There’s something swirling in the air around startups and founders. It’s refreshing, cold hard, honesty.

Maybe it took a Series A crunch or simply more ways for the truth to be unleashed. Perhaps it was startup suicide stories that got people to wake up. Journalists are even getting more honest, calling out startups that have perfectly manicured stories but lack traction.

What is going on?

Before when entrepreneurs would share battle wounds or mistakes, it happened a few years post-mortem or acquisition. Now everyone is sharing lessons learned as they happen. Even health issues, which are normally hidden from investors and peers, are being exposed. One entrepreneur recently shared a tale of being hospitalized with Rhabdomyolysis on his company’s blog. 

Bonobos founder Andy Dunn has been one of the greatest truth tellers lately. His clothing startup is over six years old with ample funding ($72.7MM raised to date). Dunn's recent blog posts include stories about the difficulty of working with some venture capitalists and depression.

There are more examples of startups taking truth serum, like Ex-Startup Weekender, Shane Reiser, when he discussed all of his mistakes and reflected on leaving one startup to join another (Kohort). Or this article about Quarterly Co getting a new CEO. RapGenius' founders revealed they had  no idea what they were doing during their first fundraise. Tara Hunt discussed startup grief and how difficult it can be to get back to reality after you've done a startup. 

One of the hottest truth topics right now is about startup failure. Recent trending Tumblrs like  “My Startup Has 30 Days to Live” anonymously peel the layer off failure in painstaking daily detail.

Anyone who has been in the game long enough knows the bumps, bruises and even acquisitions are sometimes the only difficult and true outcome for startups. VC Charlie O’Donnell says on his blog to fist bump
founders and acknowledge, “way to move the runners over.”

It seems all the things that were taboo are now topics open for discussion. When I talked about What to Do When Your Startup Doesn’t Fail, But Doesn’t Succeed Either, praise came across the country from founders in the same position or who had been there. Talking about growth or the next phases of a startup (even if it's not pretty) is now the missing piece to the puzzle a community is building.

Are the days of polish and exaggeration over? Did exaggeration ever truly benefit a startup? It used to be "do whatever it takes to get the money” but perhaps that is what got us in the Series A crunch to begin with.
Either way, the truth seems to be setting everyone free, which is good, because the tech community is finally coming together in a way that will benefit both founders and investors together. Innovation happens
when information is shared faster.

Go.

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Fancy, a Pinterest-like site with more of an emphasis on e-commerce, just raised about $27 million, according to an SEC form filed last week.

We first saw the news on Bloomberg.

The filing did not name the investors, but people familiar with the round told Bloomberg's Sarah Frier that it included American Express billionaire Len Blavatnik and actor Will Smith. 

Fancy brings in about $3 million in revenue every month. To date, the New York-based company has raised more than $80 million in funding from investors including Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes. 

Last year, Apple was in talks to acquire Fancy, but nothing has come of it.

We have reached out to Fancy for comment and will update this story if we hear back. 

SEE ALSO: Fancy May Have Invented The First Shopping Experience On Google Glass

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There are a load of startups working in the online and mobile dating space. 

Think Tinder, OkCupid, Match, eHarmony, Let's Date, Zoosk, and Are You Interested. But the list really does go on. 

Tinder feels more casual, though it has resulted in at least 50 marital engagements. eHarmony, on the other hand, is all about finding your life partner. 

The dating space is starting to feel a bit saturated, but there's still an untapped opportunity in it, serial entrepreneur and CEO of technology studio Science Mike Jones tells Business Insider. 

"I'd say the biggest untapped opportunity, I believe, is in geo-awareness and very location-oriented dating," Jones says. "But I also think it's probably the hardest nut to crack because at the end of the day, it requires a lot of people to be part of a system that sort of opt-in to alert notifications and those lightweight introductions."

These apps also rely on push notifications, which make your phone buzz whenever you have a new message from a potential mate or a match is nearby. That can be very useful, but it also requires your phone to constantly check its location with cell signals and GPS, which can be a major drain on your battery. At the same time, incessant notifications are bound to get annoying after a while. It's a major hurdle for location-aware dating apps.

