thomasptacek

Advice? I bet you $10 she will not say ``No''. You'll even get ``buying signals''. If I were you, and I wanted to learn more than I wanted to sell? Ask ``why would you want to invest in my company'' and pressure her for a real answer.

Sales is mostly about moving a process forward, so your only goal is to get to the next step.

If the VC isn't a full partner, your next step is to get to a meeting with a partner.

If the VC is a full partner, you want to ask, ``what's the process you use to decide on investments''. Usually, there's a dance of customer-validation meetings that precedes a ``partner meeting'', the outcome of which is a term sheet. So you want to chart out the state machine that terminates in a partner meeting, and then transit from state 0 towards that meeting.

You're not a bootstrapper. You're trying to get VC. You're an aspiring VC-funded startup.

Three comments.

(1) Reads like "case-in-point" for Norvig's argument that the GoF patterns are artifacts of less expressive languages. Most of these examples battle clearer, more effective idiomatic alternatives in Ruby.

(2) Yet another misinterpretation of what Chris Alexander meant by "A Pattern Language". The GoF book isn't a cookbook, it's a starting point.

(3) This document didn't benefit at all from being "typeset" in PDF; any Wordpress blog with syntax highlighting plugins would have presented it better.

Wouldn't it be cool to see the "real" design patterns for Ruby?

With an inherently smaller addressable population of users ("all businesspeople", as opposed to "all people, and any cartoon characters they like"), LinkedIn probably needs to be more aggressive about capturing some of the value third-party apps create on their site. I feel like the subtext here is that LinkedIn doesn't want to give this feature away for free.

Sorry, my fault for being incoherent. Look for the word "coup" in "Submarine". Viaweb injected a factoid into the, uh, press-o-sphere. Reporters love new factoids.

What I see work, over and over again, is companies manufacturing surveys or studies that come up with numbers and metrics about the market, like, "20,000 enterprises are deploying technology to stop the Storm worm". Some companies will do annual press releases about an official-sounding report they generate, like, "Weboopia's 5th Annual Twitter Study Concludes 4,897,489,281 Messages Delivered Over Twitter In 2007".

Again amusing that people disagree, and think that a questionairre which allows for "WhatSpace? WhoBook?" should advertise algorithm selection on a splash page.

It's amusing that anyone would disagree with this.

Schwartz. Perfect example. The government-issued PR firm for Boston companies. Competed with 2 companies simultaneously repped by them. Saw, maybe, 5? trade press hits between the two of them.

We didn't do much better, because we were also repped by a PR company, and playing the same pasteurized process press food strategy as the rest of them.

Which is my point. Wasting money on a jaded middleman to circulate press releases every time you make a dot release isn't something you should aspire to do when you can afford it, and PR isn't something you should avoid doing now.

My current company, a tiny startup, is in Forbes, Wired, EWeek, Network Computing, Inforworld, Baseline, not to mention Slashdot, Digg, and Reddit. Didn't spend a dime to do it. Definitely got lucky, but there's also definitely a trick to doing it.

I agree with the "survey" trick Graham talks about. I've seen that work over and over again.

Too many questions, and why on earth do your users care that you use SIMULATED ANNEALING? I've actually used SIMULATED ANNEALING (for graph layout) and I don't even care.

There's a nationally syndicated radio show about your product? That's awesome.

Slashdot is a PR venue.

Have you ever worked with a PR firm that was actually worth the money? I've worked directly with 4 in the past and got fuck-all from it, but we're handling our own press now and kicking ass.

If he stopped doing it after the rejection, then the criticism is hugely valid.

If, holding talent constant, a developer costs $100k in the bay and $65k in Ann Arbor, Michigan, then Ann Arbor startups have a pronounced recruitment advantage. That's all I'm saying.

The conventional wisdom is, "go to the Bay Area, it'll be much easier to find smart developers." It is, in fact, very easy to find smart developers in the Bay Area. Unfortunately, they work for Google.

I understand, and am not arguing with you. Whatever you want to call them, that "second round of folks before later" is harder to hire than the founders. They're employees, not principals, and you can't bullshit them.

I think you should ask questions of the conventional wisdom. The conventional wisdom says one of the reasons to move a company to the Bay Area is that it's easier to hire developers. You should question whether that's really true. I gave some reasons why I think it might not be, and cited my experience. I don't think it's true. But you make the call.

Also, careful with words like "later stage". You're "later stage" as soon as you hire the first person who isn't getting a founder's stake in the company. For us, that was weeks, not months, after the birth of our company.

