iamelgringo

Thoughts...

I had the pleasure of recommending one of the EIR's, and in looking at the other 4 EIR's... Kick ass people. All from a broad range of the Tech industry.. Two from the Silicon Valley scene.

The people from USCIS they they've chosen to staff the program are really impressive. I've taken to walking up to a number of them and thanked them for their service. It truly is a thankless job. After this program we should all send them a thank you card. :)

The USCIS person that's heading up the program reports to the head of USCIS, so there's a good chance that changes can be instituted.

The mission is to change and revamp everything that can be changed and revamped without going to congress to change the law.

I've had a couple of talks with the White House staffers on point for this issue, and they are extremely impressive.

BizSpark Evangelist, Silicon Valley.

Television is not about facts, it's about communicating feelings and emotions. It's about painting an image of your opposition.

Memes we need to spread:

The moguls and their political puppets that support these bills are dinosaurs.

These bills were written by lawyers who don't understand that this will break the internet.

These bills are created by "media moguls" or "media elite" afraid of innovating.

SOPA / PIPA needs to be painted as radical and extremist.

Computers and the internet have been the backbone of innovation and economic growth the past 20 years.

The censorship meme (sadly) doesn't matter to Middle America. We need to drop it.

I'd suggest the following talking points and sound bites for the next debate:

-"Kauffman Foundation says that 2/3 of new jobs are created by high growth technology startups. This bill breaks the internet, and kills startups that could be the next Facebook, YouTube, Google or Ebay."

-When faced with the lying... "Are Google, Twitter, Facebook, Ebay, Yahoo all lying then?"

-"Media companies and their lobbyists tried to kill VHS, the cassette recorder, the phonograph, the MP3 player and now... now, they are trying to kill the internet. They were wrong then. They're wrong now."

-"The people who created this bill are lawyers not engineers. They don't understand how the internet works."

-"SOPA and PIPA are radical copyright protectionism"

-"SOPA and PIPA are corporate welfare of the worst kind, protecting industries that are afraid of innovation"

-"We are in the worst economic conditions in a century. This the the worst possible time to ram through radical legislation created to protect media moguls sitting on mountains of cash".

-"In this terrible economy, we need to do everything we can to support technology companies who are one of the few bright spots in this economy"

And... for what it's worth... after we beat SOPA / PIPA, we need a Startup PAC to take a proactive long view on educating legislators and their staffers on these issues, rather than constantly reacting to awful legislation like SOPA/PIPA.

Video of Rand Fishkin's presentation, Gaining Traction: Inbound Marketing for Startups is live. One of the best presentations I've been at in a long time. I'll be watching it a couple of times.

Slides of the presentation are here.

I'd love for the video to make it to the top of Hacker News.... I'm not active on that site any more. Could ya'll hook a brother up?

I'd love to give Rand and SEOMoz.org some press, to boost their sales. He's an amazing guy, and SEOMoz is killer.

Help H&F help you...

The more views we get on those videos, the BizSpark team prove to their bosses that's it's worth buying all of you pizza and beer and wine, and renting out the "Fancy Pants" auditorium for us. It costs them about $20k every time we host an event there. ( Laura and I don't get anything out of it. )

So, if you'd like us to host more of those presentations...

Facebookify, Tweetify, Quorify, social newsif-y, etc...

Thanks

And, for helping out with that, you get:

Two free months of SEOMoz.

Seriously, it kicks ass. Try it out on your site.

Cheers,

Jonathan

Poorly worded, and I apologize for the confusion. See my other reply...

That's not at _all_ what I meant, and I didn't mean to game the system at all. I apologize about the confusion.

For various reasons, I'm not really active on this community any more. So, I asked H&F members if they would be kind enough to do if for me.

I asked H&F members to submit and upvote, tweet, like and Google Plus to give Rand some press.

