eddylu

There's a few YC companies hosting Grubwithus meals right now too if you're in the Bay Area and want some first hand knowledge.

http://www.grubwithus.com/ycombinator

We're going to find someone to add to the meal real soon =)

I'm vegetarian so I know your pain. We try to have veggie dishes whenever possible, but that restaurant is a barbecue joint...sorry. I'll see if there's anything they can make though.

Yup =) We've kissed and made amends...

The first meal in LA has Hamilton Chen from Paperlinks and Nikhil Pandit from Graffiti Geo (sold to Loopt). The second meal has Joey and Yotam from Earbits and..me

Yeah we'll make sure it happens =)

Los Angeles, CA - Grubwithus - Fulltime, Intern, H1B

Join Grubwithus and be responsible for creating real-life friendships, marriages, business partnerships, and more.

We're growing quickly and are looking for all development positions including frontend, backend, mobile, analytics, UX, etc. Our site is built on Rails but as long as you're smart and have good CS fundamentals, come join us.

http://www.grubwithus.com/jobs

Ashton has been a very helpful angel for us and he uses so many tech products that he actually gives great advice.

Him not being part of the valley is a plus! Every VC knows the same exact execs at Facebook, Twitter, Groupon, etc, so you get little benefit from having multiple Sand Hill Road VCs on your team. Ashton can connect you to a whole different world of people and influencers who could really help your company.

I want more Ashtons.

The Chicago one will be on Sunday 3/13 at around 1PM. Meal coming out soon. Hope that helps!

@grubwithus please!

Clickable link: http://www.grubwith.us/groups/hacker-news

Hey there, I'm one of the founders and actually vegetarian too =) We try to do most of our meals half veggie / half meat but we couldn't make it work with Brazilian, so we had to go all meat on this one. We're definitely going to build in more options for people with dietary restrictions though!

A few people have actually dated after meeting on Grubwithus. Job offers too. These things happen semi-serendipitously, which makes it better, because everyone goes to the meal with the context of meeting new friends, not some awkward dating context.

Yeah it's a little confusing. Those are actually the YC alumni that will be speaking to female founders

Emailing you now

Want to do this as a grubwith.us meal? We've been talking to the Publican and can schedule the meal for the 29th at 4. This way everyone prepays for their meal, shares a bunch of food, family style, and there's no payment drama at the end.

Let me know and we can set it up.

This is something we thought about, but hey, we're already live and tons of great companies get rejected. Might as well risk it and get some exposure!

Max, give it a try and you'll see that it's actually a ton of fun =) The people that go to the meals are inherently social, and always have interesting things to say. In Chicago, a bunch of people come that just moved to the city, are traveling for business, are tired of meeting people at bars, or just are older now and their social circle has decreased.

Hey everyone, this is Eddy from Grubwithus. We're interviewing for the YC W11 class and wanted to speak with a bunch of YC alumni about the program and the interview process. Instead of hogging these founders all to ourselves, we thought, why not invite a bunch of YC alumni to some meals and have many people benefit?

Whether you're interviewing, didn't get selected, or just want to know more about PG, come grub with the people that have been through the YCombinator experience and can tell you about all the wonderful details! Sign up at http://www.grubwith.us/san-francisco to reserve your seat at the table with founders from companies such as Disqus, HeyZap, Mixpanel, WakeMate, Optimizely, AdGrok and ReadyForZero.

For context, Grubwithus is a social dining site that builds friendships over family-style meals in restaurants throughout the city. Instead of reserving your own table with people you know, you're booking an individual seat at a table of new friends.

Thanks to all of YC for being so helpful and we look forward to meeting everyone at the table!

Funny, I just wrote a blog post yesterday about our extreme bootstrapping ways at Starbucks titled "Two Guys One Cup". We have free wifi because one of us has AT&T DSL at home (and you can log in with multiple laptops at the same time) and we sometimes bring seat cushions to make the chairs more comfortable. http://grubwithus.blogspot.com

From my app store experience, pricing an app $1 or $2 doesn't make that big of a difference, but pricing an app in the $3+ range causes a huge sales drop off.

Great article! From my experiences with starting ventures with friends, I would also add:

1. Make sure they have A+ work ethic. I partnered with an A+ friend with a B- work ethic, and things definitely did not go well. I've also partnered with B- friends with A+ work ethic, and now they're still business partners and some of my best friends.

2. Operate as a meritocracy. This was touched upon, but most of the time your partners will have other obligations. Every week, we set goals that each person must meet before the week's end. We have a policy where if anyone misses his or her weekly goals over a certain threshold, that person is relieved from his or her position. This happened once in my case, but the person accepted it and totally understood because he had other obligations to deal with.