tylerhwillis

Check out http://www.rethinkrobotics.com/baxter/

May not be a helpful comment, but investing in the US as a non-citizen is surprisingly easy. I have several investors from outside the US and they mock my US based investors who have more hoops to jump through.

The USG doesn't feel like it has to protect you, so if you want to put money here, they are more than welcome to take it. :)

(Of course, don't trust me, get a real advisor / tax advice)

I share a lot of the sentiment here, but I also think our generation is conditioned from a decade of hearing about all the newsworthy corner cases.

As an example: cops don't always make it worse, 95+% of the time they are helpful and create better outcomes for society. That said, all we've heard for the last ten years are the news stories that you mentioned - so we think of them as a negative force.

I think this same problem applies, in some capacity, to all the institutions listed here. That said, every single one of these institutions needs a massive overhaul to be a functioning member of the future (except cops, I really think you're wrong on that, they may need new priorities from the government -- but their organizational structure and methods seem to work pretty well).

Upvoted because this sounded interesting: "Our idea is simple - that anyone on your team should be able to use any iteration of your app or website with zero configuration. Awesomebox lets you create and collaborate like you would in the physical world, where it's easy to show people the real thing without having to ask someone to run code locally, install dependencies, or configure a staging server. What Heroku is to back-end development, Awesomebox is to front-end development - a platform that lets you focus on what you do best."

I couldn't find that on mobile without signing up, you might want to add that to an about or FAQ page.

Has anyone ever tried something like this? Seems like an interesting way to get a good domain for an early stage venture (pay a high but not crazy monthly with an option to buy in a year).

However, this seems to have few "brand" domains and lots of autoaccidentlawyer.com type stuff. That coupled with the fact that the guy who built it tries to hide his involvement with the site makes me think twice about using it.

It seems hard to use emotional arguments against logical decisions, and vice versa. Given that their initial decision was emotional ("I want to build something my mom will use!") it seems likely that an emotional counter-argument ("you respect me, and you're losing my respect by acting illogical") was more likely to work.

Applaud the effort, despite the data problems. In its current state I consider it more interesting than useful, but future versions could clearly be massively useful.

One thought: since many reg d filings are purposefully delayed by 1-2 months to control timing (and press) it might be more effective to analyze the time period of 9 mo ago to 3 mo ago.

May also be useful to add levels of caution (yellow is no deals in the 6 mo period, red is no deals in 12+).

Also, factoring in deviation from normal behavior would be a wonderful addition (and would remove some of the folks without much data represented)

PG has always been in favor of "ramen profitability." I've never heard him disparage revenue or think having it is indicative of being a small company.

>do women get raped more than men (not in USA)

This is very wrong.

The link you provide in the original comment is for violent crimes (including rape), not for rape alone. There is little doubt that women are more likely to be raped in the US than men.

Here's a relevant study from the Bureau of Justice Statistics: http://bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=1146

"Overall, an estimated 91% of the victims of rape and sexual assault were female."

+1, an incredibly important point. Feeling detached/disconnected from the world is one cause of depression. Feeling disconnected is a logical outcome of changing everything about your life all at once.

Changing habits/attitudes/etc. is important, but I'd try to do it incrementally - testing to see if these changes improve your experience, while focusing on maintaining and strengthening connections to things that you think make life easier/more enjoyable (could be friends/family or work or hobbies or ...)

[I'm not well versed in psychology, please take this as an idea to start your own research, and not a prescription of activity]

Good to see some of these firms get some good PR, but the metric they are judging by is number of companies in their portfolio that were acquired (IPOs aren't included). That's going to heavily favor funds that do lots of deals, and doesn't give a good indicator of whether the exits were profitable ones.

I really like this thank you page. Welcome to the team guys!

Did you do anything to drive people to your profile, even initially?

Even on the web, where search is more relevant than on discovery driven social networks, it's very hard to capture even small amounts of interest just by creating a site.

he said "Nowadays" - your link is 1+ year old.

Elon Musk is not Kennedy. His default style of speech is less political and usually not aimed at inspiration.

You can draw no inferences about his confidence from this comparison.

What you could take from this comparison, if you were so inclined, is that when it comes to inspiring Americans about space travel, Musk&Co. are less motivational than what worked in the past. Time will tell if you need the same motivational leader to accomplish something like this in the private sector.

From the linked article above:

"Flips now represent an astonishing 35 percent of the camcorder market. They’re the No. 1 bestselling camcorder on Amazon. They’re still selling fast."

Both technical folks and business folks both have value that exist on a slider, and their value increases with experience. Judge anyone you want to work with on what you think they can do now, how much / how fast they can grow, and how in sync with you they are.

Keeping that in mind, look for tangible skills that could help push the company forward. Experience in Design, Product Management, Marketing/Sales, or some other useful skill is great. Experience with running companies, recruiting, fundraising are all positives. Some ability to generate PR (through fame or connections) is a positive. If those were successful ventures, even better.

Here's two good posts on it: - http://www.quora.com/Startup-Advice-Strategy/What-is-the-per... - http://onstartups.com/tabid/3339/bid/13808/The-Magical-Found...

I couldn't agree more, it's not like that all the time, but far too often, the business co-founder isn't really bringing much to the table. Love the summary of your experience and conclusion :)

That said, I think we should be quick to realize that there are perfectly legitimate non-technical founders who add a ton of value. They just aren't guilty of the "looking for free labor" problem.

I'd rephrase this: "For an audience interested in technology, signal is highly concentrated in the early adopters of any publishing technology"

Or, more generalized: "For any consumer, signal is highly concentrated in the publishers who share your adoption speed of a publishing technology"

This (i think) would increase implementation difficulty. While the walkthrough on "how to use it" at the front end would be an easier on-boarding process, but the complexity of figuring out what unit "more dropbox" was in most sales wouldn't be as easy as letting the seller define any offer and defaulting to the easily understood/implemented discount offers.

re: ethics, if we look at curebit as a platform that's encouraging more ethical referrals (by focusing on pre-built social network relationships and encouraging retailers to use best practices), we shouldn't expect them to have to limit their growth by forcing early users into unfamiliar patterns in order to be the moral police on anyone wanting to try their platform.

I've just started playing with it -- so far pretty nifty alternative.

- integration with Facebook/LinkedIn/Twitter/Gmail

- sends you a daily email reminder of birthdays, info on your meetings that day, contacts you should hit up, people who got new jobs (from linkedin)

- don't think dedupe caught all my duplicates, but it worked ok.

- no exchange support :(

- design is pretty ugly, but the features are really nice.

He brings up a fantastic point on the willingness of customers to spend money. It seems iPhone users spend much more on apps than android users (anyone have data to confirm?).

That said, it seems to me like this isn't just app discoverability and trust -- having your apple id and CC# already setup from day one for most users seem more likely to be the cause. Here's a discussion on Quora about it: http://qr.ae/kY5p

That seems like a bad precedent that could harm some apps that create a lot of value. It also seems like if they are applying that rule it might be subjective -- I can think of three off the top of my head that are still in the app store:

- Taxi Magic (Taxi dispatch app)

- Uber (Black Car dispatch app)

- Fire Department (notifies neighbors abt CPR emergencies)