skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Excellent point. As I read all of the "only 1% of our users ever install more than once", I think back on the games that I've played a lot and I lose count of the number of times I've reinstalled them. In all cases, it's at least three and more often many more. Sometimes because I also want to play it on my laptop occasionally. Sometimes because I move to a new machine. And sometimes because Windows is crap and sometimes self-destructs beyond repair. I don't think I'm all that much of outlier...I only change machines every couple of years. So the DRM in EA games is just so old-fashioned and customer-hostile. It'd never cross my mind to pirate a game...but it'd also never cross my mind to buy something that I know is going to give me hassle in the future. And I have reasonable confidence that EA's DRM will piss me off at some point, if I ever have to come in contact with it.

But Steam doesn't bother me one bit. I've not yet installed it on another machine, but my understanding is that when I do, I'll just download Steam again, re-enter my login, and wait a while for the games to sync up.
According to a Reuters September 23rd is when the first Android device comes out for T-Mobile.

http://www.engadget.com/2008/09/10/t-mobile-to-offer-android...
In your example attractive blond needs anonymous dude much less than he needs her. In the OP however the match looks more even. Whats missing is specifics. Hardly anyone would jump on "enterprise software", and those who do should be looked at with suspicion.
To Skype or Not to Skype?
I see Negative Nancy is already here. Jees, cut the guy a break.
The problem is not apple. The problem is the entire mobile industry

About 5 years ago I set out to do my first mobile startup. Using RSS to SMS to provide near real time traffic updates. In the beginning the problem was to get a shortcode and SMS gateway provider. No possible way for a startup with little money to directly hook to the carrier gateway.

Then I said forget it, let's morphe it a bit and distribute games for small time developers. Cool. I already knew about 6 or 7 games developers who committed to let the startup distribute their games, but we quickly found the pain because some carriers did not allow downloads unless you went thorugh their certification program.

I also built a mobile marketing tool to help merchants geo-target their offerings. Cool. But qucikly enough you find that you have to continuously pay for each SMS, hence there was no sealing (at least not at the stage I was in) and you had to depend on a third party that can shut you down at any given time. Heck even Twitter had its service turned down by T-mobile for a short amount of time.

Anyway you go in the mobile industry, save one, you are dealing with restrictions. That is why I am saying the problem is not JUST Apple. It is the industry in general. If you create apps you will sooner or later hit a barrier. In one case the barrier will be Apple, in an other it will be your SMS gateway provider, in an other it will be T-Mobile, in another it will be BlackBerry certificates.

That is not to say there is no way around. There are applications that are truly independent of carrier rules or mobile platforms. Applications that you write once and they work on every cell phones, every carrier. It is just that developers want to bet on their apps being approved all the way to the top, or they think that if they hit a tiny 1% of the market they will make it big.
I don't mean to be overly negative, but 1) I don't really want to see this kind of stuff here, and 2) I don't think this is really an effective way to find a cofounder.
Someone proposed to start something like "iphone developer's trade union" for collective bargaining.

Locked-down APIs are one thing, but if Apple keeps up with their app-removal policies, NDAs and lack of communication on important issues, it will come to unionization and they will not be happy.
Timelessness
While Yammer seems an interesting spin on things, I'd much prefer to have this functionality contained within Twitter in the form of private groups - purely from a convenience point of view if anything.

If the Twitter dev team were able to give me everything I wanted, then I'd want the ability to start a private group with people, where updates into that group are protected from my public timeline.

I'd also like the ability to add custom tabs onto my twitter UI so that I could get instant context of any conversation happening within my group, while maintaining the ability for these messages to get forwarded to my mobile device if I wanted.

I would pay for a service like that, absolutely.
You don't want people looking for co-founders on hacker news? Why?
I was not reffering to this particular case. I was reffering to applications being shut down left and right by Apple, T-Mobile, Blackberry etc...

The mobile industry roadmap is fundamentally hard to comprehend and if you play it in long enough you will not be surprised when Apple shuts down app A or app B because you knew from the get go that this illusion of the Iphone being open is just that.
HN is the perfect place to find people like this/us.

I'm not saying I want to see HN become a job board. But, this sure looks like a credible and serious request to me.
I have no idea why everyone is bitching about Yammer- it's great!

We're using it to push out all the status stuff, random ideas for down the line, links, and deploy info. If Twitter allowed private networks, tagging, and threaded conversations we'd use Twitter. But, unfortunately, Twitter missed the boat and has failed to move forward in this area, leaving an opening for Yammer.

And guess what? They executed brilliantly! Good for them.

Now, to be fair, we're very decentralized being in Seattle, Nashville, and Budapest, so this is pretty much ideal for us. Yammer for general 'here's what I'm up to' stuff, IM and Skype for longer conversation, and email inbetween.

