They are read by some alumni and YC staff. We try hard to keep things confidential but the group of readers is large--I wouldn't put nuclear launch codes in them, just because of the risk of accidental breach.
You wrote: "As such, one could argue that the startups have been acting completely rationally by taking advantage of the willingness in the private markets to invest at exorbitant valuations."
In the words of Clay Davis from The Wire: "You think I have time to ask a man, 'why he givin' me money?' Or 'where he gets his money from?' I'll take any motherfucker's money if they givin' it away."
Many VC's encouraged startups to raise as much money as they could while the getting was good. That is a good move for the VC's (raises the value of their shares) and the entrepreneurs (they get more money). But everyone should have known that interest rates were going to rise in the future, and that's the one trigger that will truly change the capital market.
I agree. The strategic need for startups to exist in the Bay Area combined with the cost of living/cost of talent has caused costs to soar, necessitating more funding. Combined with easy money, this has been a tinderbox waiting to blow for some time.
nothing particularly wrong with Flippa per se, it's more to do with the listing requirements and the way this particular product, and the related assets, are structured.
AOL has built up a formidable arsenal of video ad tech in recent years. Surely Verizon is more interested in that rather than whatever clicky content AOL is shipping these days.
I'm ignorant - explain how it's useful?
The cynical side of me thinks its useless without high quality video content, which AOL lacks. The greatest video ad tech sucks if you don't have the brand name sponsors, but those are only attracted to higher quality content.
I think you're confusing a venture capitalist with a journalist.
Venture capitalists are in the business of growing the value of their companies.
In this case, Fred did a great job of re-introducing me to one of his companies. I didn't understand why Brewster was important, but via his thoughtful post in which he shares personal experience, he's highlighted a pain point that I also share. I'll probably try the service now, and it may even make my life easier.
Most importantly, if Fred Wilson (or Mark Suster, or any other VC) only blogged about how great his companies are, nobody would read his blog. Instead, he built a loyal readership by writing on provocative topics, having an opinion, and starting conversations. His writing-to-promotion ratio is skewed very heavily in favor of writing.
I don't think many people had the opportunity to use Aereo. They had a decent presence in New York City, and as the company expanded across the country reporters cited customer numbers in the mid five figures.
As an Aereo user, let me tell you what you missed out on: one of the most amazing products I've ever used.
Aereo "worked." It worked like magic.
First, it lived up to its claim. You could stream live, broadcast television to your phone or computer, and you could AirPlay it to your television. Everything was in HD. It worked incredibly well. So many video products fail to deliver on the user experience, or the video is choppy, or it crashes all the time. Aereo's software had its struggles, but it worked far more often than not. I could have people over and stream the Super Bowl and never worry that Aereo would crap out.
Aereo also worked remarkably well during Hurricane Sandy. I live in Brooklyn, and Aereo's Brooklyn HQ was less than a mile from my apartment, but we streamed Aereo until we went to sleep that night. Considering reports that their antennae sucked a ton of power, that's incredible on a night when power was out all across the city.
I also interviewed with the company in 2013 for a business development role. Everyone that I met was really great. They treated me well during the process while clearly balancing a million things, including their legal concerns. I really, really wanted to work there, but it wasn't a fit for a lot of reasons, their uncertain future being one of them.
When my girlfriend told me that they were filing for bankruptcy, I was sad. This is innovative technology that worked for consumers, squashed by antiquated government regulation and a highly litigious, innovation-resistant, influential media industry.
Progress, halted.
A winning product that could have delighted millions, squashed.
Aereo also worked remarkably well during Hurricane Sandy.
Provided you had internet, yes. Which a lot of people didn't. Over the air broadcasts - which Aereo were retransmitting - don't require any internet connection. In an emergency situation like Sandy a bunny-ears antenna is infinitely more useful than a bandwidth-chewing internet streaming service.
Have you ever tried using one? Given that you live less than a mile from where Aereo is receiving its signal, you might be surprised at the crystal clear, HD quality TV you can get without paying a company $7 a month. Aereo's biggest triumph was making free, over the air broadcasts look like their premium product.
