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Take the Money and Run

nate.io

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101–110 of 182 posts

Re: Take the Money and Run

#101

Post by mmorris »

ph0rque wrote: post #7

> Eventually, we'd come to learn how wrong we were, how hard the road ahead of us would be, and that selling the company would mean the end of what we'd worked so hard to build. But that night was for celebrating. So ominous... any hint as to what happened before the next blog post installment?

Another little hint from the previous blog post:

> The weakness of the design of the Zen UI also contributed significantly to the failure of the product after we were acquired, but that's another story.

[Edit: link to other blog post: http://nate.io/posts/the-second-time-around.html]

Re: Take the Money and Run

#102

Post by s73v3r »

nickstinemates wrote: post #38
bontoJR wrote: post #29

Very nice story, I have just one question: why did you guys not look for fundings or apply to something like Y Combinator? Also, I know there are a lot of other similar stories around the US. I would really like to find and ear something similar in an European country, in the hi-tech industry: a small startup doing a good job, with a tiny but prepared team, being lately acquired by a larger competitor. Is there any s…

If you can bootstrap, why raise unless you have a major barrier to achieve success?

One of the reasons they gave for selling was that they weren't sure they would be able to take the product to the next level on their own. It sounds like they would have had to seek funding at some point if things didn't change.

Re: Take the Money and Run

#104

Post by emptybits »

nickstinemates wrote: post #38
bontoJR wrote: post #29

Very nice story, I have just one question: why did you guys not look for fundings or apply to something like Y Combinator? Also, I know there are a lot of other similar stories around the US. I would really like to find and ear something similar in an European country, in the hi-tech industry: a small startup doing a good job, with a tiny but prepared team, being lately acquired by a larger competitor. Is there any s…

If you can bootstrap, why raise unless you have a major barrier to achieve success?

The stock answers to "why raise?" reduce to 1) to achieve the same success faster, or 2) to achieve a larger scale of success, or 3) because raising money drops you into a new world of experience and learning and future networks.

I'm not suggesting any of the above are superior paths to what was chosen in the article, BTW.

Re: Take the Money and Run

#106

Post by brookside »

goatforce5 wrote: post #93
rogerbinns wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also the portions are large (which everyone already knows). But it is also culturally normal to take a doggie bag of the leftovers home with you, to supply additional meals. ie one restaurant meal is good for more than one meal. This arose because the easiest way for a restaurant to increase revenue is to increase portion sizes and hence the price.

I've eaten at places in the US where they're straight up confused/offended if you don't doggie bag your leftovers. "What? Was there something wrong?" "No, i'm in a hotel and don't really have anywhere to store or reheat it." "Yeah, but... Are you sure you want it?"

b/c waste is bad. もったいない as the Japanese say.

Re: Take the Money and Run

#108

Post by AwesomeGorilla »

nkohari wrote: post #81
atmosx wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So basically, you've build the entire app yourself, right? What kind of lang/framework did you use?

Zen was ASP.NET MVC, SQL Server, and a big mess of jQuery. TaskTorch is React, Node, and RethinkDB.

Zen looked nicely done. How would you compare these two platforms?

Re: Take the Money and Run

#110

Post by nywarriorg »

jkot wrote: post #30
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #6

I'm probably being petulant or don't understand American culture, but: > To avoid spending money, we'd been subsisting on a diet consisting largely of soup. [...] But now, we'd gradually started to feel like we might be able to afford to eat at restaurants again. No middle ground?

It is not American culture, just very small part of it.

In NYC people laugh at you if you cook at home
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