I like the example from Yammer's presentation- 75% of emails you would have no problem having other people see. Hell, it'd be a great resource- yet, emails are not easily seen by people outside of the original recipients (the founders, for a startup).

With Yammer you can just publish the 75%, which are then sent out to everyone now and in the future. Someone six months down the line can look up #excelgeekery and see how our financial model has evolved, or check out #design to see the design progression. It becomes a training tool, a way for getting new hires into the flow of things, and a resource for everyone involved.

How exactly is this a bad thing? It's a win for everyone involved!
It hasn't hurt iTunes

Really? I'm a big online music buyer. I've bought well over 1000 songs online per year for the last several years, and I've never bought a song from iTunes, because I don't buy DRM-encumbered music (for both pragmatic and ideological reasons). I've bought from eMusic, AudioLunchbox, direct from artists like Radiohead and Girl Talk, Amie Street, Amazon Unbox and probably several other places that don't come to mind.

Assuming there are at least some number of people like me (and while I like to think I'm a unique flower, I'm pretty sure I'm not entirely alone), iTunes is making zero sales to some of the heaviest music buyers because of DRM. Obviously, it hasn't stopped iTunes from being the biggest online music seller...but we're still early in the online music distribution saga.

There's still plenty of time for iTunes to fall out of favor...and the longer people are exposed to the inconveniences of DRM, the more likely they are to come to distrust it and choose other options. iTunes just happens to have done it extremely well and close to transparently, as long as you're doing the things Apple thought about. But, that'll change, as more people want to put songs on their non-iPhone mobile devices, and more people want to use their non-Apple/non-Microsoft OS-based netbooks to play the songs they've "bought" from iTunes.

iTunes also had the advantage, at launch, of having as its only high profile competitors companies that were even worse than iTunes. All of the other big mainstream services were "subscription" services, where you basically got a radio station for your computer that allowed you to pick the songs, and if you stopped paying, you lost your songs. Everybody can see the stupidity in that...it takes longer to see why buying from iTunes is stupid.

So, I think it's pretty early to say iTunes hasn't been hurt by DRM, even if you assume that I'm far enough of an outlier that people like me not buying from iTunes is an acceptable trade off.
I don't think it's a necessarily a bad thing, but I think if it happened more often, it could be. I'm not sure why, but this particular job/cofounder ad just rubbed me the wrong way. It's like a personals ad with no picture. No information about the startup, and very little information about the person.

Two paragraphs of generic superlatives is not really doing anyone good, is it?
It would be nice if people looking for cofounders here participated some before abusing it for self serving purposes. Earn some karma first.
I think I just lost a little more faith in humanity. Thanks for that.
A friend who played with the new Android device say that there's no way it's comparable to the iPhone... but yes, this one device isn't what Android is about.
At the beginning its a bit ambiguous. It could be either $100,000 in cash. With some undefined amount of AWS credits, or, $100,000 worth in cash and AWS credits.

Nevertheless, they didn't contradict themselves.
It's all fun and games to tell other people to make something targeted at "customers with their hair on fire", but in reality most people's basic needs are met. Are there any "needs" that you have that aren't being satisfied right now? In many cases it's best to make something people want first and get them so used to using it that they really NEED it.

As an example, did anyone really need email before it became ubiquitous? Or was it something that a few people wanted that became an absolute need after it achieved mass adoption?
that's probably true. We weren't getting VC funding and had a stream of revenue to keep it going for a couple years.
This is a critical point that too many people here miss. If Apple wants its phone to be a "smartphone" and compete against another smartphones, then it will be compared to its current peers, NOT against cheapo feature phones and definitely not feature phones from 5 years ago.

When you do start comparing the iPhone to its current competitors, none of what you said makes sense. To go over it quickly.

-You can use SMS gateways that charge about 4cents a text.

-You don't have to use SMS at all. You can make an app that either polls a server or listens for pushed data.

- "Blackberry certificates" are an $20 ID, which you only need to use internal APIs. At no point will RIM place any restrictions on what you can do with its powerful SDK.

If you set out to develop a BB app, and no point will you have to worry about your app making through some byzantine bureaucracy and whether or not it can be brought to market. It'll be a good day when you can say the same of the iPhone.
Very good article thanks -- why am I not surprised? :-) Few minor points. Sometimes, not often, your initial valuation may affect the subsequent rounds (they shouldn't but may). Crowded cap tables are also problematic. Initial employees contributions, however small, will entitle them to more shares that the later ones -- which may cause discontent. Finally think about how many 6.7% you can give up?

