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zhyan7109on Show HN: It took 4 years to sell my startup. I wrote a book about it

pdf link added at the bottom of the page

zhyan7109on Show HN: It took 4 years to sell my startup. I wrote a book about it

raw manuscript text here: https://derekyan.com/manuscript/Obsolete%20-%20The%20Secrets...

zhyan7109on Show HN: It took 4 years to sell my startup. I wrote a book about it

Good call out! This book was definitely useful in terms of thinking about specialization before testing the market. There was even a sequel to it I believe.

However, the general audience for "Built to Sell" is for SMBs and does not cater towards the venture-backed technology startups here in the valley (who hope for a strategic acquisition instead of a ebidta multiple).

zhyan7109on Show HN: It took 4 years to sell my startup. I wrote a book about it

Here are all the materials/books that were useful while I was in the thick of it: Bilal who sold his startup to Amplitude: https://bilalmahmood.medium.com/how-to-sell-your-startup-744... Touraj who is the COO of Serve Robotics and previously did a couple M&As and was leading Corp Dev at GoDaddy: https://www.amazon.com/Exit-Path-How-Startup-Game/dp/1264703... Ezra's book on Magic Box Paradigm: https://www.amazon.com/Magic-Box-Paradigm-Framework-Acquisit...

zhyan7109on Show HN: It took 4 years to sell my startup. I wrote a book about it

Congrats on your exit! Your note reminded me something Ezra Roizen wrote in Magic Box Paradigm. Paraphrasing here, he said that M&A outcomes often feel miraculous, but then again, babies are miracles too, and they happen every day :)

zhyan7109on Show HN: It took 4 years to sell my startup. I wrote a book about it

thanks for support!

zhyan7109on Show HN: It took 4 years to sell my startup. I wrote a book about it

thanks jason, really appreciate the perspective, will checkout your book!

zhyan7109on Show HN: It took 4 years to sell my startup. I wrote a book about it

Glad some chapters are helpful, thanks!

zhyan7109on Show HN: It took 4 years to sell my startup. I wrote a book about it

Good feedback, I’ll add one later tonight

zhyan7109on Show HN: It took 4 years to sell my startup. I wrote a book about it

haha sorry this info is under NDA

zhyan7109on Show HN: It took 4 years to sell my startup. I wrote a book about it

Depends on who you talk to, 3-5% of total deal size plus a retainer is the norm

zhyan7109on Show HN: It took 4 years to sell my startup. I wrote a book about it

Good feedback, thanks! Will include a version of the original stream of conscience and raw note in a day or two

zhyan7109on Show HN: It took 4 years to sell my startup. I wrote a book about it

OP here, thanks for this feedback, my workflow was to first have a draft and then feed it into a LLM to fix grammar and improve conciseness. Wished there was a tool (I think folks are already working on) that is similar to what a book editor does which suggests changes as opposed to changing the styling.

zhyan7109on Show HN: It took 4 years to sell my startup. I wrote a book about it

OP here, 83b didn’t apply in my case as I had only stick options, referenced in chapter 11

zhyan7109on Show HN: It took 4 years to sell my startup. I wrote a book about it

Thanks for that perspective, Einar.

I agree that good bankers are hard to come by and unfortunately most simply forward decks to a broad list, and they won’t get founders the outcome they deserve. My point was more about readiness for a sale. Having gone through it, I’ve come to believe there are certain prerequisites for even kicking off a process, primarily business fundamentals and pre-existing relationships.

In my experience, a banker can amplify an existing market, but they can’t create one from scratch (at least not easily).

For example, in our case we had roughly six serious inbound inquiries before engaging bankers. While our bankers (and they are great) ran a broad discovery process and put us in front of many potential acquirers, the eventual buyer was one that reached out to us unsolicitedly rather than being introduced through the process.

zhyan7109on Polarr Copilots for Photo Editing, Video Editing and Design

Hey guys, cofounder of Polarr here. Now we have a AI copilot for photo editing, and hopefully this is a lot simpler to use than the cockpit panel that editors deal with everyday. Love to hear your thoughts and feedback.

zhyan7109on Polarr's $11.5m Series A and Why

If you search CoreML, TFlite or Caffe2 on GitHub, there are already a score of offline AI models on the vertical of image recognition and vision. While these guys might have gotten lucky landing a couple deals with phone makers to enable some 'AI', it's hard to imagine the real AI leaders like Apple, Google or FB making models more and more accessible in the future.

