dhouston

10 ms·

31.
by dhouston 17y ago
This is dangerous advice; failing fast is way better than failing slow. To get to (in your example) breakeven in year 2, you better be showing traction in year 1 after launch, or at least signs of life, which they were not. No one liked or
32.
by dhouston 17y ago
Article said a couple years after going public he sold his remaining stake, bringing his total gains to $100mm (presumably cash.)
33.
by dhouston 17y ago
Dropbox is hiring -- we need great Python (ideally C/C++ too) hackers. YC '07, later backed by Sequoia and Accel, growing like crazy (almost 2 million users, up from <100k this time last year) jobs@getdropbox.com, please put "HN" in the
34.
Dropbox (YC S07) looking for lead automation/QA hacker (Python/C++)(dropbox.theresumator.com)
34 points by dhouston 17y ago
35.
by dhouston 17y ago
Having gone down both the ramen-profitable and the traditional-VC roads, here are some pitfalls that deserve mention with the former. The two are not mutually exclusive, and the angel/VC road has its own well-known brambles, but anyway: - Y
36.
Dropbox (YC 07) needs a nasty systems engineer(dropbox.theresumator.com)
103 points by dhouston 17y ago
37.
by dhouston 17y ago
Hopefully I won't feel stupid posting this, but I wished someone had done the same thing when I applied. (pg -- if you'd rather I not share this, feel free to delete) Original Dropbox YC app: http://files.getdropbox.com/u/2/app.html Had t
38.
by dhouston 17y ago
If they can get the trademark, they can maybe win a domain dispute via ICANN: http://www.icann.org/en/dndr/udrp/policy.htm if they can prove registration in bad faith and that the owner has no legitimate interest. If the twitvid.com guys
39.
by dhouston 17y ago
as a starting point, "how to win friends and influence people" by dale carnegie (less weird than it sounds)
40.
by dhouston 17y ago
Probably what happens when no one's in charge and the legal, backwards compatibility, etc. teams have veto power over the UX people. See also: (re: windows vista shutdown UI) http://moishelettvin.blogspot.com/2006/11/windows-shutdown-c...
41.
by dhouston 17y ago
prepay is a good tactic for small customers -- getting the entire lifetime value up front in most cases. but why are you bothering with customers spending <$1/mo? (we avoided pay-as-you-go for this reason)
42.
by dhouston 18y ago
Patent link: http://www.google.com/patents?id=K7MoAAAAEBAJ&dq=uniloc+... didn't serial-code-based shareware registration schemes exist before the 1993 filing date? certainly shareware and the concept of "registering" did -- maybe the
43.
by dhouston 18y ago
shit happens. getting rejected is part of the entrepreneur's job description :) fortunately, YC lets you try again. my first YC app (for my first company, an online SAT prep which I ran for a few years) was rejected, and their critiques wer
44.
by dhouston 18y ago
for this, no -- tim wanted some help with his charity effort, so we put something together quickly. otherwise, we use analytics, split testing and surveying all the time to drive business decisions, like what policies to set, what features
45.
by dhouston 18y ago
congrats sam!
46.
by dhouston 18y ago
well, they do charge more than the competition ;)
47.
by dhouston 18y ago
the fundamentals haven't changed; the gateway drugs are just different :) php and rails tutorials, html, flash, even custom myspace profiles (for example) are the BASIC for today's kids. then you get your facebook apps, iphone apps, etc as
48.
by dhouston 18y ago
and to preserve your "orangeness", you might as well fire off smartass comments as they occur to you even if they don't contribute to the conversation. it's the HN equivalent of rewarding thats-what-she-said jokes, and it'll just be a diffe
49.
by dhouston 18y ago
congrats pg and jessica! start teaching him python :)
50.
by dhouston 18y ago
nice job mark & jason -- clever & well executed. that said, it's the marketing equivalent of a lottery ticket; stunts can be huge (for example, our critical mass at dropbox came from one carefully-crafted digg post) but only if they
51.
by dhouston 18y ago
they're not quite the same. if you raise an absurd amount of cash -- say $50mm on $500mm pre -- your bar for even a 2x return is over a billion dollars, eliminating virtually all your possible exits. especially in this environment.
52.
by dhouston 18y ago
congrats again peter :)
53.
by dhouston 18y ago
almost certainly wasn't voluntary... note the part about DAG claiming the financing should be renegotiated after the business model and projections "changed" suddenly after the financing closed.
54.
by dhouston 18y ago
jonathan -- thanks for the writeups & best of luck at google. you'll find some good future cofounder material there. swing by dropbox HQ sometime :)
55.
by dhouston 18y ago
This worked for us (Dropbox) too. Google's another example of this progression, though they also partnered with companies that already had big mainstream audiences. Also, make it easy for existing users to invite new ones. Better still, des
56.
by dhouston 18y ago
we're hiring a couple badass engineers at dropbox (python/c++; client/desktop app dev experience preferred). we're backed by yc and sequoia... shoot me an email at drew AT getdropbox.com
57.
by dhouston 18y ago
ugh. there's plenty of time to start companies, but those 4 years of "not needing to worry about food or paying rent" are unique.
58.
by dhouston 18y ago
so the guy's a noob, big deal -- we've all been there. he'll get a rude awakening soon enough, but i would imagine HN ought to encourage starting somewhere rather than not trying at all? </preach> :)
59.
by dhouston 18y ago
while this smacks of other "rackets" like SSL certificates (especially when they used to cost hundreds of dollars and verification was dubious at best), this isn't that outlandish of a practice -- think MSDN subscriptions, apple developer n
60.
by dhouston 18y ago
sweet. goodbye fogbugz :)

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