2,010 karma · joined November 8, 2010
What's interesting to me is that at once, this article speaks both to why a site like this SHOULD NEVER exist (you should really know your co-founder) but also why it REALLY MUST exist (some kind of reputation score could have helped here).
Part of the art of sizing your round is to do so in a such a way as to give you a nice bit of running room, but it's much harder to run if you always have to wonder whether there's a brick wall around the corner.
The investor is taking a certain amount of risk in making the investment. The way to minimize that investment is to support the team, make intros, execute, etc. Not dole out the cash a bit at a time like a crack dealer.
Also, the milestones are already built into the process. The seed round provides enough cash to get you past the first set of milestones. The series A enough to get you past the second. Etc.
That said, it's a decent looking visual improvement.
I really liked Django but the deployment process was very frustrating. I started with Apache/mod_wsgi which ate up a bunch of time but I eventually punted and went to gunicorn and nginx which worked pretty well. I also ran down a bit of a blind alley with buildout but eventually saw the light and started using virtualenv + pip. I used fabric to automate deployment and Ubuntu's upstart for process management.
In the end I got the process working pretty well, save a few issues, but it left a bad taste in my mouth. There was a period of time where I was waiting to get into the Djangy beta, and I was very optimistic that that would fill the gap for me, but that company eventually went away, helping to motivate me to look into Rails so that I could deploy on Heroku. (Note: There seem to be a couple of viable Django-PaaS options today, including Gondor.io and DotCloud.)
I'm finishing up my first Rails 3 project now and I love it, especially the Heroku-based deployment model.
P.S. The other motivator for me to jump to Rails was first-class support for HAML and SASS. I tried all the Python/Django hacks and got them working, but it was clunky as hell. There have been notable complaints of late about how fast Rails is changing, but I think the amount of innovation that has been going on in and around the framework is amazing.
Here's a neat video of the system in action:
Here is a previous (failed) attempt at selling the site on flippa: https://flippa.com/128889-new-retail-bank-social-media-site
http://www.quora.com/What-is-Posterous-business-model
http://www.quora.com/Posterous/How-does-Posterous-make-money
http://www.quora.com/Tumblr/How-does-Tumblr-make-money
http://www.quora.com/How-exactly-will-Tumblr-monetize-Other-...
http://www.quora.com/Tumblr/How-does-Tumblr-generate-revenue
http://www.quora.com/How-do-free-blog-publishing-platforms-e...
http://www.quora.com/How-do-you-monetize-blogging-as-the-blo...
There is surprisingly little detail here, though, possibly suggesting that the companies haven't quite figured it out yet!
I can name a hundred things my wife does that annoy me, but that doesn't mean I'm not worlds better with her than without.
I would love to find out that your experience is more typical for Groupon customers, but it strikes me that there is a bit of selection bias at play here. The fact that you are posting this on HN, with 3 years/700+ karma here, suggests you might take a more analytical approach to assessing the Groupon opportunity and building a business model to make it work for you. I doubt this is typical of the small B&M business owner that Groupon sells to.
Congratulations, though, on your success and thanks for the write-up.
From the campaign's letter:
We need your help recruiting the folks that will wage the most innovative and effective digital campaign in history, a team that will not just surpass but demolish our fundraising, communications, and organizing goals.
That kind of work takes a lot of people -- and not just people with political experience. If we're going to transform the way campaigns are run and use every possible channel to help elect President Obama to a new term, we need fresh ideas and new talent from creative agencies, non-profits, media companies, tech startups, and anywhere else that employs people with drive, skill, and a desire to serve.
So here's the deal: We need people from around the country to join us full-time in our headquarters in Chicago, starting ASAP and committing through November 2012 for this once-in-a-lifetime chance to use their skills to make a real difference.
It won't pay very well. The hours are terrible. But it will be the most extraordinary, exhausting and fulfilling professional experience you or someone you know will ever have.
That last part definitely sounds a lot like a startup!
I think it's a wonderful practice and while I'm sure most of us take on these kinds of challenges from time to time, but he seems to take an admirable zeal to it.
For example, I've taken on various learning-a-language (natural and otherwise) challenges, but I've never gone so far as to commit to practicing an hour a day, every day, for an entire year. Now, Mark only says he 'blocked out' the time, but if he actually follows through then it's very impressive.
"After all, the value is not in the index it is in the analysis of that index."
The ability for a given search engine to innovate is based on having control of the index. The line between indexing and analysis isn't quite as clean as what is implied by the article, if only for the simple fact that you can only analyze what is in the index.
For example, at it's simplest and index is a list of what words are in what document on the web. But what if I want to give greater weight to words that are in document titles or headings? Then I need to somehow put that into the index.
What if I want to use the proximity between words to determine relevance of a result for a particular phrase? Need to get that info into the index, too.
In the end, what the author really wants is for someone to maintain a separate copy of the internet for bots. In order for someone to do that, they'd need to charge the bot owners, but the bot owners could just index your content for free, so why would they pay?
http://www.news.com.au/travel/news/man-builds-worlds-largest...
It's currently on the home page of HN and has been picked up on Gizmodo and elsewhere.
As of now, Netta's Instagrid page, which is linked to on the iwannawork site, is broken and not displaying any images.
Did Netta break Instagrid.me?
All that said, I still think this is a totally awesome site and I hope she gets the job!
Armadillo book: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0596003439