21–30 of 49 posts
The AirBnB cereal boxes is more genius than desperate. I consider desperate things like the Zappos story where Tony literally sold everything he owned to keep the business afloat.
Also drove to Foxwoods to play poker once with my co-founder when we were particularly desperate. We only had enough money for one buy-in ($300). Figured that if I was asking my parents for money again, asking for an extra $300 was worth the risk, if I had a chance to win and not ask for anything.
Bill also took random jobs on Craigslist (helping people set up pod-casts, writing papers for wealthy foreign students, etc.)
I taught the LSAT and did "law school admission consulting" which basically translated to helping people write personal statements.
I went on a few 24 hour online poker binges to pay the rent. I won a lot, but had to borrow money from my parents because it took over a week to cash-out. Also drove to Foxwoods to play poker once with my co-founder when we were particularly desperate. We only had enough money for one buy-in ($300). Figured that if I was asking my parents for money again, asking for an extra $300 was worth the risk, if I had a chance…
(I'm "aberman", one of the co-founders of WePay)
I lost ~30lbs in the 2 months I was doing this. In the end the startup failed, I swallowed my pride and got my old job back, the one I'd left a year previous to work full time on my startup.
I went on a few 24 hour online poker binges to pay the rent. I won a lot, but had to borrow money from my parents because it took over a week to cash-out. Also drove to Foxwoods to play poker once with my co-founder when we were particularly desperate. We only had enough money for one buy-in ($300). Figured that if I was asking my parents for money again, asking for an extra $300 was worth the risk, if I had a chance…
shit, just posted this from my girlfriend's HN account :( (I'm "aberman", one of the co-founders of WePay)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for the details. This is getting a bit off-topic, but can you describe how a foreigner should go about finding a place to live in Central America? Did you just fly there and look for "For Rent" signs or did you line something up beforehand?
I constantly travel to Latin America, speaking at conferences and recruiting talent. I've lived/worked in Chile, Argentina, Mexico, Peru Colombia and traveled to Honduras and Guatemala. If you want to go to central america let me know. I can introduce you to the tech/startup community there. They can hook you up with the best/safest placest to live, work areas, and the whole thing. My personal experience is with Guat…
Only now can I really look back at that time and appreciate what a huge opportunity it was. Most people only have one shot in life to take infinite risk. Eventually life kicks in and you have to start making more measured decisions. However, even with the huge amount of risk I took back then it almost certainly would not have been possible had it not been for my very supportive family and girlfriend. I knew that no matter what happened I could always go home and tell them I gave it my best shot and life would go on.
I went on a few 24 hour online poker binges to pay the rent. I won a lot, but had to borrow money from my parents because it took over a week to cash-out. Also drove to Foxwoods to play poker once with my co-founder when we were particularly desperate. We only had enough money for one buy-in ($300). Figured that if I was asking my parents for money again, asking for an extra $300 was worth the risk, if I had a chance…
shit, just posted this from my girlfriend's HN account :( (I'm "aberman", one of the co-founders of WePay)
Someone who is a member of a lesser known six person startup (the other five of which Im sure are lovely people) took some front end development work from me, then dissappeared off the face of the earth - no Skype, no email, no phone calls - before the product could be completed, without warning. The guy is otherwise a nice person, but I get the feeling he was desperate for the cash and did a bad thing.
However, our client was a hedge fund manager with an in house attorney who kept trying to convince me that because of my age (I was 21 at the time) I had no idea what I was doing and was being unethical for subcontracting work. He refused to pay and threatened to have his in house attorney waste enough of our lawyers time to make it unfeasible for us to pursue litigation (we didn't have a lawyers fees clause in our contract in case of disputes). After a lot of back and forth, he ended up settling for 50% of the contract amount ($12.5k IIRC) and we didn't pay anything to our subcontractors as a result of their breach of contract. The $12.5k plus some other purely advisory (non-development) work we did paid for us to stop arbitraging consulting (which was great since we didn't have any subcontractors anymore since we fired them) and to live on for the rest of the summer and work on our startup.
We raised money from YC right before that money ran out.