dlitwak

Airbnb. Keep a room in your house open, if you live in a desirable neighborhood, and have people rotating through. If you charge high enough you could at least make up your rent and on good months make more. Keep a look out for big events like Outside Lands where there are hundreds of people coming through the city and up your prices.

The easiest way to make extra money is to use the assets you already have, like your house. Even if you don't have a spare room, keep a look out for those weekends and sleep on a friends couch or something. Look into your car and GetAround etc.

So kind of like a hootsuite but for your personal life instead of for your company it seems?

Republicans and Democrats voted almost in equal measure for the NDAA, and I agree, I don't like it one bit. I remember a few people from each party stood up, and being honest here the only notable person I remember was Rand Paul, so I give a little credit there, but very very little since most of his party still voted for it as I remember.

bullshit. I don't care how many primaries Romney won, 11 is a lot. And the fact that the one logical candidate in the race (as much as I dislike him), who was the least bit moderate, even evoked that "anyone but Romney" feeling only proves my point. The fact that people thought that crazy was better than Romney only proves my point.

And the fact that Romney had to tack so far to the right to even win the nomination proves my point yet again.

Look at polls: way too many Republicans believe stupid things like Obama is Muslim, he wasn't born in this country etc..

It's funny, I was going to bring up Mark Clayton as an example of a real outlier: the party completely ignored him (not this Akin stuff, Huckabee supported him, then the SuperPacs poured money in at the last minute when it had cooled down), it was in a state that Democrats have low turnout in since they have no chance of winning anyway, so an idiot managed to make himself the nominee. Every once in a while these things happen, yes, but over the past few years you guys have elected as your candidates Christine O'Donnell ('I'm not a witch'), the legion of legitimate rape morons, and a bunch of other memorable idiots like Bachmann who accused a Clinton staffer of being a highly placed Muslim Brotherhood operative.

You purge your party of anyone who says anything remotely conciliatory or logical/moderate.

If you were talking about one state rep, or even one senator, you would have a point. But the numerous crazies and the fact that you considered people like Bachmann and Santorum legitimate contenders for the presidency does not give you the right to call the crazies the "outliers" in your party: the inmates are now running the asylum.

I think the whole point of conservative is not changing, keeping things the way they are, as opposed to "progressive" ideas, which advocate change. I'm not interested in debating you about who is actually "establishment" etc. in that way, my point was conservatives have an "establishment" way of thinking: the tried and the true, the way things worked before, not necessarily the way they will work in the future.

I think you understand what I'm talking about.

Re the old white comment, look at the demographics: that was the only demographic republicans won. If you said democrats were just a bunch of black guys, then yes I would be offended. If you said the truth, that democrats were a coalition of young people, single women, and minorities, I would not. I'm a white male, and voted for Obama, so I understand that it is a generalization.

That link is irrelevant, I don't care if Obama doesn't like Xboxs and iphones, doesn't mean his campaign wasn't technologically proficient: whose campaign's tech broke down on election day and outsourced their development to contractors? Romney.

Who had a dedicated team of coders in house and everything worked well? Obama. Most startup guys will tell you that outsourcing their main product never ends well.

You don't get to say they are "Outliers" when Santorum wins 11 (I think that was the number?) Republican presidential primaries. When audiences at those primaries boo gay soldiers. When their candidate wants to get rid of planned parenthood.

A major party's senate candidate is an "outlier" ???/ You'd be hard pressed to find anyone this nuts on the left.

Half of the Repubs members of the congressional committee on science don't believe in evolution. The moderates who you refer to have left: Richard Lugar, Arlen Spector etc., haven't you noticed they've been cast out of the party/defeated in primaries.

Frankly, the media is too "fair." Not all opinions deserve to be treated equally. If media is sympathetic to the Democratic party it's because ours is a party based on reason, evidence and logic, not 2,000 year old myths.

True, I remember a friend chose an internship at Altria (parent company to Phillip Morris, the cigarette company) over another because they paid so much better.

Re your friend though: I'd chalk it up to a maturation and the pragmatism that comes with it.

bullshit. They are the establishment, the old white guys, whose model is not the most efficient way of getting things done.

yes, someone made the wrong call infrastructure wise, but you have to ask: why did they make this call? It's because, in their world, this is how you do it.

The Dems were more open to a different type of campaign that brought tech in house etc.

Writing it off as an infrastructure choice with no relation to how they think is disingenuous.

To everyone saying all Republicans need to do is throw money at it: Missionaries beat Mercenaries every time.

And the point of the article is that Democrats have ~5 times more potential to find missionaries than Republicans do.

Anyone who has tried to hire will realize that it is difficult, and a pool of 5x gives you a huge advantage.

