Live news broadcasts from individuals passionate about researching live events would be great, too. Anything like that that could replace MSM. From people compiling the current latest news from places like Twitter, to people actually out on the streets during events.
> He thinks that Uber is really unfair to union taxi drivers who jump through some hoops to get licensed, etc.
So they were forced to jump through ridiculous hoops, so should we force everyone to follow the same stupidity?
If anything, the solution is tear down these bureaucratic barriers and open up the competition for everyone. But you'll never see the taxis supporting this, because they know they'll lose, and would rather have their business propped up artificially using governmental force.
Taxi is a perfect market (exchangeable, homogenous product, low barriers of entry) so all profits will be competed out. But since drivers also need to make a living, everywhere in the world they have lobbied for protection so that they can keep some of the profits. Without that, they would work for (almost) free since many people would have an incentive to enter the market.
Since they are also providing a service to the public governments have granted them extra protection.
This is a system that has been working for a long time, and in the long run, Uber will not be able to change this.
Competition from Uber and Lyft is so fierce that New York cabbies are going out of their way to be polite, engaging in chatter with riders and being helpful with packages, luggage and giving extra care to senior citizens.
The list of common mistakes includes "Spending a lot of time trying to get a warm intro. You’re better off just following these rules and emailing me directly."
That goes contrary to a lot of advice other VCs say, which is that getting introduced to a VC is the most common way to get funded. Supposedly most cold emails don't turn into VC funding. Is this no longer the case?
Maybe the point is, IF you have to spend a lot of time trying to find a warm intro, then you might be as well or better off just going ahead and cold emailing.
But realistically, there are very few situations where a cold email is better or even as good as a warm email.
A corollary is: if you're not resourceful enough to get a few warm intros, you are going to struggle mightily to found a company.
I hear you, but recently I was doing a thing where I need $5M on a $15M pre-money raise. I called the front desk and was told by the secretary that "we only do introductions".
Fine, good enough, but I was on a clock and I knew who I was and I knew who they were and they could have been a great part.
About the time I am signing the paperwork (2.5 weeks later?), I get a call from one of their partners: they heard about it and want in.
No can do. Unfortunate, because I still think two of their partners could/would add value.
But I always wondered: why do VCs make founders jump through hoops that don't matter? Are they to prove the founder can sell? I remain baffled.
VCs are idiots if they outsource screening to the front desk receptionist. They can at least get an intern to do the screening - who knows they might actually not miss out on all non-warm opportunities.
There is a really big company nearly
everyone in the world has heard of for
decades. I know the founder, COB, CEO,
and saved his company twice.
Once I asked the founder for an
introduction to a VC, and the
founder turned me over to his
also famous CIO. We chatted about
old times and my startup.
He gave me a warm introduction to
a Silicon Valley VC.
Did it help? Nope. Did the VC
seem to care about the introduction?
Nope.
So, for a VC, what might be the role of a warm
introduction? Sure: Keep down the
e-mail traffic.
Next, given a warm introduction, what
does an information technology
VC really want to hear? Sure,
an easy way to make a lot of money
quickly, i.e., an information technology
company with some good barriers to entry in a
huge market with significant
traction growing very rapidly
and with founders desperate for
some cash and ready to sign
an onerous term sheet?
I never imposed on that very
busy founder or his CIO again.
Yes, some VCs regard a contact
without a warm introduction as
something contemptible from "over
the transom". Well, sounds like the
VC is so rich they don't want any more
money, is having trouble handling their
e-mail, or would be a total pain to
have on a BoD.
And, just what is the VC going to
bring except fungible cash? Do they
know how to manage high end sites of
Windows Server and SQL Server,
grow a large server farm,
manage software development with
100 developers, protect against
nuisance law suits, do well with
publicity, etc.? What do they
really know?
They're "The money guy." They don't need to know squat except how to squash ideas that don't turn out hockey stick growth. Most websites don't need funding, it's a misnomer, and ruins what could be a perfectly good life style business.
