90 karma · joined December 5, 2009
co-founder at LaunchHear YC W2010
participant at Seth Godin's SAMBA program
co-founder at MediaForge
venture capital investments at University Venture Fund
http://hnofficehours.com/profile/allantyoung/
If you're ever near the Oakland Tribune Tower, ping me and I'll buy coffee/beer.
My takeaway from this excellent post was that once you start fundraising, you need to be on the hunt 100% of the time. I see too many co-founders sharing fundraising duties and product development duties at the same time. The idea is that you should have already spent enough time building a product that is at least partially compelling and showing some traction. Once you set out to raise funding, you can't effectively skip between building product and talking to investors.
Disclaimer: I know the founders and am crossing my fingers for their success.
Thank you for wanting to contribute to the community and giving a gift to people who were not confident of their CVs and resumes. I'm sure you were able to help at least one person drastically change their CV for the better.
Can you elaborate on your "edge" when you worked as a recruiter with a tech background?
Interesting to note that there are probably a few Wufoos in the total YC universe that reached meaningful profitability without having to raise more money.
Those are the ones worth emulating even though they don't get nearly the amount of attention as ones raising mega vc rounds.
Here is a wrinkle that I think could work. Limit it to everyone that got an interview but didn't get in.
Some of the best investors concentrate.
Would such a society be less prone to looting in the event of a disaster?
Knowing who your "Guys Who Quietly Gets Things Done" are would be invaluable for any enterprise. Would they pay for a tool to help them identify and retain these quiet superstars? I think so.
This is welcome news. Aside from search engines, no one wants to drink the entire firehose. Why doesn't Twitter just enter the monitoring business itself?
But why do we need to fundamentally shake someone's core behavior or worldview? By definition, most startup ideas are not gamechangers. They're merely modest solutions that require a lot of hard work to produce.
I do agree that if you arrive at an unexpected psychological insight, you have an opportunity to change culture and create massive value. But that would be an unrealistic expectation for every startup to fulfill.
I like the post-mortem meme sweeping startup world; I find them very enlightening.
Your decision to build on top of Twilio makes a lot of sense.
There is only a limited amount of radio stations in this country. And most of them are owned by a handful of parent companies. This is a good and bad thing. Good because you can easily find the buyers. Bad because this could turn into a time consuming enterprise sales process. And this isn't something you sell on the web with a website.
Good luck! I'm thinking there could be tremendous data collection value in this business model if you add a few more features after you've successfully sold the MVP.