geoffschmidt

17 ms·

91.
by geoffschmidt 14y ago
Re downvotes -- using periods like that for emphasis (in the first line of your post) is like typing your message in all caps for emphasis. It makes your argument harder to read, but it doesn't make it more persuasive. And it makes people n
92.
by geoffschmidt 14y ago
Also, arguably unlike social media, it requires domain expertise that many potential founders do not have.
93.
by geoffschmidt 14y ago
I think it's money well spent. Facebook is one of the principle belligerent powers in the War for Talent. They're going to lose some ground in that war after the IPO. A stunning campus could help minimize that loss.
94.
by geoffschmidt 14y ago
tl;dr determination, creativity, and a good product demo. If you copy those things, you'll have a good chance of getting into YC. If you copy "Send Garry Tan beer," you'll look like "the guy that didn't have any original ideas, so he copied
95.
by geoffschmidt 14y ago
I love Hackpad! Just about all Meteor API designs, emails, and blog posts start life as Hackpads.
96.
by geoffschmidt 14y ago
> Why even bother delivering this half-baked solution? Because we used it for our funding announcement at the end of last month -- a full press cycle, where the Andreessen Horowitz and Matrix Partners press machine pushed our story out
97.
by geoffschmidt 14y ago
Two other issues that seem to come up in the bay area are "culture fit" (which is sometimes a euphemism for "we want to have fun at work and it doesn't sound very fun to hang out with someone who is old") and "trajectory" (which is a euphem
98.
by geoffschmidt 14y ago
I can second this for sure -- they have a combination of intelligence, business ability, and product sense that is incredibly rare. I've twice missed the opportunity to work with Nate, and I hope I'll get a third shot someday. They are also
99.
by geoffschmidt 14y ago
The architecture is designed specifically to support your choice of backends. The Meteor client and the Meteor server speak a simple JSON-based protocol called DDP. A Meteor client can talk to any server that can speak DDP. A Meteor server
100.
by geoffschmidt 14y ago
It's always a good idea to separate business logic from presentation logic. The idea in Meteor is that your business logic can run on either the client or the server as is appropriate in a given situation. For example, if you want to get th
101.
by geoffschmidt 14y ago
Meteor has brand-new experimental support for serving HTML to crawlers. Check out the Google cache for meteor.com :) The links work and everything. This just went live this morning.
102.
by geoffschmidt 14y ago
By raising this amount of money, we've (semi-deliberately) closed the door on any possibility of an acquihire. The valuation is too high for the VCs to agree to that outcome, and one of the privileges of Series A shares is the ability to ve
103.
by geoffschmidt 14y ago
IMO, this is dead on. We group your first two requests together as a project called Routes, and it will be one of the big initiatives we take on once the authorization and account work is shipped to production. As for your third request, we
104.
by geoffschmidt 14y ago
While I was fundraising, VCs told me that DHH could easily have raised a lot of money for Rails had he chosen to. I don't know for sure that that's true, but it certainly seems plausible given Meteor's experience. Even though we chose a dif
105.
by geoffschmidt 14y ago
What they're dreaming of is: lots of big companies write their vital business apps on top of Meteor. They spend billions of dollars on middleware and application servers that helps them deploy, monitor, and control these apps across their 1
106.
by geoffschmidt 14y ago
Here's what I learned when doing this research for Meteor. * You can sell training, but it's low-margin. If that's all you do, it probably ends up looking more like a consulting business, because you have to recruit armies of teachers if yo
107.
by geoffschmidt 14y ago
Interesting point, but if that is their thinking, they didn't share it with me :) As far as I know, they're looking the billions of dollars a year that IBM makes on WebSphere and thinking, "all of this spending on middleware and application
108.
by geoffschmidt 14y ago
I think that's a great idea. The ability to do creative things like this is the "silver lining" of having so much money in the bank (which, as I mentioned above, is something I generally consider a risk, or at best a hedge.) I'd love to hea
109.
by geoffschmidt 14y ago
As the guy that raised the $11M, I agree completely. It is terrifying and a huge risk. IMO, the biggest downside to raising a lot of money is that you are no longer accountable to anyone. You can run around saying "We're rockstars! We're wi
110.
by geoffschmidt 14y ago
Hi, I'm the OP (or at least the author of the blog post.) I should have been clearer. Most of the core devs have side projects that they're building on Meteor. I'm building a social contact manager, which I'm using for a community group I'm
111.
by geoffschmidt 14y ago
More succinctly, if you're able to build a $20M business on a $250k investment, the money to build the business came from your customers -- you've used customer financing, which Chris described in his blog post as the most desirable form of
112.
by geoffschmidt 14y ago
Chris is not talking about this. He's talking about venture capital, where (1) you typically need to raise at least $2M (otherwise the firm can't justify the board seat), (2) the money for the investment came from a venture fund that was ra
113.
by geoffschmidt 14y ago
Though it's none of our business, it's also not an assumption :) http://postcards.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2012/07/16/mayer-yaho... > Mayer first disclosed to the Yahoo board that she is pregnant in late June, in a meeting with Michael W
114.
by geoffschmidt 14y ago
Burning Man. Join a theme camp and work on a big project for three months with 50 people, then try to survive the dust storms together on the playa. It's a great way to make friends. I'm told that you can have a similar experience working o
115.
by geoffschmidt 14y ago
Since you apparently get the full $7500 regardless of how much your vacation costs, what he's effectively doing is docking everyone's pay $7500 if they don't take at least one fully disconnected vacation a year.
116.
by geoffschmidt 14y ago
While this is an excellent point and one I hadn't heard before, I'm not so sure you're properly modeling the cost of maintaining other currencies. Must we include the Fed? The enormous physical system that securely moves money all the way f
117.
by geoffschmidt 14y ago
It's not rent control that keeps SROs around - there are separate SRO controls. You're not allowed to eliminate SRO beds without building replacement beds in another part of the city (or paying into a fund to cover the cost of someone else
118.
by geoffschmidt 14y ago
Do you really think the main constraint on supply comes from rent control and not zoning limitations? In SF there is a strong desire to preserve the historical character of the neighborhoods (agree or disagree as you like, but the political
119.
by geoffschmidt 14y ago
No, unfortunately refunding the deposit doesn't necessarily clear him of liability. If I say I'm going to do something, and I don't, I can't always get out of the situation by saying "let's pretend I never made a commitment." That said, I d
120.
by geoffschmidt 14y ago
Direct link to petition: https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions/!/petition/require-fre... It only takes a minute to sign :) Most political petitions have no impact. They are just email-gathering campaigns. This one is different: it's on th

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