skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Creating "booster" apps to increase the popularity of your serious Facebook application.
It seems that to get a popular Facebook app these days, you need to create a game or fun toy of some sort.

So if you would like to make a more serious app popular, perhaps you can create fun booster games/toys that direct traffic to your more serious app.
Webvan and Kozmo made millions of dollars so how do they count as companies that "can't make money"? The fact that they went out of business is irrelevant. Amazon has a similar business model, but an amazing CEO, and they're thriving.

Digg (bookmarking) is making millions of dollars. Reddit was already making money licensing their software. Delicious was sold pretty early, but could definitely generate revenue. I don't know of any online calenders except Kiko and they weren't very successful.

I'm genuinely curious if anyone can cite some actual examples of successful sites that can't make money. I believe there might be some but I don't know of any.
Is Google's Closure of Paid Video a Sign that the Merge is Imminent
They said the important part: Joe Kraus. You get that guy rooting for you inside Google and you're probably 90% of the way there.
Another something to consider-- after your user has clicked a link, where will his/her mouse be on the page that loads next?

This comes into play particularly on sites that have a lot of repetitive actions-- e.g. hotornot. If I'm voting again and again, I want the vote buttons to stay in the same position for every page load, so I don't have to hunt for it each time. That way I can click "no, no, no, yes, no" without any thought or mouse movement.
Good article. I agree that Sun is coming back strong. I've got a Sun Fire x4100M2 on the way as part of their Try and Buy program. When you join the Startup Essentials program the prices can be lower than Dell's for better equipped hardware.
Are you talking about revenue or profits? As far as I know, Webvan and Kozmo were not in the black, ever.
Fred Wilson: Time Is On Your Side, Yes It Is
I would be very, very interested to learn more about the numbers concerning what they're doing. I'm pretty convinced at this point that service is just a bad way of making money for a company, long term. Support might be a little better, but you have to be pretty sure that they're paying more than they're demanding of your time, which seems like a more difficult calculation than simply selling a product.

Actually, as someone who really loves open source, I'm thinking the model that's most interesting right now is the google/37signals strategy of using lots of OS, and contributing back to it, and making money with the 'tip of the iceberg' that you keep proprietary. Who knows, though... it's still something that's too new to know how it will all work out.
I think this works extremely well when your users are familiar with the tasks associated with the type of thing your making. But if you're creating something entirely new, they'll need more guidance from the designer to get users started.

One thing to watch out for though is that you can't always rely on what people tell you they like or want to use. There is a huge difference between what people say and what they do. Again, this difference is further magnified if the thing you're creating is something new. It is very hard for people to imagine their life with it.

Other strategies for involving your user in the design process which work very well are: contextual inquiries (to understand what things your audience needs) http://www.usabilitynet.org/tools/contextualinquiry.htm, think aloud studies (to understand how well your product is meeting those needs) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_aloud_protocol, and card sorting (to understand how the user expects the product to be organized) http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/card_sorting_a_definitive....
Coming back strong relative to dying perhaps. Sun is still in the business of significant overcharging. Their history of selling things at 1000%+ markup is hard to give up.

I've overseen the purchase of millions of dollars in server gear over the past few years and frequently had Sun quote me a price. The closest they've ever come to beating Dell, Rackable, or my no-name suppliers is trying to sell me other customers canceled orders. Buying Sun's stuff is like buying Apple's server gear: not the best use of your money.

They're super generous on eval hardware and trying to lure you in. They still have cut throat sales guys who will try to screw you in various high profit margin ways for the sake of their commissions. Dell sales is all business, efficient, and totally straight forward.

If Sun went out of business tomorrow the Open Source world would barley notice. I like Jonathan Schwartz, but that's the reality. He should split the company in half, one half to clone Red Hat's model and one to be the The Old Sun and milk the legacy cash cow.
Friday Morning at Matrix Partners
How about Flickr, feedburner, and bloglines? I don't believe any of those were cash flow positive at acquisition, and the acquisitions were not super early.

Of course most companies are private, and therefore so are their finances. But I believe there are tons of companies that fit into the category of raising VC money, getting some traction, but then not finding enough cash flow to overcome their burn rate, and then flaming out or getting acquired. For example, has netvibes made any money yet?
I'm sure they weren't in the black. That's not proof of anything though. Amazon wasn't profitable for something like the first five years even though they were making millions in revenue.

There's a lot of reasons companies fail that don't defeat the notion that you can almost certainly make money (and probably profit) off anything successful that people want.
I stopped watching at 'professional double power'

Is there anything good towards the end of the video?
The word my vocal directors always used for what I think you mean is "project." (As in "project your voice to the back of the auditorium") A quick google turned up:

http://www.paulmason.com/Support.html

http://www.paulmason.com/Resonance.html
Good post, and I'm definitely familiar with pushy hardware sales dudes.

