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HotelTonight Is A 1.5-Year-Old Startup That's Raised $36 Million To Bring You Amazingly Cheap Room Rates

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Sam Shank founded HotelTonight a year and a half ago. Since then he's raised $36 million from investors for his mobile app.

Hotel Tonight is available on Android, iPad and iPhone devices. It works with 1,500 hotels across 45 cities to bring heavily discounted room rates to mobile devices.

As the name suggests, the rooms are heavily discounted because they're unsold inventory. For example, if you're out with friends until all hours in New York City, you can pull up Hotel Tonight, find discounted room rates, and spend the night. Hotels would much rather you reserve rooms last minute than not at all.

Shank's app has been downloaded 2 million times. We brought him into Business Insider's office and learned more about his startup.

 

Produced by Daniel Goodman, Kamelia Angelova, Robert Libetti, and Will Wei

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Here's What Flickr Investor Esther Dyson Looks For In A Startup

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Esther Dyson 400x300

You'd think a startup backer would look for the best money-making schemes.

But angel investor Esther Dyson has a different approach: She looks for ideas that are fun, she told Entrepreneur.

It's paid off, through investments in companies like Flickr and Delicious, both of which were bought by Yahoo.

Here's the key advice:

  • Fun doesn't mean frivolous—Dyson wants companies that "ought to exist."
  • Dyson believes investors should mentor the entrepreneurs they back: "The job of an angel is not to pick winners, but to pick potential winners and help them become winners."
  • Pay attention to the team, not just the product. "A company is an organism," Dyson says.
  • Decide on your role: "If you're not a CEO, find someone who is, and then they can help you realize your vision. If you are a CEO, find people who are better in specific areas than you are and let them do their thing."
  • Companies need policies as they get bigger. It's "painful," Dyson says—like watching your child become a teenager. 

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How Y Combinator Built A Billion-Dollar Brand For Startups

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Airbnb pitch

Seven years ago, Paul Graham and his now-wife Jessica Livingston founded a startup accelerator, Y Combinator.

Since then, it has become the most competitive startup program in the world. Its acceptance rate is compared to that of an Ivy League school, with similar prestige stamped on each graduating startup.

To date, more than 460 startups have gone through the accelerator, and they've gone on to raise more than $1 billion collectively.

Among them are Dropbox, a file sharing and storage company that has raised $275 million at a $4 billion valuation. Airbnb, a consumer-to-consumer room-rental service, has raised $120 million at a $1.3 billion valuation. Socialcam, which graduated from Y Combinator's program in March, was acquired this month for $60 million.

Thanks in part to these successes, Y Combinator startup valuations are climbing. In fact, one Silicon Valley investor thinks Y Combinator's valuations are so high, they're making startups more expensive across the board.

"YC has single handedly jacked up the price of early-stage startups over its last two batches," this investor says.

"The Winter 2012 batch's [average] valuation was $10 million pre-money," he complains. "In 2011 it was $8 million pre-money. The companies have raised at such a valuation that the next step has to be a $50-60 million valuation."

Graham, while flattered by the statement, doesn't believe it.

"If it's true that would be a great compliment, but I don't think we have that much influence," he told us over email.

We spoke with a number of investors; all agreed Y Combinator startups are overpriced. They say Graham has turned Y Combinator into a luxury brand—the Prada of the startup world. And VCs are willing to overpay just to have a Y Combinator outfit in their closets.

How did that happen?

As one investor put it, "Paul Graham is really smart."

paul graham y combinatorLike any luxury product, presentation is everything for a Y Combinator startup.

"Think about alcohol marketing," says a investor.

"What's the difference between a premium vodka and a non-premium vodka? The presentation. Y Combinator knows how to create a luxury product. It knows how to create a sense of scarcity. And it knows how to create a sense of mystery."

A good presentation starts with polishing up the founders. Historically, entrepreneurs have been taken advantage of by VCs. Graham is meticulous when teaching entrepreneurs how to pitch their products so they appeal to both press and investors.

Angel investor Paige Craig explains: "YC is good because it has given a lot of power and education to founders. They learn how to pitch their companies, as well as the tips and tricks of dealing with investors. I see a lot of great companies who really shoot themselves in the foot because they don't know how to play the investing game or explain their products. Graham is giving them a leg up in how to play that game."

"These guys are being coached to go for the jugular of the investor," another investor said.

Investors also say YC startups come in with an attitude most other entrepreneurs don't have. They're elusive and borderline cocky.

"There's a formula for how to go and get people excited," an investor tells us. "People who see a ton of deals can see through it to some degree. But YC is very good at creating the sense that a deal is 'Going, going, gone!' It's not the same process you go through with a non-YC company."

A YC startup founder tells us participants aren't formally coached on how to deal with investors during the program. There's no mandatory class on investor etiquette; most of what's learned comes from discussions over weekly dinners where entrepreneurs can ask guest speakers anything and absorb information.

This founder said the confidence and salesmanship comes more from the situation than from anything Paul Graham teaches them. VCs know hundreds of other investors are eyeing YC companies; YC companies realize they have their pick of the litter. "Normally it's an adversarial relationship between investors and entrepreneurs. Y Combinator just makes the playing field more level," the founder says.

Paul Graham of Y CombinatorIt doesn't hurt YC startup valuations that Graham arms his startups with cash.

YC invests an initial $18,000 into each startup. On top of that, Yuri Milner, the Russian tech investor behind Facebook and Groupon, and Ron Conway's SV Angel offer them $150,000 convertible notes. Investors know the founders aren't money-hungry, which changes the fundamental dynamics of the meeting.

Graham knows he's created a unique situation that tends to work in the entrepreneur's favor.

"Because YC-funded startups are a known quantity to investors and get introduced to enough of them to create serious price competition, companies tend to get higher valuations than they might otherwise," he writes in a blog post.

"I would bet any day that my cap was significantly higher (probably 2x) as a direct result of being part of YC," a YC founder wrote.

