I'm pretty sure Dropbox paid a lot more than $7.95 for "dropbox.com" It's actually somewhat difficult to find an unregistered, pronounceable domain that's under 6 or 7 characters.
41,000,006 reasons why I think we're in a bubble
41–50 of 269 posts
Re: 41,000,006 reasons why I think we're in a bubble
#42One of the arguments I've heard that state that things are different this time around goes like this: it is far less capital intensive to do a startup now rather than in the late 90s because of open source software stacks and cloud computing providers. I agree with this statement but it means that the average software startup doesn't need a lot of cash to develop their product. Apart from ads and perhaps domain names…
Developers are not cheap.
True and false, assuming color has one tech cofounder. What they need at this point is an Android and IOS client that can take pictures and record the current position of the user then you need a backend system that can handle the massive concurrent upload of pictures and do concurrent geo-spacial lookups. This is by far the most difficult part but MongoDB has a filesystem component and there is a plugin for Nginx that allows you to serve files directly from it.
The geospacial indexing can be accomplished by creating a 2-dimentional index of picture buckets where each bucket contains the pictures taken within a small geographical area (say 2000x2000 meters) then all you only have to iterate over the pictures in the buckets that are within the current distance from your location. The clients can easily sort their images before their are uploaded.
It may sound complicated but games do that kind of thing all the time, and often with bigger constraints (skipping a picture or two isn't going to be a big deal).
So yeah devs are not cheap, but a technical co-founder should be able to develop this.
Re: 41,000,006 reasons why I think we're in a bubble
#43I don't know about the rest of the world, but we sure are in a bubble here at Hacker News. There seems to be a real disconnect between what people want to build/invest in and what people in the real world actually need and want to pay for. Just as sample of what I've witnessed in the past few years: Ask HN: How do you like my file sharing app? Ask HN: How do you like my social app for niche ? Ask HN: How do you like…
That's really unfair. Whilst I agree there's a disconnect, I wouldn't say it's specific to HN, but rather to the entire industry. The reason why you see those Ask HN posts is because people are looking around and realizing that those types of services have been getting tons of funding and attention.
There's a disconnect, but it's in the social web world, not just HN. And I would say HNers are trying to capitalize on the hype.
Re: 41,000,006 reasons why I think we're in a bubble
#44The $41m injection might well kill the company. I've never seen startups with too much capital early on to become the next Google/Facebook/Twitter - you lose your chance to become "relentlessly resourceful"!
Re: 41,000,006 reasons why I think we're in a bubble
#45If the $40m is mostly for marketing / advertising then this is definitely reminiscent of the last tech bubble.
Re: 41,000,006 reasons why I think we're in a bubble
#46Hmph. If nothing else, posts like this are terribly offensive to the entrepreneurs that dedicate their lives to products like Color. Did anyone consider that maybe Sequoia, who have invested in companies that make up over 10% of the NASDAQ know what they are doing? Companies like Color, AdKeeper and Flipboard have "crazy" valuations based on the founders having ridiculous resumes. They have all created billions of do…
"Did anyone consider that maybe Sequoia, who have invested in companies that make up over 10% of the NASDAQ know what they are doing?" Neither Merril Lynch nor Lehman Brother knew what they were doing. "Investors are less interested in where you are today, compared to where you are going" Yes the future is important, but there's the risk-reward trade-off. If a company looks badly risky today, a rational investor will…
So now whenever someone with a successful past history does something moderately contrarian, people are just going to recite the banking collapse?
"Rebecca Black signed onto the same record label as Miley Cyrus, I think the label knows what they are doing" ... "We all though Lehman Bros knew what they were doing, dude"
Anyway, I like people that stray from the field and do contrarian things that other people think are crazy, if nothing else in 10 years it'll be exceedingly satisfying for these kinds of investors to point at all the haters (and if they fail, well, everyone was right blah blah serves them right for taking risks)
Re: 41,000,006 reasons why I think we're in a bubble
#47We're still just starting a watershed moment for ways of finding productivity gains, forms of entertainment, ways to connect and share. We haven't scratched the surface yet. There are huge leaps being worked on in the foundation technology. Give us a bubble! Spread it out, so that such 41mm deals go instead to a thousand teams. And we will give you the future.
> Give us a bubble! Spread it out, so that such 41mm deals go instead to a thousand teams. And we will give you the future.
That happens eventually, it seems, in a somewhat roundabout way, to some degree. Look at where the money from Viaweb ended up, as one example. Lots of successful people's money ends up as angel funding: Paypal, Delicious, and so on.
Re: 41,000,006 reasons why I think we're in a bubble
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Developers are not cheap.
True and false, assuming color has one tech cofounder. What they need at this point is an Android and IOS client that can take pictures and record the current position of the user then you need a backend system that can handle the massive concurrent upload of pictures and do concurrent geo-spacial lookups. This is by far the most difficult part but MongoDB has a filesystem component and there is a plugin for Nginx th…
but could you make Color.com in a weekend?
Re: 41,000,006 reasons why I think we're in a bubble
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just because there might be a bubble doesn't mean that all startups will autofail. However, if I ran a startup with ads as my main source of revenue, I would be worried as advertising budgets are the first thing to be axed in a crisis. For entrepreneurs crashes are the best times to innovate and launch new ventures because while everyone else is angsting about cutbacks and surviving just another day, the entrepreneur…
Do you mean crashes are the best time? During bubbles everything gets more expensive. I agree that a bubble doesn't mean all startups with autofail. I would like to learn from the past and understand what worked.
Yes, I meant crashes. Fixed. Thank you.
I seriously doubt that modern democratic-capitalist societies as a whole can avoid bubbles. Individual business owners OTOH can not only survive but also thrive in the aftermath given that some basic conditions are meet.
Re: 41,000,006 reasons why I think we're in a bubble
#50I don't know about the rest of the world, but we sure are in a bubble here at Hacker News. There seems to be a real disconnect between what people want to build/invest in and what people in the real world actually need and want to pay for. Just as sample of what I've witnessed in the past few years: Ask HN: How do you like my file sharing app? Ask HN: How do you like my social app for niche ? Ask HN: How do you like…
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