dmk23

TLDR summary of the article:

"Confront reality and focus on execution of your product/sales plan to get competitive. No pie-in-the-sky strategizing would save your bacon if you fail to get stuff done."

I take a very simple perspective on this "single founder aversion".

If some investor is going to ignore my traction and business just because I achieved it without signing on a token co-founder, then frankly it is their loss and I won't hesitate to politely tell them that. By definition getting to the same results without co-founders requires a much higher level of ability than if being part of a "collective". Any investor failing to recognize that is going to miss out some of the best deals and that is really their problem.

The main focus should be on pleasing customers and partners and if you do that right, eventually the right investors come along (with better terms too). Much better approach than to structure your company solely to please investors and forget what the business is all about.

You might even end up with a business making money and no investors to answer to (or at least investors not having significant control over you). What a terrible thing!

PS: Quite a few people promoted to "co-founders" should really be employees with accountability for specific tasks and projects, not an open-ended license to call the shots.

The tool is nice but unfortunately it would miss the key spam score components tied to IP reputation.

AWL (auto-white-list) is the most obvious rule, but many actual Spam Assassin installs include plugins that rely on all kinds of 3rd party service.

Is the IP you are checking against the same as IP used to send your transactional emails?

The real lesson here is that if your service relies on "Big Data" processing it pays off to build your own storage.

If you were to buy 135Tb on Amazon EC2/EBS the same capacity would cost you ~$19,000 per month, not counting charges for I/O and bandwidth.

Nice interview, but I wish she shared more technical details on what they actually did, what worked and what did not.

Especially on bootstrapping a recommendation engine from sparse data set, which is a very common challenge -

  It was definitely hard in the beginning because we had lower density of data.
  As more people joined, however, we got increasing insight into how the graph
  connects. We were then able to look at several things people have in common.
  More and more signals began to appear.

Would be great to see what data they had, how they prioritized which signals to use and how they evolved their algorithms as more data was generated.

That is exactly their problem. Spotify owns neither the customer nor digital contents.

They can play their "music discovery arbitrage" game till it grows big enough that their partners have enough incentive to step in and take over their business.

No different than what happened to Facebook app makers. Even Zynga's profit outlook is questionable as it is crystal clear from their latest filing...

Spotify's best bet is to sell themselves at the peak. But they are pretty expensive already.

Failure to live up to promised quality of service is one obvious "evil" to be added to the article.

ISP does not even have to be "deliberately" evil to underinvest in their network and oversell their capacity. Measure your latencies and actual bandwidth throughput and often you might smell a rat. This is not even necessarily by malicious intent, the infrastructure of ISPs could be sufficiently complex that some subtle mis-configuration somewhere in the upstream router could kill your performance for certain operations.

ISPs act as Internet gatekeepers and have enormous power over its clients/users. With this great power should come great responsibility.

This should not stop at the CEO level, it needs to apply to every job within the company, at every level.

Nobody cares about your excuses, whoever you are. Everyone's job involves goals, milestones and deadline. If you are performing you deserve commensurate rewards, if you are failing nobody should care to hear your excuses - only what could you fix and perhaps why you believe you deserve another chance.

The performance of the CEO and overall company performance depends on everyone pulling their weight. If the CEO does not enforce accountability throughout the entire organization, he/she is heading for failure and nobody would care about their sorry fate!

OMG, Julius Caesar had to die too!

There is no need for any language or framework to "die".

If you do not like PHP (or Perl or Python or COBOL or Ruby or Java) just do not use it. There are plenty of alternatives.

If you and your team can be productive with any of these languages, go for it. PHP with modern OO-frameworks, like Yii, can support rapid development of complex web apps just fine. Facebook runs just fine on PHP even without any 3rd party frameworks. The proof is in the development and deployment. The only way you can "kill" a language with so much support is to offer something 10x better or create some exclusive tie-in. Where is that magic offering?

Vote with your feet and dollars and just take it easy. There is no need to fight the imagined oppression.

"Letter of intent" is a very weak validation.

Either you can get an actual contractual commitment with a check or you still have not closed the deal...

