bap's comments

This is very timely for me and Good Work!

Now PLEASE tell me your logo will be a cat?? (Yes I can see that you seem to going for 'bird' sigh)

So... you're saying Elon needs to colonize Venus too.. ?

In case you're interested and aren't already aware:

UC Davis seems to be investing a bit in ASD research. This one, for instance, focuses on girls:

http://www.ucdmc.ucdavis.edu/mindinstitute/research/gain/ind...

..and there are a few others. Most focus on the intersection of Children and Autism in some form or another.

Alternatively SciAm ran an article a while back around just this issue of how and why we're "missing it" when it comes to recognizing ASD early (or at all) for girls.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/autism-it-s-diffe...

Prolific, be definition, speaks to volume and not quality? How does proof-reading contradict?

I would say that his lack of quality (dropped T on The ;] Yes I saw them too ) is perhaps supportive of his ability to be prolific "[...]make your first draft, your final draft."

I understand that you are saying that quality of edit indicates quality of thought or insight to you.

I'm pretty excited to see this get off the ground, are you planning on U.S. Market or concentrating on Asia/Australia?

I'm you're fighting an uphill battle of 'just another vending machine' but IoT, app integrated, food robot! Automated Micro-Restaurant?

When I was in my late teens and doing security things on the internet (1992/93) I used the handle Silverweed and everyone assumed it was a pot reference.

% of AWS spend is, in my experience (CTO level stuff,) fairly common for AWS ecosystem vendors. It isn't a terrible proxy for complexity of deployment AND is easy for customer to calculate.

Beej was a couple years ahead of me at Chico - he was an awesome guy then and it looks like he's been keeping at it ever since.

> (4) would pull a Zuck and surround themselves with more established/senior people (e.g. Sandberg) as they hit those milestones.

Please recall the entire context:

Thiel stated early and often (as Facebook's earliest investor) that he would stand behind Zuck retaining majority control. Based on this support there was no other option than to provide Zuck with all the support, mentorship and education he would need to scale along with FB.

Zuck had unflinching VC support :)

Diller is the chairman of the board. Levin has been CEO and running g day to day operations for a bit now.

That being said it's important to understand that IAC businesses are run fairly independently. Many (most?) have their own CEOs, etc.

Barry Diller had tried to get an acquisition of Angie's List before IIRC.

This made me think of a thing I've done in the past so here's a brain vomit about 'base page caching' - most of which is probably irrelevant here but perhaps someone will find it useful:

I don't know how dynamic or unique your pages are to each user or if they're largely ubiquitous across all users.

Assuming the latter I know that you can cache a base page in some CDN's through a different header. Akamai's DSA product in particular allows you to cache HTML using the Edge-Control header that has matching syntax to Cache-Control. Edge-Control is stripped out in transit, the client never sees it. This allows you to control cache TTL in Akamai's edge servers independently of the client side cache.

A quick look through Amazon Cloudfront docs seems to indicate that Cloudfront cache's will respect the Cache-Control header but this can get complicated if you don't want the same TTL within client side browser cache. Perhaps I missed something, though?

Even if your page is dynamic but you're willing to go a route like Angular or ReactJS polymorphic client side apps you can still offload a bunch of those basepage requests assuming your app is suitable for this kind of design pattern. The assumption is that you will be relying on API's so additional complicated caching calculations may apply ;)

Depending on how you construct your cache key you can do a certain amount of multi-variate caching and still achieve pleasant cache hit rates. This applies to both base pages and fronting API's with a CDN.

Regardless it looks like for only U.S. traffic (as a yardstick) Cloudfront charges 0.085 per GB so futzing with the AWS calculator I split a page I'm very familiar with (49KB) across your 3TB for US only traffic and the price comes to $304.68. No savings.

Looking around I see that Fastly (a lower priced than Akamai - Varnish based CDN) charges a $0.12 rate, the price there in the same scenario would be something like $400 (the number of http requests made factor into some of these pricing models.) Akamai comes in at $500.

OTOH a CDN I've never used (Stackpath) might cost only $140 which would get you close to half your current spend. Remember that depending on your cache hit/miss ration and how many cache flushes (cache object invalidation) that price could be anywhere from slightly to extremely optimistic as you still have to pay for the requests between your CDN edge servers and your AWS origin.

