mammalfriend

You could generate targeted affiliate links on social media sites. (from social media sites to amazon, etc)

This is common -- and even founders who exit their company encounter this feeling of being lost after leaving their last startup.

One thing that's been useful for me is to get off the startup founding train for a while, go get a job or consulting gig in a larger company in an industry that you think is worth learning about, and then rebuild your savings and sanity while looking for new problems to solve. You may spot an opportunity to productize a solution for your client that they are willing to pay for and beta, and this will help you avoid wandering around testing abstract MVPs in the market since you will have your first customer on board on day 1.

I don't think a month off is going to help you feel better or accelerate your trajectory in the right direction. You'd rest a lot better knowing that your next 6 months are figured out.

This! Obviously good investments are almost always oversubscribed, and additionally not all startups are raising angel money all the time. You need to find the overlap of:

* Company is raising now * You can get in on the deal * Terms are acceptable * You want to invest in the company

These are some reasons why professional investors are so busy taking meetings, and why so many angels piggyback on deals with more active/well known investors.

There have been several p2p low-latency streaming companies in the past with swarming, some of which where acqui-killed by CDN companies like Akamai. But since I haven't read the app, I won't go as far as to critique the filing.

I think the big challenge for this is that traditional bandwidth is becoming cheap, and anyone who cares about QOS can pay for it and/or build out their own distribution network.

I have kids, and I disagree that things are going to play out as black-and-white as the author suggests. My daughter (2) does stick to the curated appstore/app world on her tablet, but she's just as anxious to get her hands on my laptop and uses it to do different things. Like typing "cat" into google images to see cat pictures. Just like the rest of us ;)

But why do this for San Francisco, specifically, instead of just developing another area of the bay that has more space and fewer political issues?

The city has a host of infrastructure and political problems that make things like basic housing development extremely difficult. And while it's fun when you're 20-30ish, single, and without kids the vast majority of employees will bail from SF when they get a little older. I know this seems far off, but it happens to almost everyone. Then... where?

I wouldn't take on a cofounder/exec hire/major investor without spending a little time with them and their partner. Not because I think I'll detect some red flag, but because my wife is great at reading people and might observe something important.

Agreed. And I'm also not sure why building a VC-fundable business is used interchangeably with building a business that rewards the founder(s). I've seen a lot of exits of VC-funded companies where founders received little more than a rich employment package.

But the largest return I've seen for a founder was a solo founder who raised no capital at all.

Has anyone run the numbers on tech company founder ROI across funding type and amount yet?

The amazing Italian legal system strikes again...

I suspect that the investors thought the worst case scenario was an aqui-hire of a highly-credentialed team, at a value close to the cash invested. And likely with enough preferences to return the entire acquisition to the investors.

While this was an erroneous assumption, I can see how this may have contributed to a perception of lower risk to the investors.

What they seemed to ignore was that stuffing a very early consumer startup with a ton of cash and a lot of hype to live up to might have contributed to the failure. Instead of giving them resources to figure out the space, investors contributed rope with which the company could hang itself.

Responding to your first comment about teachers not being psychiatrists, I agree with that observation but disagree that this means teachers should not be trained to recognize the signs of mental and other disabilities. The tendency today is often to ignore the problem, given there is little penalty for failing to intervene. But there are heavy costs to individuals and society.

As an example, when I was growing up I was extremely nearsighted but didn't get glasses until I was out of the home and in college. I was unable to read the chalkboard from K through 12. Yet no teacher intervened to suggest glasses to my parents, or to suggest I see an eye doctor. Only when a college prof noticed that I was squinting my eyes at the board and said "hey man, you need glasses!" did I get my eyes examined and discover what the world looked like in focus.

Along the way, everyone from the public school nurses who administered eye and hearing tests to a DMV examiner fudged my eye test results to "help" me pass those tests. And I was pretty good at doing things with limited vision. I know I'm not alone in this regard -- many children find a way to get by with a range of limitations because they don't know there is an alternative.

But we're living in the modern world, and many limitations can be controlled given early intervention. And teachers are well positioned to observe children over extended periods of time, while doctor visits are often 5 minutes ling and most children will never see a psychiatrist at all.

It doesn't appear that they controlled for the size of the company. So it could be that larger companies in the survey (but still "startups") have more females, since they hired and few founders are women.

Not that women don't drive startup success! But DJ disappoints on statistical analysis.

It must be extremely frustrating to have been an old-time HP engineer or product designer. To watch the company transition from an innovative technology company to a gigantic services and ink firm with no breakthrough products for, well, over a decade now. And to know that inside the walls of the company HP had early products that weren't too different from the iPhone, or even 3D printers, but made a conscious decision to do nothing with them and to effectively stop working on disruptive innovation.

YC is by no means the first incubator. There were hundreds in the late 90's in silicon valley. Lots of junk, and few that turned out big businesses. Some of those big businesses failed in the .com crash simply because the capital markets imploded (and others because their business had been over-valued).

There isn't an issue in creating a process to bring business models into new markets that are working. It's innovative in a way and that's cool.

But it's not cool how they at least used to operate: contact US startups that had traction, and tell them they wanted to invest and bring them into EU. Ask for info on the business. Then, clone it.

As a side note it actually isn't great to have such a short cycle between startup traction and inevitable cloning. It means small startups have to rely on things like (gasp) the patent system to protect themselves from paying upfront to work out a business model only to have someone come in immediately to fragment the market.

This is neat. Just keep in mind that there's a difference between transformative innovation and a successful business.

What this tells me is that someone in the Google PR department had an idea, and a bunch of really smart people actually were resourced to work on it. While at the same time, my search results for useful queries have more spam than ever.

Hm.

FYI, here is the best rent v buy calculator I've seen thus far: http://michaelbluejay.com/house/rentvsbuy.html

This seems like bad advice from someone who is not especially experienced at building startups. As he suggests, there are kernels of knowledge but the recommendations are unbalanced and in many cases suggest he made newbie mistakes (e.g. - I didn't know how to manage my lawyer, so you should not hire one at all!).

There seems to be an abundance of advice out there regarding startups from people who have very limited experience, and it's a bit worrying to see it get voted up on hackernews so easily.

An actual, disruptive solution to the US healthcare crisis. There's a ton of economic value to be created, but the current ecosystem is shockingly resistant to non-incremental innovation.