I am not even going to get into option analysis; talk about introducing non-linearities. But even in a linear stream Paul's footnote that YC combinator brings to table a lot more than 6.7% (?) is probably correct, but it should also take into account the effects of the multiplier of the later rounds and options on both side.
Ask YC: How Serious Does Your Team Take Blogging?
Had an opportunity to partner up with a more established company here in the community about a week ago, and backed out. It's turning out for the better as we're learning a lot of things here in the office, thought we do miss having some resources to expedite some processes. It's no big deal.

However, round table discussions it becomes painfully apparent the team all supported the same reason for backing out as I did: we didn't like their blog.

I had everyone go to the site, try to get a feel for this other company. Look at their porfolio, and try to get a feel for the type of clients this partner works with. Everyone came back and said the blog just didn't feel authentic. It felt like they were trying to be niche bloggers and didn't actually try to communicate with people. It was stale. Contrast this to the other huge firms here in town who blog about just about anything, you can see there's a real sense of character emanating from these places (which says a lot considering one of the other companies is made up of 4 guys and a dog, yet they produce absolutely the best design work in the city, the other has repeatedly been considered the best marketing company in the south east).

This got me to thinking about something that was already troubling me: there are plenty of companies in my community that are on the web, but use their blogs as glorified event calendars. Their entire archives are repeats of "Don't for get about this event, coming up on this date". There's hardly any company philosophy or jovial conversation to the readers going on. It's wasting valuable space and it's impacting the market when you see things like this.

My question to YC: How does your team approach blogging? Is it a message board where you post ideas, and your fans communicate with you? Is it an alert system where you only talk about software? Or is it a calendar where all you do is say "Don't forget tomorrow is bagel day, come by and see us!"

Share with us your blogging philosophy.
The amount of money that some of these startups have already taken is mind blowing. What the heck are they spending it on? I was under the (wrong) impression that the vast majority of these companies had taken between $0 and $500,000.
Business Plans No Longer Required
I am now raising my second round of financing and have never been asked for a business plan - don't waste your time writing one.

I am running a silicon valley start up. I raised $300k from friends / family and am now very close to raising a substantial series A from venture capitalists. We have pitched to numerous VCs and are in due diligence with 3 of them now. No one - co-founders, employees, lawyers, advisors, investors have ever asked for a business plan.

We have a powerpoint that we update as we refine our strategy, and an excel financial plan, but are pleased that we have not had to keep a 40 page word document up to date through this process.

At business school, we had competitions to write business plans, and start-up books are full of "how to write the plan" - but this does not look necessary now.....DO NOT WASTE YOUR TIME!

Thoughts?
my wife responded with "not happening"- I've wanted separate beds (mostly jokingly) for awhile.
No one outside the tech world knows or cares what Android is. Unless it's on a damn sexy phone it won't make a dent.
I think the point being made was that the equation given (I haven't read the article, only this thread.) implies if X = $1000 and Y = $1001, then you should give away X/Y or 99.9% of the company. I think it should be "keep", not "give away". Or, alternatively, give away (Y-X)/Y.
Maybe it's just me but I'm calling a major BS on the $155k/m profit claim.

1) Assuming he got 100k visitors per month

2) Assuming each arb gets him $0.10 per click.

3) Assmuning 50% of the visitors click 1 ad (and that's wildly optimistic)

His profit would be 50k x $0.10 = $5k/mth

If he were to get $155k in profit per month. he needs to get about 3 million visitors per month. I checked Alexa, Compete and his site is nowhere that figure.

Not sure what's his motive in inflating the profit figure though. He's only going to attract more competition to his field and kill his business in the process.

Maybe he's planning to write an ebook to convince people into believing that it is easy to earn that much with search arb and hence, he'll use the NYtimes article as evidence.

With each ebook selling for $99.99 and 100% profit margin, it'll take him only 1550 sales/month to meet his imaginary $155k profit claim. Now, that's a business plan!
As of at least 10.4 the trash can becomes an eject icon when you drag a disk.
It's certainly true that 'profit' does-not-infer 'value'.

But nonetheless, I think they are adding value. Here's why i think that:

A. Customer utility (for a subset of customers) is higher for search results presented in the style of Sourcetool than in the style of Google. (i.e. Google isn't all things to all men - no shame in that).

B. Those customers do not know about Sourcetool, but do know about Google. (market inefficiency = imperfect knowledge)

So assuming this customer ultimately wants sourcetool style results, there are three steps to be taken:

0. Customers goes to www.google.com

1. Google refers them to Sourcetool

2. Source tool provides the desired services (even if that includes serving an ad)

In this scenario, both Google and Sourcetool should capture the value associated with giving the customer what they want - they both played a part.

I dont know if both parties are capturing value, but its certainly true that they both could. Google gets paid by the advertiser who places the ad served by AdSense, so even if Google's two transactions with Sourcetool are net negative, Google may well be coming out net positive with the inclusion of the transaction of the AdSense advertiser.