People need to get over the idea that they're building the next big thing.. Because they're not. Turn out profitable business and then if the growth is there push on till the day. Otherwise enjoy what you have or sell it and try again.
E.g., suppose a Web site starts to take off,
that is, has number of users per day
increasing rapidly. Then, a crucial number
in the growth is how soon can
one server computer generate
enough revenue to pay for a second server
computer? That is, we're talking
about a start on exponential growth.
Well, long the M. Meeker KPCB reports said
that can get paid about $2 per 1000 ads
displayed. Okay, maybe now that's down
to $1.
Okay, suppose send just one ad per Web page.
Get, say, a server with an 8 core AMD
processor at 4.0 GHz for $1000
and send on average
24 x 7 just one Web page per second.
Then the monthly revenue would be
1 * 3600 * 24 * 30 / 1000 = 2,592
dollars.
So, in two weeks, get another server.
So, we have essentially exponential
growth with a doubling time of a little
less than two weeks.
So, we have, in the history of (legal)
business, about the fastest growth,
the best business opportunity, of all
time.
But we were talking 8 cores, right?
At 4.0 GHz, right? If the Web pages
are relatively simple, then we're
talking being able to send maybe 8 Web pages
a second. And we may have more than
one ad per page. Okay, assume
as above but 8 pages a second with
4 ads per page and get
1 * 8 * 4 * 3600 * 24 * 30 / 1000
= 82,944
dollars a month in revenue. That was one
server. So, in a spare bedroom get a
wire rack shelf unit at Sam's Club
for $100 and put 12 midtower cases
of such servers on that rack. Have
an electrician upgrade the house
circuit breaker box and run 240 V
to the spare bedroom for the computers
and a big window unit A/C. Also put
a propane powered backup generator
on a concrete slab in a small hut
out back. Now we're up to ballpark
$1 million a month in revenue.
So, we're talking ballpark $10 million
a year in pre-tax earnings. At a P/E
of 40, we're talking a company worth
$400 million, from a spare bedroom.
Is the Internet a great opportunity
or what?
Sure, the issue is getting the users.
But with the users, there's only
a small window of time when even a
dirt poor founding entrepreneur
would take equity funding. And
without the users, still there would
be not equity funding.
Net, it looks like equity funding
and Web sites mix like oil and water.
If the site grows, if it doesn't, in
either case, there's little or no role for
equity funding.
Of course, if have just a Web site,
may have only a lifestyle business.
Okay. Not so bad.
What about "focus"? User's
focus when the look at the
screen; my focus when
I have to work on all the issues
in the startup and, then, in
addition the ads and, thus, lose
my focus; something else?
For user experience, with
my Web pages, the ads are fairly
easy to ignore. The pages are dirt
simple with essentially no JavaScript --
so that pages don't jump around.
And all the layout is just via
tables so that I know to the last
pixel where everything is.
The content the user wants
is on the left, and some ads
300 x 250 pixels are on the right.
Simple.
So, I'm guessing that the
ads will not be very distracting, e.g.,
won't hurt the ability of the
users to focus on the content,
i.e., won't yield a poor user
experience.
My take on this. This is advise for early stage investors (e.g. mostly angels and micro VCs). For A-round investments I think a warm intro is still needed.
Most VC's get approached a lot, they use this as a filter. Most angels get less dealflow. Some famous ones (Ron Conway) have set up a team (SV Angels) to deal with it.
He's not a VC, though. He's an early stage investor which I would put pre-VC. A VC may still require warm intros since he may get 1000 cold emails a day, not 100. And the warm intro is also more meaningful, since yo already should have some angel investors and partners in his area of activity.
It may be a matter of degree. My experience is that warm intros do help for early stage investors, but they aren't a requirement. Maybe a simpler way to look at it is that a warm intro often helps any introduction no matter who it is, but if you're polite, direct, and charming, you'll be fine either way. Since it was qualified as "a lot of time", I'd suggest spending "a little time" trying to get a warm intro, if that doesn't work quickly, just email cold while keeping the posted advice in mind.