Don't waste time crafting LOI language and focus on the actual sales process of getting the customer to commit to buying your solution.

Nobody is going to be impressed by LOI that does not bind customer to anything. Don't break out a champagne unless they actually put skin in the game.

Great tips and I would definitely add another one:

"Make sure your marketer is readily willing to implement automation tools to increase their efficiency".

As many new tools, MixRank included, become available, you want to be sure your marketer is not armed with a knife at a gunfight.

Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with MixRank, but know one of the founders fairly well and fully endorse their vision and product.

Even though the article covers a lot of other things, I very much agree with the headline.

I am a newcomer to Hacker News, but after spending just short two weeks immersing myself into the community I only wish I have committed HN to my daily routine earlier.

There is definitely lots of benefits to posting your submissions and trying to hit front page to promote yourself and get business for your company... But merely following discussions on the multitude of technical and business problems can really help you find the solutions you have not thought about...

In just two weeks here, I've already made some contacts from the site and incorporated some learnings into our product.

Definitely want to thank the entire community.

Have you looked at graph databases and how would you compare them to your with Citrusleaf document store?

A similar-sized ad network, CPX Interactive is running ad requests on InfiniGraph: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88HCKQ73nFU&feature=relat...

Seems like graphing engine would give you a lot of native search / lookup functionality for free.

Exactly. The way I would put it is that this CEO is flunking out in his job.

If any executive (CTO or whoever) is not getting things done, CEO's job is to replace them as fast as possible. If the CEO is failing to do that, this means he needs to be replaced.

Ben Horowitz has an excellent post explaining the CEO job: http://bhorowitz.com/2010/05/30/how-andreessen-horowitz-eval...

At the end of the day any company needs real leadership. The one described in the article lacks it.

This could actually save their business model. Merchant churn is really their biggest problem. Becoming their "loyalty solution provider" could help re-engage the merchants. The only puzzling thing is why Groupon has not done it earlier.

Exactly.

What you pitch them is on buying larger license for the whole enterprise, increasing the usage and integrating deeper into their systems.

Getting from a handful of users to thousands is easier to do when you have both initial end user champions and the support of IT.

My point was not whether "banning tools that were 'snuck in through the back door'" is childish or fair or unfair. That's not even relevant. The point was that they have the power to do this and they do not hesitate to use it. Occasionally they even have valid reasons related to security and business continuity. Remember how all those defense / intelligence secrets walked out of the door on a USB stick and ended up on Wikileaks?

There is no place for idealism in selling to BigCos. You have to work through the process and build your case or someone else will steal your deal, possibly with an inferior product.

You might think they are clueless but there is a method to IT's madness. I would not recommend publicly trashing anybody in corporate buying chain if you ever plan to go upscale and sell your services for 7 figures at CIO's level. Nobody appreciates being publicly called a fool.

CIO's job is to manage massive resources and organizations - first and foremost to keep the critical line-of-business systems running. For most of them cloud right now is neither the top priority nor a viable substitute for core infrastructure. You are right on with your strategy to get foot in the door to circumvent their slow-moving processes. However you should be thinking of how to work yourself into their higher-level planning process instead of positioning yourself as adversary of their corporate policy by calling it stupid.

Just remember, the CIOs have the power to ban technologies that sneak out through the back door. Alienate them at your own peril!

EDIT: Whoever down voted this, please post an actual substantive rebuttal.

If you know your idea sucks this means you need to change it, revise it, pivot or whatever you want to call it.

Every success that started with a lousy idea became a success because they recognized their idea sucks and changed it, not kept perpetuating failure. It is a very dangerous attitude to just dismiss legitimate feedback, hope everything just magically fixes itself and lull yourself in the sense of complacency that "it will just work out". Hope is not a strategy.

Of course it is inspirational to know that even if you start with a lousy idea you could be able fix it. But don't assume the solution will just fall in your lap and do the hard work pivoting your product and business.

IAB has tons of standards: http://www.iab.net/iab_products_and_industry_services/508676...

Have you looked into display ad exchanges and how they store and manipulate ads? That could be an easier place to get traction.

There are literally hundreds of ESPs (Email Service Providers).