Just like they're trained to handle investors, YC founders are trained to impress journalists. Sometimes, Graham reaches out to investors and journalists on behalf of startups to help sell them.

"Graham has been able to create this amazing hype machine," an investor says. "I think it's brilliant to be honest."

So, are Y Combinator startups worth these high valuations?

"It's not a trick," says an investor.

"There are a lot of amazing, amazing companies coming out of Y Combinator. They typically have technical founders too, which is something a lot of other programs don't have. And there's a ton of competition to get into YC. As an investor, it means you have to pay more."

For some investors though, Graham's luxury price has become too much.

"If you're a smart investor, you're not going to participate," we were told.

"A startup that is worth $3 million is able to raise at $5—some wouldn't be able to raise at all if they weren't in YC.  It's a bloat on the price because YC startups get so much press, they're marketed the right way, and it's frustrating," an investor said.

"My guess is you'll see valuations go back down to a more reasonable level," says Craig. "Graham is sharp. He's probably thinking about this already. You can't have a massive investor backlash."

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How To Avoid The Most Common Startup Tech Mistakes

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Manny Ruiz

For any startup founder, the first few months are an uphill battle.

During this time, it's crucial to develop a solid infrastructure that will protect your intellectual property, manage complex data systems, and ensure that you can scale up without any major glitches. It's a daunting task.

To get some insight, we've reached out to Manny Ruiz of Intelligent IT, who offered to answer a few questions on how to successfully launch a startup.

Below is a slightly-edited transcript of our conversation:

Many startup founders are on a shoestring budget. Is it OK to do some of the basic tech work in-house at first?

When you have limited funds, people do two things. An operations person does the tech work, or a sales person does it, and you feel your way through. Don't do that.

If you're not going to hire a tech person, get a free consultation. It's not worth it to have a cheap Linksys router that breaks when you're setting it up. It's better to get 3 hours from an expert versus 20 hours from someone putzing around. Get a team of experts, and build your company right.

What are some of the biggest challenges startups face?

Before handling anything related to tech, first establish this: what is your business and what business function you have? Do you want to be able to open an office, work from home? And what do you want to provide your clients? Technology will be a deliverer of these business solutions.

The big challenge is risk mitigation. Do you hire someone versus a consultant? You're losing money every day you're open, and it's key to do it right.

What have you learned working with startups in Silicon Alley?

The biggest concern among these startups is culture. They want to establish themselves as different, but without the investment in tools and the right people, it could be chaotic. If you have 30 people in New York, 30 in San Francisco, and IT is an afterthought, how do you expect to support explosive growth without centralized management? How do you manage your assets, grow and scale effectively without affecting your culture in a rigid way?

What's your best advice to startup founders?

Go with the cloud. It mitigates risk. It's a redundant methodology that applies to data centers. It encompasses data, voice, video, email. The cloud makes sense when storing, processing and transferring data. You need inventory and centralized management, and you don't want bulky infrastructure. The cloud delivers platform and software as a virtualized service.

When you have limited funds on the business side — say, you've raised $6 million in a seed round — you're bleeding money. You're going to hire 20, 30 people, and the company may die in a year. The cloud is pay as you go. Almost all startups are using the cloud. Anything hosted on the Internet is the cloud.

How would you advise companies as they scale up?

When you have a company that gets to a certain size, you should look beyond the cloud. Custom applications won't work if don't have a dedicated server. If you're steady and growing, create a private data center, and use the cloud if there's a fire, so there's minimal or no disruption. Day to day, use the processing data center. Costs can get very high to maintain the cloud. Midmarket folks will also shift away from the cloud over concerns with IP, performance issues, control and analytics. In the cloud, you have a limit on the analytics you can run.

Are there drawbacks to using the cloud?

Some people have strong feelings about putting data on the cloud. You are letting [the host] copy and replicate data. Google has the most transparent licenses, where they say, "Hey, it's your data," but others are more ambiguous.

What other new developments are you seeing in the startup world? 

There's a great new social company that connects startups who need capital with investors. It's this broad new ecosystem. Everything is really social right now. Going social means that we're moving well beyond the primary method of communication, which was email. Now communications between companies will be really group based. It's going to be topics and subscriptions, where you have circles or groups of influence. You can post private or public messages. People no longer have to consciously send information.

NOW READ: This 8-Person Startup Is Quietly Providing Support For New York's Tech Scene >

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The Startup That's Keeping An Extra Billion Cars From Hitting The Road Just Raised $13.9 Million

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jessica scorpio getaround

Getaround, a car-sharing startup, just announced that it is raising $13.9 million in its first round of funding, which includes the likes of Marissa Mayer, Shervin Pishevar and Eric Schmidt's Innovation Endeavors.

Getaround has been around for just about a year but hadn't yet raised a lot of money like most startups. That's changing today.

With Getaround, a car owner can make money renting out their car to a pre-screened driver. Most Getaround renters make about $350 each month. (Think about it like Airbnb for cars.)

So far there are 10,000 people sharing cars on Getaround (though the company doesn't share how many people are renting those 10,000 cars). It's only available in four cities: Portland, San Diego, San Francisco and Austin.

In addition to raising money, it's starting a new business called Getaway, which will let car owners rent their cars for extended periods of time. Getaround will handle the cleaning and maintenance costs, making it great for owners who are leaving for extended periods of time — like traveling abroad.

Co-founder Jessica Scorpio has a mission to keep a billion cars off the road by using the cars that are already available, but sitting unused. Getaway is another big push for that.

We caught up with co-founder Jessica Scorpio to find out what they're going to do with that big pile of money. Here's what we learned:

  • Getaway users are expected to make $1,000 each month. For now, Getaround is looking for participants who can rent their car out for a full six months.
  • Getaround builds all its hardware in-house. That means the GPS tracking system and methods for locking and unlocking the car are produced at the office in San Francisco. This really impressed a lot of their investors.
  • Getaround is focused on revolutionizing transportation — not just with cars. Vehicles were the logical place to start, but it could easily expand into other forms of transportation. Think of it like an operating system for getting from point A to point B.

