Startup Elementary sounds great because entrepreneurship does start young. I like that this environment will encourage young kids to pursue their dreams. Hopefully it doesn’t lead to young entrepreneurs quitting school to follow dreams. LOL! Just Kidding…
Congrats Liz! This is awesome! I like that your company pivoted to a new model. I am in the process of doing this myself. Why do you need so much $$$ for site that recruites part-time employees? Seems like a big whole to dig yourself out of. Just sayin
Hiring, training, and managing an internal sales team is very capital-intensive, especially in NYC. My guess (based upon the article) is that a large portion of the funds will go towards building their sales team. It seems as though they've found a profitable business model, and are attempting to pour gasoline on the fire.
She is qualified to spend the money to ensure her company dominates the market. There are 20 million college students in the US; if she helps 1 million of them get jobs, then she could position herself to receive at least 10% of their income. 1 million * $10 / hr * 10% = $1 million / working hr.
I understand the world dominion thing and that's every ones goto answer. I am sure it was Secret's answer too but you see how that turned out. Launched in 2013, raised $35M, and closing doors in 2015. I think Campus Job has an awesome business model and definitely qualified. My thought was too much cash... way too soon... for this type of business.
1. You raise not for what you need today but what you need for tomorrow. They still have a lot to figure out and the money gives them the runway to do that. If things go wrong, they'll have the war chest to survive until the next round of funding.
2. Raising more than you need allows the founders to get back to work and stay out of fundraising mode longer. The last thing you want to do is finish fundraising and find yourself needing to fundraise again 6-10 months down the road.
It would be smart for Uber to acquire Instacart. Instacart has the knowhow and Uber has the network and technology. It seems like a smart business decision that will lead to world domination.
I don't know if it is a reflection of San Fransico being insane but it does make me question the Techstars program. They funded a company that sells followers.
We sell a social media product with a market opportunity in the billions. Number of followers is just one metric. These are people that choose to follow you out of their own free will.
I am TORN because I love that YC is funding African American founders. I love the traction that the company has and that the team is solving a real problem. BUT I hate how it feeds into a stereotype that all black men are criminals. It is exhausting how hard we have to work to get others to see blacks in a different light.
The article has the black CEO, Frederick, dressed in all black with gold chains and talks about him selling drugs. The article leads with the stereotype and not what makes the company unique. I believe we need more positive images of black men. Again, let me say I love the work that CEO and Pigeon is doing but I do not like they way this article portrayed him because it is perpetuating the stereotype that all black men are drug dealers and thugs.
I didn't see the image, thats helps me understand what you meant more, I see. I'm particularly sensitive to this because as a "young black male in tech" myself i've had to navigate around some the bias, though when I read the article I didn't get the feeling it added to the stereotype. I am excited to see YC involved with more minority founders though, so TC article aside, hopefully this leads to more.
It doesn't give the press a free pass, but the consistency with which those articles mention the prison time does at least suggest that pigeon.ly is embracing that angle when they deal with the press.
Great Story!! I love the founder’s journey! Nothing was handed to you. You worked hard for everything you have! I can identify with that. This company would have kicked butt at SXSW because we did not see many fitness companies there this year.
This is marketing at its best. Create a browser that developers like to use so they can build Mozilla compatible products for consumers. Then more the consumers will adopt this browser as their default browser.
The developer browser also includes Firefox Tools Adaptor which supports remote device debugging of mobile browsers like Chrome on Android and Safari on iOS:
The incentives are nice but the "True" ride-sharing organizations would take offense to calling Uber and Lyft a ride share. They are currently defined as a TNC- Transportation Network company.
This makes sense to me and easier to maintain the code. I won't have to support older versions. And my app can take advantage of the 64bit architecture.
I'm not sure why you'd say that. There's a lot of misinterpretation going on here. Read the text carefully (emphasis mine):
> new iOS apps uploaded to the App Store must include 64-bit support and be built with the iOS 8 SDK
You must include support for these items. There is no suggestion or requirement that a developer not support iOS7 (or iOS 6 for that matter).
This also only affects new apps. So basically:
* This only applies to new apps [1].
* This only requires that new apps include support for iOS 8 [2] and 64-bit.
* Developers can still support older versions of iOS.
That's just the basic breakdown of Apple's expectations. Your customers might still demand support for older iOS versions, so this isn't much of a change as far as legacy support goes.
1: I suppose it is open to interpretation whether "new iOS apps uploaded to the App Store" includes updated versions of older apps. It doesn't sound like that to me though.
2: Just because you use the iOS 8 SDK doesn't mean you can't/don't support earlier iOS versions. Quite the opposite actually, as iOS SDKs have specific provisions for supporting older versions (note, I'm not an iOS dev, but this is what I hear).
Building with a new SDK makes the app opt in to new behaviors even when targeting older iOS versions. This can be quite a hassle. Your perfectly working app - even when deployed on an iOS 8 device - will suddenly break in many fun ways merely from recompiling with a newer SDK: touch handling differs, margins may be weird, table headers vanish because various new methods aren't implemented, screen rotation suddenly gets enabled where you didn't expect, new keyboard metrics mess up your layout, etcetc. This happens because when the runtime detects that an app is built with an older SDK, it enables a bunch of compability behaviors that newly built apps cannot opt in to.
