EMRo

:-( Dont worry. I've spent the past year talking to recruiters and there are other ways you can impress them even if you're not in a 'target major.'

The biggest reason why I'm building something in the recruiting (specifically entry level/internship) space is that right now, if you're not on a 'target campus', in a 'target major' or have personal connections, you're kind of screwed and left to the will of Taleo (may thou readeth dry job descriptions for hours with no response, gwahahahah!!!).

That's bullshit. It should be about talent, passion/interest and demonstrated abilities, not just BS credentials.

The app looks great imho. Well done on design and from what I can see the interface is simple and usable.

One question...why would I use this over a shared google doc or a hackpad?

Lot 18 does Wine, Caskers does Spirits. Both sites use pretty standard ecommerce templates with tweaking. Lot 18 absolutely has done a ton of tweaking and great design work but the core remains the same. A gallery style page with big, friendly images. None of it is groundbreaking design work. Upon closer inspection, the user flow isn't very similar.

I haven't looked at the source but there's a very thin line between taking inspiration from another sites interface and biting it wholesale. Copy Pasting = Bad, Taking the core concept and evolving it = good.

I work at the same startup space with the Caskers guys and honestly, they look too busy killing it and expanding their business to be sitting there plotting how to steal Lot 18s swag.

No clue what $8m seed means but the tech guy behind this is an algorithm monster. Not sure how that translates to consumer facing apps but it will either be amazeballs or it will be Color 2.0. Time will tell.

I'm facing the same dilemma. I'm technical enough to get the product to MVP (though I suspect it will all need to be reworked to take it to scale), have enough marketing sense to get it distributed and have enough BD hustle to have found beta partners (we're an Enterprise B2B company) to test it with.

The one thing that irks me is being alone in the trenches. This $hit is tough and its like whack a mole. You nail one thing and another thing pops up. Wouldn't it be great to have four hands instead of just two?

I often think of it in terms of resources. Right now, the resources are my time, the money investors have put in and advisors' time to a lesser extent. To hit the milestones on the way to success you have to carefully allocate those resources. The kicker is the time portion. It is very easy as a lone founder to get deep into a rabbit hole (product feature, marketing approach or customer acquisition channel even) without having anyone to check you. Other eyes on projects help you to better allocate your resources in addition to giving you double the time-based resources to allocate. Advisors are cool but they aren't in the jungle with you and they won't wake up in the middle of the night to scribble ideas and email you about something that could be a game changer for your startup.

That said, with co-founders come issues of motivation, passion for the project, etc. Partnering with a great co-founder is like a marriage but it is not easy to find the right fit.

To sum it up, I have no clue. I'm weeble wobbling between the two myself.

Secretly, Pitney Bowes (the company that handles all of the hardcopy mail billing already) is working on this. I got an early look at their ipad and webapp and it is surprisingly sexy. Instead of waiting for a startup to try and cobble together a ton of hard to work with enterprises, PB already has everyone on board due to longstanding billing relationships which is awesome. SHHHHHH don't tell anyone...

See Harvard Graduate School of Education report "Pathways to Prosperity: http://www.gse.harvard.edu/news_events/features/2011/Pathway...

Some interesting strides have been made by the Partnership for 21st Century Skills in changing how we learn and also how we measure learning success:

http://www.p21.org/

Even Apple threw its hat in the ring with Challenge Based Learning:

http://www.apple.com/education/challenge-based-learning/

Without doubt the current models being used in the US don't work. We aren't teaching the right skills, we aren't measuring skills the right way (uniform class-wide tests EOY) and the funding structure for schools encourages bureaucracy and corruption at times.

However, the problems are all tightly intertwined in one ball. I would caution against thinking that 'modern tech' is a cure all. Going from paper to iPads won't solve all of the issues in a day. That said, some really cool companies are killing it. Take a look at Edmodo.

Wish I had more time to get into this, alas, back to my code cave.

It doesn't work for me. The screen that should be showing my contacts is blank. Tried reloading, skipping. No fez.

Agreed, I asked a bunch of people but nobody could tell me. Anyone with a company name was a YC Alum. I wound up just putting my skillset (LAMP +JS + MOBILE DEV) and what I was looking for (DESIGN HELP) on my tag. It helped me to meet a lot of people and for sometimes people would just walk up and intro mid conversation which was cool.

1st) Awesome Idea. I have no idea how many times I got in trouble as a kid for OD'ing on FF3 and 7. Now that I no longer play RPG's but do dig the gym, this is a great paralell.

2) Easy fix: Allow users to set which equipment they have when they first log on. Do it by classes: calisthenics only, bands and dumbbells, home gym, full gym etc etc. This way you can normalize the quests across different classes of equipment and eventually set up for competitions (random battle?!?! lol) between people with different classes of equipment but similar fitness levels according to whatever benchmarks you set.

All in all, looking forward to seeing how this turns out. Good luck!

Agreed on the math point. I took CS50 (Introduction to Comp Sci) at school my Senior Year and being that my focus was directed mostly to kegonomics, I didn't quite get as much out of the course as I should have. I also took "Bits" which is watered down Comp Sci though the professor Harry Lewis said Zuckerberg got a C in it (?!?!?).