Here's a lightly-edited transcript of our conversation with Scorpio:

BUSINESS INSIDER: Can you give me a breakdown of what Getaround is?

JESSICA SCORPIO: Three years ago, challenged by Larry Page, I had to come up with an idea to positively impact a billion people in ten years. There are a billion cars on the planet that sit idle 22 hours a day, so we basically started solving a problem called car overpopulation. We created Getaround to allow people to make use of what's already available.

We officially launched at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York last year, when we won the audience award and grand prize. We are basically a marketplace that enables people to share cars with others nearby; anything form a Toyota Prius to a Tesla Roadster. Our owners make around $350 each month, and every month we have people making more than $1000, which offsets the cost of ownership. Getaround provides the insurance, we do driver screening to make sure people are good drivers, that's the usual background.

getaround technologyBI: And you guys just raised a big pile of money, too?

JS: We're announcing a $13.9 million Series A funding. There is a great list of investors, including Shervin Pishevar, Marissa Mayer, Yahoo's new CEO, Ashton Kutcher and Innovation Endeavors, (Google co-founder) Eric Schmidt's investment arm. We're proud to have them on board with our mission of disrupting the transportation industry. We're super-focused on three main things: continued expansion into this market, exploring partnerships that will enrich the car-sharing experience, and continuing to develop our in-house technology project. We're currently in four cities. Pishevar will be joining our board with this round, too.

BI: What exactly is the mission of Getaround?

JS: Our mission is to make every vehicle a shared one. In general, we are going to be a marketplace for sharing and making transportation more efficient. Right now we're focused on cars.

BI: Anything else coming with this announcement?

JS: I should bring up our second announcement: Getaway, a first of its kind service. Basically, Getaway is something a bunch of people approached us and asked for; it lets car owners share their cars full-time with Getaway managing the entire process. With Getaround, normally if you just list your car on the site as a car owner, you set pricing, availability, and accept requests — you're still using it on a regular basis, though. For Getaway, it's an opportunity for people who can't manage their own car to maximize the potential of their car. We expect people to make about $1,000 a month. It's great for people who are traveling abroad, people who are going on deployment in the military or have a car they really don't use. We're gonna be testing it in Chicago and San Francisco.

BI: Where did the idea for Getaway come from?

JS: We had tons of owners across the country who approached us saying they loved the Getaround idea and the service but they wouldn't be able to manage the rentals themselves. One customer, for example, went on a three-month extended honeymoon in Asia. He looked at options for his car, he had to hire someone to have his car in good working order. He approached us, and we were testing Getaway at the time, and in his first month he was able to make about $1,000 using Getaway.

Basically, there are all these different people who have cars that they park and store and barely use. Getaround takes on responsibility to clean it, maintain it, manage the rental. He would park it in a central location. When this goes live, people can apply at Getaround.com; we're initially testing it in Beta. People all over the country are encouraged to apply because we're hoping to expand. We're really looking for vehicles we know will be successful and make good money for the owners, in general we're looking for cars with under 100,000 miles that are 5 years old or newer. We're looking for vehicles that are available for at least 6 months, it's definitely a different set of cars.

BI: What about technology? You guys build your hardware in-house, right? 

"When we initially met Mayer at TechCrunch Disrupt last year, one of the reasons she loved Getaround was that we early-on invested in hardware."

JSWe are constantly improving the technology, we build the Getaround car kit in house. We're gonna continue to do that. This funding will support and continue development, but we raised a good amount of money before this. We don't run out of car kits, we have plenty available — it's up to the owner whether they want to install a car kit or exchange keys with drivers. When we initially met Mayer at TechCrunch Disrupt last year, one of the reasons she loved Getaround was that we early-on invested in hardware. She thought that was a great idea and a great investment.

One other really exciting thing we're launching is a new feature called Instant Rental. You unlock the car with your smartphone so you don't have to do the key hand off. The renter can get secure access to the vehicle immediately with Instant Rental. All the Getaway cars are equipped with a Getaround car kit, which has GPS features, and they'll all have Instant Rental.

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VOTE NOW: Help Us Choose The World's Best Design School

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Web site wireframes

At a time when four to five billion people will soon connect to the Internet through mobile devices, talented user-interface and product designers have become a critical part of of successful technology companies.

Some founders of the hottest startups in the world began their careers at university design programs. Airbnb's Brian Chesky went to the Rhode Island School of Design, for example.

Meanwhile thousands of other designers do great work at larger companies like Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon.

So, which school are the ones that prepare their students best to excel in this field?

We've canvassed a number of top venture capitalists, designers and professionals to assemble a preliminary list, but we want your help in figuring out which schools help you in the one thing that really matters: the amount the school will help your future career.

All these schools have comparable high-quality academics, smart professors, and great campuses. But some of them have a direct line to working at some of the best technology and design firms in the world.

Please take 10 minutes to answer the questions below.  In a few weeks, we'll reveal the new definitive list of the World's Best Design Schools.

Keep in mind the list is not comprehensive — if there's a college missing, add it below!

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Sorry Consumer Startups, If You Don't Have At Least 10 Million Users You Probably Won't Get Series A Funding

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empty minimal alone

The days when a startup could sell investors on a dream and no revenue are coming to a close, says angel investor Chris Dixon.

Now, if you're a consumer startup (ad based/no clear business model) and you don't have at least 10 million users, you're going to have trouble raising a Series A, he says.

Dixon says there is too much competition in the consumer space. Investors have already funded a lot of startups and there are only so many products people use. In addition, companies like Instagram have shown good startups can scale incredibly fast. They've  set the bar higher for everyone else.

Transaction-based startups, like e-commerce companies, can afford to have fewer users and still get funded, says Dixon. Revenue becomes the more important figure.