Think about Highlight, the most buzzed-about people discovery startup at South By Southwest last year. Highlight aims to connect people nearby based on their shared interests. 

But when it first launched, a lot of people complained about how Highlight drained their battery. Highlight has since improved the app's effects on battery life, but it still seems to be having a hard time catching on with people. 

SEE ALSO: A Dating Startup Is Giving Bored Couples A Way To Live Vicariously Through Their Single Friends

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Earlier this year, we found out that Foodspotting co-founder Soraya Darabi was working on new, super stealthy startup. 

Darabi had already raised $1.35 million from undisclosed investors, according to an SEC filing. 

At the time, all we knew was that Zady would be something like Etsy. 

Now, Zady is finally pulling back the curtains. The startup pegs itself as an "online destination and shopping platform for consumers who care about the origins of the items they purchase." 

It's all about transparency and giving customers detailed information about where the product came from, who the designers and manufacturers are, the materials used, and where those materials came from. 

The company will officially launch in late August. Already, its partners include Imogene + Willie, Clare Vivier, and Gerald & Stewart. 

Darabi already has one successful startup under her belt, Foodspotting, which OpenTable acquired for $10 million. Though, she left the company a few months prior to the deal.

SEE ALSO: Meet The CEO Who Lived In A Taco Bell Parking Lot And Now Runs A Cool New Startup

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For most of us, a job offer is an all or nothing thing. You do a few interviews and the company either offers you the job or not. You accept it, forsaking all others, or you don't.

But a startup called GroupTalent that finds jobs for programmers (Android, Python, Ruby developers to be precise), is turning that on its head.

Its recruitment platform supports something called a "try out" period that lets employers and employees work together for a few days, or maybe a couple of weeks, on a freelance basis for an ample weekly salary. $1,000 - $3,000 a week is typical, though GroupTalent says some folks can make as much as $7,000 a week.

The programmer is hired by a company to jump in and build something useful. If it's a fit, the two can then get permanently hitched. This is a little different than a typical freelance gig, because these companies are looking for a long-term relationship, not just a series of short-term gigs.

And here's the best part: GroupTalent will hide your Try It from your current employer. If it's not a fit, there's no harm done. "By telling us who your current employer is, we can make sure they don’t see your profile," the company promises.

The company operates in New York and San Francisco so far, and currently hosts almost 600 jobs. It has plans to add jobs in Seattle, Boston, Austin, San Diego and Los Angeles, it says.

Today the GroupTalent website added some new improved search features, too, so it's easier to browse the freelance jobs to see if something sparks your interest.

GroupTalent is a TechStars startup that's raised about $1 million so far. Its cofounder and CEO, Manuel Medina, cut his teeth at Microsoft wooing developers into writing apps for Microsoft Game Studios. He also helped convince developers to write apps for Windows Phone. Cofounder Gordon Hempton is also an ex-Microsoft developer. He worked on Microsoft's SQL Server.

SEE ALSO: How To Use Cows And Limos To Lure Great Programmers

SEE ALSO: Meet The Woman Who Is Quietly Responsible For Everything At Google

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There's a growing trend in the travel industry of renting a vacation homes with friends and family. 

But handling payments with large groups can be a huge pain. It's a process that can get awkward and uncomfortable really quickly, especially if some people aren't eager to pay right away. 

Human Gravity, a new group payments startup launching today, is aiming to tap into the $85 billion vacation rental market in the US and Europe. In the US alone, the market is $24 billion.

With Human Gravity, no one has to front the money and everyone pays their share. At the same time, you can also use it to simply gauge your friends' interest in going on a vacation with you. 

Let's say you want to go on vacation with a group of friends in Lake Tahoe. Head on over to Human Gravity to browse some listings. If you're splitting the cost with friends, select how many people are splitting the cost to see how much each person needs to pay.  

As the organizer, you simply create an account to collect the rental money from your friends. But the organizer can only collect the funds once everyone has committed. That way, no one will be charged until the group is fully in tact. 

It's totally free to use, but Human Gravity takes a cut from the booking fee. 

Human Gravity is working directly with property owners in order to maintain the quality of listings, and keep track of rates and availability. 