Yeah, that would make some sense back in 2005, maybe. During Sandy in 2012, Aero was infinitely more useful: when power ran out your TV with bunny ears became completely useless. On the other hand, you could still watch Aero on your battery powered HSPA connected smart phone. While I am sure bunny-ears antennas work great in more rural areas, they are completely useless on Manhattan.
Most people have a several-hundred-watt backup generator at home: their car. You can idle most cars for at least 2 hours per gallons of gas. That means with a 20 gallon tank, you have 40 hours of charging time for electronics. If you need to charge for an hour every six hours, for example, you'd have 10 days of phone usage.
I've had uninterrupted internet through many multi-day power outages with just my car and a $20 inverter to recharge my phone and laptop. I always fill up the car before a dangerous storm.
No car? You can buy pocket-sized power banks that recharge a phone to full multiple times for $5 a piece. Keep one per phone around for power outages and enjoy your movies.
P.S. If you have Verizon FiOS, you can keep your wired internet on too. The ONT uses almost no power; with a little hacking you can hook that up to a backup battery or your car too. Unlike cable, which needs powered repeaters on the phone poles every mile or so, your fiber's probably still connected in a power outage so long as the line hasn't physically been broken.
OTA is pretty terrible throughout Brooklyn. Unless you live at the top of a tall building, you're basically out of luck. I have a fairly clear view of the sky from my window, and I "get" 2-3 channels (my TV can identify them as channels, but you can't actually watch anything).
Bought one, it didn't work for me. Couldn't pick up a signal anywhere. Also, if I wanted to record shows I'd have to hook it to a Tivo (or similar device) which has an up-front cost and a monthly fee. Aereo provided the whole package in a low monthly cost.
You don't need a Tivo - just a USB tuner stick and MythTV, or some other open source solution. Granted if the antenna doesn't work then it doesn't work - I had some success buying a powered one.
You don't need Dropbox, just a Linux box and some rsync scripts. $7 is approximately 5 minutes worth of income for a lot of people on here...so if it takes longer than that per month to set up and maintain your solution then it's not a good deal.
What is antiquated about the idea that you don't get to use other peoples' valuable content without paying for it?
Look: the valuable product here is the content. All the technology can do is get in the way. It's great Aereo's technology got in the way less than its competitors, but that still doesn't mean people found the technology itself valuable. The content is what matters. The content is what delights consumers.
Given that reality, I think it's absurd to say that regulations protecting the people who create the content, the product without which the whole downstream ecosystem of streaming services and content consumption devices are utterly irrelevant, it's absurd to say those regulations are antiquated.
Keeping in mind that this content is being broadcast over public spectrum, you're right: the content is the most valuable product.
As a consumer, I want to access that content in an efficient, functional manner. My tax dollars are paying for it. So, I bought an antenna. It couldn't pick up any stations in my apartment, and this is a very common problem in NYC. Even if it picked up stations, I'd have to buy a separate device to record shows so that I can watch them on my schedule.
With Aereo, I was renting an antenna. The company built capital-intensive, power-sucking data warehouses in every city in which it operated and filled them with antennae for every customer. Aereo provided me with a cloud-based antenna, no different than buying one from Best Buy or Amazon.
Only:
(a) the signal was clear and reliable, not fuzzy. My friend has a long coaxial cable connected to his television and he tapes a 12" x 12" antenna to his window. Kind of ridiculous.
(b) they included a cloud-based DVR that allowed me to watch what I want, when I want. They improved the relationship that I had with broadcast content.
Aereo was very clear about the fact that they built a solution that adhered to the law because everyone had an individual antenna. This solution was very expensive, but it worked and though it was described as a Rube Goldberg machine, it made sense.
And here's the ultimate rub for content companies: now I don't watch your content at all. I don't see your ads. I have someone else's cable password, and I watch things sporadically, but I don't discover new shows like you want me to.
No. But our eyeballs watching those paid ads on free broadcast TV are enabling payments + profit for the production of that content. The numbers may vary by broadcaster and program, but the business model is clear, or atleast was.
I come down on the other side. The networks get the airwaves for free. It was a reasonable deal -- free bandwidth in exchange for a public service and an ad supported business model.
