smalter

it's not obvious that trading on material, non-public information that you overheard is unethical. it's basically the same thing as winning the lottery, and i wouldn't not cash in lottery winnings because i have the opportunity to build something of great value to others (that's neither here nor there).

it's not even obvious that insider trading should be illegal (http://business.time.com/2013/07/26/why-is-insider-trading-e...). (not particularly relevant, but i do think certain types of insider trading should definitely be illegal but the scope is debatable.)

that's a poorly written article that, for one, lacks citations. i think the point they're making with the excerpted text is that your "claim" that you merely overheard a conversation is going to be tested and could very likely fail if you have a pre-existing relationship with the tipper.

you should see a lawyer.

but the black letter law as of when i was a lawyer (2010) is that you can trade on an overheard conversation (see the switzer case involving the famed oklahoma football coach).

you don't have a fiduciary duty to the company and you don't inherit the duty from the tipper because the tipper tipped without personal benefit.

edit a reliable reference (contra some of the other sources cited in this thread): http://www.concurringopinions.com/archives/2009/08/insider-t...

Definitely constructive, thanks for this.

Much appreciated, Allen. That means a lot, especially because I'm a big fan of what you're doing with CircleCI.

Hey Adam, what was it about the interface particularly that you found confusing? We're working on improving it and I'd love your feedback on this.

My unsolicited advice: rather than being "fairly certain" that you can make $500/mo with your idea so that you would prefer to start a company first, I suggest that you reverse the order of operations.

First, be certain that you can make $500/mo by building it yourself and get the hospital paying $500/mo.

Then, if the opportunity looks good, start organizing (aka building an organization, a company) around that.

You'll short circuit a lot of pain that way.

It sounds like the only thing that YC has to do with this post is that it framed the author's initial perceptions of the company, perhaps in a way that blinded him/her to the truth: every pre-product market fit startup is a mess on the inside.

It's a bit counterintuitive, but that's why I actually do the opposite from most founders who are trying to hire: I tell potential hires everything that's horrible about our company--all the reasons why we suck, why we'll fail, etc.

It turns out that the candidate that's a good fit really values having that conversation and relishes the opportunity to think through what the problems are and how they can help. It's also extremely differentiating from how most companies hire. I say, if you suck, embrace it.

This reminds me a lot of the example that Bezos used in his April 2005 Amazon shareholder letter (http://www.scribd.com/doc/111244354/Amazon-Shareholder-Lette..., page 27).

I'd love to hear from people who know finance better whether the comparison is apt.

The analogy seems to be that when you have upfront expenditures that get paid back over time, you may not have positive free cash flow if you're continually paying up front for later pay back, and you end up with a business that paradoxically generates higher cash flow with slower growth.

My impression is that both programs rely heavily on in-network recommendations, and the programs largely have non-overlapping networks.

In addition to the $8.5M Kickstarter, they raised $15M from Kleiner Perkins. http://venturebeat.com/2013/05/09/ouya-raises-15m-from-klein...

there are degrees of product-market fit. as someone concisely put it in the comments on A VC, there's fit and there's FIT.

If you're a first-time entrepreneur, you'll most likely need to demonstrate some amount of fit, some traction, to get interest from outside investors.

Also, there are a wide range of investors, even within the VC world, some more comfortable with seed stage and others who only like to invest when a business is ready to move from initial traction to scale.

Then it's a matter of getting from fit to FIT.

Our customers find the service valuable enough to pay for it and many are tech companies like Heroku and Uber.

We've had a few companies who switched from creating something like this on their own to becoming paying customers because it saves their valuable time and they see the love and improvements we put into the product daily. It's the beauty of SaaS, really.

That makes me very happy to hear. Thanks so much for your comment, Matt.

Absolutely, Jason. As an additional note, Professor Amabile recommends idonethis and she likes the product so much that she decided to invest. http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/05/06/179072...

I'm sorry you don't like our name! We've kept it because most of our customers and members get a kick out of it.

As a counterpoint, editor of the Oxford American dictionary and founder of Wordnik Erin McKean is a fan of our name because it's memorable, lighthearted and fun. http://blog.idonethis.com/post/16062508107/lexicographer-ext...

You're right and we're working on making all that more descriptive.

Hi Greg, Dan Pink has used idonethis every day for over 2 years. He loves the product so much that he decided to invest. http://lifehacker.com/im-daniel-pink-and-this-is-how-i-work-...

Many of these prominent people found us via word of mouth and our popular blog.

Venkat Rao has an interesting piece on this topic which he calls The Locust Economy: http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2013/04/03/the-locust-economy/

The question he asks is: We're feeding on this excess supply until it's all gone--then what? For instance, regarding your point (2), to live in NYC will it become necessary for everyone to become a part-time landlord to make rent as rents escalate?

This article vastly overestimates the value of tech buzz and considerably underestimates the value of revenue.

Buzzed about tech companies where their founders are giving talks, they get mentions on twitter, they're talked about on HN, etc., but that are actually going nowhere are a dime a dozen.

Revenue actually changes the underlying economics of your business so it's close to the essence of what a non-vanity metric is.

This article takes a really short-term and dismissive view of revenue. If you're at $1M ARR after a year, throw a party and invite all of your best friends -- you've done something that less than 1% of startups will ever accomplish. If you're at $1M ARR after a year, imagine where you will be after 5 years.