To be fair, when considering pricing Akamai is the big fish here and has something on the order of 170,000 edge servers sprinkled all over the world whereas some of these smaller CDN's have far far fewer.

Once you're into some CDN's there's all sorts of wonky things you can do with parent-child tiering models that can be leveraged to further limit the number of times a call is made back to your origin (aws) server.

Here's a pretty good CDN pricing calculator: http://www.cdncalc.com/

Because BTC and blockchain utility do not need to correlate to the exchange rate against USD for the system to have massive inherent value.

[Edit: removed redundant 'correlate']

Classic.

At that level of 'paranoia' / privacy concern you might as assume this is an elaborate honey-pot. An unlikely scenario but certainly the safest assumption from a privacy perspective.

I think this deserves a conversation as opposed to a comment. The comment would have to be very long just qualifying assumptions about your situation given how oblique you have to be to protect your anonymity. Unfortunately I don't have time to write out that response at the moment.

Feel free to hit me up via email (or whatever.) Check my bio for contact information. I understand your reticence to broadcast any specific information due to your situation. Maybe we can take it to email or a phone call to allow you more latitude to talk specifics.

I"m not in any way involved with the OP but:

Thanks for being awesome Patrick. :)

Hi, I got your email and I promise I am working my way through the queue toward it!

I just wanted to note here for anyone else who feels like they are 'late to the party' that I'm trying to make this an ongoing thing.

People should feel free to get in touch!

Glad I could help!

My instinct (knowing nothing about your business or it's potential) is to launch but maybe you have legal or financial or personal reasons for not doing so.

There's a potential problem of perception from a buyers perspective:

The buyer is getting an unlaunched, friends & family market tested batch of code. Further, it is apparently something the founders don't believe in enough to take a chance on. (big red flag.) I'm not saying it doesn't have value, I know all about life choices and timing (spouses, kids, mortgages, car payments.) You just have to be aware of what you may be communicating to a potential buyer.

If they were planning on building it they might buy it but if they can build it for less, they might just do that.

I would be very tempted to launch it and see if I could get some traction. It's going to be worth much more if you can get some adoption. Yes this is riskier, if it flops out of the gate it might be worth less, realized than it was when it was all potential energy.

When it comes to the $40k: was the seed offer about the product or the team? Very commonly in seed people are betting on the team as much as the product.

Can you find someone to take over and execute on the product but leave you and your partners in the equity mix? This is risky too, you might get washed out but it's an alternative if you can't sell it. Some return may be better than none.

Can you sell your codebase to a potential acquirer? What large company would benefit most from having this product in their offering? Could you sell it to a potential incumbent who hasn't innovated in a long time and is suffering from stagnation? It might be cheaper to buy it than for them to pay to have it built. Essentially a contracting gig on spec?

I'm going to talk about geography because other people are giving good advice in other regards:

Can you move to a startup friendlier environment? Even by taking another job and working nights/weekends/lunch hours on your startup?

Tony Hsieh is doing awesome things in Vegas and it's not nearly as expensive to live there as Silicon Valley, San Francisco, LA, NYC, etc.

Create a really good plan, come up with a simple proof of concept and reach out to the incubators? Hell, Reach out to Tony to see if it's worth the move.

You'll want to have something concrete to reach out with before you do so. Execution is everything, ideas are just vaporware. Once you've shown commitment by building/executing, your inquiries will get a lot more respect and attention.

Being in a place where people value and are enthusiastic about startups will make a huge difference to you.

If you can't move DO NOT GIVE UP. I totally understand having a family or a mortgage or a spouse who isn't into moving, etc.

Building your product is more instructive and can be more entertaining than watching TV or going to a movie or whatever else you do to pass free time. You're making yourself better at what you do by expanding your horizons in this way.

I have been very successful working with distributed teams. Take a look at Automattic (wordpress.com) a company that has zero requirement on where you are geographically, provided you can do your job well.

Start building, launch a minimum viable product. If you feel the need for more help use what you've built to inspire collaborators. Don't be afraid to bootstrap if that is your only recourse:

http://37signals.com/bootstrapped

Email me (check my profile) if there's anything I can do to help. ;)