ryanjmo

My lifestyle is pretty great right now, but it has changed and improved remarkably throughout the years.

I have found that at about $30K a month in spending money, is more money than I need, even in the most expensive cities (as long as I’m hanging out with normal people with normal jobs and don’t do anything to crazy that month).

Currently, I live between Aspen, CO and San Juan, PR. I live in Aspen, because it is my favorite place in the world. There are so many amazing outdoor activities and the girls there are the best in the world (for me, I'm kind-of and extreme sports person and there are a lot of girls like that up there). The party scene is hard to beat up in Aspen, in both the summer and the winter.

Mostly though, I dirt bike all summer in the mountains and ski and snowmobile all winter.

I just recently moved to Puerto Rico for a percentage of the year for the great tax benefits of living here. So far it has been really good. I live in Old San Juan, which is somewhat like living in the Mission in SF. Dirty, grimy, hispstery and fun.

I walk or get driven everywhere I go. I don't like driving at all and don't really need to either place I live. I am in walking distance to 20 great bars and restaurants in both places.

I try to work every weekday from 8am-4pm EST no matter what timezone I’m in. That doesn’t always happen, but the more I work, the better, more stable and more profitable my business gets.

What I have found to be most important, is to make sure that I get up and get emails out early, so that no matter what is really going on in my life, it signals to everyone who interacts with my business that, I’m up early and working hard every day, which is often the case anyway.

However, for example, on Friday me my employee and a girl from down here, took the day off and had an awesome drunken brunch on the beach.

My number one employee and best friend, lives and travels around with me. We are an awesome team together and get shit done in all parts of our lives. We eat out every meal and I literally pay for everything for him when we are together. It feels a lot like he is my kid in a lot of ways, lol.

I’ve had girlfriends throughout the years, but almost every one of them has been unemployed or working on something like acting or trying to start a business. It is really hard for me to date someone with a 9-5, I think because my lifestyle is so flexible (I also require a lot of attention). My last girlfriend was a consultant and worked at home, which was the best set up so far. We would just work next to each other from each others apartments.

It took a good amount of time to get here. I’ve been founding companies for about 6-7 years. This is my third entity. Back in the day I was living on the floor in the ghetto of Berkeley, CA without an extra dime to spend on anything other than Ramen.

I’m looking to the future right now. Hoping to grow my business, save some money, spend a lot of money and have a lot of fun.

My next big plan, is to get a harem of girls to simultaneously be my girlfriends and travel with me between Aspen, Puerto Rico and the rest of the world. I’ve been working on it, getting apartments set up in both places that will work for this. Also, I’ve been looking for super smart, super hot girls who would be down for this.

So far, you’d be surprised at the reactions of most of the girls who I tell my plan to. Very few have been negative about it. Most have been at minimum supportive and they think it is cool.

I know it is a ridiculous “goal” for the future, but there are no real rules and boundaries in my life and I am going to do my best to take full advantage of this one awesome life :)

So far I think I’m on a good track.

I totally get what you are saying and I'm glad for the effort they put in, but...

I'd almost rather see a 1-1 mapping of controllers to piano keys and see people hacking on the piano, to see how good Street Fighter play corresponds to sound.

Even if it sounded terrible, I think that would be more interesting to me than this produced video, which I don't feel like I pulled a lot of factual information out of.

Hi Michael, I think you need to pick a specific goal that will make you happy and make your life better and work towards that.

We can learn, just to learn, but maybe you would be happier if what you learned had a direct impact on your life.

I studied for a while (got my PhD), but I wasn't happy with what I was doing until I was running my own company and learning what I needed to learn to make money and make my company better and make my life better.

I actually thought it was being sarcastic, until I got further in and realized it was not...

เ ђคשє Շ๏ Շгץ Շђเร ๏ยՇ.

So, I have a Ph.D. and I always ask myself why I got it, because now I just build websites.

Basically, what I feel like I got most out of it, was that it was a good life, that I ended up really enjoying. I did theory and I felt like my professors let us kind-of do whatever we want. We got paid enough money to live and I had a lot of time to enjoy my hobbies. I learned to play tennis and surf (I went to school in LA). But I would figure things out and work when I was inspired.

That is pretty much how I live now and it is still great!

This just happened to me with a parody video I created. I created all the music from scratch and obviously rewrote all the lyrics. And UMG review my video and said that it was indeed their property. So, I can not run ads against the video, which at this point has probably cost me $500-$1,000. There is nothing I can do right now but wait and hope YouTube changes its mind...

The video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJQAnamKeLs

Here is what I see:

These content owners have reviewed your video and confirmed their claims to some or all of its content: Entity: UMPG Publishing Content Type: Musical Composition

These content owners have reviewed your video and agreed with your dispute: Entity: Music Publishing Rights Collecting Society Content Type: Musical Composition

Your dispute is still awaiting a response from these content owners: Entity: Social Media Holdings Content Type: Musical Composition

What should I do?

No action is required on your part. Your video is still available worldwide. In some cases ads may appear next to your video.

