Hello all - my name is Saumil Mehta and since I guess I'm the mastermind behind this whole thread it behooves me to reach out and respond.

First of all, I'm sorry to jason_slack for the major inconvenience caused by my email. It was written by me, came from my work email account (saumil.mehta AT getlocbox.com, in case you care to know), was sent 1-1 not en masse (you can check the headers) and was in no way intended to get anyone ticked off.

Secondly, yes. I've emailed well over 100 people personally in the last 15 days. A bunch of the emails have had very similar body copy so that is also accurate. I read Hacker News a decent bit and always search around for folks doing frontend work by using the search box and if I like their submissions/comments and sometimes if I just find their username intriguing or entertaining I poke around for their bio for their email and send them the note you see above. I do it nights and weekends after my "day job".

Thirdly, I work at and run a venture-backed company in San Francisco. It's the best job I've ever had and as everyone knows, learning from and working with good folks is paramount. It is also challenging to connect w/ the same folks.

With that backdrop set, I will admit freely that I like to ask for help. A lot. I ask lots of people. I cold email a lot of people. I do it with potential customers, potential partners, potential investors, potential folks that might be interested in contracting w/ us or joining our team. I always do it respectfully IMHO. Hell, I've even done it to Patrick Vlaskovits who was kind enough to respond in my stead on this page (hey Patrick!).

The outreach I discuss above has actually been excellent. It has yielded lots of fun conversations over email and Skype and several great phone and in-person conversations with folks in the community. I used to be a (decent but never great) developer. I love shooting the shit w/ other developers. A lot of it goes nowhere because most folks are busy at their day jobs or startups or are booked for contracts or don't care to work w/ us after talking w/ us. Some of it has resulted in freelancing contracts that has really helped my startup. That's all par for the course but a great investment of my time and (hopefully) anyone that takes time out of their busy day to talk to me.

In case you care, the response rate that I tabulated manually in my Google Apps account has been well north of 25%. That tells me that folks are, generally speaking, happy to talk to me and that I'm not wasting their time or trying to sell them timeshares.

I have had exactly 2 people tell me to go take a hike over email. That's ok too. When it happens I always apologize for the inconvenience and move on. But by and large the Hacker News community has been fantastic to connect with and learn from.

Lastly, a philosophical point. We all know startups are hard and millions of dollars of funding does nothing to change that. The only way to hack it after being at it for 18 months, I've found, is to ask for help very proactively, even of folks I don't know. It has stood me in great stead in every endeavor - fundraising, contracts, partnerships, customers, office space leasing, personal sanity maintenance, you name it. I hope you will agree and if you don't, feel free to email me or call me at (415) 322-9308 and flame me over the phone in the middle of my work day :)

Thanks all and good night!