Given all that though, my previous post still stands. The prices I'm quoted as part of the Startup Essentials program are lower than Dell's. I'm looking at a few web servers, a DB server, and a storage unit and it's coming in at 85% of the Dell cost. The servers seems a bit nicer too in the components (CPU speed, number of RAM slots, etc.)
A company doing $13B a year in sales and with 4B+ in cash is close to dying?
I'm surprised at how clean Facebook's PHP is. Very nice.
You're right that it's kind of a tough for us to really figure this out without inside financial information. I'm asking the tougher question of making money instead of value. The market really judges based on value. Google bought Feedburner for its ($100M) "value" not money-making ability.

But I do think it's smarter to build a business that can be very profitable on its own, so this is more interesting to me.

Bloglines could definitely put ads on the site and make good money. It requires so few resources to run I'm sure it could be profitable.

Flickr is like a huge SmugMug which is making good profit. Advertising and freemium would have made the founders rich on its own.

FeedBurner doesn't have any place to put ads, so I'm not sure how they could possibly make money. Their market is too competitive for them to do freemium and make much. I'd count this as the first example.
It is certainly proof of something. It is proof that they were never in the black :)

This is very relevant. Amazon, as you correctly point out, was eventually able to figure out how to "make money" (read make profits). Webvan and Kozmo were not able to do so despite being very popular. I personally used Kozmo a lot.

If you are never able to get in the black, it means you are not a sustainable business and will keep having to go to the outside world for sustainability, either from an acquisition, private investors, or IPO. I don't consider this situation making money even if you generate millions in revenue. Maybe you do. If so, I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree.
To sort of half quote Schwartz: Their current revenue is a lagging indicator of previous success. Who buys Sun these days? From what I can see it's basically governments and other big institutions. Organizations that are very slow to change but spend billions. When they finally do move to commodity vendors Sun will be either dead or a totally new company. Schwartz knows this and that's why he's trying to make sure it's the latter.
ok, so we're a new c-corporation out of north carolina, three new unc mba graduates with a fourth ruby coder out in pasadena. we have a hotmail-sized concept with a working prototype already built. it's addictive, the kids are going to love it (parents too). all we want to do is hire ourselves and knock the project into beta. we also know that if we launch and gain x users right out of the gate, we will be able to get a better deal from investors.

questions = what is x? how many users does a hot new web 2.0 service need before jaded vc's start paying attention? what are the other eye openers in your opinion? until i read this article, i had been of the point of view that you should turn down all investment until you launch if at all possible. is that correct or am i wrong?

- Srini
Check Silicon Mechanics, Rackable.com, or just forward Dell your Sun quote and have them beat it if you want. For a small amount of gear though it doesn't really matter much. I'm certainly not saying Sun makes bad stuff either (they do overstate their differentiation though), just that they charge a premium like Apple does.
BijanBlog: Woulda Coulda Shoulda
Knowledge is power, 30 books every young entrepreneur should read
Seems like a pretty good list, but do we really need to hear the google story (again) or give a damn about who backed Webvan?
contact me! AIM: cellis5078 or cameronellis dot ellis at gmail dot you know what. I'm currently in the process of getting a team (its tough). Or, check out kongregate like someone else said.
No. If you are that important that your downtime is receiving press coverage, it means that you probably don't need it. You need happy users.
You can find summaries of some of these on my site: http://www.squeezedbooks.com

Some of them lend themselves very well to being compressed, like 'crossing the chasm'. Others, like 'founders at work' are really impossible to summarize.

I find it sort of interesting that he lists both 'The Black Swan', as well as the stories/autobiographies. One of the points of the former is that a lot of the big successes are just luck - being in the right place at the right time and having enough skills to capitalize on the opportunity. But beyond that, there is often nothing in particular that can be copied to 'achieve success'. It's an interesting book, and I'm still wrestling with it.
If you've read those books sure, but i think its really important to understand the history behind some of these great companies.

Really depends on your perspective - i got a lot of comfort out of immersing myself into those books during depressing times.

eBoys gives you an interesting perspective on the venture capital industry from an outsiders perspective, so i think a vanilla statement like 'give a damn about who backed webvan' may not apply to people who genuinely don't know about it or haven't read the book.

What books do u like aswanson?
Anyone have any opinions on whether or not a Cease & Desist claiming I broke US Copyright is actually valid for this? I believe I am legally entitled to post their code, and though their ToS says otherwise, I don't know if their ToS applies to source code.
If you redistribute copyrighted material without the copyright holder's permission, you're breaking the law. It doesn't matter how you obtained it.
If you have to read 30 more books before starting your business, you aren't an entrepreneur, you're an academic.
Where is the rest of the site's code?
so many books. such little time.
Free business book summaries
That's not really true - most CEOs are voracious readers with personal libraries of thousands of volumes. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/21/business/21libraries.html. Bill Gates in particular is known as an avid bookworm - every other year, he spends a week doing nothing but reading, often for 18 hours a day. http://scout.wisc.edu/Reports/ScoutReport/2005/scout-050401-...

