and the second question is always "what do you do?" and, up until very recently, answering with "I work at a web startup" was met with extremely puzzled and questioning looks.
i keep reading in the press that color had a "superstar" team and this was a main driver of the massive funding. Yet, I've never seen an explanation - why are (were?) these guys generally considered "superstars" ?
depends... what's the total value of what he stole? say, for arguments sake, it was in the 7 figure range. If I steal a million bucks from you, how long would you like me to spend in prison?
I was once a heavy quora user. Here's what drove me away (I do still use it but I no longer 'hang out' there): the overwhelming pretentiousness and self-righteousness of many within the very early core userbase who, because I was in that early group, dominate my feed (don't know if they dominate for others...). You can only read so many "what does it feel like to be dumb" or "if i went to Harvard how should I respond to 'where did you go to school?' without offending the asker?" without rolling your eyes and writing the entire thing off as a circle-jerk for the self-appointed hipster elite. These people suck and unfortunately quora has rewarded them with upvotes and therefore influence. Otherwise I think the site is great and useful for very niche/obscure questions that google cannot answer well.
i especially enjoy when shutdown notices are written to sound as though they are delivering really great and exciting news - "we've decided to shut down the website you've invested time in, but it's your lucky day because our team of ninjas is super stoked about a new big idea we're working on. It's so exciting! we can't wait to tell you about it! We can't tell you now. But there are more updates to come soon!! Promise!! :) :) :) !!!" which I always take as code for "our product didn't work. we're out of money. we're now sitting around depressed trying to think of a new website to build. you'll probably never hear from us again."
this is simply false, generally. This would have been accurate: "doing a startup funded by TechStars gives someone way more credibility than an MBA, within the population that reads Hacker News." --- which is about, oh, i don't know .01% of the world's population. A top-5 MBA (most especially, one from HBS) opens doors for you in every industry, on every continent. YC/TS makes you the cool kid at parties in SoMa. Let's try and keep some perspective here.
isn't it really that web startups are "easy" and hard-tech startups (hardware, biotech, alt.en, pharma etc.) are...well, hard? (I mean this relatively speaking, of course) -- It takes close to zero education to sit down and create a product on the web (how many of us were building websites when we were 12? yup.) - hell, we're even now questioning the value of a college degree... To create Halcyon Molecular, on the other hand, you need world-class scientists culled from top universities with years or even decades of experience (never mind all the liquid capital you need). It's simply a different ballgame entirely. With this marked difference in entry requirements, of course the web-app startups outnumber the Halcyon's 1000 to 1. Is that a problem? Well, maybe. But is it a surprise? Absolutely not.
Can't wait to see this revolutionary implementation of social game mechanics that will improve capitalism for the benefit of all.
This person managed to get into the most selective and sought after MBA program on the planet so I want to give him the benefit of the doubt but, jesus...wtf?
I've already noticed that my Google+ feed is becoming dominated by posts along the lines of "Why am I still using this? FB is the same and all of my friends are there"
I expect them to have a fair bit of churn once the novelty wears off and all the invites stop hitting people's inbox
edit: I have a lot of non-techie friends not in the early-adopter crowd (who I invited) so I expect, for them, it feels pretty empty. For people who read HN, it's likely much more vibrant. Ultimately, it's the mainstream that matters and, until it hits critical mass, I believe the people we pull in from the mainstream won't see the point and will go back to FB where their news feed is always full.
Did anyone else have trouble reading this article? It felt like it was written for a group of third graders - extremely simple and repetitive writing...but then I started thinking, "oh yea, it's been edited for the search engines..." and this made me sad for the state of written media.
Part of the problem with Boston is that it isn't hip to be doing a startup here like it is in SV (this is getting better. A few years ago it was awful). Boston is an old-fashioned town that values aristocratic careers (Lawyer, banker, doctor) and name-brands (John Hancock) far more than pave-your-own-way careers. This sounds a bit trite but it is a significant cultural barrier for a 22-year-old to overcome. You'll be far more accepted if you move west, so most do.
It's a Boston-centric publication. Why wouldn't they anchor it to one of Boston's best known institutions?
If it said "Harvard grad student" there would be far less vitriol here. The fact that it is someone at HBS getting some startup press really pisses you off - doesn't it?
Your 3 months was my 3 years. Our biggest problem was that we were funded by our founder to the tune of several million dollars. It took us 2 years to launch our product. The mix of having cash but no outside investors to report to (we did in the end but by then it was too late to matter) meant there was no urgency. We were insanely inefficient and slow moving. We lived in a bubble for 2 years drinking our own koolaid. The founders were first time entrepreneurs and all the staff were too young to know better. Though I learned a ton (mostly about what not to do), it's a difficult to explain black mark on my resume. Beware first time founders with inside $$.
question: how are you learning to code and building a prototype when you have 25 meetings + 10 meetups to go to + 100 (wildly) repetitive blog posts to read every week? The blatant exaggeration hurts your argument. By trying to make it sound so easy and straightforward you actually make it sound much harder and intimidating than it is. Get one meeting with an influencer in your market. Go from there.
maybe i am being naive but i would much prefer a google social network to a facebook social network. i trust google far more than i do facebook. i can't quite explain why, but facebook has always felt like an unwashed pair of jeans to me. They're comfortable, and they look cool, but you know in the back of your mind that they're dirty and need a wash. google, on the other hand, is like a freshly pressed pair of chinos. not exactly hip, but chances are they don't smell.
...i don't know where this clothing analogy came from. probably because it's Saturday and i was just doing laundry.
goes to show you don't have to make a product people like, think is "cool", or even one that your peers respect to be wildly successful. Just make it useful and sell sell sell.
Seems like the world is trending away from people owning this kind of hardware. As a consumer I want to be as hands off as possible. Not sure I want to deal with the overhead of putting a server in my house.
so, you regularly reject the friend requests of people you've recently met and/or people who you see from time to time but who you do not consider one of your BFFs?
you haven't spent much time with wall street types, have you? It's a lot of alpha-male, machismo, 'let's drink beers and tell dirty jokes' - which, in my experience, is pretty much in line with being "cool" as an adolescent. Your implication that being well-educated and popular are mutually exclusive is just plain false, at least where I grew up...