It's currently solely focused on vacation rentals in Lake Tahoe and has about 250 listings on the site. That's because Lake Tahoe is a pretty common destination for people living in the San Francisco Bay Area. Though, it eventually plans to expand to other locations.

There are, of course, tons of vacation rental sites. Think Airbnb, HomeAway, VRBO, and Rentalo. Meanwhile, there are also a ton of payments startups, and even a few specifically focusing on group payments, like Payumi, Venmo, and PayWithMe. 

But none of the above-mentioned companies tackle both group payments and vacation rentals. So maybe Human Gravity is on to something. 

SEE ALSO: Google Begged This Woman To Stay, But She Left To Start Her Own Company

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Red-hot online education startup Coursera just closed a $43 million Series B round, following a $22 million Series A round last year.

Investors included Learn Capital, GSV Capital, International Finance Corporation, Laureate Education, and Yuri Milner.

Coursera launched in April 2012, but it has quickly grown to become the one of the dominant players in the $4.5 trillion learning industry. It currently works with 83 educational institutions across 4 continents to offer about 400 free college-level courses online.

"It's been surreal," Coursera co-founder Daphne Koller tells Business Insider. "That's the adjective I like to use. We thought we had a good idea, allowing people to get access to education that has been lacking in many parts of the world. We knew we had something significant, but I don't think we envisioned hitting 4 million members just a year out."

But that's not to say that Coursera hasn't had its fair share of hardships. It's hard to find a revenue model where you don't charge your users. At the same time, massive open online courses (MOOCs) need to be able to offer some value or return to universities. 

Since launching, Coursera had added career services, verified certificates for a fee, and courses for credit. But Koller says that Coursera has no intention of becoming a degree-granting business. Instead, it wants to work with universities to support  them in providing accessible, high-quality degree programs to their students.

Coursera plans to use the new funding to double its employees, release an API, launch a collection of mobile apps, and more. But the main thing is to expand internationally through things like distribution partnerships, Koller says. The goal is to address physical constraints, like capacity issues, in the developing world.

SEE ALSO: Why This $100 Million Student Information Database Is 'A Godsend' For Education Startups

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Paul Graham, co-founder of top startup accelerator program Y Combinator, has some counter-intuitive advice for founders: do things that don't scale.

What he goes on to explain makes a lot of sense. Startups don't often experience hockey stick growth by themselves. They need a nudge from founders, who need to aggressively market their products and be overly attentive to users in the beginning.

How do you force a startup to scale? According to Graham:

Go out and manually recruit your early users, even if it seems tedious and inefficient. Graham cites payment company Stripe as an example. "At YC we use the term 'Collison installation' for the technique they invented," he writes. "More diffident founders ask [potential clients] 'Will you try our beta?' But the Collison brothers weren't going to wait. When anyone agreed to try Stripe they'd say 'Right then, give me your laptop' and set them up on the spot."

Recognize that your startup is extremely fragile and can break at any point.  One of the biggest reasons a startup can break early on is a lack of confidence in the founders. "The question to ask about an early stage startup is not 'is this company taking over the world?' but 'how big could this company get if the founders did the right things?'" Graham writes. "And the right things often seem both laborious and inconsequential at the time."

Create an "insanely great" experience for early users and cater to their every need. "I have never once seen a startup lured down a blind alley by trying too hard to make their initial users happy," Graham writes.

Keep the fire contained. In other words, focus on a narrow market, says Graham. He refers to Facebook, which was only at Harvard until it obtained critical mass there. Then it spread to other Ivy League schools. Finally, it opened up to other colleges which already had built up demand. "It's like keeping a fire contained at first to get it really hot before adding more logs," Graham says. If you're a hardware startup though, Graham recommends trying to scale via pre-orders or crowdfunding, like Pebble did on Kickstarter.

Make your product perfect for a single user. Graham suggests this strategy particularly for B2B startups. If you keep tweaking the product until one early user is extremely happy with it, you'll probably create a product many of their peers also love.

