fearless

5 ms·

1.
by fearless 11y ago
Most of your examples have raised large amounts of VC funding. It's debatable whether they "need" the funding to success, but they certainly wanted it enough to eat the dilution.
2.
by fearless 11y ago
The $1.2M revenue number looks completely made up by the article submitter. The article makes no mention of this or any other specific monthly revenue number. I would expect a service like this to have very high churn as people export a lis
3.
by fearless 11y ago
Path's failure is a fitting reminder of the likely outcome of making your key metrics friendships and moments rather than revenue. No doubt this is just one of many overfunded social apps that will fall into the abyss this year.
4.
by fearless 11y ago
Isn't the one job of a startup CEO to keep customers happy? Pandering to VCs to the detriment of customers seems like a surefire can't miss recipe for failure. Compare the biggest exits with the biggest disasters and you'll f
5.
Why every outbound campaign needs 8 emails(salesfolk.com)
1 points by fearless 12y ago|0 comments
6.
by fearless 12y ago
This seems like it could be a real business with a lot of traction, especially with the death of Rapportive. I wonder why the founders chose to throw it away and get jobs at LinkedIn.
7.
by fearless 12y ago
How do you measure founder quality? Most startups have some amount of traction when they raise VC funding. Either hundreds of thousands of users or $1M or more in revenue, especially with the bar for Series A getting consistently higher. Th
8.
by fearless 12y ago
The post makes some valid points, but this reads more like self promotion "content marketing" for her expensive make money online by bootstrapping course than an objective analysis.
9.
by fearless 12y ago
Most likely $0. If you don't have any traction or investors, what makes you an attractive acquihire target? If it were so easy to throw together a few friends and make a million dollars via acquihire everyone would be doing it instead
10.
by fearless 12y ago
Welcome to the unfortunate reality of most internet businesses. The default outcome of a lifestyle business is a lot closer to this than a patio11 style runaway success. The lifestyle entrepreneur myth is so pervasive on HN that the common
11.
Founders On Depression(techcrunch.com)
70 points by fearless 12y ago|34 comments
12.
by fearless 12y ago
Why do you think CryptoSeal failed? What are some lessons learned from running a YC startup for the past 3 years? It would be very interesting to see a postmortem.
13.
More exec departures hit payments startup Clinkle(recode.net)
2 points by fearless 12y ago|0 comments
14.
by fearless 13y ago
One can't help but question the wisdom of hiring multiple sales people to sell merchants on accepting a method of payment that has no users.
15.
by fearless 13y ago
It's not an entirely unreasonable heuristic. The supply of startup pitches is vastly greater than the demand for them. Investors have to filter somehow. Getting a first meeting with any VC is pretty easy, even for someone with no conn
16.
Android developers, stop making casual games(blog.mixrank.com)
20 points by fearless 13y ago|12 comments
17.
by fearless 13y ago
You're making a very bold claim that being born into wealth and connections is a prerequisite for VC funding. Do you have any hard evidence to back this up? Please don't take this the wrong way: Your comments seem to reflect your
18.
Petition to impeach Judge Roger Vinson for authorizing NSA Verizon surveillance(petitions.whitehouse.gov)
120 points by fearless 13y ago|24 comments
19.
by fearless 13y ago
Is there anything that is not somehow VC-istan's fault?
20.
by fearless 13y ago
Most businesses fail because they run out of money. Do you think getting an infusion of millions of dollars makes a business more likely to fail?
21.
by fearless 13y ago
Isn't the entire premise of venture capital that you only make money off the big winners? Assuming lifestyle businesses fail at similar rates as venture-backed companies, the way to maximize returns is to invest in the companies with the bi
22.
by fearless 13y ago
I think you should definitely consider doing this sooner rather than later. From reading your comments, it looks like you make the claim that: 1. Most startups are horribly mismanaged and are run incompetently by VCs/MBAs. 2. You have a rad
23.
by fearless 13y ago
Serious question: Why aren't you building a startup right now? You have all of these theories about how a company should be run, you hate managers, you're a top .0001% programmer, etc. It seems that being a founder is the perfect position
24.
by fearless 13y ago
How much VC funding has Gitmo raised? I must have missed the Techcrunch post about the evil VCs who finance concentration camps.
25.
by fearless 13y ago
When you say something is "the ugly truth", you're presenting it as fact, not opinion. I don't mean to be rude, but the prevailing attitude on HN of "successful people are successful because they got lucky" is poisonous to say the least.
26.
by fearless 13y ago
>>We're often distracted by the Zuckerbergs or Jobs' who are abrasive and embody their own don't-care-for-anything style, but the ugly truth is that those guys got so unbelievably lucky that they never needed to actually work on the
27.
by fearless 14y ago
Yeah- I mean it would be easier for the community to give feedback if we knew your answers as to who the target audience was. i.e if your business model was to be a gambling site like Intrade, I would be very interested in participating and
28.
by fearless 14y ago
Have you answered the three big questions of validating an idea? 1. Who is the target market? 2. What problem does this solve? 3. How will you make money?
29.
by fearless 14y ago
I still don't think nonviolent drug crimes are the same as bank robbery. When you commit a bank robbery with a loaded firearm, you're telling society you have no problem taking a person's life for a little money. If people change, why is t
30.
by fearless 14y ago
The US prison system is messed up, but mostly with regard to nonviolent/drug offenders. I am very libertarian, but I don't think this is a valid criticism in this case. Robbing a bank is not "making a mistake once". Buying coke or shoplifti

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