I think he was referring specifically to himself. However, he isn't that wrong. There are a few that want warm intros, and one that actually won't even talk to you without one [1]. But if you view your fund raising strictly in terms of dollars raised per hour spent, you'll find that simply contacting more people is the vastly more productive route in most cases.
Maybe it makes more sense from an ROI perspective. Is it really beneficial to try to establish that warm intro with a 50-80% response rate vs. in the same amount of time, sending 20 cold emails with a 10-20% response rate?
The respondents to a well-constructed cold email are also likely to self-select!
It's what you describe. They're working on it, hopefully to be released some time this year. You upload something, it gets distributed to random nodes on the SAFE network. Minimum of 4 live copies of your data, and if any of them get taken down, another copy is immediately created on another machine. This completely eliminates the need for hosted servers for most types of apps. You can upload any files, including javascript, which means you can essentially run entire SPA and other applications using this network.
Decentralization, and thus p2p, is the very reason services like these are being created, to protect against censorship. That seems the logical next step.
And besides the "altcoin" problem, MaidSafe does this. You pretty much provide a hash to the API, and it fetches your files using chunks from a decentralized system. It's genius. All the hard work they're doing is the "magic work behind the scenes" that implements that.
As for the altcoin, the word "altcoin" connotates a "copy" of bitcoin or something negative. It's not fair to call SafeCoin an "altcoin", since it has nothing whatsoever to do with any other coins. It's completely original (and does not use a blockchain), and it deserves a chance to prove itself. But I understand all the bitcoin evangelists don't even want to consider that another digital currency can make it to the top.
> But I understand all the bitcoin evangelists don't even want to consider that another digital currency can make it to the top.
Can you explain why "Safecoin" is needed and more importantly, how it is superior to Bitcoin? It sounds like a reinvention of something that already exists, done to raise funds (they wouldn't have received millions of USD$ in funding otherwise). I've never seen a good technical explanation, it's all very hand-wavy and vague.
Secondly, Maidsafe seems to be trying to solve a problem that does not exist - backing up personal data to a p2p network. It's a flawed idea because there is no way to know if your data is sitting on a botnet that could disappear any moment. There is a financial incentive to pretend to be multiple clients and use as little hardware as possible. Maidsafe cannot know if your 10 copies of data are on 10 hard drives or 1.
Ah I see you're not really familiar with the project. "backing up personal data to a p2p network" is far from what they're doing. They're creating the backbone for a completely decentralized internet. It's up to everyone to use their API to build the "apps" on the network, whether it's a website, social network, media site (youtube), etc. The possibilities are endless, just like the current internet you now use. The only difference is that it's made with security and privacy in mind. No DNS, centralized servers (like AWS), etc are required to host your apps--it's all taken care of for you.
On to your safecoin questions. They're inventing a new digital currency that aims to get rid of the problems that exist with bitcoin. Namely, scalability. If you're familiar with bitcoin, you'll know that every full node is aware of every transaction. The current limit is 7 transactions per second (though there are talks of lifting it, which has other implications, but that's another matter). Bitcoin also requires specialized hardware to mine and keep the network secure. Miners service no purpose except this end.
Safecoin has no blockchain, therefore not everyone is aware of all other transactions. Transaction are 100% free and unlimited, and the "miners" are nodes that provide storage and bandwidth on the network, thus adding actual value (and this is how the network AND safecoin is to be bootstrapped, answering your first question). Also, app-builders are also rewarded safecoins for people using their apps, adding further incentive to build on the network (yes, you can earn money just by building a useful app people love). Since all nodes don't need to know about every transaction, scalability is not an issue. DDOS protection is already built into the network.
I can go on, but in reality, if it works, it'll blow everything else out of the water and truly change the networking landscape. I'm actually planning to write a blog post explaining how it works since questions like yours come up all the time.
Edit: oh, and feel free to ask questions and browse posts on the forum at maidsafe.org.