Yes, some of these people exist in silicon valley. But the fact that the entire cast is white, not one asian or indian, there are only a couple engineers, and they live extravagantly, they did not pick a good cross-section of what the valley is really like.

I know shameless networkers, I know wantrepreneurs, I know brogrammers (kind of am one to be honest). But seriously? the entire valley isn't like that, and this only reinforces those negative stereotypes.

You can find plenty of drama with real life experiences. We got a frivolous cease and desist letter that stressed me out for an entire day when I thought we might have to change our name, I slept on my roommates floor so I could make a few hundred dollars off my room on AirBnB during the Outside Lands weekend. My friends and family loaned me money, paid for meals, let me airbnb out their apartments for profit while they were away and gave me almost all the proceeds. Follow enough entrepreneurs and you won't need to manufacture drama and you don't need to show me searching for a semicolon in my code.

In conclusion, a wasted opportunity.

QED

99 Designs held the money in escrow. I suppose there is no guarantee that he would cooperate with what you want after you had awarded him the competition, but you can withhold the money indefinitely and it worked out fine for us.

We tried using open street map at mozio for a by. For u our primary concern was public transit data. T was too much bother and too expensive to do transit data, and googles release of the transit API a couple months ago solidified or decision to go with google maps for the foreseeable future. Osm is fine for applications like Wikipedia and four square which don't require much on top of maps but for companies doing more advanced things google is still the best choice.

I read a venturebeat article on the LinkedIn app, seems like they used some Node.js, a bunch of work arounds and A LOT of domain expertise to get it to work as well as it does. I personally found the article interesting as I'm trying to figure out native vs. HTML5. seems like, barring incredible expertise about the quirks of html/js, native is the way to go.

pretty cool. nice to see the emphasis on a company that actually makes piles of money for a change!

I've always said that I think the ideas/businesses of famous founders don't undergo enough scrutiny. As a complete nobody, I can vouch for the fact that I have been GRILLED by VCs and angels in meetings. Some of these meetings led us to realize flaws in our go-to-market strategy, and pointed out the customer acquisition obstacles.

I feel like famous founders often aren't asked these questions by VCs, they will just invest because of the name, and then they go down the wrong path, building a product that isn't completely necessary, without a true understanding of the market. I have literally been told by investors, when I asked why the invested in a certain product I thought was a dud, that "oh well the founders did ___ and I just bet on them figuring it out, even though I knew they were barking up the wrong tree."

Sometimes the scrutiny that can come with being a nobody is valuable.

Surprised that there are no comments here in favor of his premise: I for one am getting sick of constantly hearing about the next "social local mobile app that helps you rate the experiences of friend's of friend's cousins" getting funded.

I know I am not the only one: the Founder's Fund's tagline goes something like "We asked for flying cars, we got 140 characters."

Yes there is value in Facebook and Youtube etc., but he makes a good point that most of these companies got the formula just a bit more right than many other competitors with similar ideas. It is often just as easy for them to get the next iteration wrong and lose the consumer. Instagram was the perfect example.

There isn't anything necessarily wrong with this, I take a somewhat agnostic view of it all, if you can make money doing it it is obviously valuable to someone. And perhaps it's easier. But the companies who are doing something more concrete and valuable should be getting more attention in my opinion, and the investors should be focusing on them more.

Good point about the fact that she had gone as high as she could go at Google, but the disparaging of startup CEOs:

"Running around Silicon Valley begging VCs for a handout; pitching weary journalists on another software product; building everything from the ground up and never knowing if people will actually use it. That’s not power, folks; that’s just working like a dog, and it’s a gamble at best, no matter who’s doing it."

I don't get her logic, the entire valley is built on people who did exactly that at one point. And now shes trying to convince us that well, obviously, she'd want to go take over a failed company instead of possibly trying to start her own, who'd wanna do that, that's just ridiculous?

A gazillion execs at companies like Facebook (Asana, Quora, I think), Paypal (SpaceX, Tesla, etc.) went and started their own company and have plenty of power.

Not to mention the obvious point that maybe "power" shouldn't be the only thing someone aspires to . . .

He's worth about 26 billion, I'm pretty sure that even if he cashes out 5 billion that is still plenty of incentive to deliver. He's waited 8 years, I don't consider that a "rush" to cash out.

Totally agree. However, I grew up with a family in the film business, and my parents always said you could tell who was in charge because they were usually wearing jeans. The pages/errand boys were the ones in suits.

I also wish their website would be a bit nicer, but they have probably realized it doesn't matter, they are on top and anyone whose worth one's salt already knows it.

surprised this didn't get more attention, would have assumed it would rocket to the front page.

