talsraviv's comments

Good point. But it is the world's best opportunity to get leading investors on the platform to make an investment or two to give it a level of credibility others have not reached. That itself is a mini network effect problem but having them all in one room makes it much easier.

Having the world's leading angel investors on the platform would be one of the keys to establishing a successful two-sided network.

The team behind it - these guys have each built multiple successful companies with exits or massive profits - together with the YC spotlight. You're right that being in YC alone won't cut it but as we've seen it definitely amplifies the power of a great team.

The YC spotlight is particularly perfect for this concept because of demo day. They might be the only startup that can get all their most important and prominent target customers (and thought leaders) in one room, very shortly after launching.

I'm with you. I feel the same way about startup porn. It's just that when I saw Wasswa's email it hit me most programmers don't work closely with good marketers and understand this. It's an unnecessary lost opportunity. I also figured there's many hard working people like him that just needed to be told marketing (or any skill in that set) is learnable that got me motivated up to write something.

Amazing summary. I've bookmarked this comment. Thank you. It would be great if you'd elaborate on each one in a post with one story that may have led you to realize this - to make it more memorable. Heck this could probably be a textbook but a short post would get the most eyeballs. And when you post it, i'd like to be the first to know.

It's [almost] like a checklist when working on any marketing project to get inspiration from and make sure you're doing a complete job.

So true. You have a massive advantage to learn quickly because you have complete freedom to iterate as you please without waiting on anyone.

Also sort of true. @bretpiatt nailed the administrative side, but @macspoofing you are right in that we also wanted to free up equity to attract talent. It made more sense that the first equity to be set aside for employees shouldn't dilute active founders and investors if possible.

Tal here, I wrote the post and google image searched my way to that photo. Some images on the web are so ridiculous you don't believe they're real or think about them as you would if you saw them in a news context.

I reverse imaged searched to discover it's a real picture of a drunk driver killing a man and injuring 10 in Monterrey, Mexico in 2008. I apologize for those of you who had to see it, and thanks Toan for acting quickly to remove it.

can't disagree with any of that...

Free from the consequences of my actions? How do you know how I voted in the last election?

If anytime you travelled abroad you were treated like a hard-core Iraq ware supporter and Halliburton board member you'd get sick of it too. Or if every time your country vaguely became a topic for discussion things immediately devolved to view you and your nationality as not much except native american murderers and subjugators and ask you to answer for everyone else's actions in the history of your country. And when you have a well articulated answer explaining that it's more complicated than an archetypical narrative, or anything slightly well-written, they dismiss you as a highly-trained PR spokesperson lurking on forums instead of a human being with an opinion.

Yeah, it gets tiring.

As a result, you don't really want to get into details because it doesn't really sound like anyone's too open to hearing what you have to say, just looking for a fight. And then people pre-empt you by saying "stop calling me an anti-semite" and "I'm sick of you people saying ___ " while at the same time completely ignoring other important human rights abuses going on in the world, you begin to wonder why you bother engaging anyone, and instead just resort to asking to talk about it elsewhere, not when you're trying to read Hacker News.

And yes, snarky one-liners that gloss over the entire region's history evoke all of this.

Asking someone not to generalize is not the same as claiming someone is an anti-semite. I appreciate your clarification that you're not questioning Israel's right to exist, I read too much into it. Finally, thank you for helping this thread comply with Godwin's law.

As an Israeli I was really hoping Hacker News could be the one online forum where I didn't have to hear generalizations about my country's right to exist. I respect your opinion and I'm sure there's more complexity and historical awareness to mutually discuss, but please keep the snarky one-liners to Reddit.

+100 for Dreamit (C'08). The founders/investors are exactly the kind of people I didn't realize I needed as my mentors. Even though it was the first year, they had a long-term calm about them that kept me thinking constantly about what am I learning, what is the next iteration, instead of staring at bar graphs.

Being 10 feet away from other teams was amazing - we had awesome frisbee games where some of our best ideas came from, and my most trusted startup-world connections have come from working in close proximity for three months.

Of course, like the site says, a chain is as strong as its weakest link, so saving passwords in chrome/firefox or using the same one for all of them, or being victim to a phishing attack are all still just as vulnerable as they were before