merrick

I found the series of articles as a whole to be an enlightening account from the perspective of a restaurateur who tried new things in San Diego.

This was Part of 5 of a series that begins here:

http://jayporter.com/dispatches/observations-from-a-tipless-...

Prior to this aside from being a patron of restaurants my only knowledge of the restaurant biz was based on Setting the Table which Fred Wilson blogged about here:

http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2007/01/setting_the_tab.html

Did the founders watch The Wire - love the name!

Curious about the part where you put foreign non-AT&T sim cards in and it works, without jail breaking?

I was told they would not change them in 2010, so I setup the new desired one.

This resonates more with me:

"Airbnb makes its money in real estate. But everything inside of how Airbnb runs has much more in common with Facebook or Google or Microsoft or Oracle than with any real estate company. What makes Airbnb function is its software engine, which matches customers to properties, sets prices, flags potential problems. It’s a tech company—a company where, if the developers all quit tomorrow, you’d have to shut the company down. To us, that’s a good thing."

Marc Andreessen http://m.wired.com/epicenter/2012/04/ff_andreessen/all/1

It's not paving the way, it's removing an obstacle - this act while weakening insurance companies on one level, makes them much stronger with more guaranteed revenues, thus making their lobby stronger. A stronger insurance lobby would oppose universal health care with more determination.

Those 5k deductible policies still cost $500 a month for family in a small group and leave you really exposed to 15k per person (max out of pocket) and max 45k out of pocket for the family. That's not inline with what healthcare should cost. An individual may pay $75 for that same policy but still have exposure of around 15k per year max out of pocket.

The HSA plans are just as expensive as middle of the road plans as well and are geared towards people who save a lot to begin with.

The average age of a tech startup founder is 39, and a % of those have families. They should not have to risk financial ruin as a tradeoff for starting a company that could provide jobs.

I realize that universal health care is not on the table today, but I do hope we can change that over time.

I worked on a small scale cluster at a pharma company 6 years ago. The scientists goal was to discover new compounds to patent without having to do the screening by hand. The cluster would screen thousands of compounds simultaneously all day long. It was very interesting work.

Ryan I am impressed with all of your achievements including http://thinkvitamin.com/ but I am not sure your advice is as sound as your business. Your team has built a great brand globally over many years with the conference business, and in my opinion you have done a nice job leveraging that brand equity for your new startup.

I do agree that if you are building a revenue focused company, you don't have to go to San Francisco.

But it's hard to argue against how easy it is to raise money or get acquired in the valley vs anywhere else in the world. Look at how easy it was for Path and Instagram to raise money and to get cheap money at that. In other markets many VCs want to see revenue not just traction and that revenue can work against you and lower your valuation - making the money more expensive.

For reference to Instagram, see this Chris Dixon interview with Kevin Systrom

"He also talks about how the serendipity of Silicon Valley contributed to the formation Instagram, remembering a party that Dixon once threw in San Francisco where Systrom ended up meeting his key angel investors."

http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/02/founder-stories-instagram-l...

"Jacobs said RunKeeper is poised to hit 5 million users this month, compared to 2 million at the start of the year. After a big spike of one million downloads in the first week of January, new users are still up five times since going free. Interestingly, RunKeeper’s premium $20-a-year Elite service, has also seen a three times increase in purchases, though Jacobs said that, overall, the company is seeing less immediate revenue than prior to the switch."