His advice to founders: "If you are thinking of starting a non-transactional consumer startup, be aware that you are entering what is perhaps the most competitive sector in tech in the last decade." And if a VC does offer you money, take it.

Here's Dixon's post >

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The Most Controversial Entrepreneur In The Valley Is Back With A Clever New Venture

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Anu Shukla Offerpal CEO

One of the best things about Silicon Valley is how forgiving it is—you don't just get a second chance here, you get a third and a fourth.

Anu Shukla, a serial entrepreneur, is back with a new company, RewardsPay, Business Insider has learned.

She got scorched at her last company, Offerpal Media, for defending shady offers marketed to players of social games like Zynga's FarmVille. (Offerpal's now known as Tapjoy; it's become a mobile-advertising firm.)

When then-TechCrunch blogger Michael Arrington called Shukla out for Offerpal's business practices, she called his charges "shit, double shit, and bullshit"—and thereby became the highly visible face of the offers business, which let marketers give consumers in-game currency in exchange for signing up for a service or product.

Arrington had a point, though. Some of those offers were misleading—supposedly "free" services that charged a monthly fee to people's credit cards.

The heat got so bad that Shukla stepped down as CEO in late 2009 and left the company in 2010.

So now she's back! Shukla and her PR rep didn't respond to requests for comment, but here's what we've figured out about RewardsPay:

  • Shukla is its CEO.
  • It signed a deal to let Discover cardmembers spend their Cashback Bonus or miles balances on Facebook gift cards, iTunes credit, or in-game currency on Disney's Club Penguin.
  • Kima Ventures, the French angel-investing team of Xavier Niel and Jérémie Berrebi, have backed RewardsPay. (Kima was also an investor in Sparrow, the mobile email-client maker recently bought by Google.)

Shukla is a relentless promoter, so we're surprised she's kept the company so quiet. The company's website suggests that it's going to let you spend frequent-flier miles, but it hasn't announced any airline partners yet.

That may be a tough sell, since airlines already have partnerships that let customers trade airline miles for shopping, magazine subscriptions, or gift cards. Points.com, for example, lets American, Delta, and JetBlue customers redeem points for PayPal gift cards, among other rewards.

But Shukla's insights into the virtual-currency market, garnered during her controversial tenure at Offerpal, may give her an edge. No BS.

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10 Million Users Is Not The New 1 Million Users—If It Were No Startup Would Ever Get Funded

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Chris Dixon

Yesterday, one of New York's most active angel investors Chris Dixon wrote: "ten million users is the new one million users."

Dixon said there is too much competition in the consumer startup space. So unless entrepreneurs show investors truly staggering numbers, they're going to struggle to land Series A financing.

(Dixon says transaction-based startups, like e-commerce companies, can afford to have fewer than 10 million users because revenue figures trump traffic.)

Since Dixon is the one cutting startups checks, founders should probably listen to him.

But is that 10 million milestone pre-Series A even possible to achieve?

Let's look at traffic figures and funding milestones for some of the most funded, hot startups over the past few years.

Social Media Companies

Tumblr:

  • Founded: 2007
  • Funded: Raised $750,000 Series A in December 2007.
  • Traffic: In January 2008 Tumblr had 180,000 users and was growing by about 17,000 users per month.  Founder David Karp told us then that he wanted to hit 1 million users by the end of that year.
  • Raised Series A years before hitting 10 million milestone

Twitter:

  • Founded: March 2006
  • Funded: Raised $5 million Series A in July 2007
  • Traffic: It took nearly 2 years for Twitter to reach 10,000,000 users
  • Raised Series A about 1 year before 10 million milestone

Facebook:

  • Founded: Early 2004
  • Funded: May 2005 raised $12.7 million Series A
  • Traffic: Reached 1,000,000 users 10 months after launch. It reached 10 million in about 2 years.
  • Raised Series A about 8 months before 10 million milestone

Pinterest:

  • Founded: 2008
  • Funded: $500,000 angel round in January 2010; $10 million Series A closed in May 2011.
  • Traffic: It only had 418,000 uniques in May 2011. It grew to 7.5 million uniques in December 2011 and nearly 18 million in February 2012.
  • Raised Series A 8 months before 10 million unique milestone

Mobile

Foursquare:

  • Founded: March 2009.
  • Funded: $1.35 million angel round in September 2009 ($20 million Series B closed in June 2010)
  • Traffic: It took 13 months for Foursquare to get its first 1,000,000 downloads. In June 2011 it hit 10 million users. Now it has about 20 million users.
  • Raised angel round about 21 months before 10 million milestone

Path:

  • Founded: Late 2010; Relaunched late 2011
  • Funded: $8.65 million Series A raised February 2011; $30 million Series B raised post-relaunch in April 2012
  • Traffic: 1 year to get first 1 million; 2 weeks to reach additional 1 million post-relaunch. Hasn't reached 10 million milestone yet; currently has about 3 million users. 
  • Raised $41.2 million and still hasn't reached 10 million milestone

Instagram:

  • Founded: March 2010
  • Funded: $7 million Series A closed February 2011.
  • Traffic: 1 million downloads in 2.5 months; 10 million in 14 months. Now more than 80 million downloads.
  • Raised Series A about 3 months before 10 million milestone

OMGPOP/Draw Something*:

  • Founded: OMGPOP in 2007; Draw Something mobile app launched January 2012
  • Funded: Series A in 2008; Didn't raise since Draw Something launched but was acquired by Zynga 2 months later for ~ $200 million
  • Traffic: Draw Something exploded to 50 million users in 50 days. 
  • * Draw Something's freemium model actually generates significant revenue, so it could be considered more of a transactional startup than a consumer startup
  • Acquired after it reached 10 million users in just a few weeks

Media:

Bleacher Report:

  • Founded: 2006
  • Funded: $1.5 million Series A closed November 2007
  • Traffic: In February 2008, BR had about 400,000 monthly unique visitors. Now it has about 22 million monthly uniques.
  • Raised Series A years before hitting 10 million milestone

BuzzFeed:

  • Founded: 2008.
  • Funded: $3.5 million Series A closed in July 2008.
  • Traffic: It's unclear when BuzzFeed hit 10 million users but it was sometime in the past 2 years. In May 2010 when it raised $8 million (and Dixon invested) it had 3 million monthly uniques in the US. Today it has about 30 million monthly uniques, up from 20 million in April.
  • Raise Series A years before hitting 10 million milestone

From the above, it looks like Dixon's 10 million user number is most feasible for mobile app companies. Draw Something reached 50 million users at warp speed. Instagram's growth was slower but it still grew at an explosive rate that any investor would be happy to financially back.

