arkonaut

Agreed. People often use the term "consumer space" as if it only means some free app or product being given away for free ad infinitem... Dropbox, Airbnb, Uber, Kickstarter are all consumer services that all had huge years in 2012.

Dropbox is a particularly interesting example because it has a B2B counterpart in Box. Dropbox however is 2 years younger and about worth about 8x more. Consumer is certainly not dead. Free consumer maybe, but even then, Snapchat just showed us that VCs still have an appetite for free apps that skyrocket in user growth. (and appetite is an understatement.)

Really well done! Love where the payments space is going.

> "90% of tests fail"

This is a valuable point for those looking to get into split testing, growth testing, growth hacking in general. Unless there is this kind of understanding going in, a 90% 'failure' rate (failure to find something that works) can be quite demoralizing.

Additionally, startups that hire or look for a growth hacker should be obsessed with the number and quality of tests, not just the graph magically beginning to go up and to the right. It's easy to think that anyone that gets things 10% right isn't really good at their job - don't fall into this trap with growth hackers. The good ones are testing 10 things a week, so good results will come.

I was also wondering this... A local meetup making it to the homepage of HN?

It's like what people have been saying for years...

PayPal, three things you need to work on: customer service around people's money, better api docs, and above all, a brand new homepage

i think this is quite smart. it's not just the hype, but similar to app.net, it's guaranteeing there is a minimum threshold of demand.

what do you mean by 'ballsy to sidestep kickstarter.' has kickstarter become some kind of sole-arbiter of product development? FWIW, if this style of e-commerce continues, someone should develop the API for this/app.net type of sales instead of each building the billing system from scratch.

Am a fan of this fee/tuition structure over Dev Bootcamp's and know a girl in the current class - She built a grocery shopping/calorie counting app that blew me away within 3 weeks of the course. No prior programming knowledge or experience.. was impressive.

What a contrast a zoom and filter can have on an image... The actual image is him intently/genuinely listening to what I can only suppose is a question from an audience member of some kind. And the Venture Beat cropped version is supposed to make it look like he's coldly calculating someone's demise.

Google Ventures is not the "Google" of venture funding. And there are about 5-7 firms that would have this type of brand-value that don't even consider these kind of tactics.

huh?