flavio87

don’t know if this qualifies as big in your book, but there are some well marketed advances here:

https://deepmind.google/blog/alphaevolve-impact/

Scientific search engine/agent to surface papers with commercial potential (patent, moats, etc.) - eventually wanna expand to cover any search query. Imagine having someone reading 1000s of science papers on your behalf, with your goals in mind, and then telling which papers to pay attention to and why

How much time and $ would it cost to register your tokens as a security? Would it be possible without any financial history? I remember Lending Club was able to have them registered and offer securities with their peer to peer loans to unaccredited investors.

This sounds awesome. However I'm a bit saddened that there is no mention of CO2 or climate change in this discussion. What about building solar planes vs just faster planes will do even more harm to the environment if people start flying more because time is now shorter?

congrats to Will, Robbie, Chris and the entire team. to the moon and more :)

May I suggest the following https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindfulness_(psychology)

Can you find a question (not an answer) that can help you look at things differently? Who is it who is jealous? How does it feel to be jealous? What's going on right now?

seems like their executing incredibly well and big congrats to the team. I do wonder a bit how defensible this model is - it seems to me that safeway already has most of the infrastructure available to do deliveries and then could significantly outperform instacart deliveries from safeway in terms of customer experience for example.

- they always know what's in stock in which facility when you order, no more replaced or missing items - they don't charge the high 20-30% markup that instacart charges to their customers

in terms of marketing, they could probably have lower cost of acquisition on scale as well. - they could market their app in-store very aggressively at every single checkout counter.

what Safeway is most obviously lacking is a frontend that's as good as instacarts, but now that instacart has shown how to build it, it should be easy for safeway to build this out.

maybe they don't have their distribution setup such that they could actually deliver within 1-2 hours? what else am I missing? how can this be a defensible business long term?

Na'ama and the idea are awesome. congrats on the raise and good luck!

snapclass - although this happened a lot in the past, we are now curating the platform much more and also our repayment rates are in the 85% area. If you diversify well and go for A/B rated borrowers you can definitely make very positive returns.

We are now doing around USD 1M per month, are growing the number of borrowers rapidly - which allows for more diversification and better returns (on average)

this is really awesome. was always hoping caltrain would introduce that - never occured to me that you could hack the system like you guys are - very amazing and wish you best of luck!

We are serving investors who don't want to expose themselves to bitcoin price. The current bitcoin price reflects pretty exactly the aggregated sum of expectations (wisdom of the crowds style) of what the likelihood is that bitcoin will go such astronomic levels.

We allow investors who think and breathe in USD (or other fiat currencies, for that matter) to invest all around the world 'using btc', without exposing them to btc. The returns we generate are so high because we have borrowers whose only alternatives are pay-day loans with 3000% APR (checkout wonga.com) or credit-card interest (checkout brazil's crazy 120-200% APR on outstanding credit card debt) If we provide 30-40% APR interest for them, that is a huge win, they can refinance their high interest debt and repay at a much lower rate. At the same time, that is how investors can make 19% a year after some defaults.

> nobody will ever lend bitcoins out for productive uses.

that is not true. Checkout https://btcjam.com. Investors have funded over $4M in loans so far, growing quickly. Loans can be linked to USD (if your revenue is in Fiat) or BTC (if your revenue is in BTC, for example for a miner). In other words, you get a loan denominated in USD, but paid in BTC and you are removing any exposure to the volatility. If the BTC price has doubled when you repay your loan, simply pay half the amount of BTC.

The bitcoin price doesn't matter for the linked loans. Bitcoin is more than just a store of value - it is also a means of sending value across the world for very low fees - and in this case, giving credit to people who can't easily obtain it at affordable rates.

(disclosure: I work at BTCJam)

the left column says what the growth rate was from today vs 7 days ago. the right column is a weekly average growth rate over a period of time, by default 30 days. So if the value in the left column is higher than the one in the right, this would mean that this week the metric is growing faster than it has on average in the last 30 days.

what exactly would you like in GBP, the prices on top?

we could probably track the growth of trading volume, if that is what you mean?

Do you have ideas about why it failed?

Aren't they going to have the same problem like Tutorspree, that once you have the contact info of a cleaner that you like, you simply work with him/her directly and bypass the (hefty?) exec transaction fee?

Is there anything preventing a website that has access to your email address or name for that matter (ie because you created an account on that site) to sell the information between email and browser fingerprint to advertising networks?

I agree that they would be bad investors if that was their only criteria. But most investors (and in fact most consumers) are heavily influenced by social proof. Have you ever bought a certain article over another one on Amazon because it had great reviews?

What a feature by TC is saying, this startup is interesting enough that TC wrote about them. It is a sort of a filter, much like YC is one.

Being written about on TechCrunch can also help create a sense of urgency with the investors you are already talking to, because now there is potentially more people interested.

great idea. however the execution could be better. make the transition smoother, have some sort of motivational background music that pumps you up. it can also be a bit longer.

great analysis. if you can keep them challenged and provide them best possible environment to tackle the challenges, they will be happy. They will excel and so you have excelled - automatically making the people you report to happy...

I do agree with your point that 4 hours is not much and that it should not be taken lightly. However I still admire him for even thinking about it and don't think he is longing for some god like recognition. View it as a first step for him and maybe, if he realizes how much he is enjoying doing something charitable he will want to do much more. Hopefully you find a project that allows you to understand what they do within the first day and then can commit some more time to it during 2012!

ah forgot about that - thanks for clarifying.

you are calculating the tax here at around 25%. Wouldn't this count as long term capital gains tax (if you hold the stock for more than 1 year, which it seems likely since the company was incorporated in 2007) that is currently being taxed at 15%?

do you know what the main reason was for them buying the assets? Traffic, Codebase, Domain, YC fame? did you post all your traffic stats on the auction at the time?

in the interview he says around 1.5 mio in 2009

a quick look at quantcast shows that US traffic (which is by far the most monetizable) hasn't grown at all since july 09 (though there is a nice bump in intl. traffic) http://www.quantcast.com/twitpic.com

so i would say 2-3 mio is a more reasonable assumption than 5 mio. which is still fantastic.

why is nobody talking about the fact that google adsense runs the exact same scam ads? they even run on techcrunch, twitpic, mashable and many other "reputable" websites.

-2. buy google adwords for the benefit / pain your product is alleviating. 1. measure searches/clicks to see if it's worth building a product. 0. all the steps above

We launched a protest against internet censorship here: http://www.myheartbeatsfor.com/against-internet-censorship/

what about Monster, doing 1.3 bn in sales a year?