Technically "microblogging" is the generic term for Twitter's service, as I'm sure you know, but given how quickly they dominated the space it's a bit obscure (like saying "ice pop" for a Popsicle). I'm curious about the polarizing. I've never seen the word used that way before; does it refer to screening certain types out, or to attracting only certain types in? Is the idea to avoid the misogynist and alt right types who have ruined Twitter for a lot of people?
Jon - really enjoyed failing to stump you the other day at the Urban.Us dinner and love what you are doing. Question: "The target tenant earns between $50,000 and $100,000 — the teachers, restaurant servers, police officers and entry-level tech workers who struggle to afford the $2,700 studios or $3,500 one-bedrooms popping up on Rincon Hill or Mission Bay."
Do teachers - let alone restaurant servers - in SF make >$50k?
Great to chat with you as well, great conversation and I appreciate the hard questions. Median teacher salary in 2012 was $59k according to public school data, restaurant servers with tips make the highest salary per geo of the restaurant industry in San Francisco clocking in at $50k base with between $20-50k in tips totaling $70k to $100k. We don't want to stop at $50k as a baseline though. Our 3 buildings under construction will have suites that can be afforded on a $25k a year salary. Our goal is to build, at scale, for those making minimum wage. We can only do that by brining down the cost of housing further which is the core focus of our business.
Spam does not mean unsolicited marketing. Door-to-door sales, direct mail, telemarketing, billboards - even the guy who in every tourist trap in the world who begs you to come eat at his restaurant - are all unsolicited marketing, but not spam. Spam refers to bulk-generated, unsolicited marketing over electronic mediums.
The distinction is important, because in non-electronic mediums, the conversion threshold for unsolicited marketing is high enough that the market more or less self-regulates. Email, or electronic mediums broadly, became a new territory because the CPM of unsolicited messages effectively went to zero, meaning all but the lowest conversion rates would generate positive ROI.
As such, sending strangers unsolicited messages about new services over email, twitter, etc is legit, as long as you are doing so manually and are not deceiving them. I have no idea what the AirBNB folks did, but I suspect that it was manual.
For a graphical illustration of the history of the word spam, check out this google ngram search: http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=spam%2Cjunk+mai.... I started it at 1930 b/c I thought it was kind of fun to see the spike around the time that Hormel introduced the other sort of Spam.
I've worked with teams at Lean Startup Machine who have done this, but you have to be careful not to get shut down by Twitter as a spammer. I like how dools did it: only targeting people with the hashtag, and writing personalized messages. Think of it from their perspective: if you received this tweet, would you flag the user as spam?
It's very hard for media - even specialist media - to be as well versed in the technical knowledge of the practitioner. You see it all the time in financial journalism as well where people through around large numbers that are grossly distorted from reality. If the journalists were as good at the technical aspects of what they covered as the practitioners, they would be making a lot more money as practitioners (see for example Michael Arrington, or Michael Moritz before him). Celebrity journalists such as Michael Lewis or Tom Wolfe might be excepted from this rule, although even Andrew Ross Sorkin makes a lot of financial errors in his writing. Dan Primack is one of the few financial journalists who puts so much energy into understanding what he covers to get it right, yet loves the beat so much that he doesn't seem to be interested in becoming a money manager any time soon. I've digressed a bit towards financial journalism, but tech journalism and other journalistic areas in which technical knowledge is required suffer from similar problems.
Either they can do it or they shouldn't do it at all. It makes little sense to read an article that you know from the beginning is wrong because the journalist couldn't understand what he's writing about. Bad information is worse than no information.
That's an unrealistic standard: journalists are very rarely experts in what they report, but their flawed accounts can still be useful. The reader just has to be aware and avoid overconfidence in the particular details, when those are filtered through flawed, erroneous, and oversimplified sources.
You can still extract some signal from a noisy or biased channel: bad information is better than no information, if you have some inkling of how it's bad.
If I recall correctly from my AP Journalism class a billion years ago, mainstream journalists - we didn't have such a distinction then but I'm imagining that would be the equivalent - are taught to write at a 6th or 7th grade level. Of course the site just rated the above at 18.2. I'm going to have to work on this.
The founders in YC are hardly naive innocents who are undervaluing their startups. A) the empirical evidence shows that they get the highest valuations for their seed rounds; and b) the current conversation explicitly addresses the case where they already have an offer with a cap 2x that what Google Ventures is offering.
Etsy is considered to have one of the top engineering teams in NY - their CEO was originally brought in as CTO to solve what was at the time a technology mess - and they have a strong engineering culture. Dwolla is hungry to get developers to use their platform, and Alex and the NY team were a key part of organizing AngelHack NY. I imagine b/w the two of them they will do a good job.
