earle

It's not a rumor, Jeff Bezos did indeed work at D.E. Shaw & Co. So did quite a few well known people in technology.

Mahout should clearly be on this list!

It's a form of structured debt financing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convertible_bond

It's better to have a good lawyer about this.

It's a template designed by Khoi Vin, that's why its beautiful and unique. www.subtraction.com

Since you don't have any documentation or agreements between parties, you can also most certainly expect a lawsuit addressing all of this under the event you become successful with your efforts.

I would therefore consult with an attorney, and see what the ramifications truly are, and what long term items you must now consider in the event your idea becomes successful.

I believe that patient information even at the Physical Therapist levels require HIPAA compliancy. I'd speak to a lawyer before you start having people use this, so that you are not liable.

maybe jhh will chime in here as he went through this exact situation @ the secret

I'm looking for:

  1) talented information visualization experts (protovis,
  raphaeljs, flash/flex/actionscript, HTML5 strategies)
  who are comfortable working with large scale data

  2) anyone fluent with large scale data mining with
  Mahout (hadoop, hdfs, clustering strategies, SVD, 
  latent semantic indexing, noSQL [hypertable and/or
  cassandra]

  3) fluency web app development at tier 1 properties
  with startup experience using common stacks with 
  large user bases.  django expertise in particular

fastest growing startup in atlanta. full benefits will relocate appropriately talented individuals. US Citizens only (sorry).

proven management team with multiple successful startup exits (over $2B). earle {dot} ady {at} gmail {dot} com

Yes, the "10-20% of the equity" is generally provisioned for the company's stock option pool.

This is definitely biased towards technology startups.

Last I checked one of the most profitable "internet" businesses (Groupon) in the last decade is in, and founded in, Chicago.

This is also illegal!

All those examples had justifiable reasoning beyond "stay and pray"..... right?

I hear Madoff has a 12% growth account for you.

Be interesting to see how quickly you get your first lawsuit!

CONTEXT

(what I would change) / (why i dont actually run one) != what you you think it is.

I think there's a pretty big disconnect between your version of "working prototype" and what is actually necessary.

If your goal is to get some seed money, to build a "prototype" to raise money, then the net requirement isn't a full functional app, but just enough to get the point across in an elegant enough way to secure additional financing.

This could be as simple as a sketch on a napkin, and as complex as a full functional website with an e-commerce component.

As long as you can effectively deliver the experience of what it is you need money to build, then your medium for doing so isn't as important as getting the point across.

Can you name startups launched since 2005 which have > 20M in revenue and haven't taken series a capitalization?

The thing that nobody understands until you've lived through it is just how long it takes for some companies to get profitable and self sustaining. And just how long it takes for some companies to get liquid and leave the portfolio."

The thing that less people understand is when to cut bait. I think avc is making excuses here.

you can just upload to S3 and use AWS Elastic Map Reduce, fire off 10 nodes, and have this done in minutes. No need to start EC2 instances

You should talk to a specialist about this, not HN.

Who exactly upvoted this? The fact that this is on the front page of Hacker News is really disappointing.

That's pretty obtuse. You should certainly take their position into consideration, and even more certainly should be talking to a competent attorney with M&A experience about this.

This is good advice. HN is plagued with people posting when instead they should be speaking to attorneys.

This is only good in big diameter ropes. I wouldn't suggest tying this in monofiliment.

Jasonz: I have a startup in the medical field I'd like to talk to you about. How do I contact you directly?

EDIT: I should add, I was the co-founding CTO of Hotjobs.com, amongst other things -- this isn't some mickey mouse thing.

I'm not sure what this does differently from every other search engine, or search engine aggregator?

Aggregating results via third party APIs is a neat, although old, stunt -- but doesn't exactly translate into a startup business to compete with search engines.

Why is this on Hacker News at all?

And better yet, why is failure to contact a lawyer a recurring mistake of Hacker News posters?

Bad advice.

If your goal is money, just spend your money on powerball tickets since your chances are much, much greater.

If you do what you love because you're passionate about it, and you're exceptionally talented at what you're doing, rich is a natural byproduct.

“Oh, you hate your job? Why didn't you say so? There's a support group for that. It's called EVERYBODY, and they meet at the bar.”" -George Carlin