For other startups, particularly media companies, the 10 million figure is almost impossible to hit pre-Series A. Pinterest has experienced the most explosive growth but even then its success was four years in the making. The company raised outside capital long before it hit the 10 million user mark -- it just exploded from almost no traffic to about 10 million users very quickly, in about 8 months.

But for news-driven sites like BuzzFeed and Bleacher Report, there's no way to achieve Dixon's magic number without Series A financing first.

That said, the overall message behind Dixon's post rings true:

Times have changed.

Investors are falling out of love with consumer startups. They see too many of them and not enough of them live up to the hype. Consumers are getting tired of hearing about new ones too. Their time is limited and so are their attention spans.

Dixon is also right that companies are able to scale faster now than ever, so if you can't get those staggering numbers with little initial capital, it could be the end of the road for your startup.

So what should you do if you want to found a consumer Internet startup but haven't raised money?

Heavily consider bootstrapping, at least until you have proven your idea has legs. Then you can try to raise a small seed round and scale quickly.

But most importantly, don't start a company without seriously considering Dixon's words of caution:

"If you are thinking of starting a non-transactional consumer startup, be aware that you are entering what is perhaps the most competitive sector in tech in the last decade."

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This Ex-Employee Has Some Simple Advice For Getting A Job At Google (GOOG)

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Google BBS

If you're trying to get a job as a software engineer, you're more likely to be hired by learning just one programming language and mastering it, according to a former Googler on Quora.

That's despite the existence of a huge number of programming languages. You don't want to be okay at every language, and should instead focus on mastering a single language if you want to work at a technology company, Leo Polovets writes on Quora.

For example, if you want to work at Google, many products there are typically coded in Java, according to another former Google employee.

So if you really want that software engineering job at Google, or really any tech company, start brushing up on the company's most-commonly used programing language, Polovets writes.

It isn't just about mastering a programming language though. You should master different skills of building a technology product, like user experience and infrastructure in addition to the typical ferreting out of bugs and development, he writes.

Here's the full post from Quora:

Become awesome at one language -- you'll stand out much more than being pretty good with a bunch of languages.

Most software teams use 1-2 languages for the majority of their work. Which of the following do you think they would prefer?

  • You know their most-used programming language like the back of your hand.
  • You kind of know their most-used programming language, but hey, you also know a little bit of Haskell and Scala and Python and ML?

I can assure you that as an employer, #1 is much more appealing than #2. (Of course, being an expert with several languages is even more appealing, but it's not expected when you're just finishing your studies.)

As an analogy, think about picking players for an elite basketball team. Do you want 5 jacks-of-all-trades, or would you rather have an amazing forward, a terrific center, and the best point guard in the league? The first team would be solid, but the second team would be incredible.

That said, your best programming language should not be the only thing you focus on. Try to be great at one (or more) software skills: algorithms, software design/architecture, UI/UX, database design, etc. An uncommon combination of 2-3 skills that you're really good at makes you a very attractive candidate for lots of jobs.

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This Brave Soul Moved To Silicon Valley From Atlanta To Kill Pinterest—And Just Needs A Developer

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Pinterest killer developer ad, Costco parking lot, Mountain View

You can pick up all kinds of things at Costco! We're not sure world-class developers are among them, though.

Bobby Johnson, a former engineering director at Facebook, shared a photo he snapped in the parking lot of a Costco in Mountain View.

The car advertised a job for a developer at a "Pinterest killer startup."

The Georgia license plates and 678 area code suggest that the car, a Toyota, belongs to someone who just moved to California from the Atlanta area. (If you're reading this, Atlanta, drop us a line.)

It's yet another sign of the manic job market in the heartland of tech and the continual draw Silicon Valley has for people with ideas they want to build.

 



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How To Completely Erase Yourself From The Internet

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safe shepherd

Your information is for sale to all kinds of different entities.

Thankfully, there's an easy way to remove it from the places where companies harvest it.

Safe Shepherd has been helping people protect their privacy since being founded in October 2011.

For a very agreeable price of free, the web service will help you take your info off the grid.

We took it for a test drive this morning.

Head over to safeshepherd.com and click on "Sign Up Free"



Fill out the basic information it asks for



It will scan all kinds of public records to see where you appear



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Meet Yardsale, The Startup That Wants To Give You An Easy Way To Make Money Selling Your Old Stuff

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yardsale founders

In 1999, eBay had one of the most vibrant communities of local sellers, who would often hand-write notes for the items they sold and took special care of each other.

Fast forward to 2012, and it's more or less been replaced by Craigslist. The wonder around local selling has essentially evaporated, with eBay now focusing on power sellers.

Enter Yardsale, a new app for selling things locally that ran through the Summer 2011 Y Combinator program. After launching just weeks ago, the app picked up more than 100,000 installs and is going straight after eBay and other peer-to-peer local sales services.

You can download the app here.