Seems to me that Google should merely be setting is rev-sharing terms with Sourcetool to ensure that both parties capture value.

tom saffell
[ASK HN] Splitting equity
Hello HN,

We are a small tech startup in very early stage we have a product partially built and had a beta going to validate our idea. Currently we are expanding our team. Also, we are changing the roles of a few key team members. We are really struggling to decide how to split the equity.

Our leading founder is taking a passive role now due to several unfortunate visa issues, and a new addition to the team is bringing high value proposition to the team. However, it is very hard to quantify value each member is bringing to the team and give it a number. How did you decide to split your company? How do you quantify each team member’s contribution even before we launch the product?

Please point me to a good resource where I can learn about how to go about finding answers to these questions.
I owe my cofounder relationship to my blog, and the idea for my company only came to me after writing about what sort of thing I wanted to work on.

That said, it's not exactly a blog for the company. Our intentions are, though, that as we build this thing (a compressed air powered scooter) we'll post more and more that's of interest. We'll have a little photoblog, which I think will give investors and readers and prospective engineers a window into the operations of the company, and might build up some buzz. It's also a soapbox, which I tend to enjoy. :-)

I put a ton of time into my blog though. About 1 - 2 days in the writing/editing phase, and a pipeline for research and thinking and trying out the ideas in conversation is weeks or months long.
What rubbed me the wrong way is the power structure is in this relationship. He baits people with a few fluffy paragraphs and has the pick of the litter with responses. He chooses the mate because he gets the other guy to tip their hand. Thus it's not a matching of equals, not a friendship, but an awkwardly arranged employer-employee relationship.

Also, like dating online... you have to wonder if a guy that can run a successful startup with 5 employees already (not a menial task at all and would definitely suggest having an established network in Canada), why would he need to look for a partner online in the first place?
This is getting a little boring. Obviously Apple are going to reject apps that are a little too close to their existing apps, or might cause offense, or dumb down their product.

They built it, they own the ecosystem, so they get to decide.

Don't like it? Write a webapp instead.
I read only some of these comments and I have to say: EASY !!!

This is static analysis of a single decision; and it has to be viewed with those limitations in mind.

Option analysis and risk, nor is dilution after each round is talked about here. Yes if the Google founders had given shares left an right they would be in serious trouble making isolated decisions. Nonetheless, it is hard if not impossible to bring mathematical rationality to something fairly dynamic, if not irrational.
Give me a &*^%ing break
Good for you. I don't think, though, that one size fits all in this situation.
What is an effective way to find a cofounder? I sort of just lucked in to it for my situation. We should have an Ask HN/YC about that once this one is buried..
"Ask HN: Looking for hard-working, ambitious employee"?
So let me get this straight...yammer should have won TC50 because no one would use their crappy product if they didn't win?

Fail.
+ "...willing to discuss equity|profit-sharing in future"
Ok. I'm going to eat my words now.

He did get 3million visits per month.

http://www.quantcast.com/sourcetool.com/traffic
(Change the period to All-Time)

Massive drop from 3million visits in April 06 to 100k in April 08 and now 10k in Aug 08.

Amazing if he attracted the 3 million people to his site purely with Adwords alone.

I wonder how many terms he has to bid for (> 100k?)
From a standing start, iTunes became the #1 music retailer in the US in less than 7 years. You don't matter to them.
Yes, this has been common knowledge for the past 8 years to any SV entrepreneur who didn't go to business school.
The web, at least: http://ben.web.cern.ch/ben/TCPHIST.html
I think Yammer is hilarious. The thing is, I don't think they're trying to be funny.

Twitter:

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

Yammer:

Yammer is a tool for making companies and organizations more productive through the exchange of short frequent answers to one simple question: “What are you working on?”

Now, my latest pet project...

h8ter:

h8ter is a service for malcontents, hostiles and haters to communicate and stay hateful through the exchange of quick, malicious answers to one simple question: What do you hate?

http://h8ter.org/
Feel free to let me know if I am beating a dead horse; but it seems (e.g. matasano etc) like you have extensive expertise/knowledge here and I'm interested in your opinion.

My next questions are about DRM in the general context of content protection. Do you think it will ever be difficult to (find and) download an unprotected Top 40 single from the Internet? An HDTV rip of a television show? Will the "DRM ecosystem" be able to secure popular content in the future, thereby having a significantly detrimental effect on piracy? Is the security of BD+ the beginning of a trend in next-generation content protection, or an anomaly?

What I'm really trying to puzzle out is whether DRM prevents, or will prevent in the future, enough piracy (and convinces pirates to purchase? Very hard metric to quantify) to warrant the substantial inconvenience it places on legitimate customers.
Currently on the front page: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=303101

Also, http://paulgraham.com/equity.html
Soft economy hits entrepreneurs and small business harder