You're making a lot of sense; I'm just saying, my experience was that it was harder to hire in the Bay Area than it has been for me to hire in NYC or Chicago, where I hire now.

It's also obvious that developers are more expensive to hire anybody in San Francisco than in Des Moines or Minneapolis.

Also, please note the bias towards founders in these discussions. A tiny team of founders is a good start, but you eventually need actual employees.

This is really cool, thanks. I had no idea about Windylabs and ChicagoBeta. Unfortunately, it looks like ChicagoBeta has flatlined since early summer. Any other pointers like this?

Isn't this the problem Facebook is supposed to solve? =)

Just to reiterate, an idea that goes from 100% to 25% based solely on Paul Graham is not a good idea.

To restate the original point: I feel like some of the people on this forum approach starting a business the same way they approach applying to college, or to grad school. That is not how it works. Your success is not gated on the "grownups" in the admissions office, or the department, or Y Combinator, making a decision about you.

If you catch yourself thinking about it that way, stop. Even if you get your 2 month's consulting dollars out of Y Combinator, nothing else in business works that way. There's no professorship to apply to once you get funded. You actually have to engage the market and win.

"We know because we make people move for Y Combinator, and it doesn't seem to be a problem. The advantage of being able to work together face to face for three months outweighs the inconvenience of moving. Ask anyone who's done it."

Hello, Paul. I'm selection bias. We haven't met formally, but you're obviously acquainted with me.

By the way, you didn't say they WOULD give up their dreams. You said they SHOULD. Thank you for introducing the idea of BATNA to the discussion.

I am utterly skeeved out that there are people in this forum who think their "chances of pursuing their dream [startup]" are lessened by not getting "funded" by YC, and that their "chances of success" with that startup are significantly reduced.

As a serial startup founder with 2 VC backed companies behind me (one as a founder) and 2 bootstrapped companies (both as a founder, one current, thriving, and multiple years old), let me respectfully call bullshit upon you.

To support my calling down of The Bullshit upon you, let me focus your attention on two completely obvious facts of the industry:

Fact the (1)st: the Overwhelming Majority of thriving web startups are not YC-funded.

Fact the (2)st: the Overwhelming Majority of YC applicants do not collect $16,000 (one solid month of consulting dollars for a skilled developer) from Paul Graham.

If your dreams don't survive not collecting a vanity round from Paul Graham, your dreams are weak and don't belong in the industry to begin with. I leave you with that thought.

My perception, from experience, is that it's actually harder to hire in the Bay Area than, well, anywhere else. Anyone with a modicum of talent that you interview in Sunnyvale can pull a $130k/yr job out of their back pocket, and the BigCo alternatives in the valley are actually pretty spectacular.

If you need a large team of very gifted engineers, start in a college town that isn't Palo Alto or Berkeley.

It really freaks me out that there are people on this board who think the BATNA for a founder in the YC negotiation is "give up on their dream".

If the preponderance of evidence is that her defense lied in court, $9,250 sounds low.

Not really. First, they have very little to gain from keeping .NET closed: there are strong open-source replacement projects for the "proprietary" framework classes, and .NET assemblies don't really protect source code, even when obfuscated.

Second, even if that weren't true, opening things up is actually not out of character for MSFT, despite the conventional wisdom. For instance, you can download near-complete debug symbols for the underlying operating system. If you've ever read assembly with and without PDB files in IDA Pro, you know what a big deal that is.

No it's not. Reading CIL code in the Reflector is often better than reading it in Visual Studio: the Reflector is an amazing little tool with one of the best integrated cross-referencers I've used.

I'm guessing you've never actually used it, because you're using the word "disassemble" to describe it. Like JVM bytecode, CIL is unambiguous, explicitly typed, and doesn't rely on aliasing; therefore, like JVM bytecode, it is easily reversed back out to a high level language. You're not reading CIL opcodes in the Reflector, you're reading C#.

I wonder if this is a valuable lesson for developers here. Bytecode VMs do not offer strong protection of your source code.

A QOS router (1997 called, wants its etc etc etc) with 2 research network customers (estimated recognized revenue from both deals: -$20,000, including services), and a dark fiber startup. Revolutionary.

There's a strong response to this statement, and I'd love to hear it, but haven't yet: name one application whose adoption is hampered meaningfully by the current architecture of the Internet. Even BitTorrent works over NAT.

Innovation happens on top of the Internet, not inside it.

No, the original post called them criminal. Which is an asinine argument.

It is your phone after you pay for it. But if you want it to work, using Apple's software, you have to abide by their license terms. They weren't secretive about them.