BrandonWatson

Someone posted to me about this on twitter...looking more into it, it's a false positive. You can check at http://onlinelinkscan.com.

That's the beauty of his approach, in my opinion. He deploys the money in one shot, to many companies (portfolio theory says this reduces risk), and does so with little diligence. He may be pricing many angels out of this type of deal because they won't have this same appetite for risk as Yuri does. What he finds acceptable for risk is not what most angels would, thus he can price out the risk premium with the uncapped convert.

Site went down for a moment there...bluehost to the rescue.

The main issues revolve around some topics I hadn't seen elsewhere.

1) Will Paul's talent filter function work as the influx of applicants grows? One poster suggested he doesn't think a 3x is possible. I disagree.

2) What happens when older, more seasoned folks see this? Will they see this reduction of risk as the opportunity they have been waiting for to start something? Don't underestimate the power of "what if" and "what could have been" for people who have been working for 10+ years, but kids/mortgage got in the way of starting something.

3) What will the angel response be? Offering more money in the next go round isn't the right answer. Yuri have removed the risk premium from angel investing. That's huge.

4) Is it possible that there is too much of a choke point, now, for talent selection for YC? Will the ecosystem continue to flourish, or does it run the risk of stagnation, because the selection criteria doesn't allow for random mutation?

5) Will financial engineering take hold? With a few players doing this, things could get messy.

You're not quite right with your conclusion. Sorry you didn't read all the way through.

If anyone ever questions the value of the idea versus the value of execution, use this as a cuationary tale. Here's my post outlining this very idea from 2 years ago:

http://www.manyniches.com/n00b-notes/my3words/

2 years. I even registered the domain my3words.com.

What did I do with it? Not much. I have no idea if Mark saw my post or not. I kind of hope he did, so that I can feel a little better about not executing. That maybe I inspired him.

However, that doesn't change the bottom line. He executed. Worth-ful. I had the idea, but didn't execute. Worthless.

Hats off to Mark.

I run dev marketing for wp7. Shoot me an email and lets see if we can't get you on the list. brwatson@microsoft

Interesting theory. My thought was that they might have actually created a problem which could blow up their revenue model.

http://www.manyniches.com/uncategorized/did-google-instant-j...

Part of that post discusses that the clever SEO marketing types will likely try to figure out the pathing through the suggested keyword list and perhaps bid up the leaf node terms. Whether that's a temporal or systemic change is unclear.

I had the good fortune to actually spend some time geeking out with Jimmy on campus. Great guy, and he will be missed. If you are in NYC, reach out to him. He's a geek worth knowing.

Awesome...I can't wait to see it.

Yeah, it's very short notice. Sorry about that. The plan to bring phones for developers landed at the last minute. But, given the opportunity to do it or not, we opted to do it.

I'm confused...people here are hating on the price? If you don't like the price, don't buy it.

Free markets are pretty efficient, and pricing anamolies have a tough time persisting. DHH and crew are not perpetrating a crime on society with this price. They are not withholding a public good which cannot be obtained from anyone but them. They built something, and want to try and sell it for a price they set to customers they hope to win. Welcome to capitalism.

The point is - and this is especially true with software these days - there's always an option priced above free which causes someone to say "really?" But if you derive value from it, then you will pay. If not, you won't.

There's likely better ways to spend our IQ units than hating on the price of an app.

To be clear, I am not throwing stones. I am, of course, a MSFT employee, so I have a bit of bias there. As a data junkie I like to ensure that the right conclusions can be drawn. A post like this, when contrasted with the $4+ billion that the Office group makes, well it's hard to draw the dire conclusions that one might make from this data in a vacuum.

While this is great data, can you include some data about the makeup of the sample pool? Specifically, I am wondering how much of a conclusion you can draw about worldwide, or even US broadly, versus what could potentially be very a highly technically adept audience, thus skewing one way or another.

Couldn't agree with you more. Developers want to learn new things. They also want to get kudos or recognition for their work, and make money. Hopefully we will over eliver on all of those fronts. Our business was built by supporting developers, and we look to carry forward all of the great things we have learned over the years for the new Windows Phone 7.

I will have more posts this week with code samples and other info as I pull it out of the dev team.

Great idea on leaving the content for others to share.

I had put together an outline a year ago for a book. The working title is The Failing Point. I started writing, and built up a good head of steam. I knew that getting a publishing deal as an unknown was almost impossible. Since the content is in essay form, I started posting them online in blog format at the url www.TheFailingPoint.com.

