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In the UK crowdfunding startups is becoming common using Seedrs or Crowdcube and a few startups I know have raised a few hundred thousand from their users (and wealthy individuals using these sites).

You have to click the invite email and attach your account rather than just going to the panel.

Your assumptions are based on a PandoDaily post where they cover just a few of the fellows that have decided to publicise their companies.

There's a wider (but far from full) list here. https://www.quora.com/Thiel-Fellows/What-were-the-results-of...

I'd say most of the projects aren't known about (in beta, not startups, not publicised or not launched) at this point, some will fail but I can see quite a few big tech companies springing up from that batch.

I believe they said today that fellows have raised $34M+ in funding and I know quite a few YC founders in the fellowship and I've only just scratched the surface of speaking to people.

Quite the opposite, America was founded on the latter. Only recently has the American dream been referred to as joining the stable middle class.

I've had this feature for at least a month now on Chrome Canary for Mac. It's definitely useful but its still buggy.

Hey guys! Just wanted to show you version one of a product I'm building. It allows anyone to instantly generate a funding page and if you hit your target, the money is moved to your account via Stripe.

Because of Stripe we only support UK, US and Canadian customers at the moment.

Once a project is funded you can export the emails and other data and there are no limitations on project type, amount, etc. People are free to create as many as they want.

http://i.imgur.com/om4cKXq.png

I think Summly was really started by SRI or at least co-founded by them and then the exec team was brought on to run it. They created the tech, put Nick as the CEO/face of the company as he had previously built/outsourced Trimit & tried to build a consumer startup on it.

There seems to be very little distinction between SRI and Summly.

Did it take them three years to launch? I know there is tech behind this but if it doesn't take off then they're fairly stuck.

Maybe he bought it from someone else or paid for multiple years.

I came to a similar conclusion with something that I'm building so I realised to focus on the people with inbuilt audiences on social media & their web presence (creators, charities, product makers, etc). Rather than building another marketplace.

Why not buy the .com too? Plaidio.com isn't taken, if a startup takes off 'io' doesn't work well anymore. I understand the io trend but I don't think that 'money.io' is ever going to be able to afford money.com.

What is it with the "io" domain names? Seems overkill now.

I think it'd be smarter to just add 10 - 20 new names for specific categories rather than an extension for every brand you can imagine ".apple, .amazon, etc". This could lower the resell price of the .com slightly and raise revenue. Like .co did but it wouldn't confuse the user heavily as this move feels like its changing everything.

Apple does offer about 10% off for bulk discounts (between 5 - 12% roughly). They may have not known, been signed up or just let students choose themselves.

I'm part of a team building distributed crowd funding tools that focus on these problems for independent sellers. Some similarities to Celery, just in terms of product.

Levchin has money in most of the major payments startups so it's interesting to see him launch his own venture. I like the idea but the current site/demo doesn't really feel like the right execution. I suppose I should get to know it before making a decision.

I'll be interested to see how they respond to you uploading that.

They send me so many emails. It's a joke, I probably put in a fake number but I hear they also call a lot of people. Offer a free 'data t-shirt', make you install their product and call/email you constantly.

This is absolutely interesting but I'm not sure if post-Kickstarter you'd regain a target goal or some of other same functionality. Rather you may want to be able to pre-order with a different model. Like Pebble took with their website.

This is great to see. I'm working on something similar which has a few more features is focused on integrating into other brands websites or social networks.

I think this is going to be an exciting arena with a lot of market potential. The current marketplaces support a small percentage of the audience and free form platforms can let anyone crowdfund.

Wow! So smart this is something I do when coming up with domain names but nice to simplify it, making it incredibly faster.

They acquired Vine and just yesterday let them launch their product under Vine and stay in New York.

They acquired TweetDeck and changed it a little but the team and registered company still resides in England.

and as you said Posterous is the other example, although I wouldn't say that's really a Twitter product. They're just letting people leave that at their own will and eventually they'll just turn it off.

I can just imagine someone in the ad agency saying "We should create a Tumblr blog around the ad".

The piece was removed for some reason?

Either TechMeme got it wrong or the story was edited to remove it but the TechMeme quote includes "YCombinator" in that list. http://www.techmeme.com/130108/p31#a130108p31

Edit: Now says "(including, previously, Y Combinator)"

If you're bootstrapping a SaaS then you're probably right. If you're building something big, like a Square, BankSimple, Spotify, etc then your chances of success drop considerably. Especially on the raising money front.

It's a really odd term though. A lot of non-tech founders aren't necessarily business guys (MBA's). They may have a lot of knowledge in a space, eye for design (Jobs), ability to lead a team and build a product & biz that grows.

Great stuff! A great list of companies.

Yes, I paid slightly more than I probably should've for a domain (no-where near this much but in terms of how important it was) and it'll hinder you from making future pivots or product changes which could be bad.

When looking for domain names I found one that was on sale for $100k, simply as a joke I offered $10k and they accepted this. Obviously I don't even have that but it probably means you don't need to pay so much. Most people look at how much domains were worth in 2000 and think they can start the bidding at that price.

If the name is still for sale and they're willing to sell it, it probably isn't worth what they're asking for it. If you can find someone with experience in the space that you trust, this helped me a lot. Traffic is also key in most names, unless they're a short one word .com they aren't worth much without a lot of traffic.

Hipmunk can't compete with anyone on price as they use prices directly from airlines vs a mix of travel sites and airlines.

Hipmunk has a great interface & iPad app if you want to compare on flight "agony" and their hotels interface is very good.

I don't think it's as much of a problem for IFTTT as they're currently the dominant player with in my opinion the best product. If they don't sell to the enterprise then Zapier will be able to strike in that market.