dm8

Although, Everpix was great as a product it was market that killed their chances. Today, for every photo I take from iPhone it is backed to Google+ and iCloud. And then there are other platforms like Flickr etc. However, I believe Everpix had superior organization technology. But did that matter to masses?

Institutional investors and VCs don't take market risks. They are willing to take risks associated with product, technology and even the team. But they never take risks with the market opportunity.

In the verge article, what did they get in terms of feedback when investors passed their opportunity -

"The reaction was positive for you as a team but weak in terms of whether a $B business could be built."

Also, I'm surprised why didn't team focus on any other revenue streams?

Is working at a startup mandatory as part of curriculum then?

Also, every startup has tons of different problems at micro level even though macro themes are consistent (e.g. getting new customers etc.). It will be hard to generalize problem solving across startups.

I agree that Everpix couldn't find scalable business model for their product. But what I'm saying is you may not necessarily need MBA to find market/business model.

How can you have formal education in Entrepreneurship? It's pretty much on job type of learning. Not trying to be snarky but I'm genuinely curious.

That was fascinating read. Kudos to the team for opening up their finances and talking about them openly. It brought some scary memories when I was in a similar situation a while ago and had trouble paying AWS bills even though they were much smaller than what you guys have to pay. Startups are indeed hard.

One thing that I've learnt is that market size matters the most in venture backed startups. And if your addressable market is not large enough then product or team are irrelevant.

Regardless, good luck to the team. I'm sure things will work out eventually for everyone.

I think it is about the decisiveness of a founder. It's not about asking her to come at 9. It's about having a team ready by Monday and flying people from out of town.

Although, I appreciate that the designer took his offer seriously. More importantly, it's the guts of a founder in this case that made it happen.

Most users don't even care about going to second page of search. With knowledge graph, Google gives you precise answer right away and takes full screen on mobile (nearly half of the screen on desktop). I think Google is optimizing for users rather than SEO/Websites.

As a someone who works in advertising, even I dislike banner ads. They are obtrusive, annoying and take away the attention. Google should go back to adwords and make them better rather than anything else.

Looks like there is a pattern -

New Google Analytics landing page - http://www.google.com/analytics/

Or Google Hangouts landing page - http://www.google.com/hangouts/

How much time does it take for NYT to make these interactive stories? (pure technology not data collection or field journalism)

If it's not significant then this is certainly future of journalism.

[EDIT]: Looking at couple of interactive stories in recent past (Snow Fall and New Silk Road) looks like this is something they want to repeat again and again. Do you think they've developed some sort of framework (like Django/Rails) ?

Doing IPO means raising money from public markets. So with IPO money, they believe they can buy lot of companies, hire people and make it really profitable business.

FB/Google/LinkedIn didn't have to go public but they had to due to SEC regulations and/or their existing investors.

Looks like they are betting on potential. To be honest, Twitter is so mainstream that it is entirely new medium of news/discovery/conversation just like Radio/TV/Internet. I'm sure they will be extremely profitable company in the future.

Letter from founders/company seems to be really short and to the point, just like Twitter itself. No grandiose words but simple mission - "..to give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly without barriers"

http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1418091/0001193125133...

Key numbers:

Revenue for first 6 months till June 2013 - $253.6 million with net loss as $69.3 million

Monetizing isn't bad. But advertising is unimaginative.

Ads is not an easy business. You have two sets of customers, i.e. users and marketers. Striking a balance between the needs of both of these sets is always a key. Also, you need to build necessary technology like ad servers, bidding tools, reporting & analytics etc. "Ads" are a product too. And building a great product takes time.

> But they had three years to think about monetization, and the BEST plan they came up with was advertising. Not freemium, or selling products, or any other business model.

Instagram is for-profit company and if their ARPU via advertising is significantly greater than other options then it's in their stockholders (currently FB and public markets) interest to go via advertising route. I'm sure they must have considered all the options internally. But reality is very few people are willing to pay for online products.

Out of curiosity, why do you feel them 'intrusive'?

