lawrence

Bingo. If I were selling on premise software, this would be in my deck. Selling fear is one of the oldest sales tricks in the book.

I do believe however that enterprises act more rationally than consumers. So while consumers seem to be falling in to the "meh, I don't have anything to hide" camp, enterprises tend to be a bit more conservative. The thought of the NSA's private contractors going through customer data and hr records could actually be enough to slow down some of these enterprise SaaS companies.

It didn't make me laugh.

I would downvote this story if I could. Color operates in a parallel bizarro world that most of us will, thank god, never know. $40M in funding and no users? Check. Three months off to Hawaii as founding CEO? Check. CEO who says he would pivot if he was back in the office? Check. Move along, there's nothing to see here.

I find platitudes backed by data pretty useful and interesting.

I'm not sure the author is a basketball player:

"Aiming for the center of the basket increases the chance of hitting the front of the rim and having the shot drop straight down."

Has anyone ever seen a free throw drop straight down after hitting the front rim? Seems like the only way to make that happen would be to throw the basketball baseball style on a line, and nail the bottom of the front rim. Even Shaq had better mechanics than that.

Well, I think if it were about the money he would have lawyered up, and not gone public. My understanding of his post was that the decision to go public meant he cared most about warning others.

You may want to consider putting the $10K towards a good cause (if Miso eventually steps up), to show it was never about the money.

Thanks for sharing. Sounds like Miso may have made a business decision, and you are reminding them of the cost side of that equation.

Talk about taking transparency to the next level. This post has revenue, freemium conversion data, cap table breakdown, valuation, vc negotiation detail, and how Rand and his co-founder / mom amicably decided to part ways. Amazing. Has there ever been a private company at this scale with this level of transparency? Go SEOmoz.

I haven't really noticed the pall. LinkedIn and Jive are doing very, very well on the public markets. As far as the private markets, valuations and acquisition prices don't seem to be, ahem, slipping too much.

Oh man, I couldn't disagree more. Not only is Foursquare still relevant and presumably growing, but there are a whole bunch of cool services building on Foursquare location data in interesting ways (Instagram, Path, Sonar, Banjo, etc.).

I find myself talking about Rapportive a lot as one of the better executed examples of the contextual delivery of relevant content. Glad these pioneers got rewarded for their work.

You might be right. But dropping one giant startup in there will almost certainly mean new coffee shops, restaurants, and more courage for other startups to move in.

The area to watch right now if you want central location, access to Bart, and an up coming startup scene is around Civic Center, between 6th and 10th and market / mission. It's still VERY sketchy there, but not for long - Twitter is coming soon, and this should start to gentrify / startupify things. Lots of classic, old SF office buildings there too.

Agree, but not sure what that has to do with execution. More passion? More expertise? You think that's why 4sq won?

Yeah, this is an interesting topic. Why did Foursquare win? Was it anti-cheating provisions that were too strict in the early days? New York vs. Austin? Better PR? Simpler product? Dodgeball users as jumpstart? Who knows. One thing we do know was that it wasn't money.

pattern recognition? My favorite investors were entrepreneurs once, but those that can at least identify attributes of companies that tend to wine can add value.

Rand, I wouldn't be surprised if this post gets you that round, and at better terms.

Neil will be kicking himself at some point.

In my 10 person company, stuff like finance / cash management, distribution, statistics, operations, marketing, and sales are pretty crucial.

Probably more so than the cleaning of the office (which is handled by the building).

Maybe we are an outlier though.

Well said. I think you need a little swagger to handle the overwhelming odds against you as a startup. What you don't need are assholes.

I'm not sure about that. Many startups are either creating markets, or going after brand new markets. Expanding / educating the market is more important than destroying your competitor in these cases. I find it ridiculous when two tiny startups in a market that the mainstream doesn't even know exists start bashing each other. That energy is better spent expending the market.

glympse? Ish, would like to connect with you. we build geo apps, and work out of the mission (in the us bank building on 22nd and Mission).

It probably comes down to personality type as to whether you are comfortable with this sort of message wrapped in self promotion. I thought it was an effective piece, but it would have been more effective if someone else had written it about him.

And by the way, don't hate me because I'm beautiful.

By going to jail, this guy will likely get even more inbound links. It's extreme SEO.

Hopefully this is PR spin. If it's not, it's pretty disturbing that allegations of one mean merchant can cause an algo change. How many businesses will be collateral damage of this update? How many fake negative review campaigns with this spawn? If this is a real algo change, it was done in an extraordinarily hasty, reactionary, and cavalier manner. (Please don't ding my site G, nothing personal)

Yes, we used it. 15 very high quality leads (funds and angels) within 48 hours.

DoubleDutch (http://www.doubledutch.me) has three internship positions open: bizdev, engineering, marketing. Based in the Mission District of San Francisco, close to Bart.

Any time I start to get too trusting of people / government, or too dismissive of conspiracy theorists, I read something like this.

This is pretty evil.

Events based chat + location makes a lot of sense. Reminds me a bit of Meetro from back in the day (though that was IM).

And what will Facebook overlook? Maybe location? Was Facebook's failed acquisition of Foursquare like Yahoo's non acquisition of Google?

That is exactly right. I'm to the point where I will only sync with FB if I know and trust the founders of the company.

That doesn't scale so well.