If the networks want to give up their bandwidth and let the government auction it off, fine. I just don't like this crap that they get the spectrum for free, and I can't rent an antennae of my choosing.
IMO, either we allow Aereo, or we make the networks pay for the spectrum, or we get rid of over the air and use it for cell data.
I am all for people getting paid for their content, but your argument is like saying libraries should be outlawed.
You're precisely right: it was a deal.[1] The broadcasters get the airwaves for free, and the public gets TV over those airwaves for free. The deal said nothing about allowing people to capture content over those airwaves and broadcast it over the Internet. You can hardly blame companies for not wanting to give up more on their end of a deal than they agreed to give up!
[1] I think it's a waste of valuable spectrum on creaky inefficient technology, mind you, but it's the deal the government made.
I think you Kennedy and Roberts are all on the same page in thinking Aereo quacked like a retransmission company.
The problem is Aereo got greedy and screwed up the marketing. Had their homepage always said, rent a streaming DVR for $10 a month, it wouldn't be a problem. Capturing content and streaming it over the internet is perfectly legal. TiVo does it. Cablevision does it. Slingbox does it.
Aereo should have acted like a hardware rental company until after the supreme court ruling.
"broadcast" is the wrong word here. The whole point of Aereo is that it was unicast, which is hard to rationalize as being different from running a wire.
"I am all for people getting paid for their content, but your argument is like saying libraries should be outlawed."
I suspect if you set up a privately owned library and lent out bestsellers, that's exactly what would happen.
That said, it'd be a real kicker IMO if the government stepped in and started broadcasting everything on the public airwaves for free anywhere in the world over the Internet. If the broadcasters don't like that, tough, go broadcast on cable. Of course, this will never happen because corporatocracy...
> What is antiquated about the idea that you don't get to use other peoples' valuable content without paying for it?
Slingbox allows you to stream broadcast content without problems. Broadcasters are OK with that. So Aereo was basically renting out 1000s of little slingboxes; how's that a problem now?
Also, it's worth noting that there are slingbox colocation services in the world where you can rent a slingbox in a remote datacenter in the TV market you prefer...
Can you replicate the functionality of Aereo that way? If so, why is Aereo's bankruptcy a loss? Could all of Aereo's customers just go rent a Slingbox instead? Legitimately curious here.
No one is claiming Aereo has that right. They're claiming that the person renting the antenna does.
The implication of the case seems to be that renting an antenna does not give you those rights in the same way buying one does, which is bizarre and kind of hard to rationalize.
Except the whole argument was that the 3rd party company wasn't doing it, it was simply providing a location for the customer's rented property to sit, wasn't it?
Because cable companies pay broadcast companies to redistribute broadcast content - it's a major source of income for the broadcast companies. The cable companies said that if Aereo were allowed to get away with what they were doing then they'd do the same thing themselves.
So Aereo was screwed because _cable_ companies decided to overpay? Can you imagine if you bought a car, and then the dealership comes back to you for more money because your neighbor paid much more for the same model?
So a completely unrelated third party has a completely separate deal with content producers that has nothing to do with the legal free OTA broadcasts. Still doesn't add up.
Then tell ABC, CBS, FOX, & PBS to get off the effin airways and become cable-only. Surely there are those who would find uses for the bandwidth that would serve the community
You can protect your content, up until you broadcast it publicly; then people who want to can watch it. If aereo is over the line, but having an antenna on your roof isn't, then it starts to become unclear where the line is.
If the value of Aereo's service was the technology, then couldn't they have stayed in business by paying licensing fees on the content? Ultimately, that's what the legal disagreement was over--the fees, not the technology.
Hardly, there is no such thing as intellectual property.
With property you have exclusive access over a physical item, with intellectual privilege the government is granting you the exclusive control over an idea, visual or audio representation of an idea, or some other non-physical concept.
for example Copyright does not apply to a DVD it applies to the visual idea's and representation of those idea that happened to be stored on a DVD
The government created this artificial privilege and enforces that with threats of violence.
It is in no way akin to property, nor does is have any analogous relationship to property.
> Hardly, there is no such thing as intellectual property.
There absolutely is such a thing as intellectual property.
