mortona

I moved on to found another startup.

About six years ago I set up a Dropbox-like service for real estate brokers to handle the paperwork side of the sale and purchase of condominium blocks.

I built the product, which was basically a service for storing and authenticating access to PDFs.

I'd previously built a news portal for the industry and had a mailing list of around 8,000 professionals. I emailed them all and got nothing back. At the same time I researched a few flagship developments and contacted the parties involved. Eventually one agreed to use the service as a trial at zero cost. I was excited - this was a big business. But they weren't interested in continuing and I saw nothing back.

About a month later I received a phone call from the technology manager at a top 5 national firm who'd seen our product being used by this company and thought it was exactly what they needed. I flew for a meeting with them, I copy and pasted my way through a template SaaS contract. They made me fill in a disaster recovery questionnaire and quite a bit of other paperwork - no-one ever checked anything. They wanted the source code for this website in Escrow but in the end they never made any arrangements.

They signed the contract and six years on they still use the service, are the only client, and absolutely love it.

My only helpful advice would be that enterprise sales are actually way more personal than consumer stuff. Me and this technology manager get on well, and have worked well together for years. As the client, they expect to be bought lunch and dinners - that's just the way it is. After all, they sign the checks. Over time my contact has gradually realized that this is a one-man operation. At the same time he's risen high in this company because his initiative has delivered a service that really works for them. Meanwhile all their competitors spurned my 'simple' service to do it in-house, and most of them still haven't built anything. My client merged with another company who had sunk $220,000 into developing the same system and it didn't work. They scrapped it and now just use mine.

I don't want to talk about the service (or grow it) - I keep it going because the monthly check is good, and because they rely on the service.

No. Retail investors don't have the opportunity to scrutinize the company's records beyond what is publicly availbale, to take up references, or to meet with the management team. The VCs and funds investing in late-stage private companies do have these options. They can do as much, or as little, due-diligence as they like. And not just because they can demand things as a condition of the investment, but because it's perfectly reasonable to spend $50,000 on a couple of expert technical opinions when you're investing $1m+ but unfeasible if you're putting in $30k of life savings.

To my mind this really throws the excesses of the financial industry into light.

The sum of money reportedly made David Cameron's father, as the director of a long-established stock brokerage, is less than some of my 25-year-old friends were earning as relatively junior employees at London investment banks in 2008 (£200k+ pa).

I found it quick to understand the ideas behind React, but it was a lot more difficult to understand how to apply that to practical problems and to 'think' in React.

React.js By Example [http://reactkungfu.com/react-by-example/] was enormously helpful in showing how to structure various different real-world apps. So if you find yourself beyond the basic CommentBox examples, but not sure how to build your own components then this might help.

When you see how crowded European truck stops are you realize that parking a truck there is probably the ultimate challenge for an autonomous driving system.

This system might allow two drivers to drive a convoy of maybe six trucks across a long distance of highway, but it doesn't provide much benefit over the existing road-trains that they use in Australia - and they've never been used in Europe.

It's still exciting and amazing though.