patrickambron's comments

Hi, I'm the author of the slideshare/founder of the company. You are right, before the actual surge, there was a lot of upfront work understanding how to build our product and how to tell our story. That said, once you have the right product with the right viral loops we learned that taking an extremely focused story (check out this ONE feature) to the right audience accelerates growth like crazy

You might be right. I don't really know people who use foursquare, and it's use cases from a consumer standpoint are really limited to people who live in cities (forget middle america)

That said, this round does make a lot of sense for investors and management. If they didn't raise a round they would have run out of cash. That's over 5 years and $100M down the drain today. Rather than write the entire thing off, they're giving the company another 2 years to create something worth more than bankruptcy. There is still a lot to bet on. I'm not sure where they'll concentrate, but there is something valuable in being the location based layer of the internet, or being in a position to make cities more searchable on the go.

Notice it's a debt round (w no valuation). They aren't trying to value the company higher, they're just trying to keep it alive as cheaply as possible

it helps people improve what shows up when someone googles their name

Good Call: The actual product is BrandYourself.com

I didn't even realize you could do that. Thanks for the heads up. I'm going to check that out. I agree, the bigger the graphic, the better

Thanks man, the goal is to get our product in front of more people. We convert very well when we get people to our site, so this seemed like a cool, fun way to do that

Thanks, appreciate the kind words.

In terms of posting a photo, we are. We're posting a graphic of their grade. Is it not showing up for you?

I will definitely let you know how the conversions are and how many people we get to our actual site

Fair enough

It's a very fair point, and I think it's good to always err on the side of "not being shady".

Just to play devil's advocate, many companies would never have broken through the clutter if they didn't break a few rules to be seen at first. This includes great companies many of use use every day (like AirBnB). Reddit was forced to create fake accounts and pose fake conversations to get started. Google certainly was breaking some rules when they began scraping/indexing the entire web (i realize this is an oversimplification).

The ones that are truly garbage disappear when they start breaking rules. They piss people off. The ones who do it right, and offer something valuable, rise up.

Again that is just playing devil's advocate. I don't think it's black and white, and I think it's a really interesting conversation

I think SlideShare is one of the most underutilized tools out there. It's a great way to break up a lot of information (people enjoy clicking through) and they have a vibrant community. I post things up there and routinely get tens of thousands of highly relevant views.

I read about this in the past, and I think it's a really interesting conversation. Would you consider this spam?

Personally I lean towards no. Yes, you are emailing a stranger, but in a relevant way and presumably only one time.

That's a really interesting point. I think a big part of anything like this is how prepared you are. For example, Florida routinely gets hit with much stronger storms, but they are much better prepared. New York doesn't deal with many Hurricanes, so our infrastructure--that millions have learned to depend on--failed. To your point, it's amazing how places and people can adapt to different conditions. I'd love to hear more about running a startup in Lebanon

I'm not sure I'm following

This is so awesome. One it's cool to see a company care so much about it's customers and its reputation. Two, it's amazing how much fuel they need to fun

I actually wasn't aware of this. Sounds cool Can you elaborate?

Yea that was really surprising to me. It's another reason I feel lucky to be in this industry. It became obvious people love what they do more than any other industry.

This is such a good comment, and something I've wondered about too. I think there are three parts of the equation

1) StartUp people, especially founders, have a heightened appreciation of Time. Big organizations build in redundancy and shared responsibility. If something doesn't get done, it's not your fault and it's not the end of the world. The business goes on. In a startup, the buck stops with you, and if you don't get it done, it doesn't' happen. Time can not be wasted

2) Startup people generally love what they do. They aren't looking for a day off. Contrast that with most people. A day off is welcome.

3) The tech industry has an "us vs the world' mentality that separates it form othe rindustries. Even my friends who wanted to work--because they had deadlines, etc--were left with no recourse. Our industry wants everyone to succeed. It's empathetic. Most people understand the pain and joy of building something, so they do everything they can to help others succeed as well. That doesn't exist (in my experience) in other industries, and it creates a community that other industries don't have. I think that's part of what we saw last week.

Absolutely. It was pretty amazing to see how the whole city came together, especially leaders – from Obama to Bloomberg to Governor Christie to Sterne to many others.

Definitely agree. A few simple changes and you can make it really easy/fun to go through lots and lots of quotes :)

Really cool idea (and nice design). I know it was a weekend project so I bet most of my feedback are things you've already considered, but here it is:

1) It's a little hard to tell the source of the quote from just the thumbnail, unless you recognize the cover. I think there should be a title above the quote that includes Book and Author (in addition to the thumbnail of the cover)

2) It's such a cool concept, but I'd like to be able to browse by books (business books, psychology books, fiction, literature, best sellers, etc).

3) Make the page more dynamic, so you don't need to refresh the page every time you call for a new quote. This will make it much nicer/enticiing to quickly scroll through quotes. The refresh creates a bit of friction

4) Make it easier to tweet/share it out. You have a tweet/pin button in the corner, but I would integrate it into the quote box. If it's a good quote, I want to post it to other places