Disqus is, for better or for worse, the best comment system out there. (somewhat tied with Facebook Comments depending on use case)

There isn't an effective embedded real-time "AMA" type platform that exists to my knowledge. Wouldn't be a terrible idea for a startup (but it could be argued that it's redundant with Facebook/Twitter)

I recall being asked to do an AMA on two YC-funded AMA platforms. (My guess: somebody told the founders "Patrick is in that happy intersection of 'people who have something interest to say' and 'people for whom doing lots of writing for free sounds really attractive.' Why don't you ask him?")

AFAIK, both companies no longer do that as their line of business.

Seems like if you are doing an AMA, reddit is the place to do it. I can't imagine any blog comment system working well for the task, and I can't imagine a way to build a profitable company that makes an AMA solution.

Add 2 cups of Node, a dash of Redis, 3 table spoons of two way data binding a la Angular; garnish liberally with some well thought out UX and you have yourself the recipe for the Storify of AMAs.

Somebody get pg on the horn and find me a cofounder! :)

Are you programmer or other?

Programmer.

I think it would be a fun project from a programming perspective but from a viable business perspective I think reducing it down to a list of requisite technologies is "mostly" an exercise in nerd whimsy. AMA exists as a concept because of Reddit and its community, whereas Storify helped shape the concept of Twitter narratives (or maybe contexts is the word I'm looking for). For an AMA if you get heavy hitters, like Barack Obama or Bill Gates, they are going to go to Reddit because that's where the community is, which is precisely the type of AMAer you would need to make an "AMA startup" a viable business. So while Storify can grow from out of Twitter an "AMA startup" would have to grow at the expense of Reddit, and that's where the real challenge is.

I would more say Storify successfully captured that idea and function in their brand name. It could be possible for AMAs. I am working on something bigger that could easily fit this structure into it. I don't feel very far along yet, still needing to build the permanent team, though perhaps we should chat. I eventually want to foster an environment where people can focus on projects like this within the company.

Agreed about the concept and brand synchronicity of Storify. Looking at it you can immediately get the sense of what it is without having to resort to something like "it's AirBnB for golfclubs!".

I followed you back on Twitter, just have had a busy day of meetings today. Will hopefully get a message to you soon.

Whilst I like Disqus for a commenting system, it makes reading large threads rather difficult. This is exacerbated on mobile devices. Furthermore, many ad blockers (AdBlockPlus, Ghostery...) hide all disqus comments. I think reddit would have been better here or even twitter. James Altucher does a q&a on twitter that works quite well until he hits his limit of tweets/day.

Anyway, I've done some 'transcribing', editing and formatting to make it a little easier to read[1]. If anyone from betalist or Patrick takes issue, feel free to get in touch and I'll remove it right away. However, hopefully this will allow more people to see it. I've linked the source so you can see the original.

[1] http://www.startupclarity.com/blog/startup-advice-patrick-mc...

Thanks for doing this. I agree Disqus isn't ideal for reading this many Q&A's. I think there's almost 50 questions and over 100 comments. Didn't see that coming.

We'll be releasing a PDF soon with a summary of all questions and answers. You kinda beat me to it hehe, but the format will be different anyway, more close to the original (giving question askers credit as well, etc).

Thanks for the suggestions. This is our first AMA so it's a learning process for us as well. I didn't have any problems with Disqus' speed, but I agree it's not the best UX for reading comments (we'll be releasing a PDF with a summary soon), and dropping guest's comments is awful. We were able to retrieve two comments (they were initially flagged as spam). I'm not sure wether any other comments were lost. Looking into that.