Viewing profile — SemanticFog

VCs would happily invest in low risk, high-return investments -- that is in fact what they are looking for. But wherever there is truly low risk, multiple funding sources will comp…

If you're working on a big idea that is slightly ahead of its time, then persistence can pay big dividends -- check out the story of Pandora ( http://www.businessinsider.com/pandor…

This is the tech equivalent of being trapped in a Portlandia skit. You guys are taking his parody seriously...

Is this guy for real? Or does he transcend our limited notions of "reality"?

In general I think pay-to-pitch is highly suspicious, but I'm sympathetic to Graham Lawlor and Ultralight startups. He charges a small fee to cover expenses and make sure people ar…

On the one hand, it's kind of a classic dick move by Mark, pretty typical of his bloody mindedness. (He's more of a bulldog than Zinga ever was.) On the other, in any company as bi…

You're absolutely right -- RDBMSes were designed to solve problems with the nosql-type approaches that preceded them. The nosql bandwagon is blindly rolling into the past, where it…

There's already artemisinin resistance starting in several places around the world, especially the Thai-Cambodia border, a very chaotic area with high endemic malaria. The main pro…

Most vaccines are against viruses and bacteria. Malaria is a more complicated organism, a protist with many local varieties, and a tremendous ability to evolve around vaccines and …

There are so many ways to screw over a non-employee, minority common shareholder, you may well have no case here. For example, if the company hit a rough patch, it might have been …

Why change when you are hauling in billions of dollars per year, and there's nowhere to go but down? The mobile carriers are going to extract as many dollars as possible while they…

Comforting words from pg... If you start a startup, you'll probably fail. Most startups fail. It's the nature of the business. But it's not necessarily a mistake to try something t…

The real story might be that his product just isn't as good as the competition. It took 10 seconds of searching to find https://www.igradeplus.com/ , which on the surface looks lik…

@pg I think you should consider that your portfolio company is possibly not telling you the whole truth after they screwed up in a major way. I have no idea what happened -- just a…

They have every right to promote their differentiation. Speaking as someone who lives in a great part of Manhattan and is often out of town, I've never used AirBnb because I don't …

The most important reason to move to EC2 is flexibility -- do you need to quickly add servers, then later turn them off? If you have very predictable needs, and already have dedica…

There's nothing unique to AOL here. When I first got out of college, I interviewed at local newspapers up and down the east coast. Entry level jobs had awful pay, about $15K/yr, bu…

1x is still 1x -- if you don't get over it, the common shareholders don't get paid. In a pool as big as YC's there will be plenty of examples.

You'd be surprised. The ones that raise the most money also have the hardest time getting over the preferred total. The purchaser will take care of the employees it wants, but othe…

If YC holds common shares, then you need to adjust the expected value down quite a bit. On any exit that isn't a huge win, non-employee common shareholders are by far the most like…

If Java could be redesigned from scratch, with no concern for backwards compatibility, it would probably look a lot like C#.

I say this as a person who has read thousands of resumes and hired hundreds of people at multiple startups: Your record will hurt you badly at places you don't really want to work.…

Please let them hire some decent people to handle communications to AWS users! And we won't complain if they also get some engineers with world-class expertise in network attached …

Chrome used to crash frequently for me on multiple Windows 7 64-bit machines, but it runs rock solid now. It turned out the problem is that Chrome auto-updates flash, and their sof…

We had consistent serious problems related to EBS for a several-month streak about a year ago, and I heard almost identical stories from other EC2 users around the same time. Insta…