> With property you have exclusive access over a physical item
With property, you have exclusive rights with regard to something, but the exclusive rights may not be specifically to "access", and it may not be in a "physical item". Intangible personal property (which includes intellectual property, but also lots of other property rights in nonphysical things -- like securities, rights to legal action, etc.) is hardly a new thing.
> The government created this artificial privilege
Property is artificial, man-made, exclusive privilege with regard to something -- all of it is created through government, and all of it is enforced with threats of violence.
> It is in no way akin to property
Even your own description is exactly like every form of property.
Yes, the content is what's valuable. And it's already paid for by the ads, which are part of the content stream. As far as I know, Aereo wasn't interfering with those ads in any way. The providers are getting exactly the same deal that they always have - your eyeballs on their ads in exchange for content.
I don't see how they can legitimately claim that they are entitled to more money because it's all happening over the internet instead of in your living room, especially when they aren't lifting a finger to distribute over the internet themselves.
Copyright law forces cable companies to pay to retransmit content. According to the Supreme Court, Aereo is "substantially similar" to a cable system, so it's bound by the same requirements. Unfortunately for Aereo, it's not actually a cable company, so it can't participate in the compulsory licensing scheme.
I was a big fan. I live behind a hill, so getting the local terrestrial channels OTA is impossible. Aereo made this possible plus some great features like the DVR functionality for $8/month, with the ability to watch in my kitchen (on a laptop/tablet) was great because I live in an old building and running coax to all the rooms isn't really an option. We are a household with minimal live TV requirements. It was nice to watch the Olympics.
Unfortunately, we're back on Cable. Luckily there was a cheap package for 12 months to get us back on. I'll likely be cancelling at the end of the time, though.
This is a great idea. In general, I think there's great potential in anything that connects developers with other developers to provide reviews of software.
Recently, I tried to research some of the new CMS/API platforms that have been released in the last year. There was no information. I'm sure these API's have been used thousands of times, but developer has written a review. So I'm left making decisions off marketing pages and PR-driven blog entries. Implementation takes hours that I don't have, I just want a trusted review.
Not really. At least e-commerce has a pretty capable incumbent (Shopify).
CMS is an interesting case, though. There are 4-5 companies trying to take on WordPress. I could go with the incumbent, but I'd love -- LOVE -- some real dev reviews of that stuff.
Like, where's the fucking unboxing video for developer software?
The top three ecommerce platforms are all Java based (hybris, Oracle ATG and IBM Websphere) and there are a ton of "tier 2" platforms that are cover the .net and PHP stacks.
The tier 1 systems will cost you a significant amount of money to get up and running though (over a million $ is not uncommon).
If you only know of the PHP platforms then I guess you don't play at any significant level in the industry (like most people on HN).
Only in software industry do we still fee this way! For e.g. Can we imagine a car delivered to us without involvement of any third party components?
Why do we feel software always has to be built from scratch or use free (open?) stuff? What is wrong in software being built on credible third party services?
Perhaps the sign of a mature industry is when such credible third party partnerships become the norm...
I reckon the main issue is reliability. In your example of car delivery, if one driver is unavailable, there's gonna be a replacement. You could argue that if one datacenter goes down there'll be another, but those too can fail - see also the Amazon outage last year or whenever it was. And unlike a car delivery, these 3rd party suppliers (like AWS) will severely impact your business if they fail.
Of course, so would a power outage. So IDK, there's pros and cons, as with everything.
My analogy was to depict a car company and not a single individual's car. As in software company using third party services has the same business risks as a car company using third party services.
My view point was not from a single individual using the product but from the manufacturers view point.
Personally I'd be more wary of startups that have few external dependencies, because it likely means their trying to do too much that is outside of their core competencies and/or not spending as much time as they could be on their unique value proposition.
Sure you can run your own centralized git hosting for your team. Do you really think you could do it better and more reliably than GitHub? Especially for less than $7/mo? And sure you can probably run your own instance of postgres, but how confident are you that your backups are going to be there when you need them? And that it'll be up as much as a dedicated instance of Heroku Postgres? I can probably count the number of people more experienced and qualified than that team (wrt running Postgres) on my fingers and none of them are going to run your database for $50/mo.