Don't you think they are better since you can completely ignore them by scrolling down rather than taking you hostage to watch 30 second video or interstitial?

AdsNative - http://adsnative.com/ - San Francisco, CA

We are building ad-server & suite of tools to fix advertising on mobile. In short, we are making digital advertising content driven and enjoyable. Like you, we also hate intrusive nature of existing display advertising.

Everyone on the team has strong technical/design background. More info on AngelList - https://angel.co/adsnative

We are hiring (full time)-

* Engineering Lead for Mobile

* Front-end Engineer

Feel free to contact me (my email is in profile) or contact@adsnative.com.

[EDIT] Here couple of problems/challenges we are solving -

* Keeping latency less than 150ms while serving millions of ads every second

* Since these ads are content driven, figuring out content virality and doing last mile tracking based on analytics/data mining

There are many such challenges that we are tackling so please feel free to get in touch with us even if it's just out of curiosity for you. We love to talk what we are building and getting feedback from startup/hacker community.

Why just "CEO"? Why not startup founder? Isn't it applicable to all the founders too?

I'm curious, how is it different from IndexTank (which was acquired by LinkedIn)?

Fair use doctrine is great and it was fascinating to learn about when I was a grad student at Berkeley. We need to educate people about fair use so that everyone knows how some of these lawsuits are ridiculous.

Anyone interested in how copyright vs. fair use works should watch documentary called RiP: A Remix Manifesto (http://ripremix.com/). It covers all the major issues related to copyrights, fair use etc. I highly recommend it. In fact, Lawrence Lessig is part of that documentary.

Why? What was the reasoning?

On a side note, is there anyway we can donate money to his family. ~ $1500 with 36% interest is lot of money for his poor Nepalese family and I doubt they will be able to repay that debt. I guess they will have to work rest of their life just to repay money.

I'd be up for donating some money to their family. How do I do it?

They are well aware of working conditions. I'm sure some migrant workers might be returning to Nepal and this type of information spreads quickly within rural communities. And Nepalese people will still work for them. Poverty makes people do all sorts of things. And that includes taking risks with your own life.

They were so confident about their search results that they were giving links to their competitors' websites at the bottom of their page

Lot of Indians also work in these countries due to poverty reasons. I feel privileged to be born in a relatively wealthy and educated family in India. If it was not the case may be I would have one of the migrant workers like them.

If these countries have oil money in abundance then why don't they give good working conditions and pay more money. Few million dollars will hardly going to move needle for them. I smell corruption.

"a significant uptick in the number of parties, hot girls roaming bars trying to chat with any guy that looks like he might be an engineer and looking for a job"

That is a pretty bad strategy to hire from founder's perspective. Will reasonably smart engineers like these strategies?

On a related note, a friend of mine was telling me that he saw someone (on OkCupid) mentioning about contacting her only if you are engineer since her startup is hiring engineers. Ha!

Discovering new content. I follow influential people in the areas that I'm interested in. And they are always sharing interesting links/insights/opinions. And I also share some!

Congrats, Twitter. Another product that was mocked as a "toy" becomes revolutionary and finally going to raise money on public market. I use twitter everyday and it is my primary information network. I'm sure they will be successful!

It has lot applications beyond security.

I was a fan of IQ Engines work. They had some class researchers from UC Berkeley working on their team. However, I always felt that theirs was a solution in search of a problem. Looks like that killed their venture. That said, Yahoo has acquired some legit team that was working on some hard problems of image recognition and CV.

Out of curiosity, why did he think Apple had far superior payment system? I personally think Apple's payment gateways no better than Amazon Checkout or Google Checkout experience.

I'd love to read more stories on it. But editors/founders of this site need to improve UX/Design

I used Android from 2010 till 2013 and recently switched to iPhone. iOS is just notch above in terms of performance, over all design and finish. Android is good but software updates suck. And apps on iOS are much better designed (both visual and UX).

Lastly, all the google apps work on iOS so I don't feel I'm missing anything.