Many of them offers APIs that can be programmed. You just need to define clearly what exact automation functionality you need and then select the right ESP based on API features and other factors, that surely would include pricing.

YC recently funded an ESP as well: http://www.mailgun.com

Take a look

Seems like you are offering the same data manipulation people currently do either with desktop software or custom coded server apps. Your value here is turning it into a web service and making it easier to use. There is a very strong case for doing just that.

What I would recommend is to connect the dots and clearly position your service as cloud alternative to desktop / server data manipulation packages. Get very explicit about it and target similar customers. Do not limit yourself to just data on the web and allow file uploads. Make a feature-light free version and charge for a premium one, determined by data volume or number of manipulations or something like that.

I think there is a lot of room for cloud-based statistical service to undercut traditional players in this market.

The reason they do it this way is because it is much easier to evaluate with confidence the people who come through their network. When sizable money is involved it is really the only way to invest. That's the same reason most people would not send a wire to a "long lost Nigerian relative" - the trust in the people on the other side of the table is low.

That's just part of the game. If you want investment from the top tier find a way to get on their radar through their referral network.

Of course the exception to the rule is to build insanely strong traction, revenue and visibility - via either bootstrapping or a handful of angels. Companies like Storm8, 99designs and a few others would fall into this category. The trouble though is that in many competitive markets the odds are against you reaching that position. If a competitor does raise significant resources and uses them to seize advantage in the marketplace your window of opportunity might close real quick.

That's why it is not necessarily a bad thing that it is Good Fella business. Just figure out how to navigate the system and use it to your advantage.

Be a pragmatist!

At the end of the day the responsibility for recruitment is with the company management. Recruiters could have a role to play, but it is above their pay grade to decide what kind of candidates you want. They could surely help sourcing and pre-screening though. But if you are going to use recruiters you have to manage them carefully. Recruiter not given clear direction is poised to waste your time and money trying to place the first wrong candidates they come across.

You need to closely screen and supervise your recruiters. Start with an open-ended question: "how would you go about sourcing candidates for XXX position", "how would you screen them", "how would you entice them"? Listen closely to what they say and if you do not feel comfortable this would yield you the candidates you are looking for, fire the recruiter and look for one that would understand your needs.

Recruiters, like any other service professionals, are always trying to sell you on their experience, but you owe it to yourself to closely inspect their claims and methods. If recruiter is any good they won't be offended and would cooperate.

Contingency fee recruiters are especially renowned for sloppy work. If they only get paid when they place a candidate their only incentive is to sell you the first warm body they find. This type of attitude you have to nip in the bud.

Thanks, will definitely check it out. Still, this is the sort of thing Google should have rolled out themselves as part of G+. Having a tool like this could be one of most significant tools for their user retention.

The feature G+ is missing the most is being able to use it to post into Facebook and Twitter. I like the idea of having an alternative to Facebook, I would love to see G+ succeed, but the real problem is the time it requires to manage multiple incompatible social network presences. The thing Google could do is to make G+ a dashboard to control all your other social accounts. I hope they realize that this is one of the biggest issues for people like myself who would like to switch but are scarce on time to completely migrate their entire social network.

That's a great summary and I'll add a few points here.

VCs and press have very short attention spans. They are only interested when someone they know and respect is interested. Because they are constantly bombarded with crap, they constantly have to make decisions who to pay attention to and who to ignore and dismiss out of hand.

If you just pay your own fare to get a table nobody is vouching for you. This sends a signal that if nobody does why should anybody else? Now the companies presenting on the stage are there because Techcrunch is implied to have reviewed the whole industry and picked the cream of the crop. Because there are fewer of those it is easier for VCs and press to focus their attention. Spotlight is scarce and is usually pre-negotiated.

Going to conferences is fine if you are gathering industry intelligence or looking for very specific types of customers / partners, but to really attract VCs / press you better have inside track beforehand.

I have not encountered DDoS attacks directed at my own properties, but I had domains hosted on Namecheap that were hit when their DNS got DDoS'd a few times last year.

There is plenty of coverage of this if you just do a search: http://www.google.com/search?gcx=c&sourceid=chrome&i...