there are only a handful of large "start-ups".

They have definitely been struggling and they will likely see the same churn they've had in the past. If you look at their app charts on App Annie or a similar service you can see it.

around 3000 for a half hour or so when Blink-182 pushed out content to their social channels (Facebook/Twitter) using our site. Have also had slow build up to 2800 when one page went viral. The site/app is http://backspac.es

Perhaps tied to the fact that devs often feel as though they have been hustled by "business" folk in the past.

On iOS I store that info in the keychain. In database I believe it is usually stored in plain text as the user can at anytime remove access to the credentials on the 3rd party's site.

I think there's always a difference in hustle required between a founder and an employee and how "big" you want to go.

You can live a beautiful life making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year as an employee and raise a wonderful family. It's a wonderful thing about being an engineer and there's nothing wrong with that.

That being said, if you are doing your own thing, and are shooting for the stars as the article mentions, you're going to need to have the hustle on your side.

I suppose I can show the emails:

> Hi Dmitri, > > Thanks for applying to Counsyl back in August. At the time we didn't > have any openings in engineering but now we do. > > We'd like to schedule you for an initial phone interview with Rishi > Kacker, VP of Engineering, to learn more about your interests and how > you may fit in at Counsyl. > > Please book an appointment here: http://bit.ly/Rishi_appointments > > Enter in your full name in the "What" section and the best number to > reach you in the "Where" section of the appointment slot. > > Email me once you've finished booking your appointment so that I can > confirm that it went through.

I responded saying -- hey this is spamming me and is kind of disrespectful/underhanded approach to recruiting and they said:

Hi Dmitri,

This is definitely an error on our part. I'm sorry for the annoyance.

It looks like your name was pulled up as an exceptional candidate back in August (likely from a HackerNews thread). You should have only been contacted to check for interest, but unfortunately, you were sent a stock email (as if you had previously applied).

See the attached linkedin profile PDF from August.

I'm sorry again for this clerical error. I'll look further into the root cause and hopefully we can prevent this type of error in the future. I'd be happy to take a call if you have further concerns.

EDIT: On the linkedin profile they mentioned and sent via screen shot, it explicitly says no recruiters.

Their recruitment is quite annoying. I never sent in anything and they sent me emails saying thanks for applying and to fill in a slot on the calendar for when I could meet. Their approach to the process immediately turned me off.

Just keep going, building, and keep applying. Don't stop for anything or anyone.

I find it interesting that companies like Twitter and Instagram were very focused on location initially (due to their founders interest in location) but have more or less have moved away entirely.

Whereas big companies that stuck it out with location - 4sq, gowalla, highlight, loopt, etc seem to struggle reaching a similar scale.

1010data provides a web product for performing transformation on large sets of data and it's quite nice. We used it when we used to do analysis of mortgage pools etc.

That's very interesting! I bet it took a lot of effort to do that I didn't realize how nicely it was done. There is definitely value in clips like that for fans and the artists.

I see pubic statistics have been disabled, if you don't mind me asking, where are most of the views coming from?

But will that video you took of Kate Nash ever be content that thousands of people would enjoy watching? That's what a startup would be betting on. If so, where would they watch it? There's a big difference between viral videos, produced videos and videos from everyday life.

Why do you think mobile video will become mainstream? A lot of mobile video is hard to watch, and requires a better connection than other mediums. Vine is interesting in that the capture mechanism is interactive,but do you have any examples besides the use of Vine? I'm still unclear whether it will stay or will be a fad -- it's hard to tell due to their awesome distribution.