What can I do about my video's status? Please note that the video's status can change, if the policies chosen by the content owners change. You may want to check back periodically to see if you have new options available to you.

Please take a few minutes to visit our Help Center section on Policy and Copyright Guidelines, where you can learn more about copyright law and our Content Identification Service.

Me either, exact same setup. This happened to me on http://keepvid.com as well; that site runs on a java plugin as well.

I'm happy that it isn't just me (I was actually scanning the comments to see if anyone ran into this problem), but I really would like a solution to this. If anyone finds one, let me know!

So would it be ok to copy a site/game that doesn't have much traction if you have a better distribution channel and can get the copy traction?

In this case the original creator isn't hurt at all and actually may benefit. Would you consider this ok?

If it is ok, where do you draw the line?

So far from people's answers to my question "what is so morally wrong with this?" I do not think the reaction that it is so wrong is as cut and dry issue as we want it to be. But, if I am missing something obvious, I would actually really appreciate the insight!

But doing what you described with the paper, certainly would be considered cheating by a university. But, what is morally wrong about that? What makes the university rules, the correct rules to act by? Certainly, if you choose to go to a University you are agreeing to follow their rules, but outside of breaking your agreement with the university, what is wrong about that?

Why can't we use other people work to create our own. If someone took my thesis and turned it in and got an A, I would be psyched for them and happy they used my work. It doesn't hurt me at all.

There are tons of comments saying that copying these games is wrong and imoral, but no one is explaining why it is so wrong and imoral.

Please explain to me why, because I literally don't get why it is so wrong and imoral.

Disclaimer: I don't work for Zynga, but I do copy the shit out of stuff.

Naive.

The most innovation and the largest growth in distribution for video in the modern world has been in the many professional YouTube channels that exist. EpicMealTime, FreddieW, RealAnnoyingOrange, have literally millions or fans that watch every single one of their videos and they are currently making millions of dollars.

In fact FreddieW has raised over $270K on kick-starter for to create a movie, all donated from his fans http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/freddiew/video-game-high....

Now, beyond just the individual YouTube channel owners, there are currently (start-up) studios that professionally manage and assist YouTube channels (for a cut of course). Some of these start-ups are http://machinima.com/, http://makerstudios.com/, cloudmedia, http://fullscreen.net/ http://www.thecollective-la.com/ http://break.com/

All of these companies, either have millions of dollars or have raised millions of dollars. Now they are currently in a land grab for all the top YouTube channels, because if you control the top YouTube channels you control distribution. And currently top YouTubers are some of the only people on the web, that can effectively and consistently distribute to millions of fans.

My point is this, innovative people are already challenging hollywood and are off to a great start. In my opinion, if someone is serious about killing Hollywood they need to first study whats already out there and figure out how to work with the people who have already made some serious progress!

>> The Internet has solved #1. Any content can be distributed to any one in the world for an effective cost of $0.

Very few people actually have the ability to distribute content on the web at an effective enough level to make money off of the content produced. Currently the majority of these people are people with huge YouTube channels.

It is very hard for anyone to distribute good content even if they have money. The problem of good content getting distribution is not solved.

Nice, sounds good. Funny, I always worry about the timing of sending emails. Got to get over that one, ha. I sent one email out, I guess I have two more to do.

Ha, the timing of this is pretty funny. I have had a start-up in LA for the last year, in the entertainment industry. I spend time in the professional YouTube community (like freddiew, annoyingorange) and spend a lot of my free time meeting people and learning about Hollywood. I especially find the people who are in both industries really interesting.

It is very interesting for me, because there are few programmers in the Hollywood and YouTube communities, so there are a lot of interesting opportunities available.

I literally just today turned my head towards building the most entertaining thing I possibly can. My thought on it is a site that is super branded for entertainment like break.com or collegehumor.com or smosh.com. And combine that with a big YouTube channel, just like those websites do.

But at the same time, it is necessary to see where the eyeballs are currently heading. I think reddit is a wonderful example of a modern entertainment site which can be seen in its huge growth. I would be nice to combine the usability of a site like reddit with the targeted branding of a site like collegehumor.

The super interesting thing to me is that a project like this is much more of a lifestyle business than a venture business. BUT THAT is currently a huge difference between Hollywood and Silicon Valley. I see LA as the land of the cash businesses and Silicon Valley as the land of the VC businesses. All of my professional YouTube friends are making straight cash and building large audiences, but will never have a public exit or a huge windfall.

It seems to me Hollywood's culture about cash business verse Silicon Valley's culture, is an advantage for Hollywood in creating entertainment properties. Entertainment properties require a careful and focused branding for a focused demographic and audience, you can make millions off something like this, but it is hard to IPO.

Ok, that article was totally awesome. I have realized the fact that I have difficulty reaching out to people and entities to help me figure out what to do (in general business problems and on technical issues) was something I wanted to work on.

I has just set aside 2 weeks where I was going to focus on this. Then yesterday PG's essay and today this. Time to get started.

Any other good resources out there about this stuff? :)

Cool, thanks, this makes sense.

