TWSS's comments

It's funny, I was 35 when I realized life was short, quit my corporate job, and started working on startups. My mid-life crisis, complete with impractical sports car.

At 35, I had enough experience that working on boring projects for idiots became physically and emotionally painful. I'm still working for an idiot, but it's the one I see in the mirror every day, and at least now I'm fully engaged and invested in what I'm working on.

We've recently had to do something similar, and I appreciate the transparency around this. Thanks for sharing your experiences and intentions with your customers, it's a good template for how others can gracefully make decisions like this.

The point about deferring to a man when you both start talking at the same time struck a chord. As the CEO of an early-stage startup with two male partners, I'm slowly breaking myself of that habit when we're talking to a mentor.

It's painful to keep talking over my partner. Frankly, I label myself a pushy bitch when I do it. But the fact that I need to earn this title keeps me doing it.

Because the list is so long, and a bunch of the cons mention cost, I'm going to flog my friend's company, Cloudability (http://cloudability.com). They help you track and control your cloud spending and they're an AWS solutions provider.

There are only three of us at Stayhound (http://stayhound.com), so our list is pretty short:

Mockflow for creating and sharing flows and wireframes

MailChimp

Google docs & calendar

Gmail IM

Google+ hangouts for team video conferencing

Trello for task management

Capsule CMS

Github

Google AppEngine

And we're in the process of considering a move to AWS.

As someone with a failed education startup in my past, this makes me deliriously happy. It means that there are still teachers out there who haven't had all the initiative beaten out of them yet.

That said, yes, education publishing is a huge business. It's really only a matter of time until the publishers take over the digital publishing space, too.

Re: fiber. I wonder how much of this has to do with NYC's older infrastructure. Does Boston boast better access?

It's obvious that his sister shares his genius. I'm so grateful she shared this intensely private experience with the world.

I have a half brother, ten years older. We didn't grow up together. Mona's story gives me hope that there are relationships we seek out later in life that are just as fulfilling, if not more so, than those we are given as children and take for granted.

+1 for Portland, definitely.

Holy shit. I'm in a tech incubator now (http://www.piepdx.com) and this sounds nightmarish to me. To be frank, I hadn't been following the show all that closely, but I can't even imagine the added stress of having cameras around filming me with my co-founders.

Melanie, I'm really glad you called bullshit. Keep rocking.

"Overmentored and undersponsored" really resonated with me for two reasons - first, there aren't that many women in a position to act as sponsors (either as CEOs or angels), and second, because it's hard to ask someone to go all-in on you.

Women tend to showboat less than men, and want to let their work speak for itself. Unfortunately, it's never going to speak as loudly as an ace self-promoter.

As a UI designer, this is something I need to tattoo on my forearm. Sometimes I'll spend so long banging my head against a problem that my bike-racer colleague will take me aside and remind me of the principles of overtraining.

Of course, I ignore him 80% of the time because I can't stand to step away from a problem before it's solved, but he's always right.

That has certainly been a facet of my experience in 15 years spent working in or adjacent to development departments. Although I think it has less to do with being attractive, or a woman, as being _cultured_ the way women have conventionally been.

We're taught to be polite, warm, and deferential, and to thank someone effusively when they do something for us. I've seen men work the same angle, though.

I keep hearing that they're coming out with a 15" MBA next year. I'm on a 15" MBP now, and while the weight kills my shoulder on longer jaunts, I can't see giving up the screen real estate (I'm a front-end designer/developer and spend a lot of time in CS5 and eclipse).

I have a few startups brewing right now. For one I'm working with technical co-founders, and another I'm not. Trying to "rent a coder" for the latter has proven to be much more difficult both short term and long term than having partners who code.

First, I had to come up with cash to pay someone. A painful thing to do when you're bootstrapping with no real income.

Second, I had to spend copious amounts of time not only writing a technical spec for someone who didn't grok the app but also carefully crafting a contract that would assure that I kept the IP.

Third, maintenance has been a bitch. Iterations take weeks instead of days, and I'm never a contractor's top priority.

In contrast, my partners are (like me) working for equity, have a deep, intuitive grasp of the product and what it does, and are engaged enough to not only turn around changes quickly, but also suggest improvements themselves.

Obviously, there are situations where renting a coder will be one's only option. My experience has been that it's an awkward, painful process.

In the future, I would choose to cobble together a non-functional prototype (I'm a UX designer who writes display layer markup) to help me attract a technical co-founder or an investor rather than hire another contractor.

Would have been helpful to include examples with each of the types of pivot. Like Burbn -> Instagram, as an example of a zoom-in pivot.

The interesting part of this from my perspective is "my dad - a lifelong entrepreneur."

I recently saw that pud is a year younger than me, and we entered the job market at almost the same time with similar skill sets. Why did it take me so goddamn long to pull my head out of my ass and finally start my own company (at 35)?

Perhaps pud's acceptance of risk has a genetic component, or at the very least he was brought up in an environment where he learned to adjust to uncertainty.

He credits laziness - but we all know that lazy + smart = effective. I wonder if that's part of entrepreneurial DNA as well...

Oregon. One of only a handful of states with self-employment assistance programs - the others are Delaware, Maine, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania, AFAIK.

I fought against the need to quit my job for over a year while I was working on startups on the side. It took an idea that I was wildly passionate about and a well-timed layoff to make me realize that being "all in" wasn't just a poker metaphor the already-successful used to look down on plebes like me.

That said, I'm stupidly well-placed to be working on my own idea, unpaid - I'm using the self-employment assistance program through my state's unemployment department to get UI checks without having to job hunt (I do, however, have to submit business plans and the like). I also have enough in the bank to cushion me when the government cheese runs out.

Good question. To clarify: I cashed out 1/3 because I'm inherently conservative financially and had no idea whether the stock would go up or down. Not because of tax purposes.

My colleagues who ran into problems with Uncle Sugar are the ones who bought and held their stock for less than a year (but long enough for it to tank in value), didn't make estimated tax payments and were fined by the IRS, or otherwise made decisions based on irrational exuberance, like borrowing against their options to buy jet-skis and crap.

Hope this answers your question.

Heh, good point, and fodder for another interesting post - how working at a startup is like Vegas...