I was just watching PG's Office Hours: http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/b/298808297 and at around 28:40 he has an insight that is almost word for word from our 2009 application: make a tool that targets the busybody matchmakers to circumvent the chicken and the egg program with dating sites. Don't make a dating site, just make a tool for matchmakers.
I guess the lesson here is that if you have a good idea, 10^n people have also had the same idea, 10^(n-2) are working on it right now and 10^(n-3) have a decent shot of making it work.
I was wondering, though, out of interest, how many other people have had the same experience of being unsuccessful with their YC application only to find their idea being touted, or, more gallingly, another team being accepted into YC with the same idea?
I really couldn't find a simple wrapper to pycrypto that would encrypt data correctly in Python 3.
So I tried to follow the instructions at http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2009-06-11-cryptographic-right-answers.html (written by HN's cperciva) and wrote https://github.com/andrewcooke/simple-crypt
Is that OK? Given the problems Tarsnap had with CTR mode, was it wrong to follow those instructions anyway? Have I got the offset handling right?
It seemed like it would be better to write this once, get it revised here, and then publish it (I'll make an egg for pypi once it seems OK) than quietly write my own and let others do the same (it was surprisingly complex - I mention the Tarsnap issues because after reading about them realised I had the same error...).
Apologies if I overlooked an existing package. And thanks for any constructive criticism.
I think a lot of people on HN would have bookmarked great content on how to get customers when you've just started out. If you could share them, that would be great. I'm planning to take the plunge next month and would appreciate any information on customer acquisition strategies. Thanks.
To start us off, I have the following: http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/04/in-the-pursuit-of-traction-have-you-considered-all-verticals.html
I have a significant amount of my portfolio tied up in my company's stock. The opportunity to take some profits (~200% gain from my options) presented itself last month and I passed to wait out the capital gains period which would have taken around 6 more months. The money wasn't desperately needed, but I've been tucking it away in a nest egg for my own startup one day.
Long story short, tech recently got hammered and even with the bounce back I lost far more than I would have saved in a preferential tax rate. Normally I'm pretty objective about my stocks and will take profits without being greedy. In hindsight, I think I didn't make the "a dollar saved is a dollar made" connection: not making the right play simply because of taxes is still a form of greed. Are there any good rules of thumb for incorporating tax scenarios into your trades?
I guess the lesson here is that if you have a good idea, 10^n people have also had the same idea, 10^(n-2) are working on it right now and 10^(n-3) have a decent shot of making it work.
I was wondering, though, out of interest, how many other people have had the same experience of being unsuccessful with their YC application only to find their idea being touted, or, more gallingly, another team being accepted into YC with the same idea?