Thanks, I am going to give it another try. My first thought was to register the company here, but it takes 2 months to do so! But worse comes to worst, I will have to do that and ask the accelerator to move be to a different batch.
162 karma · joined November 10, 2013
My bad luck was that I had a new interviewer who was extra cautious, understandably. He was in a doubt and went to speak to the guy in the next counter, and came back and said no. Which is a little screwed up because the guy in the next counter didn't even speak to me!
But there's no scope for an appeal, so the only option I have is to reaply and this time take some document as evidence and hope I have an experienced interviewer.
The problem is that there's no "directive" as such, so a lot depends on the interviewer one has, because it's so subjective. Mine was new and had never heard of what an accelerator was. He thought it was an MBA!
But there's no scope for an appeal, one has to reapply and pay the hefty application fee again!
Silly me, I didn't see that before the interview. Anyways, my interviewer was new and had no idea what an accelerator was.
What I am doing now is interviewing in another city, with the same application, albeit with added true information that would support why I want to come back, which I honestly do in the short term as my parents are unwell. The city I interviewed in first has almost no startups, so they have never encountered a situation like this before. This time I am interviewing in a city that has a history of sending startups to US accelerators including YC and Techstars.
Let's see, I am interviewing this week. Taking all documents including my parents medical documents and a printout of the page above. Fingers crossed!
As a good example what you mentioned: "As needed, the organization will also hold open auctions to raise funds from its remaining pool of stellars".
This is a huge thing! Who decides when "as needed" is? If it's the board, what's the basis of their authority? Just being a non=profit doesn't stop one or more of the board members to act in self-interest.
And we are talking about a full fledged monetary system here with legal repercussions in terms of international law. With Bitcoin, no one was technically "responsible" for what folks did with Bitcoin. Will the Stellar organization be responsible for oversight and arbitration for any legal or financial fraud? And will the board BE held accountable or responsible for any systemic issues rising from speculation or any other activity?
This is what makes me uncomfortable. The biggest point about cryptocurrencies is that they are not centralized. In that sense Stellar seems a lot worse than regular currency. With a regular currency, at least the respective Central Bank or other monetary regulatory authority has credibility and accountability in the sense that they are indirectly elected by citizens as they are selected by the elected government. As such they have to have a history of integrity and monetary experience, and can be removed if they act unethically.
Stellar's board, on the other hand, is self-elected, and with all due respect, don't need to have the level of accountability or have the credibility of running such an organization, which even if it owns "just 5%" (+2% of Stripe's) of the currency can potentially have substantial control over it. And being a non-profit doesn't add a stamp of either, means little.
But I would like to comment on the substance because that is the link that was shared; and avoid all the on and on conflicts about the author of the piece.
I hate to be that guy, but while I appreciate the optimistic note (no pun intended), I think we really should introspect on how 2013 was actually a year of setbacks in fight against poverty and other related social problems including the ones listed by BillG, which I want to point out. I am writing on the basis of my knowledge (which I can assure you is credible) and will append references later.
1.Polio: While there are some obvious achievements, the question of Pakistan is one country that has taken long backward steps since being close to eradicating it just before 9/11, and most of that has to do with geopolitical reasons. Post 9/11 the insurgent groups started targeting polio workers and banning immunization programs alleging that they were American spies. Because none of these were allegations were substantiated, the village elders fought against their voices, and the immunization program continued with the insurgents not being able to do much. However that changed with the Laden killing which in a way vindicated the insurgents as the chief informant was a doctor affiliated with the polio program. Since then the elders lost their ability to object, and the insurgents gained their authority which has resulted in completely dismantling of the polio program with periodic killings of polio workers, the last one less than a week back.
The number of polio cases in Pakistan has grown about 40-50% since then. And one would argue there's a lot that the west can do to regain confidence for the local workers without jeopardizing the so-called continuing war on terror. This is a contentious issue, but ones that needs to be highlighted and not as simple as the Pak PM giving assurance to Gates.
2. Child mortality: Sure child mortality has gone down but it is far from the target set in the Millennium Development Goals (UN MDGs). More importantly its not just the poorer countries that are doing badly. Amongst the worst performing countries has been India which goes on to my next point that economic growth or the rate of poverty going down means nothing more than in numbers to the state of social welfare. The overall child mortality has gone down because of two separate factors: 1. Countries in latin america and south east Asia have improved drastically through better "socialistic" maternal and child welfare programs while the rest amongst the poorer countries languish. 2. The civil wars that plagued sub saharan countries before the 2000s have gone down both in their occurrences and their casualties, of which women and children formed a huge number. Sure you hear about the current violence in the likes of South Sudan, Mali, Syria and CAR but these are nothing compared to the violence of the past and the civilian casualties are much lower in number.
3. Poverty rate: From the point above while in absolute terms poverty has gone down, social inequality has grow. More importantly the measure of poverty line is highly debated as growth in income in low and middle income counties has also seen concurrent high real inflation on the ground which is highly under measured.
4. Rich counties re-committed to saving lives: This is actually perhaps the most concerning. Just read this piece by Jeffrey Sachs, one of the world's most well known development economist who was is a key advocate of the Global Fund that Gates mentions that http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeffrey-sachs/world-to-poor-dr...
Sorry if this sounds like a long rant. But I really strongly believe that we need to be realistic of what has been achieved. I appreciate what Gates is trying to do, but we need to introspect on how little we are doing to address these grave issues. And discussing the man and not the article itself is one of those key symptoms of our indifference and lethargy.
Any ways, if cryptocurrencies are to be taken seriously and formally, these entities have to up their customer services, at least to a BOfA level, which isn't much to expect ;)
"the attack originated from the hacker gaining access to our filesystem and modifying the send/receive page to send to a static address."
TO be fair Hindi, even though it grew more organically was given a formal status of national language by the predominantly Northern Indian Congress government post-independence to use it as an instrument to exert central political influence on the rest of the country, rather unfairly. At the time of India's independence, there were far more Tamil and Bengali speakers (not just native) than Hindi, but the central government forced Hindi to the rest of the country which did lead to a lot of understandable backlash, primarily in the South, which is why they dare not make it the official language of the country.
Not sure about Urdu's status in Pakistan though.
Even if people want to come closer the state and politics always gets in the way.
If I were running an accelerator and you were applying to mine after having gone through another program, I wouldn't just look at if I will gain (financially or otherwise) from you but really question how you will gain from having you in in the accelerator, having already gone through a similar, perhaps even conflicting process.
For a company with a more specialized market like education or health, while the requirements above stay the same, there are important differences. So going through a generalized accelerator to build those fundamentals and then going through an accelerator specific to your industry makes sense because while building strong fundamentals in business may be the smae, scaling up, selling and operating successfully in these industries is rather different and perhaps even more different than the consumer space, like Imagine K12 for education and Rockhealth for health; or even the other way round.
And frankly most day-to-day presentations and even most pitches understandably don't have something jaw-dropping to talk about, or else they would attract a TED talk, no? If you're giving a pitch, chances are you have to convince the investor/audience with an almost complete narrative. Having a story framework is useful, but it has to have enough information that backs your assertions, which is not true for a TED talk. Data is important, but the art is in the way you present them. Having no data might point that you don't have a strong case, or just didn't care. So have one or two convincing data representations.
And slides are important, to help you say what you wont be able to say verbally and the second to guide the audience about the structure of your presentation. Most people aren't great story tellers. It's an art which few can be trained in. In those cases you need to use your slides to complement what you are saying and keep the audience engaged.