adamsmith

At Xobni I singlehandedly wrote 30,000 lines in three months.

That fucking hurt.

But that sunk cost was my #1 motivator during the first year. I remember telling myself that I had to make this work, because if I didn't then I'd have to start all over again.

There was a point a long time ago where Xobni was very close to dying. PG said to me "Well if xyz happens then Xobni will be dead."

I was hesitant to argue against PG in those days, but I remember saying without hesitation "No, if xyz happens then I'm moving to Texas to live with my parents and eat Ramen noodles for as long as it takes to come back. I will not let this thing die." I couldn't bear the thought of starting over.

But super wall has lock in, vis-a-vis the existing posts.

I think there are details that are missing from your post, e.g. are the cofounders first time entrepreneurs / are they more senior than you? If so, how much? How senior are you? Are the seed round investors all angels? How good are they? How many?

What is the startup's next proof point / how far away? How far away from launch are they? Are they 10% burned through their seed round, or 80%? I.e. when is their out of cash date?

How big is the option pool? What do you and the founders think your dilution will look like through exit?

Do you get [ partial single ] and/or double trigger acceleration? If single, what do the founders have? (Note: the founders acceleration can affect valuation at early stages of company.)

How much does this startup need you?

(Would be happy to chat with you briefly to give you my thoughts on your situation. Email: my username with a period inbetween first.last + xobni.com.)

Yup, totally right. Fixed now. Thanks!

This statement, while true, doesn't make sociology unworthy of study or investigation. One of my favorite political science professors in school claimed on the first day of class that poly sci is a science. But they have few data points, and can't perform experiments, so they actually have a harder job.

We were moving servers. Sorry, should be working now.

Totally a joke -- sorry for confusion!

The firm should do the work for deferred cash payment. I.e. they do $25k of legal work, and you pay up when you get real money. You obviously need to look credible / have good intros / etc.

They shouldn't get equity because they don't _really_ add that much value at an early stage. It will also look bad to investors if you give equity to people who shouldn't have it. Work on your product, ask questions later.

Set up an S corporation if you incorporate yourself.

Haha. My two favorite startup books: High Stakes No Prisoners, and Founders at Work.

(btw, who are you? email me at adam@adamsmith.cc?)

Read your favorite of the others again. There's nothing like repetition!

"How can you internalize all of that knowledge?

I can give you two hacks.

First, use repetition. Download the audio versions of Paul Graham's essays, burn them on a CD, and listen to them over and over again. Read books once, identify the ones you like, and then read those again and again, every six months."

 - http://blogs.xobni.com/asmith/archives/27

That number isn't what matters. Stickiness is what matters.

Shameless self-linking: "What You Should Be Measuring," http://blogs.xobni.com/asmith/archives/33

Great post!

Raising more than 10x at a time can be like putting rocket fuel in your Vespa. If you burn through it then you're probably going to quickly. If you just keep it in the bank then you probably should have raised less.

How can you grow too fast? Growing takes away options and forces you to commit earlier to larger projects. If you're cheap and burning low then you can have multiple shots at the target. If you have a 300k/month burn then you better have the right target in your scope.

Why might it make sense to raise less rather than save it in the bank? There are a few inflection points in the value of a company over time. You release your product, and your valuation goes up 5x. You reach breakeven, the valuation goes up another 3x, etc. You want to time your raising money (and the amounts) so that you get money when it's the cheapest for you.

If it cost $x to reach the recent proof point then it's rare for the cost of the next proof point to be > $(10)x.

He probably could have hit Ctrl+Alt+Delete or unplugged the power, but that was it. The program absorbed other keystrokes and mouse clicks.

Either way he was a cool older guy. He had to be cool to put up with 400 teenagers.

I think his biggest reaction was flattery. He was flattered that we made a surprise video for him for his last lecture.

Hi jwp,

I think I tried or wanted to do f3hops. Either I did it and I was stretching the 2GB memory limit, or I couldn't. As you exponentiate the sparse matrix more and more you get a less and less sparse matrix. I was really hurting for memory.

Yeah, I really wish I could have spent more time exploring the algorithms side. If I didn't start Xobni during summer 2006 the plan was to write a book on machine learning, in practice. One of these days..

P.S. Would love to get in touch. Can you post your email or send me a note? My email is adam dot smith foo xobni.com where foo == @.

Check out the report -- http://www.scribd.com/doc/747/Friendship-Prediction-on-Facebook

Cliffs notes version:

It turns out that how many friends of friends you have in common is the best predictor. After that, it's the number of photos you appear together in, and how many photos your friends of friends appear in. Following that is the number of classes you have in common.

All of the traits (like religious views, what state you're from, guy/girl, etc) are secondary.

It worked pretty well.

(Coincidentally, the facebook friendship prediction was my answer to the last question on the YC app.)

Adam Smith (Xobni) personal blog: http://blogs.xobni.com/asmith

Howdy,

The good news is that startups are actively looking for good hackers. Investors are also looking too, since that's one way they can really help their companies. So he can find cool startups and email them, or find cool investors (like YC) and work from higher up in the stream.

My startup, Xobni, is very actively looking for great hackers. We are YC alumni and recently raised a series A financing from Khosla Ventures. We're still a small team, too, so all of the benefits of working for a startup are in full force here. You can email jobs foo at xobni dot com (remove foo)!

Adam

I crawled the MIT facebook and built a friendship predictor that will take guesses at who, out of the people you are not currently listed as being friends with, you actually are friends with in real life. People's traits (age, sex, home state, etc.) are significantly less predictive than how close you are on the [ friendship / class / photo / group ] network. In descending order of predictive power, the most important traits when considering two people as potential friends are:

how many friends you have in common how many pictures you simultaneously appear in how many classes you have together relationship status looking for (e.g. friendship, dating, random play) how many facebook groups you have in common

It went really well. The people who attend are the best part of startup school, for sure.

For an example of offering too little equity, see the Equity section at http://blogs.xobni.com/asmith/archives/5