Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Etacts (YC W10) Shutting Down

etacts.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 64 posts

Re: Etacts (YC W10) Shutting Down

#33

Post by pclark »

angelbob wrote: post #24

That's deeply unfortunate. I loved you guys on demo day. Based on my choices, apparently I shouldn't try more angel investment. I was an investor in NewsLabs. This would have been another "yeah, let's invest" choice if they were interested (they weren't). I think I may have picked the two first to close up shop.

or etacts got acquired, of two startups you'd have invested in, one had an exit (and the other returned some of your money?) - now scale that intuition to an entire portfolio ... :)

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/email_crm_startup_etact...

Re: Etacts (YC W10) Shutting Down

#34

Post by andrewjshults »

I'm not sure what I'd import the data into (at least right now), but it'd be nice if they offered an export functionality rather than just wholesale killing all the data. I don't use it all the time, but the followup feature was great and something that I'm going to miss having.

Re: Etacts (YC W10) Shutting Down

#36

Post by angelbob »

pclark wrote: post #33
angelbob wrote: post #24

That's deeply unfortunate. I loved you guys on demo day. Based on my choices, apparently I shouldn't try more angel investment. I was an investor in NewsLabs. This would have been another "yeah, let's invest" choice if they were interested (they weren't). I think I may have picked the two first to close up shop.

or etacts got acquired, of two startups you'd have invested in, one had an exit (and the other returned some of your money?) - now scale that intuition to an entire portfolio ... :) http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/email_crm_startup_etact...

NewsLabs did indeed return some of the money.

There are several companies that I could have easily chosen that seem to have done well. It's just that the ones where you can see in advance that they're going to rock usually aren't looking for small, independent investors without a network of contacts.

In fact, by demo day several of them had already taken enough funding from seriously high-prestige investors that they weren't really looking even then.

The Etacts guys were very pleasant and personable about that, though, and were still very happy to talk :-)

I hope they did get acquired. Go them!

Re: Etacts (YC W10) Shutting Down

#37

Post by angelbob »

paraschopra wrote: post #32

I am amazed how such a small team can use $650k of funding in just 6-7 months. Can anyone comment? Though I would love to see a detailed postmortem post on this.

Partly they're amazing guys. If you talked to them, you'd understand some of how they managed.

All that stuff PG talks about -- utter confidence, and projecting "we're going to succeed and change the world," like it was just going to happen with you or without you? They were really good at that.

Re: Etacts (YC W10) Shutting Down

#38

Post by joshu »

angelbob wrote: post #24

That's deeply unfortunate. I loved you guys on demo day. Based on my choices, apparently I shouldn't try more angel investment. I was an investor in NewsLabs. This would have been another "yeah, let's invest" choice if they were interested (they weren't). I think I may have picked the two first to close up shop.

I didn't realize you were angel investing, Noah. Drop me a line.

NewsLabs wasn't raising enough money, so I didn't even consider it. I've said it before but: don't invest in companies raising too little. They will fail.

Re: Etacts (YC W10) Shutting Down

#39

Post by Tichy »

I always meant to create a Greasemonkey script that lets your friends pictures decay physically on Facebook or Twitter if you don't stay in touch. Still think that could be fun.
Post reply on HN