AlexTheFounder

What's the main one advantage of Node.js over php (or ruby)?

The person has approached YOU :)

Seems like A/B testing for the new sites is a chicken/egg problem of its own - you first have to have users to test how to get users.

For me too, Adsense was either too expensive or gave too little traffic, both without any real learning opportunities.

Vitamin vs painkiller is a better analogue. Consider Facebook, it isn't really a "must have", but seems to be doing just fine

And scientists. The reason I think is in the traditionally more system-oriented education.

The stats FlightCaster collects is like the stats on road accidents: if you go by route A on Ford you have a 90% probability to broke the car (and be late), so you better switch the route or the car.

How many will do that?

The difference in pitching a VC vs. an angel is in presenting your far goals. I guess no VC will like your promise to quickly become a profitable company with few employees only and making hundreds of thousands per year, and not going to grow beyond that. Angels might like that more than having to wait several years to get a smaller slice from a bigger pie.

"The monetization model needs to at least result in a $100M revenue business growing at 20%-30% with strong EBITDA margins." - that was the stock answer to VC question

I have a feeling that YC tries to fund the companies that change how people perceive and use technology. Others are just the me-too examples.

Is that the case with what you do?

Its interesting to see who they choose in the end. 20 companies is a pretty high number to get them all right. Anyway, keep going and maybe when the summer ends you will have better chances of further funding than any of the TS (or YC or ...)companies!

Your team and the execution looks very good to me. But that is also the case with the rest of the applicants, I guess. Despite all that talk about ideas beign secondary to the application, at this point all you can really show is a cool idea and your desire to dominate the world.

Seems like you fail on these two tests completely.

The right way to do it is to set your price high enough and to introduce a discount. Playing the discount % up/down you can finally arrive at the best price.

-- ASP.NET and ASP.NET MVC are actually completely different (even though they share the same name) --

They use dirrent rending engines, but the business logic is more important and is usually > 50% of the codebase, so it can still be reused in MVC Asp.Net.

Its Ok, coz the target market for the MVC Asp.Net is 2005 or ealier. Lots companies are still at dotnet 1.1 actually with the latest version 3.5

timez, timeflip, timeside, timezoo

If something just "cannot not work" then it will broke unexpectedly and will take you by surprise.

I guess the next logical step for 'other funds' is to lower the percent of equity they take and to increase the money they invest. That can make startups think twice before turning over to YC.

it is in the open now:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/22/the-nasty-exploding-ter...

As they say: strategy is all about what NOT to do

Timing is king. For MS it means that they have to adapt to new trends faster if they don't want their products abandoned.

MVC is a really big step forward, something that most people didn't expect from MS (meaning the inclusion of third party stuff).

By itself .Net MVC is smaller than Struts, as it uses the rest of previous Asp.Net stuff.

The perceived value on the other hand is big, as it totally changes the way how Asp.Net applications can be done.

> "Ideas are priceless. If you are a programmer and you aren't "plugged" into the bubble money, a great idea is your only chance."

Think about plentyoffish.com - a multimillion one-man company. His 'priceless' idea was to let people to see others contact details for free, which in 2001 was quite new. Then all he had was to fight off spam, every day. Great execution really.

" I suppose Google was just another me-too search engine and MS-DOS was just another copy of CP/M "

I think you're wrong on both your assumptions here. Search wasn't a solved problem, even the simplest forms of spam succeeded these days.

Also OS in general aren't a solved problem either, coz the hardware keeps going and people's needs change

These problems were and are hard to solve and rare startup can do it. Even to tackle the problem lots of reseach needed.

Why there were only 15 or 16 startups? Was it the initial number or have some companies not made it to the Demo Day?

Its all about the percieved value. Its amazing how hackers (me included) don't get this.

Normal people rarely care about the technology, they do care about little things that improve their live

From that list only TheFunded seems the most focused on the 'real' entrepreneurs. I wonder how much value does it actually hold.

I think you might be misleading here. Your post about starting with a friend triggered quite a lot of emotions, so its staying not only because of its length.

But you're right that longer posts are more likely to 'catch' the reader

I do not 'keep peace', we both understand that it is the most productive approach. And yes I do have my voice when needed.

We're married for 12 years, have 2 kids and overall we're quite happy. Just because my wife is always right about the house and kids, does not imply anything how deep our relations are.

In fact I have more time to hack things because I can leave a lot to my wife. That's how successful companies get built

This is basically how family works. Every party should have a right to be 'right' in the agreed range of situations (my wife is always right in the house, no matter what).

So, the founders should split the territory and then follow to the agreement.