pg, this is all your fault.

You don't seem to grasp that we're talking about a completely orthogonal issue. Ron Paul could be the best presidential candidate in history. The problem I'm talking about is simply a structural one: because such a small proportion of visitors on social news sites vote, 100 of his vocal supporters can dictate the stories for a site with 100,000 users.

Man is politics a tar baby. I wish I'd never made that comment on reddit. Nothing personal (I mean this more about the reddit commenters than you), but it's a topic that brings out the dumbest in everyone.

Don't make my life difficult. I have other stuff I need to work on. Don't make me spend hours babysitting news.yc and implementing countermeasures against abuse.

1) You oftentimes can't afford success. Google and Facebook would've gone broke without outside funding of some kind, long before they found a way to generate significant revenue.

2) VCs are advisors, and are likely smarter than you about lots of things-- especially how to sell a company. If you want a lifestyle business (37Signals, for example), then avoid VC. If you want to sell a company, you'll have a better chance (and sell it for more money) with a motivated VC.

3) Sales, marketing, and support cost money, for most businesses. If you've got paying customers, telling them "sorry, I'm at my day job" just won't play. For a consumer play, this is less of an issue.

4) A lot of ideas (b2b, mostly) just aren't simple enough to bootstrap with 3 people and 18 months. Of course, it's easy enough to avoid those business ideas. ;-)

5) Businesses are ticking timebombs. Stretch out your development time and your stretching out the opportunity for disaster. A team member can lose interest or get a great job, a killer competitor can manifest and snatch up your customers, etc.

6) Momentum. I can say with experience that it's REALLY hard to keep momentum going with 3 people working part time (I'm doing it right now). When you put a startup on the back burner, it's rare that you all get to focus on it at the same time. When you're rarin' to go, your partner is "really slammed this week".

7) Necessity drives success. When your startup is your full-time job and you have an investor looking over your shoulder, your going to work harder and better. If you've got a job, startup failure is more of an option and delays aren't very painful.

8) Debt or VC can get you to the point where your growth curve starts quicker. When you are confident about the fact that you're on track to build a zillion dollar business, $100k of debt/equity financing get get you there a LOT faster.

All that being said, I've sold two bootstrapped companies-- it works.

I'd advocate for bootstrapping your way to the point where you know if you're on to something. If you can prove that the market desperately wants what you're building, then it USUALLY makes sense to get some cash (via debt or equity)... Assuming you want to focus on growth/exit events instead of profit/lifestyle.

I don't think that is the case. Your essays are fundamentally different than the Ron Paul news stories. They have a limited shelf life. I don't really feel a need to bookmark the latest Fox News injustice towards Ron Paul or clips of his last debate or news that the s&p dropped 7% or news that Sarkozy won. I want to read about it; I think it is important; but I don't need to read about it 3 years from now.

But Ron Paul does end up on Digg and Technorati. Ron Paul posters are all over my campus. There are packed rallies and meet ups. I think that Ron Paul is important news right now. A lot of young, technically proficient people seem to agree. (These are a lot of the same people who like you by the way.)

It would make good business sense to implement some sort of clustering method. So, a great number of minority groups could happily use the site and view the ads.

But, if you were the editor of reddit, I would hope you would not censor Ron Paul's stories. The community would if it wanted to; if you search for Ron Paul on reddit, you will find that the vast majority of his stories have 0 points. This invisible hand of the reddit market would surely please Ron Paul.

edit: My god does that last sentience sound dirty...

Because when a competitor comes along that does have venture funding, they will leave you in the dust. They will be able t do more in less time and scale faster, while your hobby site remains just that.

Please tell me I'm not the only one who recoils at the inference from

"Liberals had more brain activity and made fewer mistakes than conservatives when they saw a W"

to

"Based on the results, he said, liberals could be expected to more readily accept new social, scientific or religious ideas."

!

As the article notes, political orientation is correlated with a lot of things: income, education, religion, race/ethnicity, etc. Even if they tried to control for any possible confounding variables (the article doesn't mention whether they did), I'm very skeptical that they've successfully isolated a causal relationship between liberalism/conservatism and some innate brain capacity that makes you good at pressing a button at the right time.