What I did learn was the basics of putting together algorithms and "thinking like a computer." For a guy who studied Social Anthropology and whose last math course was in High School, you can imagine the nitty gritty of building a C search algorithm was difficult to get at first glance (Linear search, bubble search my a$*).

To cut the BS:

1) CS I took was broken into discrete testable units. For each problem set there was a core CS theory that you needed to understand to be able to finish it. Some were less functional (ie arcane data structures), others were basics of programming that anyone should know like the back of their hand (pointers, data manipulation etc).

2) When self-teaching, you tend to pull together bite size chunks of important info necessary to solve a particular problem rather than building a solid foundation. If you're completely self taught, you'll miss 101 level theory points that may help you later when tackling a known problem that has a solution or is nearly impossible. That said, in self teaching myself, I've cobbled together quite a bag of tricks as well as the resourcefulness to pull up any info I need to solve a problem and absorb it quickly. I've yet to meet a problem I couldn't tackle just because I wasnt a "CS Educated Programmer".

Through the course though, the biggest takeaway for a non quant type like me was breaking problems down into discrete parts solved and tested by logic loops (read: thinking like a computer). The basic structures and solutions to problems involved I still use today when I program for the web.

Nice, all great pictures! Where's your about/contact? Would love to learn more abt loudly, confidentially of course.

It makes me dizzy but its def intriguing and inviting otherwise. I signed up. I'm working on a similar landing for the website promoting my mobile app. NYC based, trying to decide between cityscape and zooming in on a particular experience within the city

Whats "weak?"

Where'd you go to school and do you have links to some stuff you've done? Were you a CS Major? Do you do design?

I'm an amateur too but I've gotten far enough to hack something together. Could use some help (specifically with JS and AJAX on this mobile webapp im working on. If that sounds up your alley, comment with your twitter handle, we're funded (angel) and would love to have another hand on deck.

Cant pay a ton of course while we're trying to keep burn low but if you've got hustle and are willing to learn, I'd love to chat w/ you.

I appreciate the constructive response. I'm going to do that. Just joined this community so just learning the rules now. Thanks.

Noob question: I hacked together my little mobile website and am looking to cut down on search time for a "similar search" I built.

Short Description: Each "unit" has x attributes in the form of strings (tags). Searching queries a database using a standard mysql regexp search for each tag across all "units" and sorts responses by # of tags matching Desc.

I know this isn't StackOverflow so this isn't really a tech question. What I want to know is if the problem is just that I'm a noob (just learned to code/do web development in the past few months) and need to learn more about data structures or if that's just the nature of php/mysql regexp queries (if its a database structure issue, let's not even get into it lol)

Don't need specifically black role models but it would help. Just proof positive that being a programmer can be interesting and lucrative. Coming from a social anthropology background and having experienced it in grade school myself, there is an issue of "talking and acting white." Programming falls directly under that umbrella unfortunately.

Is it complete BS, absolutely. But at the core of it, we're talking about people delineating groups based on sameness and otherness which is a practice as old as there have been social structures.

It helps kids to identify with a mentor whose shoes they can envision being in directly. More important than "looking like" though is feeling a sense of kinship that comes from similar background. I'm a firm believer that we should focus on the level of privilege not color. There are all types of people coming from a disadvantaged background that need help, how do we make programming/startups attainable and "sexy?" Silicon Valley's got that down but NYC is still a "banking city"

Agreed, this is something that might be good to address through something like http://www.nfte.com which has a large group of entrepreneurial young minorities who are all sharp but looking for help/mentorship.

They focus mostly on the basic tenets of entrepreneurship but I would love to see more minority programmers coming out of underprivileged schools and situations.

I'm black as well. Went to Harvard and when I graduated I worked at the Kauffman Foundation. During that summer I pitched the idea to lawyers for deferred payment on corp formation and found a technical cofounder in August.

We wound up building a pretty miz alpha because I had no clue what I actually wanted to create to solve the problem I had in mind. Got very minimal traction, worked at a quant hedge fund to bootstrap. Learned to program (LAMP + JS) during the nights and weekends, launched a beta, got basic ("this could be interesting") level traction. Pitched angels, got funded, now working on an html5 based mobile website to capture the function our users find most interesting.

In general, I haven't experienced any discrimination or racial issues as yet. To be quite frank, the most helpful people have not been my color. This surprised me quite a bit because in the finance world where I interned all throughout school there's a strong "cultural networking" focus where you are connected with multiple career mentors, some of whom were "diversity" mentors.

With regard to my venture, I took the "open" approach and told everyone my idea in hopes of bouncing it around and making it better. In so doing, I met a lot of really interesting people of all colors who have served as advisors/friends/partners to this day. The startup community seems to be very much merit based and quantitative. If you have skills, traction, etc. you'll get looks but you wont get a handout for any reason unless you hustle for it.

(You should check out black web 2.0, http://blackweb20.com they have an interesting community of people in tech.)