aberman

Written by billclerico, my co-founder at WePay (S09), and now founding partner of Convective Capital, a venture capital firm committed to solving the wildfire crisis.

I hope not.

The BBB gives Uber an "F" rating based on a handful of complaints? Uber serves over a million users a month! And I'd guess most of their customers are repeat - one sign that customers are happy with the service.

I wish I could up-vote this a thousand times. Slava is one of the most genuine founders I've met, and I wish him and RethinkDB all the best.

Great team, great product, natural fit. Congrats to Ancestry and 1000Memories.

Congrats Jason and Byron. You guys deserve it. Salesforce is lucky to have you.

My 2¢:

If it's a software product, and you're debating whether it's time to release, it's probably time to release.

If your customers try your product and quickly abandon it because of it's imperfections, you prioritize fixing those imperfections. If they complain a little, and a few of them leave after a while because they're fed up, it's probably worth fixing those imperfections at some point, but you may want to focus on other priorities.

So true. I think the sign of a great PM is the ability to see all the imperfections but the self-control to focus on the things that matter and to de-prioritize the things that don't.

It's easy to make a list of everything wrong with your product and spend eternity trying to fix it all. It's harder to reconcile imperfection with the reality of limited resources and business objectives.

A big difference to whom? I don't think the author intended to imply something different by using that particular language.

I doubt the author consciously thought: "i'm going to make this apology less effective," so who cares if the language didn't exactly resonate with you or the OP? I don't think it was malicious or disingenuous; if anything, the NYT needs to hire better copywriters, so their emails don't get dissected as frequently.

Founder of WePay, here.

Quick clarification: We're actually not really working on solving the problem of helping people "send" money. Our primary focus is making it dead simple for anybody to get-up and running, collecting/accepting payments online.

We think that collecting money is a bigger pain point and a larger market.

"Sending" money falls into two categories: P2P transfers and remittances. Remittance is a pretty large market, with old (Western Union) and new (Xoom) players alike. It's not very exciting to us, and it's a difficult business to break into.

P2P is a little sexier, but the pain point is not as high, people are incredibly sensitive to cost, and it's a problem that will be "absorbed" by the bigger companies (Amex/VISA now have solutions, PayPal offers it for free, your bank will offer it soon). It's more of a feature than a real business. I actually think Venmo has an awesome product and does a great job solving this problem, but I'm guessing that it'll be hard for them to build a big business on that alone.

Just posted a job add on dribbble. Agree that it's a great place to recruit designers.

duly noted - will update

Then you should have a portfolio, no?

I'm not saying that having a blog makes you an "accomplished author" as the original commentator suggests I was implying, I'm just saying that seeing your work is the easiest/only way to screen for talent.

For a design candidate? Curious why you think that...

Would their academic credentials have been more helpful?

I also caveated that comment: I may be missing out on some good candidates, but seeing something they've created is the only way I know how to screen design candidates. Perhaps that does make me an idiot :(

I sent him a "thank you" email for that exact reason. Seriously.

You are correct, sir. On all accounts.

I live with the founders so I've had Lockitron for about a year. in my unbiased opinion: it's absolutely amazing especially if you have a lot of house guests (hacker sleepovers).

I haven't met the guy, but now I like him. And I am pulling for him. So he has accomplished at least that.

And don't worry, his investors knew that he had no idea what he was doing when they wired him the money. If they didn't, it's their own fault. At least he knows what he doesn't know, which is more than I can say for most people.

This one is a sleeper. Might not get as hyped as the other YC companies in its batch, but I think this could definitely be an interesting business.

Well done, sir.

Again, I agree - I didn't think this belonged on HN.

haha - it's awesome that you know who they are even though we bleeped out the name.

I figured it might get posted to HN, but I was hoping it would just live on reddit for a while...

Rich from WePay here. Definitely did not want this to end up on HN. Awkward...

edw519: I know what you're going to say...and I agree with you this time ;)

Soon.