Don't have a big launch. It's often a mistake to have a big buzzy launch complete with embargoes and articles in eight different publications, Graham writes. The idea of creating initial buzz is a lazy way to onboard users, and doesn't guarantee startup success. "It would be so much less work if you could get users merely by broadcasting your existence, rather than recruiting them one at a time," Graham says. "But even if what you're building really is great, getting users will be always be a gradual process—partly because great things are usually also novel, but mainly because users have other things to think about." He also cautions startups to stay away from partnerships with big companies at first. It may seem like a user-onboarding shortcut, but it often ends up being too much work for too little reward. 

In conclusion: "It's not enough just to do something extraordinary initially. You have to make an extraordinary effort initially," Graham says.

SEE ALSO: 12 Common Mistakes Startups Make In Their First Year

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Brit Morin is the founder of Do-It-Yourself content and commerce site, Brit + Co. She has raised more than $7 million from investors such as Marissa Mayer and Huffington Post investor, Oak Investment Partners.

She's also married to Dave Morin, founder of Path and investor in dozens of startups. Her husband made a fortune as a former Facebook employee. 

Critics say Brit Morin is only getting a shot at a startup because of who her husband is. It's a statement male founders who are married to successful women don't often have to deal with. In a recent interview with Wired, Morin says how she handles the negative assumption.

"I don’t feel like a victim, and I try to not think of myself as one," she says. "I would say that no VC would invest in a company that doesn’t have successful growth metrics and a solid revenue plan. If the VC did, they would be pretty dumb."

When asked why investors have given her multiple millions, Morin alluded to her company's early traction:

"We started with just me and one other person, and we’ve grown to a team of 16. We’ve started seeing our traffic tripling on mobile, month over month. Mobile is where 60 percent of our traffic is coming from. Users on mobile are coming back once every couple of days, so they’re super engaged there."

Here's more on what it's like to be married to a fellow tech founder and the stigma the couple is battling in Silicon Valley:

Produced by Business Insider Video

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Startups are often times filled with driven and enthusiastic 20-somethings. It's common for the median age in a startup to be under 30.

But millennials are prone to burnout, and some things might be best handled by someone with more experience, 28-year-old startup founder Courtney Boyd Myers tells Bianca Bosker of The Huffington Post. 

Boyd Myers previously worked at a startup staffed mostly by millennials. But she left in April to start her own company, Audience.io.

Now, she works with a slightly older group of people and took some time to reflect how that affects a startup.

There are a three major downfalls, among others, to having a startup made up of millennials, according to Boyd Myers:

• Their common age limits their view on the world and how they work.  That's why there are so many apps for things like food delivery and taxis. When you're 25, getting a pizza or a ride home seems like a problem technology ought to solve. But where is the app for fixing transport infrastructure or homelessness?
• They waste time trying to figure out problems that someone with more experience would have easily been able to handle.
• Burn-out is inevitable because millennials typically don't have families, kids, and other responsibilities outside of work. They don't yet see the value in a work-life balance.

Read the full article here.

SEE ALSO: Google Begged This Woman To Stay, But She Left To Start Her Own Company

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It's harder for startups to raise money now than it was two years ago.  As a result, startups that are still figuring out their business models are either unable to raise money, or they're forced to raise "down rounds."

In short, a down round occurs when investors think your company is worth less than the last time you raised money. 

Brad Horowitz, partner of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and board member of startups such as Lytro and Foursquare, has some advice for founders who are attempting to raise money right now.

He says markets are emotional, not logical, which is why they fluctuate. In today's down investing climate, he likens founders who are struggling to raise capital to the captain of the Titanic. They've hit an iceberg, and now they need to make sure the lifeboats are ready, Horowitz says in a column on Fortune.

Raising a down round isn't the end of the world, says Horowitz. If you're burning through investors' money and don't yet generate revenue, there's no choice but to raise at a lower valuation. "You need to figure out how to stop the bleeding, as it is too late to prevent it from starting," Horowitz writes. "Eating shit is horrible, but is far better than suicide."

Down rounds can create issues founders need to deal with if they want to right their sinking ships. Employee moral often takes a toll. "If you raise money at a lower price, your people will likely not only freak out, but possibly believe they were lied to," Horowitz writes. Founders need to explain the situation truthfully to employees and instill confidence. 

Horowitz suggests saying something such as, "Yes, we did a down round. Yes, that kind of sucks. But no, it's not the end of the world." 