Rand flew down to SV on his own dime to talk to our H&F members for free. He didn't ask us to promote SEOMoz, and never required anything out of us. He was truly one of the most delightful, genuine and kind speakers that we've had at H&F. I'm more than happy to do whatever I can to help him and his company out.

BizSpark sponsored the event by buying everyone pizza and beer. H&F doesn't get a dime out of this. Hackers & Founders is completely boot strapped ourselves, and do a lot of this for love of the game. And, we're pursuing becoming a for benefit corporation.

When Rand and I first started talking, about speaking to our people a few months ago. I arranged for SEOMoz to give H&F members two free months of SEOMoz for free. I emailed that offer to our people last month, but no one signed up. I figured that after Rand spoke, people would be a bit more interested in trying the SEOMoz service out.

I emailed the link to the free trial out with the link to the video to our Meetup, because I'd received about 20 emails asking for both the video as well as the free trial in the past 24 hours.

The free trial is also publicly available as a sponsor link on our meetup page at http://www.hackersandfounders.com.

I apologize if people thought that I was trying to game the system. I'm not. I'm trying to give a friend, and a great entrepreneur a boost. He helped out community out a great deal. His writing has helped me out a great deal in the past.

And, for what it's worth, SEOMOz has an affiliate program. If people sign up for a one month trial, the referrers get $25. It's not really worth that effort for me, and that's not what H&F does. So, we chose to waive the affiliate fee and SEOMoz chipped in the extra month to help everybody out.

We're trying to get ammo, and then trying to hack together some press coverage to highlight these stories.

I'm suggesting that it's common for 500+ YC founders who are and have been active HN members, to quickly upvote articles about other YC companies.

I'm suggesting that this is a cultural artifact of what's happening on HN, not an algorithmic one.

And, I'm suggesting that this cultural artifact changes the content on HN to be quite focused on YC companies. It's natural. It's reasonable. And, certainly beneficial to the investment aspect of YC. You run a media site about startups, and you invest in lots of startups. Those startups naturally want their investor to do well, and their brand to succeed.

I'm not accusing you of malice. What I'm saying, is that I think that this cultural artifact benefits YC and it's startups to the detriment of the startup community at large.

There is an unofficial "Upvote YC company articles" rule among YC founders. So, that's why YC company news tends to dominate HN. And, why so many amazing non-YC companies tend to not get profiled here.

It creates a echo chamber, which I think is detrimental to the entire startup ecosystem. It also gives an incorrect assumption to a segment of geeks that YC companies dominate startup the startup scene in Silicon Valley. In reality, YC companies are a very small percentage of the $20B of Venture Capital that is invested in Silicon Valley every year.

ZOMG...

http://www.frys.com/search?query_string=&cat=-68384&...

Google dudes... I know you can't tell me anything because of NDA's and lawyers and stuff. But really? What are you thinking?

Why not pour a couple of $ Billion into Desktop Linux?

What node foo in this graph do I need to connect to? What nodes bar[] surround foo? What is the strength of each edge connecting bar[node] to foo?

Getting from node baz to node foo is recursive:

Get_to_Node_Foo( node baz ): Look at all the edges and nodes surrounding baz. Are you next to foo? Ask for intro. Else, move to the node that seems closest to foo. get_to_node_Foo( that_new_node ).

That depends.

Adam Rifkin, the founder of the 106 Miles meetup and pretty kick ass nice guy and serial entrepreneur, was funded 12 years ago by Kliener Perkins. So, if you got to Adam's meetup, and bump into him, you're now 1 degree of separation away from John Doerr.

So, if you take Adam out to coffee, and talk to him about getting an introduction to John, Adam can certainly provide an into to John, but he's far more likely to talk to you, get a feel for what you're doing, and then provide introductions to 10 other investors and amazing people that could probably provide as much or more value than John Doer.

Good question.

There's also a very strong culture in Silicon Valley of "quality introductions".