I got into a 2x per week posting rhythm, and the strategy was to do this for the first 2 chapters, over the course of 2 months, and then stop. I had planned on taking the "success" of building traffic to a publisher. I didn't want to keep posting all of the content that would eventually be in the book at the risk of putting off any potential authors.

In the second of 2 months, I generated 20K uniques without spending any money. Links were posted here and Digg. I also tried to incorporate TweetMeme (great) and Yahoo Buzz (useless).

Well, the few publishers I was able to get the proposal to have either passed or taken their time in getting back to me (which is the same as a pass). So now what to do?

Based on the feedback I saw in the comments here at Hacker News, and emails I got, people appreciated the content. My "why" for doing this is not to say that I am a published author. I'd love to make some extra money, sure, but mostly because I feel like I have a unique set of experiences and am a decent enough story teller that the content is useful to those who would come after me. It's the content I would have liked to have seen before I embarked on my startups.

This project is well outside of my comfort zone, and perhaps I relied too much on a "if you post it, they will come" strategy. Now that the first two chapters are out there, and I have no traction with the few publishers I have approached, what would you suggest?

I bought your book months ago...great content. It was easier to have you translate the content to family than for me to do it - I'm not a published author, so I am much less believable. :)

I would love to email you some questions about my book project and where to take it from where it is. I am blwatson at gmail

Keith does a once a year comedy show on his birthday (Apr 15) in NYC and they get fans coming in from all over the world to see it. He's not headlining Madison Square Garden yet, but it's impressive regardless.

When you put it like that, I sound like a socialist, and not the unrepentent capitalist I hold myself out as.

This certainly could be seen as no different than the government taking the tax receipts and simply paying down your debt for you. In that case, you are right, they are subsidizing, but the interest is being paid to the debt holders, so at least you retain some semlance of a business transaction. Perhaps the debt holders would reduce interest rates knowing that they have first lein on income streams.

The current plans have such things as debt forgiveness, which could potentially incent the wrong behavior, as opposed to this idea which would (in theory) incent you to get a job paying down debt as quickly as possible.

It was great to have discovered Yappler and MichaelApproved on HackerNews and I look forward to meeting more .NET devs here. I came back into MSFT to bring some of the startup mojo to our marketing and product development in developer tools, and we're definitely making forward progress.

If there are other folks on HN doing cool stuff with .NET, please let me know about you. I want to be your conduit into MSFT. Let me know how I can help you. As someone who ran a company that was a Vista launch partner, I know what a total nightmare it is to navigate MSFT. Let me help you. Oh yeah, and definitely go check out yappler.com. :)

It's a funny thing...when people talk about iPhone development, many times they remard on the quality of the tools - specifically XCode. IMHO, XCode is good, but loses out in a comparison to Visual Studio Express. It's a really great, and free, offering.

When you start from VIM, Emacs or even TextMate, XCode is going to look good. Starting from the Visual Studio experience makes XCode look less stellar.

Anyone who has a cool or novel use of .NET can feel free to @reply me on Twitter or email me. I would love to blog about it.

@BrandonWatson or brwatson [at] microsoft

Sam, you are reading my mind. My only job in life is to think about the developer on boarding experience. That includes how to get started, what you can do with it, community support, etc. You are spot on, and it's in the works.

Feel free to downvote...I was sharing what I could from an offsite, and I thought the bit about rethinking how they approached customer support by talking not to other CSS orgs, but rather to firefighters and emergency workers was amazing...and that their key take away was to drill often. Stress the system. I've been in many small startups, and none of them have ever taken this approach. I thought it was very novel.

And I have DDR3 here at DevDays for those with those shiny, pretty MBPs. :)

Mine would be the first machine upgraded. :)

I love that answer even more! :) My profile makes it pretty clear I work for MSFT. I spent 9 of the last 10 years doing LAMP development. My home machine is a MBP 13". So yes, I am more clever than a mass consumer. However, I am not a fan of Linux for desktop. I will take free-bsd based OS X over any linux distro, but that's a personal preference.

I dont use it as a primary PC. I use it for travel and meetings. Nothing more. I couldn't get used to all of the issues I laid out. It was a very painful experience. The most common apps open on my netbook were Outlook and IE/FF.

I love this answer. Yes, it is true that you can solve the problem with light weight linux distro, but the mass consumer market has rejected linux on netbooks.

My netbook has 2GB of RAM. The proc is limiting, and I suspect the network throughput (and associated proc hit) are constraints as well.

I found myself want the small form factor more than the experience. A refurbed MBP was a nice price point, though more expensive, but a much, much better experience for day to day use. But that's just me.

You plat WoW on a netbook? For real? Screenshot! What res and fps?