zhyan7109on IBM Cloud Developer Console for Apple

Perhaps I'm not understanding the intent of this collaboration between Apple and IBM but I would like to think that anyone who can write/publish iOS apps should have the aptitude to spend a couple hours understand the basics of deep learning. Would you honestly use an app that was contains an image-classification model that's trained using this flow. Please enlighten me. Or am I the only person who DD'd on their product? Have you tried other web interface versions of online models trainers like SageMaker, Rekognition? Do you work for IBM?

zhyan7109on IBM Cloud Developer Console for Apple

I have used both CoreML and MPSCNN in the past, the pain point is typically how to translate a cloud-based model to run directly on the phone. Caffe2 to CoreML is good so far, but issue is CoreML is a black box and crashes are often not decipherable. I'm looking more in a universal flow that can port models trained in TensorFlow or PyTorch and at the same time some way to debug intermediate results. Or better yet, if there are existing mobile models that can be used is best. Just reached out!

zhyan7109on IBM Cloud Developer Console for Apple

Just spent a few minutes playing with the Watson Custom Model for vision flow and let's just say I am totally disappointed is an understatement, few things I noticed: 1. You first need to register an account, and to my surprise there is no command line tool or REST APIs, the entire interface is written in HTML. Hmmm, are they expecting me to specify the network structure by pressing buttons 2. Okay next, after choosing the visual model, it leads you directly to a web page with a bunch of widgets where you can add classes and negatives. To a seasoned ML engineers, this whole interface is useless. The classification has to be done at a full image level, no way to define the layers, the loss function, or any knobs to play around with the network. To an amateur, this is also very confusing. What are they expecting us to drag in to the negatives, if it's a logistic classifier, I could understand but for classifying an image, what exactly do you expect us to put? 3. Btw, to upload images, they expect .zip format, and this is where i stopped. Do they seriously think I will now export this so-called "model" to CoreML and load it to my Xcode?

If they came up with this 5 years ago I might play with it a little longer, but don't the IBM engineers keep up with what's going on at GOOGL, FB or AMZN. I can't possibly imagine anyone using this to develop iPhone apps for the purpose of image recognition, even if it's an offline flow.

zhyan7109on AWS Pinpoint Launches Two-Way Text Messaging

nvm, http://docs.aws.amazon.com/pinpoint/latest/userguide/channel...

zhyan7109on AWS Pinpoint Launches Two-Way Text Messaging

Is this available outside of the US/Canada?

zhyan7109on Adobe support tells teacher to “get a better job”

Wow, shame on this Adobe support person. 50 bucks a month is no trivial amount. Plus, with teachers paying school supplies out of pocket and not getting paid for the extra hours marking and prepping. The least this person could've done is to show some respect!

zhyan7109on Ask HN: Gracefully declining support for some major browsers?

Hmm, I agree. This app is actually pretty good. The iOS version even has brushing capabilities. I wonder if the only way to get exposure nowadays is via paid acquisition. There are literally thousands of excellent apps that you just never hear about.

zhyan7109on Emergent Chip Vastly Accelerates Deep Neural Networks

This will be a game changer a few years down the line! Can't wait to see the commercial SW stack complimenting this.

zhyan7109on Microsoft rep: your app just left LA

I don't have a comeback for that one... The analogy definitely clears the mud.

zhyan7109on Show HN: Lens Battle – Make comparing lenses easier (with leaflet.js)

that's a fair statement, i just felt the subjects could be improved. Seriously, no one uses these lenses for shooting baby dolls. Something that's a bit more relevant, or pleasing to the eyes would be much better subjects. I'm sure these guys can spare a couple hundred bucks and hire a professional model to do some shooting ;)

zhyan7109on Show HN: Lens Battle – Make comparing lenses easier (with leaflet.js)

Pretty good start i'd say. Nice to see leaflet.js getting used outside of maps. A couple comments: 1. the choice of the subjects is questionable. Couldn't you have chosen a better scene? Perhaps a landscape/portrait where extra detail can be more easily compared between the photos. Let's be honest, who's ever gonna take a photo with these lenses on a doll. For crying out loud, get some models and I guarantee this will take off! 2. would like to see more lenses to be added, along with different zoom settings