I was surprised as well. But he is talking about Australian dollars, not American ones. which makes it around $17k US. That makes $6k/month a head, plus office cost (bank fees, ads, furniture etc).
Thanks for the clarification. It's still on the high side, imo, but depending on where you live, it may be sort of a low-end floor. I would think that many people would just forgo taking money out for the first several months, but perhaps there were more than just the 2 original folks? I couldn't tell from the article.
I'd be curious about what this also means for Instacart given their strategic partnership with Whole Foods and their direct competition with Amazon Fresh.
Groupon is hiring product managers of all levels in the SF Bay Area. No introduction needed on what Groupon does. Join us in disrupting the local space. We have a great team that's passionate about the local space and works incredibly hard to improve how people find things to eat, see and do in their neighborhood. We're working on many challenges - from improving our local data (quality, accuracy, canonicalization for terabytes of data) to improving customer and merchant engagement within our mobile apps.
When my co-founders and I were applying to accelerators in 2008, we had been accepted into a Philadelphia based accelerator called DreamIt shortly before our YC interviews. Not knowing if we would get into YC, we accepted with DreamIt as it was an exploding offer. A few weeks later we found that we got accepted by YC. After deliberating it for sometime, we went back to the DreamIt team and told them that we wished to rescind our acceptance. This started a shitstorm with the DreamIt team as they seemed to take this very personally. It was the first year of doing the accelerator and they went as far as threatening to take legal action. Not knowing what to do, we turned to PG and Jessica for help, a bit hesitantly, as we were afraid of what they would say. PG expressed his extreme disappointment with how DreamIt had reacted to this and was supportive of our situation. He send them an email telling them to back off and that this was not an acceptable way to be treating founders.
Just one anecdote out of many of how YC has gone to many lengths to protect founders.
Since that experience, I've realized that it really doesn't do accelerators any good to introduce these conditions in their funding offers. It creates a bad reputation amongst founders in the increasingly competitive field of accelerators. And founders ultimately need to pick based on what they think will have the most impact to their business. Compete on benefits you can offer to founders, not legalese.
So many accelerators behave wildly unprofessionally and inappropriately for the space that they're in.
Perhaps all that's needed is more high-visibility guidelines like what YC is doing now. Perhaps we need better platform for evaluating investors from the founders perspective, instead of networks that really only care about evaluating startups.
Either way, the situation seems to be getting worse, with the continued explosion of accelerator programs around the world. I hope we find an effective solution.
So basically you made an agreement with one set of investors and then went back on your word because another, "better" set of investors wanted to put money in? Maybe it's just me, but this doesn't reflect that well on you.
The effectiveness of the relationship between investors and startups in SV is built on upon being upstanding and not being overly manipulative. Founder/Investor agreements that are born from the manipulation of unexperienced founders always should be EXPECTED to turn out badly.
There's a child-like expectation that once the deal is signed or agreement is made that it's over. It never is, that's just the beginning. If you're expecting that everything is finalized as soon as an agreement is made, regardless of the conditions, then you're simply bad at business and taking risks that you haven't yet realized.
(Of course this isn't true in Europe. They love taking contracts extremely literally, and their economies suffer enormously for it.)
The founders could always threaten not to work enthusiastically (or basically at all). Nothing the investors can do about that. So the investors are better off taking their money back.
If DreamIt accepted you then a few weeks later after you had plans to move there pulled their offer in order to accept another team how would you take it?
I am not saying I would have not taken the YC admit but I would understand DreamIt being a little pissed.
Of course PG helped you wriggle out of your DreamIt acceptance. He sees you as an investment. Who wouldn't try to protect their investment?
1. Yes, its usable without Facebook. Sign up on the site and you can upload media directly (or email them in).
2. No limit on how much you can upload at the moment. This might bite me in the ass later but if anything changes, there'll be a grandfathering in of older accounts.
3. You set up a password for your timeline. This is then shared automatically with "subscribers" that you add to your account. They will get notified (via email) when you post anything and can click through this email and never
4. Great question. Currently the plan is making money on prints (a PicPlum like service - printing of photos and mailing to family members). I may also introduce a premium version with more storage.
Would love to get your thoughts on the revenue ideas. And great questions - I should spell some of this out on the landing page more.
So as for question 3... one password? So anyone who has access could log in as anyone else who has access using their email and the same password, right? Also, do they need the password when clicking from an email or is there a special link there that lets them bypass password entry? If the latter, how long do those links last?
I don't mean to pry too much into implementation details, but I am very selective about what I share, so it's important to me.
Yup, one password that they need to use to login, along with the email address that you've whitelisted for them. So its possible that someone could guess the password and their email address to get unauthorized access. I've debated a lot on this one and from the many parents I spoke to, this seemed to be a good middle ground between having some security and keeping it simple for family members to use.
The links in the emails have a special link that unique to each subscribers. These links at the moment do not expire but thats something I'm changing soon. All the images in the emails expire after a week.
* It solves a key problem for parents: How do I easily share my baby's pictures & videos privately without requiring my friends and family to sign up or install something?
* It automatically finds pictures of your baby on your Facebook feed and pulls them into your baby's timeline, so that your grandmother can see them.
* Built in SF with my buddy and I using Django/Python, MongoDB, AngularJS
Very cool! My wife and I have this issue. We and my parents want to share pictures without posting our child's life for facebook to control, but still have that convenience.