I'd guess that for all but a very small subset of nonprofits there is pretty much zero interest in Bitcoin because pretty much no one would like to donate to them using it.
There's actually been loads of both small and prominent organisations accepting bitcoin. Save the Children, American Red Cross, EFF, Greenpeace, Hal Finney's ALS fund, Mozilla, Wikipedia etc etc.
If you look at the Humble Bundle for example, Linux users consistently outdonate windows users in voluntary transactions every single time. Bitcoin is a bit like that, too, both because of the type of crowd and because people are eager to spend and use bitcoin and to support charitable organisations that participate in the bitcoin ecosystem.
Lastly, it's an interesting angle because payment processing costs 0% for charities, yet the payout is in dollars, euros or a bunch of other currencies including bitcoin (just like for any other business btw if you use Bitpay)
It very much seems like charity is one of bitcoin's biggest usecases at the moment. Not saying it's the best thing ever, but we shouldn't discount it as there being no interest and no charitable bitcoin users.
In my anecdotal experience, specifically with charitable donations, bitcoin contributions tended to arrive in very small amounts compared to donations in the form of government currency. Also, we saw the frequency of bitcoin donations taper off from a couple per day to absolutely nothing after about two weeks of accepting it. On the upside, adding a bitcoin donation option was actually very simple, so although the bitcoin contributions haven't been very significant, it really didn't cost us anything either.
> It very much seems like charity is one of bitcoin's biggest usecases at the moment. Not saying it's the best thing ever, but we shouldn't discount it as there being no interest and no charitable bitcoin users.
But that's not really the question; the question is if there are enough to justify the development effort and, especially, to justify prioritizing that over other options like PayPal.
There's no real development effort. Multiple companies have code snippets and tens of plugins available for most popular CMS/Ecommerce/Webplatforms that you just throw on your website, add your unique id and tell the company your bank account. It doesn't get much more complex than that.
Regardless, the point is fair. You could probably raise a few dollars by selling hugs in the streets, doesn't mean it's the best way to spend your time. Whether bitcoin is, it's hard to say. It's definitely small and nascent, no doubt about that, but it also means its users are more eager, more engaged, on average. As in, if you take a million average bitcoin users and a million non-bitcoin users, the former I believe will raise a ton more money. But given there are only a few million, it's inevitably going to be small in absolute terms. In any case I was just replying to someone saying non-profits have near-zero interest and I disagreed.
Recurring payments are not supported globally yet. For example, a German customer cannot use PayPal to make RPs.
Except if the company is applying at PayPal and is large enough (e.g. Twitch; German users can indeed subscribe to channels), because PayPal is basically granting the account owner (company) the right to just deduct money from the donator. And for this they need to trust the company.
Source: We called PayPal support last friday because we tried to make RPs work with German customers in one of our projects, but had to cancel that plan because we are not a large enough company (i.e. we didn't even apply for this kind-of secret treatment).
This is what I started thinking about as I was reading the paranoid HN comments. I believe there's open source voice recognition but the challenging part is taking commands and making them actionable.
Defining commands and their corresponding actions is something I think an open source could actually do much more effectively than companies. When everyone in the world can contribute commands rather than a single team of software devs it is possible build up a much larger collection of them. I would really like the ability to add commands to a natural language command system when a command I use doesn't work. Also, I think that a reprogramable command system would open up an interesting programming paradigm where one could define new commands and actions in terms of other commands in the system. For example,
What's new?
> Unrecognized command
When I say "What's new" read the "In the news..." section of Wikipedia's main page.
That's a great idea. If this was used by a large group of people one could take the total commands used for a specific action that were programmed and make the n% most popular ones the new standard going forward.
Also, if there existed something like a phrase thesaurus that could be extremely useful for building out a list of commands. For instance, "What's the weather?" and "What's it like outside?" mean the same thing and if you searched for one in the phrase thesaurus a synonym for the other would pop up. Then all the computer would have to do is take the input phrase, search the thesaurus, and find a synonym that it recognizes.