He ends with a final reminder to startups that cash is king. If you don't make money, you'll need to pray for an acquisition.

"If you generate cash, investors mean nothing. If you do not, then your success will depend upon the kindness of strangers." 

SEE ALSO: DOWN ON STARTUPS: What Happens When No One Thinks You're Worth Billions Anymore

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The lack of women in technology conversation is nothing new. 

Over the last few months, the topic has been fueled by events like "Donglegate" and its backlash.

It's since become common knowledge that women are underrepresented in tech jobs, but what about their representation in the tech world as a whole?

Here are  statistics that shed some light on both:

In the U.S., women are actually more likely to use social networking sites. In December 2012, 71% of women compared to 62% of men surveyed were using social networking sites, according to Pew Internet.

Google, LinkedIn, and Reddit dominated by men

Here's the breakdown of the actual user base make-up, according to a 2012 report by marketing firm DigitalFlashNYC. Note: Women make up the majority of users on Twitter, Facebook, Zynga, and Pinterest. 

Stat 1: LinkedIn: 63% men and 37% women

Stat 2: Google+: 71% men and 29% women 

Stat 3: Reddit: 84% men and 16% women 

Stat 4: Regarding Reddit, men are also twice as likely as women to be Reddit users, according to Pew

Wikipedia is dominated by men 

In short, that means men mostly determine what and how information gets shared. Wikipedia has about 81,000 active editors per month who contribute the growing number of public available-made content, according to an April 2011 survey by the Wikimedia Foundation. But most of those editors are men. 

Stat 5: 8.5% of Wikipedia editors are women. The total percent of women editors has increased somewhat over the years, but Wikipedia recognizes that its editing community suffers from a lack of women editors.  

Underrepresentation in venture-backed tech companies

Women are vastly underrepresented in high-level roles at U.S. venture-backed tech companies, but having more female executives "makes a significant difference in pushing a company to success,"according to a 2012 report from Dow Jones VentureSource.  

Stat 6: 1.3% of venture-backed startups have a female founder.

Stat 7: 6.5% of venture-backed startups have a female CEO.

Stat 8: 20% of venture-backed startups have one or more female C-level executive.

Men dominate venture capital and angel investment industries 

Stat 9: Women represent less than 10% of high-level venture capitalists in the U.S., according to the Kaufman foundation.

Stat 10: Only 12% of angel investors in the U.S. were women in 2011, according to the Center for Venture Research. 

Lack of diversity at influential tech companies

Earlier this year, CNNMoney released a report from its investigation into the 20 most influential tech companies in the U.S. They were only able to receive government reports of diversity data from five of them.

Stat 11: Cisco: 44 out 225 officers or managers are women.

Stat 12: Dell: 27 out of 125 officers or managers are women.

Stat 13: eBay: 10 out of 55 officers or managers are women.

Stat 14: Ingram Micro: 47 out of 236 officers or managers are women.

Stat 15: Intel: 6 out of 41 officers or managers are women.

Vast underrepresentation in gaming industry

Even though 45% of all gamers are women, women are vastly underrepresented in the gaming industry.

Stat 16: Women make up about 11.5% of all game developers, according to the International Game Developers Association. 

STEM and career placements

Women who obtain a degree in STEM (science technology engineering math) are less likely than their male counterparts to work in a STEM occupation, according to the  U.S. Department of Commerce Economics and Statistics Administration.

Stat 17: As of 2009, there were 7,430,000 workers in STEM jobs in America. Male workers held 5,640,000 of those jobs.  

Stat 18: Women hold less than 25% of STEM jobs, according to the ESA. Among women in STEM jobs, 27% of them are in computer science and math jobs and just 14% are in engineering jobs, according to the ESA.

Internet usage in developing world

In the developing world, women's Internet usage is much less compared to men's.

Stat 19: There about 600 million women online compared to 800 million men in developing countries, according to a 2012 report from Intel. 

Stat 20: On average, nearly 25% fewer women than men have access to the Internet, according to Intel.

Stat 21: The gender gap jumps to nearly 45% in regions like sub-Saharan Africa.

Stat 22: About 35% fewer women than men in South Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa have Internet success.

