sethjohn

Anybody know how to hack the Brightcove video (rss feed) onto my iPod (preferably just the sound!)?

Agreed, building an advertising-supported startup is complicated...as starting any company would be. Advertising is VIABLE business model, but this certainly doesn't mean it will always work. Many startups will rely on advertising and many will fail, but that doesn't mean that they would have succeeded if they tried a different business model.

There are, of course, both advantages and disadvantages to an advertising-based business model. As you say, advertising is likely to be volatile during a downturn. Also, the type of sites which rely on the eyeballs--advertsing are often easy to 'spoof'. (Low attachment.)

The advantages of advertising is that it's simple to implement. For a YC-type company, with a few $K funding and a few people writing code, there is probably no easier way to start generating revenue. No sales team neccessary, no 'critical mass' of business customers, no need for corporate partnerships.

There are risks in any business model, succeeding will alwyas take incredible skill and incredible luck, but with $12 billion in advertising spending each year, many successful companies have been and will in the future be built upon advertising.

$12 billion was spent in online advertsing in 2006...Google has built their business almost entirely on advertising...Online advertising $ is skyrocketing while TV and print are stagnant.

Advertising is a perfectly legitimate business model.

Agreed, this topic is getting old. (Edit: no pun intended, seriously, I just noticed this!)

Still, I have a theory about all this...

The stats compiled by Valleywag are impressive, they show that almost all of the top 0.1% most gigantically successful companies were started by people in their 20s (Microsoft, Google, etc).

What they do not address is the age of people who start the other 99.9% of companies. I would agree that companies started by young people are more likely to be outlandishly successful (for a variety of reasons: creativity, time, etc) but I don't think that they are any more likely to start a very successful company. In fact, I would suggest that age makes it more likely that a company will be a success, though perhaps not a paradigm-busting breakout.

I'm no expert on this, but isn't the conventional wisdom that this time around the economic factors are much more solid. There is a much more revenue being generated, simply because by now people are making a lot of $$ of purchases on the internet.

Just because people are selling companies and there's a lot of money floating around doesn't mean it's neccessarily a bubble...maybe it's just good business.

I would ammend that to "$12k, a few weeks, and an incredibly powerful platform for self-publicizing his site."

As with most things Web 2.0, there's a catch-22 at the beginning; Nobody posts, so nobody visits, so nobody posts. Guy's PR ability to drive traffic to his site is certainly much more valuable than the idea or the technology.

Sure, any young hacker could have built a site like that for $12K and a few weeks...but that may not be enough to give it a similar chance for success.

I'm sick and tired of Reddit-knockoff social vote-on-something sites, the idea is simplistic and derivative, I can't imagine taking advice from 14 year old internet trolls about what I should do with my time...

...and yet, for reasons I can't fully explain, I really liked it! It's simple, local, and with the opportunity for vicarious thrills imagning other's experiences...

My only suggestion is that a site like this (more than Reddit/Digg/YCnews/etc) would benefit from having multiple different groups or interests to filter with. Maybe front page is most popular events all around, but you can filter the list to show only the most popular events by music, or bicycling, etc.

Nice work, looks like it could become something great.

About 5 years ago I heard Bill Gates give a talk proposing a system to charge 1/10th penny charge for anyone to send you an e-mail. After the e-mail is accepted, you can excuse the charge for anyone sending legitimate e-mail...but spammers would wind up with many thousands of dollars in bills.

Seems like a genius idea, wonder why I haven't heard anything more about it?

We have some founders, some ideas, and some demo products...hopefully we'll start pitching in the next few weeks. Do we need a lawyer now? Or can we wait until we get a term sheet and go from there?

I agree that the rise of the "MBA-google" submission was significant. I've been impressed by the complexity and sophisitcation of the content that suceeds YC news. Such high quality content is diluted on most other social news sites among a lot of "funny ha ha" articles.

Maybe (probably!) I'm taking this way too seriously, but facile content seems like the biggest enemy of quality on a site like this.

Also, nothing against far33d for posting this, it's clear that he saw a level of depth and value in this that I didn't. And it's clear from his other posts and comments that he takes content/value seriously. I just thought this was an interesting case study.

So maybe the article doesn't enlighten those of you with extensive knowledge of the technology/market, but it did a great job of answering my basic questions.

I can think of about a million cool cell-phone apps, none of which exist yet. Conversely, there are about 10x as many web apps as I would ever need. There must be reasons why this is so...if it's not the ones listed here, what are they?

I believe this article discussed only convertible debt, and only regarding seed-round funding.

No matter what the situation, though, aren't the investors going to own your company if you really run out of money? And if your company is doing just fine, shouldn't it be easy enough to get another loan/investment to keep the creditors at bay?

I was sort of surprised the first time I learned that anyone would give you financing for debt. Even at a 20% discount rate, it seems like a successful startup should be increasing their valuation by a lot more than 20% between rounds.

Conversely, debt seems like a really bad deal for investors. They only get a 20% discount when the company goes into Series A financing, in return for the risk that the company will go belly up before then and they lose it all.

