waderoush's comments

I was a first-time marathoner in 2012 and I found Hal Higdon's site very useful. http://www.halhigdon.com/

FWIW, training for a marathon isn't too complicated. Start at least 18 weeks beforehand. Run about 10-11 miles during the week and do one long run on the weekend, building up to 20 miles two weeks before your race.

Yep, I got a Chrome malware notice about TechCrunch just now.

AJ Forsythe explains that in the story: "That was a function of being in college. It was an underhand toss to a roommate—‘Hey, the phone’s for you’—and the ceiling fan intercepted it."

pg briefed Xconomy on the changes this morning, and the interesting part to me was the feeling that too many failing YC startups were feuding internally over the extra cash. He said such disputes have been taking up more than half of Jessica's time recently. Now startups will have less money to argue over.

http://www.xconomy.com/san-francisco/2012/11/26/y-combinator...

I think Twitter is more like a protocol than a website; and frankly it's too important at this point to be left in the hands of Twitter Inc. I'd love to see a serious discussion about making it a community-owned standard on the same level with TCP/IP or SMTP. But I guess that could never happen in a free-enterprise-obsessed world -- unless, perhaps, Twitter proved itself to be such a bad steward that its users demanded some kind of "nationalization."

Steve and his people tell me that an e-book version coming later this year, probably iBooks first then Kindle (which is harder because of the formatting limitations in ePub).

You can't question either Eric Ries's or Steve Blank's chops as entrepreneurs. Read this piece we did at Xconomy, which includes the story of how Steve and Eric met and influenced one another: http://www.xconomy.com/san-francisco/2011/07/06/eric-ries-th...

I'm a journalist for one of the publications listed in Cision. (I'm San Francisco/Silicon Valley editor at Xconomy.) Cision is a fine company, but if I were an entrepreneur at a cash-strapped company I would never pay $2500 for a list of media contacts.

A much better (and cheaper) strategy is to read the publications that follow your industry, figure out which reporters at those publications write about your niche most often, and contact them directly with a quick summary of your company and its latest news. Most publication's websites list reporters' email addresses, or at the very least provide an address for story tips. Of course, maybe digging up this information counts as "spending countless hours," but I don't think a media strategy has to be so time-consuming. Whatever your company is working on, there are probably only five to 10 journalists who will know enough about your field to do an accurate, thoughtful story. Figure out who they are and target them directly.

By the way, my address is wroush at xconomy dot com.

Maybe I overdramatized. My point in the opening of the piece was that in the dominant Silicon Valley mythology, building a "lifestyle" company is seen as a less macho and ambitious path than building a VC-backed company that has a shot at making its founders and investors mega-rich.

That's a nice piece by the Merc -- glad they discovered you guys! Congrats Brett. It's just too bad so many journalists start by default with the "how this new thing is NOT Facebook" angle. I'm guilty of it myself, of course.

Author here. It's not ass-kissing, it's a genuine compliment -- Antonio is a good writer.

Also, I think his success with the blog posts is instructive. Antonio freely admits that he's writing "linkbait blog posts to get us free PR" (http://adgrok.com/why-founding-a-three-person-startup-with-z...). I wouldn't advise trying this unless you have something genuinely engaging to say. But you have to admit it's an inventive, low-cost way to get your startup off the ground.

It's true that there are 13 companies that pitched yesterday but haven't launched. And one that didn't pitch at all. Attendees at Demo Day aren't asked to sign NDAs. There's just a gentlemen's agreement (sexist term isn't it?) not to write, tweet, blog, etc. about the companies that haven't launched yet.

With regard to the points Harj and others make in this thread about TechCrunch, I have no idea if they have a policy of turning up their nose at companies that have already been covered elsewhere. I certainly would never agree to YC's off-the-record request for that reason. I observe it because I think the YC companies deserve a chance to control how they make their first big public splash.

YC startups tend to launch in TechCrunch, but TC by no means has a lock on YC coverage. I invite you to check out Xconomy's debrief on Demo Day and compare it to TechCrunch's version. ;-)

http://www.xconomy.com/san-francisco/2010/08/25/the-definiti...

Author of the original article here. I guess I should have said that I never glance at the Gmail ads and I have a hard time imagining why anyone would, as they are consistently irrelevant to me. As soon as I learned about a plugin that could replace the ads with something useful, I installed it.

On the other point that seems to be getting commenters riled up -- "messing with other people's content" -- I think I am on Rapportive's side. I admit that I would be seriously annoyed if someone wrote a plugin that replaced my stories on Xconomy with, say, TechCrunch stories. But that's the risk of publishing on the Web, where the viewing platform is not ultimately under your control. And if people started using such plugin widely, it would be useful feedback for me -- it would mean that I should do something to make my own stories more interesting. Google should see Rapportive as a signal that something is missing in Gmail. Either they should provide more relevant ads, or they should copy (or buy) Rapportive.

Editor of Xconomy San Francisco here. For all you startup types, Daniel makes one point that I would absolutely agree with and underscore. Don't send us press releases. It's true, we get hundreds a day. They have a magical way of making a great company sound boring. Have them ready as background material, but don't lead with them.

If you put RunKeeper in lock mode and you don't run the iPod, your iPhone should last you a whole marathon (unless you're exceptionally slow). In the last couple of releases, the company has focused a lot on power management, and I've found that it is tremendously improved over the 1.0 release.