30 books also shouldn't take you too long. If you devote yourself to reading full-time, it should be between 10 days and 2 weeks. If you read them at a more leisurely pace (subway time, before bed, waiting for dinner to cook, other downtime), it might take you 3 months or so. Either way, the benefits - particularly with this set of books - far outweighs the costs.

(If anyone cares, I've read 12 out of the 30 on this list, and am hoping to get more out when I visit the library this afternoon.)
I haven't read The Black Swan, but I read Fooled by Randomness. He has a secondary point that because most successes are just luck and yet people don't want to admit it, there are large profit opportunities to be made by betting on improbable events. That's really entrepreneurship in a nutshell - usually, if you look at the businesses that actually net billion dollar payouts while they're younger, you'll say "There's no possible way that can succeed." And that's why the founders make so much money when they do.

(Of course, 99% of the businesses where there's no possible way it can succeed don't actually succeed, and you get back to Taleb's argument again.)
Reading is good. Correction. Reading is GR8. The only issue is that you have a few hours in a day to focus on your startup and you tend to translate any minutes and hours into features and debugging, thus sparing 20 hours for a book can be an issue. Also one issue is that 95% of books in any given category are mostly copy and paste books. What I suggest is to ask 3 people you consider as role models WHAT BOOK WOULD YOU RECOMMEND? You will end up with 5 or 6 titles, but they will be way more helpful. If you admired me I would suggest "THE MYTHICAL MAN MONTH" "WORLD IS FLAT" , and I have not read the following one but every one here talks about it "FOUNDERS AT WORK"
"The only issue is that you have a few hours in a day to focus on your startup and you tend to translate any minutes and hours into features and debugging"

I've found that they don't directly compete. I usually read books when I'm a.) mentally spent and unable to work on much of anything intellectually or b.) in a place where I don't have a computer, eg. the subway. If I weren't reading I'd probably be watching TV or posting on news.YC or something like that.

Also - I'd highly recommend against reading only 5-6 titles on a subject. You want that 95% overlap, because the point of reading books isn't to gather information (there's Google for that...), it's to train your gut instinct with other people's mistakes. All books are highly contextual - after all, other people's advice is only relevant when their situation is similar to yours - so you need to triangulate between them and figure out what's relevant in which situations. You're trying to develop the intuition that says "No, this is a bad idea" when you're about to do something stupid, and the way to do that is to read enough about stupid things other people have done that your mode of thinking shifts you away from that.

You know you've succeeded when you forget your sources.
Entrepreneurs face some pretty tough questions at a very early stage. Should I take Angel or VC money? How much money should I raise? How much equity should I give up? How much equity should I grant to early employees?

The math equation is correct, but the likely outcomes are nearly impossible to estimate. I have been on the management team of 5 startups and advised many others. There are some "norms" and guidelines for how much to raise at each stage, how much equity to give up, and even how much stock to grant employees as you grow the company.

I wrote an in depth blog on these questions, too long to detail here, but Paul is on the right track. For more details see How much Equity for Investors and Employees?

http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2007/08/how-m...
at a high-level i agree with the post, however practically speaking, you're overlooking several significant issues:
1) diff between preferred vs common shares
2) liquidation preferences in terms sheets
3) supply/demand for investor capital in the market
4) competitive position of VC/company in the market
5) exit targets / preferences / restrictions by investors / entrepreneurs

these 5 factors (& many others) have DRAMATIC impact on the 1/(1-n) calculation you mention. while i don't disagree with you in theory, practically applied the outcomes matter a fuckload.

see leo dirac's presentation on term sheet liquidation preferences for just one perspective on this:
http://www.embracingchaos.com/2007/08/vc-term-sheets-.html

- dave mcclure
http://500hats.typepad.com/
Women, yes, but I'm fairly sure that's evolutionarily hardwired. I have absolutely no sense for clothing on either women or men. Especially not color clash. I was presented with what I was later told was the absolute most clashing colors, period (a green and an almost-green), and had no idea that they were particularly bad.
I agree partially, I am not saying that you shouldn't read the most you can. I used to read one book a week. I found that when you read different subject, then that is good, but when you read the same subject over and over again, you usually end up with the same data or you end up with so much information that you can hardly act up on it. Reading to learn about entrepreneurship is good, but DOING is much better and I still believe that reading 40 books about "lisp" is not going to make you better than reading 5 great ones and using the rest of your time practicing. Although the point of reading is not solely to gather information, it automatically comes with it. The server between our ears stores it all. No delete. Rarely. At the end if you want to read 30 books that are truly valuable to you, then read HISTORY before and after the major World War and Market crashes. Read about Ricardo competitive advantage theory.