How does this square with the (admittedly problematic) conventional wisdom that investors look for a ~10x return on their money and expect ~1/10th of companies to fail?

I suspect there's a hidden upside to a startup that require a lot of money...it's going to be more difficult for competitors to get off the ground as well.

Somewhere down the line you're going to sink many $K into marketing, I don't see why paying for a domain name that already has some traffic and name recognition is a categorically bad idea.

Was it a bad deal for 'freedrive.com'? Depends on the specifics of the situation and how the company leverages their name recognition.

Sounds like good news to me. YC can't pick every good team, and can't be the right fit for every good team. Highland seems to be specifically seeking life sciences and what looks like some more techie (non-software) ideas.

They seem to have their dates confused in the article, though. How can this program have "just launched" if the application due date was 11 days ago?

I would steer clear of .org, .net, or many others...but I think that .tv domains can be a great choice if you're doing something video-related.

.tv is different enough from .org/.com to be memorable, and can be quite descriptive about what you are offering.

Looks like a fine way to get data out of Excel...but how do I get it back in?!

Yes, I work on a Mac.

The nice thing about VBA was that you could mostly work in Excel, only using VBA to supplement when neccessary. (Open another file to import data, for example. Or take a value from cell X, and plug it into cell Y a couple hundred times until the answers converged.)

You are right about the Larger Issue, perhaps this is a blessing in disguise as an opportunity to wage my own personal war against the Microsoft Monopoly.

I haven't looked much at Slashdot lately, but they have certainly put a lot of work into designing a good system for moderating comments. You are right that they have some dimensionality, and a way to "fade" trolls by adjusting your settings so you only see highly rated comments.

Still, for me at least, I don't find their dimensionality very helpful. "funny" and "informative" are rather broad categories. If all the content on Slashdot could be simultaneously ranked on a scale of "value to startup entrepeneurs looking for seed funding" and "online video content"...that would be useful to me!

I don't have any particular ideas about what should be done, but limiting your choices to "up" and "down" seems so narrow. Maybe I should jsut be happy it works as well as it does!

I was fooled by a troll yesterday. (Then people started docking ME points! Oh, the injustice! ;) )

Anyways, the simple up/down voting seems to reward trolls with lot's of attention (negative points) and prime real-estate (bottom of the page). Instead, why not add a "fader" where a couple of "fades" will turn trolly comments grey then white...

No social news sites I can think of are playing around with multi-dimensional voting of any sort...is there some good reason why not?

Oh @#%!

It's a little embarassing to admit on YC news ;), but pretty much all of the code I've ever written was Visual Basic interfacing with Microsoft Excel!

As a scientist, most data from most instruments gets spit out into Excel files. Being able to interface between Excel and VB allowed for powerful data processing. (My advisor built an entire CO2 climate model in Excel a few years ago!) I'm sure it was all much slower than it would have been written in another language, but it was easy to look at and it did the trick.

What am I supposed to do now? Teach myself Matlab? Not upgrade Excel?

I think this dilutes the concept rather beyond the point of utility. A memorial site would need to foster a very specific mood and offer a few specific tools for this purpose.

Transparency is good for the entrepeneurs, but perhaps not for VCs.

It must take a lot of work to prepare an insightful honest answer. A shady answer gets the entrepeneur out the door without the need for putting together a well-structured argument.

I don't really get that. Corporations don't generally do things because they "get pissed", they do things because because it's economically advantageous in some way or another, no?

The fact that comments may be viewed during the YC app process probably has something to do with creating a focussed audience. But, how much?

I'm excited by what seems to be a boom in micro-seed startup financing...what could less charitably be referred to as the YC-app knockoffs.

This guys seems to have a good approach, though, in defining a slightly different niche for what he wants to do. While I would be willing to concede that nobody can implement the YC model as well as YC, I hope there is room for more micro-seed startups^2 with different focuses and different approaches.

Making "something people want" is always good advice. I thought the interesting issue raised by this article was the particular situation where "making something people want" involved playing to the lowest common denominator. Facile content at the expense of intellectual depth. Mars Bars instead of balanced meals.

During seed-stage development, driving users by any means possible seems like great advice. (Or, at least, great advice 99.9% of the time.) Seems like it could be an increasingly dangerous strategy over time, though, at least to the extent that it encourages you to focus on lots of users/pageviews instead of finding committed users who really need your product.

And, IMHO, in the long term (a few years) they will steadily lose viewers to sites with a better algorithm for quality (insightful and informative) if they don't make these changes.

In the short run, lowbrow material can be quite successful. In the long run, though, quality wins out. People still read the classics, the Simpsons is still around because it's complex and smart.

I think the same is true of companies. There is a lot more value (both morally and monetarily) in building for long-term popularity (via quality) than in brief cheap thrills.

And so, specifically, I'm betting that YouTube will soon be replaced by sites that offer higher quality (production values, intellectual material, better organized) content...the popularity "Farting in Public" will soon pass!