The perceived value of a person's personal network in Silicon Valley is directly proportional to the quality of introductions that person can make to others. (Read: matching person to investor)

In the past three months, I've met a CEO of a 300 person gaming company, M&A execs from Fortune 500's, Engineer[0] from Google Finance, the head of the Singularity Institute, artists that make 2 story flaming sculptures, an architect that works on computational architecture, a man who built a battery that charges in 10 minutes that is currently in use by Special Forces in Afghanistan, a former Yahoo VP, a VP from AT&T, the CTO of America and the man who wrote the Jobs bill... a person on the US Council of Foreign Relations, a man who helped the Arab spring flower in Egypt...

That's not to brag. I've simply been extremely deliberate about networking over the past 5 years.

In Silicon Valley, even after being here for 6 months. You probably don't realize it, but you're only 2 or 3 degrees of separation from everyone else who's really, really impressive in town.

To that density, add a culture that places an extremely high value on helping others out, and you have something amazing.

We're spinning up Hackers & Founders University. I have a hair on fire need, and I suspect you might be able to help. :)

aka iamelgringo@ googles email service

No doubt YC has a phenomenal brand, and does a great job, and has had a couple of impressive rounds raised recently by AirBnb and DropBox.

But, there's a huge segment of the startup ecosystem that doesn't really show up on HN.

MassChallenge is graduating 125 startups next month. Their last batch, last summer has raised $100M in total.

Angel List has helped over 700 startups get funded in the past 18 months.

Startup Chile just seed funded 125, and opened applications open for another 100 startups today.

Then, there's 500 Startups, IO Ventures, RockHealth, AngelPad, StartX, BlockBox, TechStars, etc... And, a number of those startups have raised really impressive rounds, but they don't tend to get the local blog coverage or coverage here on HN.

Who knows... Here's hoping things slow down a bit.

And... after spending an evening looking at Google's calendaring API's... he's got a couple'a points.

A friend of mine who raised money in 1999 said that to get their MVP off the ground, it took 20 engineers, and $7M in venture funding. I doubt $100k would have paid for the Oracle licenses back then.

PowerShell vs cmd.exe PowerShell is actually a complete shell scripting language, that gives you full access to all of the .NET libraries and methods. It also has a rather nice IDE that ships with Windows as is. Also, you can use PShell of Exchange and other server automation, you can do remote scripting, and it has some pretty decent security controls baked into the system.

I've been using them for years.

I wouldn't necessarily blame Angel List.

Angel.co has gone from 25 to 3000 investors in 18 months.

Add 10 to 12 IPO's in the next few years, and you'll see thousands of newly minted "Qualified Investors" interested in angel investing. Where are they going to go? Angel List.

They've gotten over 600 startups funded in the past 18 months... I think they're just getting warmed up.

The question that I'm interested in with Hackers & Founders, is how do we teach thousands of engineers how to build great products, and once doing that, how to you help them build great startups, and then how to you help those founders turn around and be serial entrepreneurs.

Tons of VC's that I talk to tend to turn up their nose at our community, and proceed to tell me, "Send me your Rock Stars".

My question to them, is... "Where do rock star entrepreneurs come from? Do they descend from heaven on a cloud like Mark Zuckerberg? Or, do they try a bunch of things, fail a lot, and then slowly become rock stars?"

I've had beer with 5 out of BusinessWeek's "Top 20 entrepreneurs under 30" two or three years ago. Did I know they were rock stars then? Nope. No clue.

I'm really interested in having H&F, and all the grass roots startup communities that we partner with around the globe be a support system to failing entrepreneurs. If entrepreneurs fail enough for long enough, they generally improve their entrepreneurial skills with each startup they create. Eventually, they become rock stars. YMMV

http://beta.hackersandfounders.com/faq/meetups/is-there-a-ha...

Meet at least one or two new people every couple of days. And, meeting people online... much different than spending an hour with them over coffee.

After a few years, you'll be amazed at the opportunities that become available.