Success alone is word we shall use with care. Successful at is better. And you are successful when your grandkids' kids read about you (of course in a positive manner) in their class. Most likely you won't be here to know that you have succeeded.
How much is "college' important to startup entrepreneurs?
I've used both, and Blueprint is way ahead in terms of design sense. It also doesn't require obscene amounts of nesting. The constant attention to the baseline is a huge win (the Blueprint links to relevant authors about using it in design).
New way of filtering RSS feeds
I'm tired of all these books and articles. A lot of them are fun to read, but it seems like nowadays you spend more time reading than doing. Is it really a prerequisite for any entrepreneur to read so much?
read The Black Swan - it's fantastic. It's been 3 weeks and I'm still thinking about all the implications. Also, read "Accidental Empires".
Tooling and integration are definitely major points. I guess any time you get the whole app stack from a single vendor; you're likely to get a more integrated product (os/400, db2, RPG and green screens; ...maybe not.....:)), while at the same time forfeiting opportunity to pick the individual components that suits you the best. You're obviously more dependent on developments at your vendor as well. So if you believe MS is dying, you should probably choose another database. Considering Word's dictionary includes RPG, yet neither Postgres nor MySQL, that belief might not even be that farfetched:).

Now, for what I am trying to do, easy access to a proven distributed transaction infrastructure is non negotiable. MS provides this. So does Oracle, and certainly IBM. The Java world provides this in spades as well, but I'm not sure how nicely the popular open source db's play along. Last time I looked at Postgres, this seemed at best a medium priority work in progress. Since it doesn't take too many systems left in disagreement about the status of a million dollar transfer to annoy the heck out of some people, in this case I'd rather stick with one of the known entities.

For somewhat similar reasons, I prefer MSSQL's ability to replicate in synchronous mode over the asynchronous / possibly lossy replication that MySQL ships with (.net client auto failover is a nice added bonus). I believe there are add on products for MySQL and Postgres to accomplish the same, but that they are neither free nor used, developed and tested as widely as MS' version.

In addition, MSSQL comes with non rdbms features that Postgres/MySQL lacks. Some of these may have Unix/Linux/open source, or at least Java, competitors/equivalents, but since I intend to use several of them, combined they add a lot of value to Sql Server. For example, a pet peeve of mine is that the root of at least some evil is doing synchronously that which could be done asynchronously (obviously not db replication:)). Since my app is financial enough to 'require' strong transactional support, Service Broker asynchronous transactional message queues alone might have been enough to sell me on Sql Server.

I'm also assuming many end users will be Excel jockeys. Hence, giving them access to slice and dice 'their' data in Analysis Services cubes (still trying to wrap my head around the security implications of this one), and integrate said cubes into their own worksheets, instead of just providing canned reports, looks advantageous. Less work on my part as well:).

And, although I have written my share of database transfer and replication scripts in Perl and Python, the latest SSIS seems a better tool for that purpose. I'm assuming I need to generate reports involving data from multiple outside systems.

Damn, this ended up being a long post. Hopefully some will find it valuable. If nothing else, the pills I popped are finally winning the war against my Saturday 'morning' hangover:).
Hrm... yes, on the other hand, there is definitely a trait that I recognize in other people because I see it in myself, which is that of the "knowledgeable person". We take pride in knowing, in being informed, in reading a lot, but at times are less 'doers'.... Waterhouses and Shaftoes, so to speak.

To some degree, I think this trait deals with a desire to have all possible knowledge prior to taking a decision. However, at times, that sort of 'maximizing' behavior is counterproductive when compared with someone who gathers 'enough' information, and plunges ahead.
I believe Netflix is built on .net. They might not be Google, Yahoo or Amazon, but damn... .
This is a great concept for books and articles in general. A while ago I was thinking a collaborative book summarizing site would be a good idea; if you could pull it off, scaling to massive amounts of summaries would be easier.
I also tend to lean too far to the "Waterhouse" side of the spectrum.

I think a lot of the problem is that people are mentally adding "before you start your startup" to the title, when nobody's actually said so. There's no such thing as "prepared enough" to start a company; you learn what you can and prepare as best you can, then just do it and clean up your messes along the way. The books above will probably help, and some may change how you position your initial idea, but it's not gonna kill you to read them after getting started.
No. But it helps.
Distributed karma: an idea for fixing recommendation systems
The limit of 70 characters per line on your website makes your essays easier to read -- whether on a large screen, printed, or more recently, on the iPhone. I've always liked that. A while back I started resizing wide texts in my browser because I realized from reading your essays how much easier it is to read smaller columns of text.
Disgusting... looks completely procedural. They could really clean up their code with a decent object naming convention and __autoload