Stat #23: Nearly 30% fewer women than men in parts of Europe and North Africa have Internet access.

SEE ALSO: How Mens' Reactions To 'Donglegate' Show Sexism Exists In The Tech Industry

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Tinder is one of the most popular apps in the dating space, even though it doesn't even position itself as a dating startup.

It's generated over 75 million matches and at least 50 people have gotten engaged thanks to Tinder. 

But finding love on Tinder is easier for some than others. And now there's even a Tumblr blog out there to help you better understand why you got rejected.

"Why I Rejected You On Tinder" is a little brutal at times, but it seems to be all in good fun. 

For the sake of maintaining these unsuspecting Tinder users's privacy, we've blurred out everyone's face and name. 

Look below to see why some people are getting rejected on Tinder. 

"There is an 87% chance you wear Axe body spray."

"There really is no best case scenario in terms of whose profile this belongs to…"

"You once robbed a bank."

"You look like someone who might say “I’ve got your tickets to the gun show.'"

"I’d be impressed by this photo if I was a six-year-old girl."

"After taking this picture you turned in to The Incredible Hulk."

"You might make me dress up as Princess Peach for Halloween."

"110% chance I have a night terror after seeing this."

"You are the oil painting of Dorion Gray?"

"That thing you’re doing with your pinky."

"Our kids would be picked last in kickball."

"You’re doing my least favorite stretch."

"You wear a wetsuit to the movies."

"You use wire hangers."

"You invested all of your 401k in Wonka stock. "

"Someone once tried to explain golf to me and I fell asleep."

SEE ALSO: At Least 50 Couples Have Gotten Engaged Thanks To Red-Hot Hook-Up App Tinder

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Multi-tasking is overrated.

In fact, it actually makes us less productive in the office and more prone to making mistakes, according to researchers at Stanford University. Evidence also suggests multi-tasking may be killing our creativity.

If you really want to get things done, you need to stay focused and create personal connections with people, Y Combinator partner Sam Altman writes on his blog. 

A lot of early-stage startups try to take on too much at once and don't have a clear set of priorities.

"For whatever reasons, many founders love to spend time on anything else—worrying about the details of corporate structures, interviewing lawyers, doing a really good job bookkeeping, etc.," Altman writes. "All of this pretending-to-run-a-company gets in the way of actually running a company."

YC advises startups to focus on writing code and talking to users. The best companies are excited to talk about evolving the product for the sake of their users, Altman says.

But it's hard to accomplish great things on  your own. That's why it's critical to always recruit and promote talented people. 

Head on over to Altman's blog to read the full post. It's a great read. 

SEE ALSO: This Is How It Feels When Your Startup Fails

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This is a story of modern-day love, where the wife of a tech exec outs him on Twitter for supposedly cheating on her. 

Scott Jones, the founder and CEO of search engine ChaCha, seems to be in the middle of an alleged adultery scandal.

His wife is claiming on Twitter that he's having an affair with Renee Larr, a marketing and PR assistant at ChaCha, Sam Biddle of Valleywag reports.

• UPDATE:Scott Jones denies he cheated on his wife.

In one tweet, VeeVee Jones claims that her husband and Larr are working together to file harassment charges against her. Some of the tweets that Biddle cites have since been deleted, but that doesn't mean she has stopped talking about the affair on Twitter and on her personal blog. 

"It’s been over 24 hours since I found out the love of my life was capable of deceit,"@VeeVee wrote on her blog today. We weren’t a story book match made in heaven… But I honest to god love him with all I know."

They apparently met on Match.com. But when she was eight-months pregnant, she claims he cheated on her. She was ready to leave, but then Scott got diagnosed with cancer, she writes. She stayed, but recently realized that he fell out of love with her, she says. 

Meanwhile, @VeeVee is actively tweeting about the alleged affair on Twitter.

SEE ALSO: Michael Arrington Files Lawsuit Against The Woman Who Accused Him Of Rape

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Earlier today, we wrote about search engine ChaCha CEO Scott Jones's wife accusing him on Twitter of cheating on her. 

His wife, Vee, claimed that he has been sleeping with a current ChaCha employee.