We caught up with co-founders Ed McManus and Ryan Mickle to find out what's happening at Yardsale. Here's what we found out:

  • Within 2 weeks of coming out of beta, the app was installed more than 100,000 times. The app has a four-star rating and was ranked in the top-50 lifestyle apps when it launched in early July, according to AppData.
  • Sales usually happen within 10 to 15 minutes. More often than not, the seller is only a few block away. But you can sell to someone within 200 miles, according to the app.
  • You can literally sell anything. That can range from a car, to a boat, to a pair of Justin Bieber tickets, which apparently sold for $1,200. That's going straight for Craigslist's jugular.

Here's a lightly-edited transcript of the interview:

BUSINESS INSIDER: Tell me a little bit about yourselves.

Ed McManus: Right after school I joined Scribd, I was there for around two and a half years. We worked on the core technology powering the site. I left about two years ago and started exploring ideas, launched a few side projects.

Ryan Mickle: I'm an early eBay user since back in '99, left management consulting about 5 or 6 years ago to come back to Silicon Valley. I went to school in Berkeley and was dying to come back. I was doing consulting on product. I was working with a couple Y Combinator companies and a couple clients, and that was around the time I met Ed and came up with Yardsale and wanted to go after it.

"It's one of those rare opportunities where you're surrounded by people who make you feel like you're totally out of your league."

 

BI: You guys went through Y Combinator, correct?

RM: We were in the Summer 2011 batch. It was amazing, we really enjoyed it, it's one of those rare opportunities where you're surrounded by people who make you feel like you're totally out of your league. You just wake up and want to push yourself harder. We left Y Combinator last summer and made the choice to put our heads back down and just crank on the product with the desire to make it really, really great. That's pretty unconventional for Y Combinator, it's more difficult than jumping right into a launch as quickly as possible. We chose to be under the radar, getting Yardsale to the point that we thought it would work. 

BI: How'd you guys settle on the idea? 

EM: We were thinking about how back in 1999 on eBay there was this really incredible community. Most people would hand-write notes to each other, there was something vibrant and incredible about that community. It's likely due to the economics of the web, but in order to scale you had to focus on the power sellers and effectively abandon the community. When we thought of the opportunities on mobile, we wanted to recreate that community and scale buying and selling for those individuals.

BI: How does this differ from eBay?

EM: We set out to create the easiest way to buy and sell things to your neighbors. On Craigslist, the market is riddled with fraud, and eBay has a high barrier for entry. We heard from a lot of eBay sellers that reputation that was becoming a barrier to entry, you're up against people with ratings of tens of thousands. if you're the guy on there with a single digit rating no one trusts you.

RM: eBay by design rewards people who are power sellers. We wanted to create Yardsale so it'd be an inviting experience for a first-time user. It adds value to the lives of an individual seller. We knew we could take that process and turn it into a 15 or 30 second listing process. Mobile is the best place to do that.

yardsaleBI: How big is the network so far?

RM: One of the things that surprised us right away was how many transactions happen and how fast they occur in proximity of the buyer and seller. We're seeing items get purchased from people who live within a block or two. Items sell within 15 minutes or within an hour. We know there's a huge opportunity in this niche space that's local selling, it just hasn't been cracked yet. Mobile just lets us dive in with finer granularity with items that are literally blocks away from you.

EM: One of the core values at the beginning was to focus on community and to foster that. The bulletin boards were a great place in the early days to discover what works for other sellers and find people with similar interests. eBay got a little bigger and tried to really focus on maximizing the average sale price, and a lot of those individual sellers, they lost the edge they had before. You lost the community you originally had, it kind of evaporated. Now you have a lot of retail sellers, power sellers selling retail goods, it's lost a lot of the community.

BI: What devices are you on? Any plans to hit Android?

RM: We're just on iOS right now, we're really just focused on making that product as effective as possible. Our number one goal is to help people get their items sold. We're working on the monetization details, there's plenty of opportunity. We believe that we can build features and an experience that's absolutely worth paying for. But we'll never degrade the experience with ads, we know we can add value in the experience of actually buying and selling. We're still trying to figure out exactly what that looks like.

BI: What kind of traction have you guys seen?

RM: We've been really surprised by the response we saw after launching. It was only about 5 weeks ago that we opened up nationwide from the closed beta we started after Y Combinator. Within 2 weeks we broke 100,000 installs, 80,000 of which were new users. We immediately started seeing sales all around the country, which really blew us away. We've sold cars, we've sold boats, I think one of the most surprising aspects is seeing how little it takes to create a liquid marketplace in a city that isn't New York or San Francisco. Those are our biggest cities.

BI: What's the strangest thing you've gone on sale on Yardsale?

"The users, they don't even care about the money they are making, it's fun and it's such a light experience in buying and selling these items with their neighbors."

RM: Well, just today we sold a pair of Justin Bieber tickets for $1,200.

BI: Oh boy. So where do you go from here?

RM: Everything we've done so far is a small sign of what's to come. We're at the front of the space that we consider casual selling. So, we're focused on expanding in new cities and improving the product, and really focusing on that community that we know is one of the core reasons that people keep coming back to Yardsale. The users, they don't even care about the money they are making, it's fun and it's such a light experience in buying and selling these items with their neighbors.

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Most Tech Startups Aren't Really 'Tech' Businesses At All

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Most of the potential “technology entrepreneurs” I meet aren’t interested in launching technology companies.

"What?" you ask.

Let me explain: At its essence, most tech entrepreneurs are focused on addressing a specific, unmet market need.

And, believe it or not, they tend to want their underlying technology to be off-the-shelf. For most, new-fangled technology is something they avoid. And I think that’s great. How can I say that as a serial technology entrepreneur?

Because if you take a step back, you realize that the vast majority of what most people think of as “tech startups” aren’t really technology companies at all. And that includes most of those that I’ve been personally involved with as founder, officer or investor, as well as most I’ve studied as a business professor.

Rather, most “tech startups” tend to be businesses that intelligently apply existing, off-the-shelf technology platforms to do a dramatically better job addressing a common issue faced by a targeted customer set.

