adora

The story of Derek Black is also interesting. A former white nationalist (godfather was David Duke) who would later denounce his racist views after befriending an Orthodox Jew.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/the-white-flight-of-...

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/26/opinion/sunday/why-i-left...

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/22/podcasts/the-daily-transc...

One-liners are hard.

One problem is people trying to pack ALL the features and ideas into that summary. So in the pursuit of wanting everyone to get the entire vision, the "what you offer right now" is lost.

As a company's product offerings expand into many, this gets even harder.

just tried it. so basically this makes microsoft office usable again? hallelujah.

at the very least, you can get LOIs or POCs

somewhat relatedly, best engineer i know is an english major.

i hired a firm to close down everything, including the sale of remaining assets - some of which ended up with aaron. obviously everyone around the table could've done better.

I decided 7 years ago, despite not knowing anyone in Silicon Valley, to just quit school and move there. Got the first startup job that I could, which happened to be at Slide (founded by Max). I hate networking and generally avoid the whole social tech scene -- so I just worked hard, delivered results and got attention that way. My point is, by working hard AND smart, you can create your own opportunities, e.g. having access to investors when you really need them, etc. It takes time and commitment but it's certainly possible.

if their ultimate monetization strategy is the smarter yelp stuff, then building on the foursquare app makes more sense (trying to reacquire all those users would be costly)

didn't have a choice. initially applied to cleaning companies in mountain view (and surrounding areas) but was rejected. almost went all the way to santa rosa to take a gig there but the sf job turned up, which saved me two additional hours.

being able to do next day payouts to sellers is very unique afaik and pretty awesome.

failchat.com / chatfail.com

yet another humor site.

Hypothesis: this would lead to less innovation over time as VCs would start looking for less risky, more guaranteed wins.

It's pretty standard that with age, experience trumps education. Case in point: at Slide (run by Max Levchin, a top flight programmer himself), the VP of Engineering had an English literature degree and absolutely no formal computer science education.

It's really in case Facebook "screws them" -- in that scenario, nobody is tied to the Facebook login and can still access the site. Allowing them to Facebook Connect now lets them at least take advantage of viral "things" -- e.g. a wall post is posted when you sign up.

Stay hungry for sure but perhaps simply "stay humble" is the key takeaway from this article.

It looks like it's run by Facebook to promote quality campaigns amongst the marketing community. My first thought: "Dribbble for Facebook campaigns"

From who? That seems pretty important.

Incorrect, at least one of Zynga's co-founders (Justin) is a programmer -- though he's probably not doing much of that anymore. One of the common misconceptions is that Zynga has only one founder ... it actually has many.

But I get the point you're making and it's still valid.

LinkedIn's "People you may know" section is now filled with historical figures and fictional characters, all of which have pretty elaborate profiles.

http://awesomescreenshot.com/057alia5b

Hm, what exactly do you think data mining is? How much money do you think Facebook gets out of data mining?

Data mining at Slide was top tier but there was an unfortunate mis-timing with the economy tanking (read: advertisers had no money) ... and hence the eventual shift towards virtual goods.

I don't think many people understand how advertisers eat this stuff up. When they start throwing money around again (probably soon), you bet the big guys (like Color?) will repeat the benefits.

Yep, totally. And something like this also helps the other side.

Case in point: have a couple friends who quit their high-paying engineering positions, and ended up consulting for companies as the first technical interviewer a candidate meets. Companies will pay a lot just to have that first filter. Interviewing is so time consuming!

Being "well-connected" will only get you so far. YC helps you develop as an entrepreneur, among many other things unrelated to having the right connections. Even if you previously worked at a startup, that's still very different from founding your own company.

Also, I think a lot of people overestimate the value of their current network, and underestimate the value of the YC network.

When I began to realize I was spending more time building random web apps with a friend instead of doing my research. To be fair, my research was pretty bland, so it wasn't that hard to get distracted :)

As soon as I realized I had to be involved with startups, I quit grad school, bought a one-way plane ticket to California and haven't looked back since. Best $500 spent ever.

You truly can't appreciate the pace, the spirit and the community that is Silicon Valley without physically living in it. These past few years have been the greatest and most fulfilling time in my life so far.

Thanks for the link! Appscale looks a bit limited for production use, but definitely will play around with it!

Re: open source. We might just brute force it for now. If not, we'll definitely pretty it up at some point and open source it. At the very least we can publish our learnings.

Yeah, it's really, really slow -- and the ETA is 2 weeks! Although I have some faith it'll be fixed sooner.

We're thinking of porting over to EC2. If anyone knows of any reliable tool that supports this for production, please feel free to shout. Otherwise, we'll probably be building something ourselves...

perhaps http://www.flixster.com/ (and its Movies Facebook app) is the closest analogous site.

Look into Braintree (http://www.braintreepaymentsolutions.com/)

They are known to have the best customer service and can deal with these types of issues better than the other solutions.

However, it is slightly harder to set up an account with them as you have to meet certain requirements before starting an account (and literally talk with a representative). For example, new businesses with no credit history probably will find it very hard to get an account with them. That said, all these precautions probably lead to reduced risk and higher quality clients on average.

I agree. They had their story. At worst but acceptable they could have said that it was an Apple employee. They completely went over the line by naming said employee.

The question they should have asked themselves first was: "Does naming this person CONTRIBUTE to the story?" This is clear Journalism 101. The answer was and is clearly "no." The best line of defense for them is they have none.

Sometimes I hate the internet and its cache. This is one of those times. Anyone can ruin anyone. The really good news is that it appears he has many people on his side.