Jones did not immediately comment, but he has since provided Business Insider with a statement via his PR rep:

"While I would have preferred that this remain the private and personal matter that it is, the recent accusations made by Vee Lee against me and other employees of ChaCha are simply not true. This is a regrettable situation and I want to thank my family, friends and employees for their understanding and continued support during this trying time."

SEE ALSO: ChaCha CEO's Wife Is Claiming On Twitter That He's Cheating On Her With An Employee

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"What do you know now that you wish you had known at age 20?"

That's the question Benjamin Ling (who you should definitely follow on Twitter), a partner at venture capital firm Khosla Ventures, posed to to his Twitter followers two weeks ago. 

Thanks to the reputation he garnered from his senior roles at Google, YouTube, and Facebook, Ling was able to get answers from a range of big names in Silicon Valley, from the CEO of Reddit to one of the founders of Sun Microsystems.

Many of the responses focus on the importance of building relationships, the importance of perseverance, and advice for those looking to start their own companies.

Ben turned to Twitter to ask what people wish they had known at age 20. After getting over 200 responses, he rounded up the top 20.

Hunter Walk, Director of Product Management at YouTube

Michael Yang, Head of Biz Dev at Pinterest

Apple has acquired a Canadian startup called Locationary to help with its Maps app for iPhones and iPads, AllThingsD has confirmed.

Locationary uses data submitted by users to catalog venues like restaurants and keep an up-to-date list of what's still open and what's not.

As is normal practice when it acquires a small company, Apple did not disclose how much it paid for Locationary.

Apple had one of its biggest blunders recently when it switched away from Google Maps data in the Maps app for iPhones and iPads. The user uproar was so huge that Apple CEO Tim Cook had to issue an apology and promise to improve the product over time.

Meanwhile, Google just issued a great update to Google Maps on the iPhone and iPad. It focuses a lot more on helping you find what you'd like to do in addition to getting you from Point A to Point B.

DON'T MISS: The Top 25 Tech Companies To Work For In 2013 >>

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Real estate brokers say millennials are buying homes— and expensive homes — like never before thanks to wealthy parents and the tech boom, Wall Street Journal's Lauren Schuker Blum reports. The younger generation also thinks houses are a safer investment than the stock market.

"In the last two months, half the folks I sold homes to were young entrepreneurial types — and they were all buying homes for over a million dollars," Washington D.C.'s Michael Rankin of TTR Sotheby's International Realty tells WSJ. He says those kinds of buyers didn't exist a few years ago. 

Rankin and other real estate professionals are seeing more clients skipping starter homes and condos altogether for sprawling houses. The tech boom is largely to thank. "Brokers say many of the young buyers today have made money during the IPOs of technology companies such as Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, or they have profited by starting their own companies," Blum writes. She cites one Facebook employee who moved from a rented 800-square-foot apartment to a $7 million 9,000 square-foot-home. A former Facebooker, Rick Armbruso, who is now 33, purchased a $1.2 million, 2,000-square foot home 2.5 years ago.

For those who aren't independently wealthy, parents are stepping up to the plate. A luxury broker in Los Angeles tells WSJ she's seen "more parents buy home for their children in the last year than in [her] whole career."

The reason: There's a generation of wealth that didn't exist before in America. Baby Boomers made more money as a whole than their parents.

"For the first time since the pre-Depression, Gatsby era, we have a generation of kids whose parents made a great deal of money and are giving a great deal of it to their children," Harrson Group's Jim Taylor tells WSJ. He recently conducted a study about wealth in America with American Express Publishing. "Prior to this, very few families had money through inheritance. There is a living wealth transfer currently taking place that this country hasn't seen in decades."

SEE ALSO: What It Feels Like To Be Ridiculously Wealthy By Age 25

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For the past year, I've come home to the same scene. I walk in the door to a seemingly empty apartment. But I'm not alone. There's an entrepreneur in there, too focused – or frazzled – to notice I've walked in the door.

He stays in the spare bedroom we have, which has now morphed into a nerdy man cave with a big-screen TV, five computer monitors, and an iPad. And there my ex-Wall Street boyfriend Matt works day-in and day-out on his bootstrapped sports company he's trying to get off the ground.

