rahooligan

re high res financing: closing dates can also vary in addition to cap. i've personally experienced varying closing dates with same cap and the initial bit was much needed at the time. haven't experienced priced yet but can imagine process being a bit slower.

re less control and no board seats: agreed. though i think it depends on the board member. in your case, i'm sure he was top notch :)

re raising few hundred thousand or less: hmm, don't have enough data. but uber's initial round was $200k. https://angel.co/uber

According to Mark Suster's earlier article - http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2012/09/05/the-truth-abou..., there are 2 main downsides to convertible notes from a founder's point of view:

1) If an investor invests $500k at a $4.5MM cap, he signs up to get 10% of the company assuming the Series A priced round will be at a higher valuation. But, if Series A is at a lower valuation, say $2.5MM, then the investor gets 20% of the company. However, if there was a discount associated with the convertible note then the note converts at 80% of $2.5MM. So a down round is really bad for the founder. But I can't imagine a down round being much better for a priced round.

2) If the Series A is $3MM at $12MM pre with 1x liquidation preference, the Series A investor gets 20% of the company. The seed investor who invested $500k will have his shares converted at the $5MM valuation. However, he will end up with a 3x liquidation preference or $1.5MM in liquidation preferences. I think this is okay as long as you raise a few hundred thousand dollar convertible note seed round. If the convertible note seed round ends up to be in the $1MM range I think this can become an issue for the Series A investor which is Suster's main point.

Convertible notes have benefits like high resolution financing, less control & no board seats. I still think convertible notes are the way to go if you are raising a few hundred thousand dollars in seed. But if you raising a seed in the $1MM range, it seems like priced rounds are preferred.

according to this the main problem with notes is a down round can get you into a lot of trouble because of the liquidation preference multiplier. but what if you never have a down round? if you can avoid the down round, it seems like convertible notes are still preferable. down rounds are bad even with priced seed rounds.

Would you not have filtered out the novice Larry Ellison through this standard? He started Oracle when he was 33 and I can't find anything substantial he did prior to that.

This is really cool & solves a problem for me. I installed the bookmarklet and am looking forward to using it. I see that you are relying on the community to summarize pages & don't have a large enough data set built up yet.

What would be awesome is if you could somehow automate summarization using NLP. Check out condensr.com. They are able to summarize restaurant reviews...might not be at the same quality level as your current summaries but it came out of research from MIT & could be useful to you.

oh no. what email service was it (yahoomail?)...dont forget to unspam it!

Thanks. Our db isn't that big yet. We are adding books & ratings every day though!

We have a strict set of criteria when rating a review as positive or negative. In general, if the review is even slightly negative we rate it as such...in the case of Moonwalking, NYT expresses a few disappointments about the book. This is to help surface only the very best of books in each genre.

Thanks for the comment. The bold is applied again in the css...not ideal. Removing it makes it less heading like though. Can increase the font but not sure if it will suffice.

In the case of Moonwalking with Einstein over 70% of critics gave it a positive.

If 7 out of 10 critic reviews are positive, the rating is 70%. We recommend a book if it scores over 70%. More info here: http://idreambooks.com/toread_or_nottoread

Thumbs up/down doesn't personalize yet...

We focus on critic reviews to create a recommendation of higher quality (they don't do critic reviews).

We made some changes for the search to work better...just need to deploy.

most def...we need to differentiate them better.

Didn't think you could get more granular than SFF. We tried to group genres together for simplicity. But some users don't seem to be liking that. All genres/categories are currently listed in the dropdown in the header.

We will be adding sort/search by author/reviewer as we grow the db.

The redundancy is unintentional...need to fix. If you sign up, you get to add books to your 'Reading List' (link under book show page image), enter giveaways and receive a newsletter with top rated books. We plan on adding more features...

Amazon is user reviews only. We like RottenTomatoes aggregate from professional critics like NYTimes & select bloggers to create a book recommendation of higher quality.

Where is the link to the announcement by the scientists that the author talks about? I'd be curious to read it and make up my own mind.

I am grateful to Ben for making such posts. They have the potential to save me months of misdirection.

Best parts:

” Whenever I meet a successful CEO, I ask them how they did it. Mediocre CEOs point to their brilliant strategic moves or their intuitive business sense or a variety of other self-congratulatory explanations. The great CEOs tend to be remarkably consistent in their answers. They all say: “I didn’t quit.”

and

"Focus on the road not the wall—When they train racecar drivers, one of the first lessons is when you are going around a curve at 200 MPH, do not focus on the wall; focus on the road. If you focus on the wall, you will drive right into it. If you focus on the road, you will follow the road. Running a company is like that."

Im working on the exact same concept (it isnt ready for public launch yet). The major hurdle Ive run into is the legal side of things - it is illegal to "sell" any type of potentially hazardous food i.e. hot food from a home kitchen no matter what state. You can sell baked goods like cookies, jams, jellies and so on from a home kitchen from a handful of states though.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potentially_Hazardous_Food

I came. I saw. I installed.

Are you able to share how the partnership was executed? Was it a verbal/email commitment or did you draft up some legal agreements?

Congrats on the launch! The app looks awesome.

The US gives over a billion dollars in military aid to Egypt for strategic reasons and also to maintain peace between Israel and Egypt. This aid is not meant for Mubarak but it is for any government Egypt supports. So US should continue providing such aid even if Mubarak is toppled. Hope peace is restored soon. Thanks for posting the email. So informative.

http://bit.ly/gxLfZj

My co-founder has been out of town for about a month now and while not substantial (yet), I see my productivity sliding. I have come up with some hacks to prevent this. But there is a kind of intensity/momentum that gets generated when the two of us are in the same room. The effects of colocation are probably different on different people but in my case at least, I need to be in close proximity to my team.

corrected. thanks for the catch.

I don't believe KPCB's investment is driven by ROI as much as it is driven by its need to have blockbusters like Twitter on its portfolio just so it continues to be seen as a bluechip VC firm.

I found the situation to be similar in north america too (ontario, canada and michigan to be specific). There are people that show up to these events and sit on panels and have access to all sorts of funding. They say they can help entrepreneurs without having a single startup under their belt.

well they are successful. they make close to $1Mil a year. If you arent a developer, I prefer the strategy of getting something out there as fast as you can, getting market validation and then bringing someone on board/improving wuality...isnt this what MVP teaches us?

http://mixergy.com/free-apps-interview/ - these guys make $80K a month in app sales by outsourcing everything.

Momentum MI seems to be a YC clone to me. They copied several things from YC - they take $20K for 8% of equity, they have a 'Demo Day' and so on.

Organizations like these seem to be popping up everywhere. And the companies they are funding aren't the same quality as YC. It seems like there is a ton of capital available and a ton of startups are being created (especially web based). Are we in some kind of a bubble? As a startupper, I find this interesting.