So if you think of companies in fields ranging from mobile gaming to e-commerce, from cloud-based apps to mobile advertising, from near-field communication (NFC) apps to social networking plug-ins, they’re not really tech businesses in my book.

They’re technology-enabled businesses.

These companies tend not to be inventing and introducing any new technology.  No need to. Instead, they’re applying existing, proven frameworks, app development environments and marketplaces—the iPhone and iPad and the iStore; Android and Android Market; app development on Facebook; RFID and NFC technology; Microsoft Office365 and MS HealthVault; mobile geolocation services; ERP apps; Google Apps; and the list keeps growing—and using both vendor SDKs (software development kits) as well as open-source toolkits.

From that baseline, entrepreneurs can solve vertical-market-specific problems remarkably quickly and cheaply without reinventing the wheel with the underlying technology. They can cobble together a prototype solution, get it in front of lead customers, and interactively incorporate real-world feedback.

Fantastic. Because neither smart entrepreneurs nor their customers nor their investors, frankly, are fans of technology risk. Science projects belong in research labs, not deployed in businesses and being foisted on commercial customers. Startups, meanwhile, are usually best off focusing their efforts and their scarce capital on solving a real customer problem—and basing their solution on bullet-proof, market-proven platforms.

Jim Price is a serial entrepreneur and Adjunct Lecturer of Entrepreneurial Studies at the Zell Lurie Institute at The University of Michigan Ross School of Business. ©2012, James D. Price.

NOW READ: The 7 Principles Of Successful Entrepreneurship >

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Entrepreneurs With 'Founder's Disease' Will Make Any Investor Run Away

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Awhile back, a pair of entrepreneurs—I’ll call them Jen and Jeff—approached me seeking advice on launching their new business.

They were looking for help in formulating their go-to-market strategy, tightening up their business plan, and figuring out how much capital they’d need to raise and how to raise it.

So I sat with the partners for an hour or so hoping to size them up as people while also getting a sense for their business concept.

I came away impressed.

They were coming to the table with four things I love to see in a startup team: a truly innovative new-business concept; a running head-start on developing the product; domain knowledge in their industry; and what I call useful scar tissue—they’d both previously experienced the stresses and challenges of startups.

They offered me substantial stock in exchange for my advice and a board seat, and I said I’d seriously consider their offer.

So why, two days later, did I choose to turn them down?

Because, as I reflected on our conversation, I realized that the partners had been manifesting all the symptoms of the dreaded founder’s disease. Here are the classic tells:
 
1. They insist on a C-level titles, even if they aren’t qualified: It’s OK to start out as president or even CEO, but savvy entrepreneurs know that, at some point, they may need to bring in professional managers who’ve managed rapidly-growing teams.
 
2. They’re not coachable: They approach most situations thinking they’ve got the answers already, and they’re not good at seeking and accepting advice from outside experts and investors.
 
3. They’re controlling: They have trouble letting go, and feel the need to be involved in even the smallest decisions.
 
4. They want to raise OPM (other people’s money, from angel investors or VCs), but they’re not willing to play the game the way it’s played: On the one hand, they want (or need) investors’ money to launch and grow your business, yet are horrified by the level of equity dilution they’ll suffer and the number of board seats and preferred voting rights their new investors might have.

Founder’s disease is widely considered a total turn-off by outside investors, A-list talent, and in-demand advisors and board members. Why? Because companies led by such founders inevitably remain small.  Success tends to be constrained by the founders’ capabilities, and by the fact that their attitude scares off talent and capital.

By contrast, “disease-free” founders do what’s right for their business, not for themselves. They focus on bringing in the best and smartest capital. They relish taking advice and counsel from the pros. They’re not threatened by surrounding themselves with people who are smarter than they. And they focus on growing the whole pie, not on the size of their proportional slice. By creating a successful whole, good entrepreneurs create a virtuous circle with a vibrant work environment, engaged customers, and strong returns for their investors and shareholders.

Disease-infected startups, meanwhile, remain struggling and under-resourced, with the founders so often directing the blame at the potential investors, customers and employees who turn them down, grousing that those folks “just don’t get it."

Jim Price is a serial entrepreneur and Adjunct Lecturer of Entrepreneurial Studies at the Zell Lurie Institute at The University of Michigan Ross School of Business. ©2012, James D. Price.

NOW READ: Most Tech Startups Aren't Really 'Tech' Businesses At All >

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Meet Ted Roden, The Unlikely Founder Of Fancy Hands: His Army Of Assistants Take Care Of Your Grunt Work

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ted roden, fancy hands, august 2012, bi, dng

Ted Roden did everything startup founders are told not to do. He didn't have a cofounder and he didn't start a company in his 20's.

He started one alone, in his 30's, as a father.

When Roden first started working on personal assistant startup Fancy Hands, he was still collecting pay checks from The New York Times where he worked in R&D and helped develop News.me.  He was writing a book, and his wife just had a baby.

He was so pressed for time that he struggled to get everything done -- so he turned to people on Craigslist to help him accomplish simple tasks. The Craigslist assistants helped him schedule meetings and make dinner reservations, but more importantly, they gave him some sanity at a crazy point in his life.

Roden figured other people would enjoy a similar sanity-saving solution. He opened up Fancy Hands to the public in April 2010 and paying customers grew organically.

Roden finally left News.me when it was acquired by Betaworks. Fancy Hands had enough paying subscribers to keep Roden financially afloat.

Since then he's grown his business to seven employees and he's hiring more people. Fancy Hands has thousands of customers paying at least $25 per month to have menial tasks completed. Roden's assistants have done everything from deliver flowers to wait on hold. They've even written love poems and tweaked resumes.

Users pay for tasks in bundles; Fancy Hands doesn't charge by the hour. Five tasks cost $25 per month, fifteen cost $45, and unlimited task plans are $95. Tasks don't roll-over if they aren't used.

Roden recently raised $1 million. A slew of investors, from Polaris Ventures to SV Angel, were all to happy to finance his rapidly growing company.