He works in solitude with a business partner he's hired but never physically met – unless you count the constant IMs, Snapchats, and Skypes they exchange daily. He's a Notre Dame grad and we sometimes joke that he may have pulled the ultimate Manti Te'o hoax on Matt, getting a portion of the company when he can't be 100% positive his partner exists.

That partner he's never met was hired two months ago, and he could easily be the difference between life and death for Matt's startup. Because more than just an extra pair of hands, his partner is a solution to the loneliness that has engulfed Matt, a sole founder, for the past year. It's a loneliness no loved one can take away. It can only be diminished by teammates who equally live, breath, and anguish over the company.

Matt's not the only one.

Jonathan Hefter describes the pangs he used to get while he spent four years alone in his parent's basement, building a startup Neverware. Neverware provides software that makes old computers run like new; Hefter sells it to schools that can't afford to update their computers every few years.

Hefter likens his early days to a child dressed like a ballerina, dreaming of performing professionally at the New York City ballet one day. At some point that child stops dressing up and becomes that person. That's what's happening to Hefter; he's now living his startup dream. But he had to overcome a lot internally to get there.

"Starting Neverware as a sole founder was the most isolating experience of my life," Hefter explains. "Long before I had successes to share with a team, I had failures that could only be called my own."

Another entrepreneur who knows the loneliness of a startup well is Alex Shye. In April 2012, Shye left his job to try his hand at a startup. He says he's not a sole founder by choice, but because none of his friends are interested in starting a business. And he's found the founder dating pool to be limited as well as challenging.

For Shye, the hardest part of working alone is having no one to share the ups and downs with or the vision for the company. 

"This is extremely lonely," Shye says. "I am in my head all the time, and a lot of ideas echo around."

Shye now has a group of trusted individuals who help chip away at the emotional burden of being a sole founder. He also has a supportive girlfriend who is so willing to listen. Shye sometimes feels she's his co-founder. He's also found other entrepreneurs to be generous with their time.

"I have found entrepreneurs surprisingly willing to help, and willing to make good introductions. Now, I don't have anyone as invested in the vision as I am, but I have three to four people I can meet up with regularly and bounce thoughts and ideas off of," he says. 

His advice to other single founders is to either join an accelerator, a co-working space, or create a network of friends in similar positions.

"One thing that has greatly helped is just keep a network of single founders to share stories/ideas, get feedback, and commiserate with," says Shye.

For companies with more than one founder, there are different burdens to bear. They're someone you have to split a percentage of the company with, and you may find you ultimately don't work well together. Some of the biggest startups have gone through messy co-founder divorces, including Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai of Foursquare and Paul Sciarra of Pinterest. It's for this reason that investor Mark Suster encourages entrepreneurs to forego a co-founder altogether.

"I think most people do 50/50 partnerships because they’re afraid to start alone," Suster writes in his article, The Co-Founder Mythology. "It’s scarier because if you fail it was only you and all your fault. Somehow it feels easier to leap together. I know. It’s what I did the first time. I say, “go ahead & take the leap” if you want to start a company (many people don’t want to – that’s OK, too.). Hire your co-founder...50/50 partnerships can be hugely unstable – even if you’ve been friends since high school."

But he may not be taking into account just how painful solitude can be.

"The solo founder vs cofounder journey seems very different," says Shye. "There are conversations I have with my solo founder friends that people who are cofounders just don't get."

The ultimate loneliness solution seems to be finding a someone to carry the weight of a startup with you equally. For Matt his new partner, Tyler, seems to be doing the trick. His site's traffic has more than doubled since Tyler joined two months ago. And as someone who sees Matt every day, he is a different person now. He's more like his old self. As much as I tried to be there for him during the first year as both an advisor and investor*, nothing can compare to Tyler's constant presence.

Similarly, Hefter found relief for his emotional turmoil once he was finally able to hire a team. He still gets overwhelmed from time to time.

"It's very possible to hire people and still feel alone," Hefter says. "You know you've built the right team when you no longer feel like you work by yourself."

[*Full Disclosure: I am an investor and advisor in Matt's startup. Yes, my bosses at Business Insider know about this, and it is also listed on my author bio page].

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