Nice to see someone putting a damper on the idea that everyone in Silicon valley goes from rags to riches. In actuality most people go from relatively wealthy families educated by elite universities with a LOT of help, to possible success.

More people need to remember that there is no such thing as a self-made man.

I think it's hard for anyone to tell the reason why he was fired. But 11 months is just suspicious. They didn't realize he wasn't a good fit sooner? Fire him sooner, or wait a month so he vests to do the right thing.

Sounds like they used a young guy to do their dirty work while they were small, and once they got funding and didn't need someone who had rights to such a large portion of equity in the future, brought on people who would take less.

Pretty sketchy.

For what it's worth, whenever our family has a conflict that's possibly legal with someone, it is resolved pretty quickly once something is sent on my father's legal stationary.

Lawyers scare people, can't hurt.

I can understand the upside of this, with the better routine, health, everyone living in the same house etc.

However, I think the isolation is VERY dangerous. Yes, silicon valley is a bit of an echo chamber, but at the same time, you are around some of the smartest minds in the world. Our first few VC meetings resulted in a "pivot" of sorts. Still same end goal, but different way of going about it. Being around everyone in the travel tech industry, and being able to set up meetings with them, has changed our go-to-market strategy and our priorities.

These smart people have a way of poking holes in your strategy. There is something to be said for talking to "normal" people, but I can say we have talked to hundreds of normal people, and the most valuable advice we got was from those VCs and angels, or travel tech people.

We possibly would have wasted months if we didn't seek out these experts and learn from their success and failure.

By moving to Hawaii you risk losing that.

The Adioso guys kind of mentioned this, that living in Melbourne they weren't around the same type of environment and PG brought them back to earth when they got back here. The ruthlessness of silicon valley has it's upside.

5% for one promotional opportunity that has no guarantee of working out, that you have no say about how you come off, isn't a good deal. There are other smarter ways to get exposure. and after the hoopla dies down, you are left with a large chunk of equity missing.

You have to prepare for how the worst user will abuse your system, and American didn't. They should have done the calculations based on a worst case scenario.

I've heard of people refer to it as the "Penis Problem", referring to Chatroullette's inability to stop perverts from exposing themselves on their service: lesson is that whatever service you provide you need to think about that 1% of the population will abuse it, and possibly ruin it for everyone else.

And this is just plain stupid for not having any opt-out clauses, or ability to revoke a pass, or setting any cancellation ground rules. Seems like they could have done a lot to stop this from getting out of hand, but were too incompetent to do so.

if you do enough research, the "unlimited" hosting isn't unlimited at all. There are certain restrictions in the fine print. which is exactly what American should have done.

uhhh no, opposite. the university would have a greater incentive to foot the bill for your law degree because lawyers will probably make more money, therefore giving them more money.

too extreme. I like the concept: less students would be funneled into liberal arts majors that don't have a high return if the schools realized that they could get a percentage of every bill gates they spit out.

some cs and engineering programs are shut down because they are the most expensive to run. this would reverse that trend.

seems kind of like VC applied to schools. but then the schools would have to be completely free: we are giving away a percentage of our company, we share in returns with our investors, but we sure as hell aren't paying them.

Disagree, if a student wants to pursue computer science he/she should have a lower interest rate than a philosophy major. There is a much higher likelihood that the CS major will pay back the loan soon.

There is a bit of a naivete among college students, that having any degree from "X prestigious university" is enough for the big boys to respect them and give them a high paying job. As a consequence I know many graduates who end up working as waiters etc. Perhaps had this tradeoff been made more evident from the beginning, they would have made different choices.

The student isn't deprived of their opportunity to get involved in low-value fields, but that low value is more apparent, which should help their decision process.

And more high value graduates, with higher incomes and a better ability to donate back to the university would probably increase revenues in the long run.

1) as many have mentioned, submitting to a news site like this does not a launch strategy make. Look into strategic partnerships, try to get some legit press, figure out how to incentivize people to share it etc., virality etc., all the typical stuff that it seems like you haven't put any thought into. It's easy not to, and is perhaps one of the pros of talking to investors actually, they will remind you of your woefully inadequate customer acquisition strategies and get you rethinking them.

2) hackernews is a reflection of silicon valley, which is a bit of an echo chamber, keep that in mind. The common behaviors of people using this site are so drastically different than the average person that you shouldn't read much into its success, either way.

3) don't give up so easily.

4) props for having the balls to put yourself out there like this. Too may people in silicon valley have this facade of success all the time. They are always "killing it." This is somewhat necessary as when we are looking for funding we aren't about to publicize any setbacks, but they are there and good to remind people of.