We stopped by last week to meet Roden and see what the new Fancy Hands office is like.

Fancy Hands occupies a pleasant, well-lit office in SoHo, just off Canal Street.



The company is all about making your life easier so you can relax.



The team is small and works out of one big room. There are only seven people on staff. All assistants work remotely.



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Realtime Raises $100 Million To Make The Internet More Like Live TV

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André Parreira Realtime

Imagine never having to hit your browser refresh button again. Imagine that the whole Internet continuously live streams itself, even if you keep a single Web page open for hours -- or if you access a site from your mobile phone.

Imagine being an enterprise that builds a website that updates worldwide in a millisecond and then reports back to you in realtime what people are doing on your site.

That's the goal of Brazilian company Realtime, which launched in the U.S. today with $100 million investment from BRZTech Holding, a three-month old São Paulo-based venture fund.

The goal isn't just to bring Realtime's products to the U.S., but to fundamentally change the way the Internet is delivered, the company says.

This isn't a really new idea. The concept of "push" technology grew up in the 1990s with the Web and is the basis of a lot of services, like instant messaging. (Remember PointCast Network which pushed stock info and was embedded into Internet Explorer and Netscape? It was eventually killed off by RSS feeds.)

But Realtime already has a couple of offerings that are different from that old tech and have been widely adopted worldwide. The company claims it has 2,000 global customers and already delivers "an average of 500,000 messages per second, with a worldwide footprint that surpasses 80 million user-connections every 24 hours."

Realtime does this through a cloud for hosting realtime apps known as Open Realtime Connectivity and it offers a freemium product for building apps using a language it calls xRTML (or extensive Realtime multiplatform language). xRTML can convert an existing static web page into a Realtime “live Web” delivery page.

It is opening offices today in New York and Santa Monica, Calif.

We asked CEO and founder André Parreira a few questions about the company's technology and how it differs from other ways to create live apps on the Web.

Do you have any U.S. companies using the technology yet and what are they doing with it?

Realtime is in the early stages in terms of relationships with clients, who are advertisers, e-commerce sites and publishers. Right now, this is still a proof-of-concept stage with clients.

Clients are incorporating xRTML on their site to see the power of real-time and testing the real-time analytics to determine the business intelligence that they can get from it.

Clients are seeing real-time in action: how many people are looking at their home page and ads -- and they're making valuations on time exposure.

How is this different from other methods to build streaming apps on the Web, like Flash or Silverlight?

Realtime is not an app.

Realtime allows developers, companies, etc. to have a single focal point of information (think of a message bus) where you can have different systems communicating with each other (a desktop app, a mobile app, a web app). You suddenly have the ability to have information flowing to and from different systems while allowing you to actually PUSH that content to a web user, without the need of plugins or anything else installed on your browser or computer.

While it CAN work with Flash and Silverlight (we provide APIs for these two platforms), it's not really comparable. You can make your Flash game and use Realtime for all the multiplayer communication, for example. You could even do a multi-platform multiplayer game by having the browser (Flash) version, a mobile version and a desktop version, all communicating between each other (through one-to-many and many-to-many communication).

Realtime is a way for applications and users to communicate between several platforms and using a plethora of protocols (it uses the best possible - WebSockets for browser, for example), not to author content or applications (like Flash and Silverlight is).

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Pinterest Is Open To Everyone Now -- Here's How To Get Started

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pinterest cats

Pinterest no longer requires an invitation to register an account.

It's open to anyone that wants to join. You only need to sign up with a Facebook account, Twitter account, or email address.

If you've been waiting for a while, now's the time to get in.

If you're on the fence about joining, here's a quick run through of the process, and what you can do with Pinterest.

Head over to Pinterest.com and click on "Join Pinterest"



You can pair it with your Twitter or Facebook account, but we're going to use an email address



Pick a username and enter the rest of the required details



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These Are The Apps Silicon Valley's Rising Stars Use To Survive

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matt debergalis meteor

Starting a company used to be incredibly hard — you had to buy up a ton of software licenses and hardware, like SharePoint and Oracle servers, to get anything off the ground.

Nowadays, it's still incredibly hard to start a company, but thanks to a whole suite of new cloud-based applications that simplifies everyday tasks, it's less of a headache.

And more often than not, you'll find a few favorite mission-critical applications among Silicon Valley's newest wave of red-hot startups.

There's a new site called WeUseThat that's profiled a number of the top rising stars in Silicon Valley to find out which apps are their favorites.

We've assembled the best for you below.

Stripe

Startups using: Most newer startups, including Beeminder

Stripe is rapidly becoming the go-to payments option for any new startup. It's a few lines of code that you add to your software that immediately enables you to accept credit card payments.

It's one of the easiest payments solutions in the world, and the terms are much nicer than some typical credit card companies.



Twilio

Startups using: Beeminder

If you want your application to have anything to do with phone calls or text messages, Twilio is the go-to API. It lets you plug your service into a phone line that can accept phone calls or deliver text messages.

The best example was GroupMe in its earliest days, which let you send text messages through its service to multiple recipients, creating a text message "chat room."



Rapportive

Startups using: Beeminder

If you can't afford an expensive customer relationship management suite, Rapportive is a great option because it shows profiles right inside your email inbox.

Most startups today use Gmail, and Rapportive assembles a lot of information about an incoming contact and displays it neatly in your inbox.



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12 Pinterest Users You Should Be Following

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christine martinez

Now that Pinterest is in open registration for anyone to join, it's time to start following some interesting pinners.

No matter your interests, you'll find someone interesting on the site to follow.

From topics as vague as architecture or as specific as wedding inspiration, Pinterest has you covered.

Evan Sharp

Pins about: Art and architecture

Check him out here >



Centsational Girl

Pins about: affordable interior design

Click here to check her out >



Fitsugar

Pins about: Health and exercise

Check it out here >



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