It is a twelve minute video; a minute comercial is less than 10% of the overall time. It really isn't that unreasonable, in my opinion.

Watching a minute commercial on the internet is a good way to support video on the web.

In reading the comments it looks like I'm in the complete minority here, but I think this was impressive.

People are mentioning that there will possibly be problems with the hotel, or a story of how a similarly constructed hotel failed in one way or another.

However, once the company constructs 30 of these hotels all of these bugs will soon be worked out. It is the fast iteration and refining of the process that will eventually enable this company to create a building that is close in quality to what takes much longer to build in the US.

tldr; Construction companies in China are able to act web startups in the US. This will give them an advantage in the long term.

YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world. Not using them for your embedded videos (and getting the extra views on your site that will launch you higher in search) could be a mistake for many businesses.

If you want to prevent click throughs, after the video starts to play, just put up an invisible div over the video, but above the controls, so the user can't click through, but can still controle the video.

Once the video ends, pop up whatever you want if you don't want their recommended videos to show.

Best of both worlds.

I know about the YouTube ad market and $2-$3 is reasonable, especially for gamers who get higher CPM thanks to very targeted advertising.

"When I put the bubble hypothesis to Norton Grubb, professor of higher education at the University of California, Berkeley, his response in an email was that the bubble hypothesis was "ridiculous". He went on:

'The problem is that there are no other routes to better occupations and higher salaries anymore, except for those who have odd skills (athletes, rock stars, starlets willing to reveal all) - which most of us don't have.'"

Programing and start-up skills allow people to get better occupations and higher salaries without education. This is only going to continue to be more prevalent in the future; especially as these skills become more available to the masses through resources like HN and incubators like YC.

I think education is in trouble...

Honestly, it seems really relevant to me. The idea is great, a lot of people will end up using it and it has a cute/wow factor.

It also servers as a reminder that the Internet loves kittens and other ridiculous things. It is important to not forget this general principle and to keep it in mind when designing your product.

People are ridiculous; remember to use that to your advantage.

I think the point that it was a she and not he is particularly important. I also think the point that the original commenter missed this point is particularly important. Knowing the HN community, that is the reason why the comment got voted up.

So, I often have to justify the time I spent getting a PhD in computer science (Cryptography), because I have a start-up that programs Facebook Apps now a days.

The only reason I can, is because I really didn't spend that much time actually working during the whole period and spent a lot of time learning to surf and play tennis well.

I really feel like I learned a lot of valuable lessons from learning to play tennis and to surf. I'm really glad my PhD afforded me time and money to make that possible.

For what it is worth, I feel like a huge part of having a startup is to have some outrageous goal you want to achieve. My goal is to own a pair of dolphins that I keep at my beach house area and ride around around the ocean in my spare time.

I'm glad to know that I will be able to develop deep relationships with them as planed :)

So, you have some obscure reason for being in stealth mode, but can't tell us more than that, other than that the original poster is completely wrong in your case. You show this by giving completely generic arguments to one line sentences from his post.

In my opinion you are not really contributing to the discussion. Just stop.

This summer, we joined the first class at i/o ventures out the of Mission in San Francisco (http://ventures.io), after being rejected from YC many times.

We had three things we where hoping to get out of joining an incubator and i/o seemed to offer these things (plus it was in the mission in SF, which rules):

1) Ability to hang out with other people doing start-ups. My co-founder and I had been coding alone for the last few years and we really wanted some people to develop relationships with who were doing the same types of things as us.

2) Introduction to the top angel investors in the valley (to get our next round of funding). The guys at i/o definitely gave us a huge amount of introductions. There were 150 angel investor / VCs at our demo day for only 6 companies (that is a pretty badass ratio!)

3) Help with our product. While we thought we knew what we were doing, the guys at i/o taught us a lot about how to build products people want.

Overall the experience for us was great. From the time we joined in June we went from around 200K users to over 1.7 million users today. We just recently wrapped up our seed round of funding (400K) from some of the top investors in the valley, including Charles River Ventures and Dave McClure's 500 Startups. Additionally we made friends that will last a lifetime.

i/o has one of the best track records I have heard of as well. There were 6 companies that joined, 3 of those companies (including us) went on to raise a solid seed round, 2 were acquired and 1... well is pivoting, so we will see what happens with them.

Jim Young (Hot or Not) was the main i/o partner who got us to join. I will never forget the way he described incubators (as it was one of the main reasons we joined as opposed to waiting for the next YC cycle). He said, "Incubators are like martial art houses, different incubators specialize in different things depending on what you want to do." I found this really true with i/o, because they seemed to specialize in costumer facing startups based around social media and entertainment. That was exactly us so it was a perfect fit.

One main point is this, there are many good people out there who can get you to where you want to go. YC is just one of many routes to what I think is every entrepreneurs goal: Building a successful company that greatly benefits your life.

Enjoy yourselves!

Maybe they just really want people to have pop-ups allowed on their site and have AB tested the landing page to this...

Maybe not...