61–70 of 170 posts
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Not sure why this was downvoted. It's a little negative, but I do agree from this experience and you blogging about Jamie something better will come along! Good luck and is the weather in Phoenix still "100 and above it's a scorcher out there" :) ? You emailed me this summer re: my start-up. Good luck!
The alarm clock thing, right? :)
"We supplied a great deal of support and value to the 7 companies over the first 2 months of our 2010 cohort, and we received nothing in return for the 4 companies that were cut"
It seems like they are implying that the 4 companies somehow owe them something.
That really sucks! But dude, why give up on the idea? you're selling the domain and moving on? Incubators aren't necessary.. keep plugging away and launch anyway.
I'm just in survival mode at the moment, living on my parent's couch at the moment with negative money in my bank account. I need to sell some things to try to get back on my feet again - that's why I'm seeing if I can sell these domains.
When I saw this title, my immediate thought was "hmm, I wonder if this is about Bootup Labs?" I've met the people behind Bootup Labs, and I like them. They're smart. They're enthusiastic about what they're doing. But I was never really convinced that they were able to make things work financially. I've seen enough startups that I can usually tell when a startup is running on fumes and spending all their energy on try…
In case this makes anyone think cperciva is not very bright, I replaced the original HN title with the title of the blog post itself.
Jamie, I have a friend at Digg who is trying to contact you. They're looking for designers, if you're interested in a job.
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What sort of program offers $100k to that many groups and doesn't follow through? Not to be facetious, but: A program which doesn't have as much money as they're offering people. The founders of Bootup Labs put some of their own money in, but they're raising money (or trying, at least) from VCs for the rest. They're paying themselves [EDIT: or not -- see reply from dannyrobinson below] from the $50k/startup managemen…
As a manager of Bootup, I can assure you that we haven't been personally paid anything. The $50k is funnelled through the company to maximize canadian tax credits, which can amount to a meaningful amount of money. And it's used to pay for rent, legal, accounting, and other services that are for the benefit of the startup.
The way it works is that you get 50% of your R&D expenses back from the gov't, in cash, several months later. To claim it, you have to write reports explaining the R&D value of each project. Besides the obvious bureaucratic overhead, it ends up affecting the organizational structure of the company. It distorts the way the business is run, maybe by only 20%, but that's enough to make you lose in the market in the long run.
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You shouldn't have accepted companies that you couldn't afford to pay. You shouldn't have asked them to move to a different country. Very reckless and irresponsible and to then attack the poster as "twisting the truth" about tiny details seems even worse to me. You should be sorry. You should show some humility.
I agree completely with apphacker. Being evil or unfair on the Internet is anathema to a (web) startup-related enterprise. 3 out of 7 startups funded is ridiculous. With this hitting the HN community, your best hope is that all three of those startups make it big, or you've just lost whatever credibility you have (with startups that count). Good luck.
$50K for 8 months is a lot of rent and accounting services.
If the Management Fee pays for the managers' salaries, like Danny and Boris Wertz, then they are not necessarily incentivized to have quality startups in each cohort... more important to Bootup in that circumstance is having enough startups to cover their overhead in each 8 month cycle.
Boo the VC's in this one! The investors of BootupLabs did not have confidence in 57% of their latest pool of startups. i wonder why they invested at all if they dont fully back their judgement? Here's what probably happened, I bet the investors squeezed Boris and Danny with the alternative option being closing their doors early on all 7 companies. Sometimes VC's do evil things to extract more ownership in last minute…
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>I didn't suggest that Bootup was closing down or was out of money. The title of this posting is "Moved to Canada to participate in a startup incubator that had no money"...
http://i.imgur.com/cXxdv.png
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What sort of program offers $100k to that many groups and doesn't follow through? Not to be facetious, but: A program which doesn't have as much money as they're offering people. The founders of Bootup Labs put some of their own money in, but they're raising money (or trying, at least) from VCs for the rest. They're paying themselves [EDIT: or not -- see reply from dannyrobinson below] from the $50k/startup managemen…
As a manager of Bootup, I can assure you that we haven't been personally paid anything. The $50k is funnelled through the company to maximize canadian tax credits, which can amount to a meaningful amount of money. And it's used to pay for rent, legal, accounting, and other services that are for the benefit of the startup.