Of course, revenue is just part of the picture. You have to look at revenue growth, whether it's transactional or recurring, how monetization happens, the market opportunity, etc. etc. But I'm pretty confident that revenue is a better indication of how a company is doing than Facebook likes, Twitter mentions, web traffic, etc. that currently comprises the author's startup momentum index.

It's as hard to learn from failure as it is to learn from success.

I saw this vividly when I was in law school. You get your whole grade based on one exam at the end of the year, which is typically comprised of several essays.

People who did well often had an inordinately high opinion of themselves, but people who did poorly often had an inordinately low opinion of the system. It's random, it's based on luck, I did better in classes I didn't study for than classes I did, etc.

It's hard to learn from mistakes. Just as we rationalize success, we rationalize failure. It's not about whether the person speaking is a success or failure at all, but the merits of the argument being made.

Looks like the same talk as was transcribed here: http://blakemasters.com/post/23435743973/peter-thiels-cs183-...

A few companies like 9gag and Vayable did YC and 500 the accelerator, but others are just YC companies with 500 as an investor. E.g., you see 500/Techstars crossovers in the list.

There are zero YC/Techstars crossovers because both are accelerators only unlike 500. Both YC and Techstars companies view themselves as having gone to the best accelerator program and it's expensive from an equity standpoint to do multiple accelerators, so it makes sense that there is zero overlap there.

iDoneThis -- anywhere -- full-time

http://idonethis.com

We make it easy for people at work to track and recognize progress.

We're looking for generalist web developers who are excited about our product and building a company from scratch. Our stack is Python, Django, Coffeescript, Backbone.

If you're interested, email me at walter@idonethis.com.

The article isn't about Dustin being right or wrong, it's about the regrettable way he treated a fellow enterprising young person who was trying to start something.

It's really easy to dismiss and poke holes in peoples' ideas. The funny thing is that you usually walk away from that feeling pretty smart and full of yourself because you're mostly right.

Then you find out that you called it all wrong. And if you're introspective, you'll realize that you weren't just wrong in your thinking in the moment, you'll remember that you are actually a flawed, small person who knows very very little.

Early on, when I knew even less than I know now, I had a conversation with a guy named Gary Chou who then worked at USV. He's a model for me on how to treat a green person starting out. He didn't seem to be trying to answer the question, "does this suck?" or "can this be a $100M ARR business?" When we talked about what I was working on, he really sought to find out what was interesting about it, how people were using it, and what it could mean and become.

The game looks really fun. I'm going to get it now.

One thing I looked for and didn't see was additional tiers of contribution a la Kickstarter. The post-game credits tier, the t-shirt tier, the poster tier, etc. The art and game looks so fun I would've tossed in an extra $20 to support you guys and get a shirt.

I have experience with this type of customer acquisition. It works, but it's painful in that it is extremely boring.

To take some of the boredom out, I did two things: (1) Used oDesk to gather email addresses with business information and (2) Built a custom system to send out individualized emails.

(1) My experience is similar to Tracy's in that the quality you get from Elance/oDesk will be poor . . . at first. The reason why this is so important is that if you want to do as Tracy describes, which is send personalized, non-spammy looking, friendly emails, you have to get business data (company, CEO's name, etc.) free of any errors.

I found freelancers on oDesk and get them the Inc 5000 and told them to get me the email address of the CEO, the company name written in plain English as you might use it in a sentence (ie, not Hacker News Incorporated, but Hacker News), the CEO's first name that he/she goes by (e.g., Katie, not Katherine), etc. I had to go through it by hand like a teacher and point out every mistake made, and I did this about 3 times before I started to receive higher quality data.

Then got those people I trained to train others and I held the "managers" responsible for any errors. I hired mostly native English speakers from the Philippines.

(2) I had the freelancers enter data into a shared spreadsheet and wrote a script to dump that into a database which would prepopulate templates. I would then inspect each email and send them out one by one (this step could perhaps be skipped later on).

Each company had a "thesis", e.g., Inc 5000 companies want to use our product because they're growing quickly, and various other attributes that would determine which template was sent for which company and then compiled analytics accordingly (A/B testing different templates for a given thesis was built in).

The system then scheduled follow ups after a given amount of time up to 3 follow ups before stopping.

This stuff works, but it's a grind. If you start to pay freelancers for the info gathering, you should carefully watch your expenses and track the relevant stats (conversion rate, CLTV, etc) to make sure that you're actually making money.

One last thought, I'm sure Tracy's post and my comment will get pushback about being spammy, and I sympathize. Even patio11 got pushback for his post encouraging people to use email more as a channel. I think it's very important to craft an email that's meaningful and delivers some value to the recipient, and that means targeting and craft in the email itself which was at the center of my efforts and you can see the same in Tracy.

Awesome job, Andrew. It's very cool what you've built.

A few nits:

- I didn't realize "Try It Now" was a link to play with the product without signing up. This might do better as a button.

- I think the great Jotleafs that people have created really show the potential of the product and provide the inspiration. It would be great to put that stuff at the forefront a bit like you've done with Your World of Text (the homepage is a canvas).

No, they were pretty up front that Sparrow was a talent acquisition. They said that the product would continue to exist but they weren't going to update it and they were going to work on new projects at Google.

Oddly enough, for me, playing The Sims taught me how much time is spent eating, defecating, and sleeping.