Good point. I'll probably add in some background textures, images next time. Perhaps also a next / back buttons along with a current page indicator. Any other suggestions towards how it'll signify a scroll action towards more content would be welcome.
I did on purposely have the 'pages' resize directly to the user's viewport using javascript as a visual style of design.
Cheers rodly! Yeah I'm definitely not happy with it and want to fix that/get it re-done if we decide to keep it. I'll most likely have it stop animating after a while and also only load when it's in view. It's something one of us threw hacked together really quickly with HighCharts.js
I'm really sorry about that, thanks for bringing it up Secoif. I've just pushed a quick fix. The website was supposed to be fully responsive to iPhone/iPad resolutions using various javascript and flexible width methods.
Unfortunately I made a change to video providers (to VidYard for analytics) which broke the video resize script (FitVids-JS). Whoops, my mistake.
Regarding older founders. I'm currently working with one of the founders that is a statistical anomaly on the upper rage of the graph. Reality as I perceive it is far opposite from the case, perhaps this is why they are a statistical anomaly within YC.
I haven't finished listening to the podcast highlighted in this post but a point to note is that the book was rushed into print which may have affected the Isaacson's writing quality.
Congrats to Justin and Jason, the podcast really is something to be proud of. It combines a nice mix of tech and startup discussion.
It's not really for people who like short podcasts, but this is what makes it great. You get depth where other podcasts won't go or that just glosses over talking points.
Yes it would be impolite to bad-mouth specific people. But one can talk generally about traits and characteristics with a reflection on mistakes made and improvements to such processes.
Your age does not matter. Depending on how old you are and if your a first time entrepreneur I suggest that you have a big vision but adjust your tangible goals correctly to the amount of time and resources you have available to you. Perhaps aim for something you could easily sell to another company or a product that can gain paying customers.
In terms of finding a co-founder, why not partnering up with another teen? Events like Young Rewired State (UK - http://rewiredstate.org/events/young-2010), hack days and barcamps all usually have teens attending them.
Check out TeensInTech (Bay Area - http://teensintech.com/) which also runs a teen tech incubator.
There are also a few online young entrepreneurial groups such as Millennium Generation https://www.facebook.com/groups/rockstars and theres WebeTalk IRC chat (http://webetalk.com) which is frequented by some of the youngest YC startup founders.
If you want to take a different more active approach try building something small and useful that will get you tons of press and coverage on HackerNews. You can also tip TechCrunch ([email protected]), building something that people are aware of outside of you telling them will definitely help you find and secure a co-founder. On top of that the media and others absolutely love young entrepreneurs stories. So with a bit of work you will be able to get coverage.
If you want to team up with a more experienced person, why don't you ask them to be your mentor, ask their advice (it's generally good to have personal advisors, they'll help you out). Build that relationship and if things look good, maybe you could ask them to join as a co-founder or help out. Many startups do this to acquire higher level executives or even investors.
If you have a technical background, you don't need a co-founder to start. I hope this helps and good-luck, many of us have been there before.
When I read this line: "..even began offering her own Internet Survival Guide, free to download after submitting your e-mail address."
She gained my respect, it's basic marketing 101 but even grown adults trying to market a company often don't have this type of intuition to capture marketing/relationship leads whilst the buzz is still hot.
As far as I'm aware (I'm friends with the founders) they have hired someone to run New Bamboo (Rails Consultancy) and have also merged their other SaaS product Panda (http://pandastream.com - Video Encoding) with another US company.
So the founders full focus is on the Pusher product. Most, if not nearly all investors tend to want you to put in professional management in a service business and spin off the product to a separate company before investing large amounts of seed capital.
Where does the data go after it has been submitted? I'd be careful when entering data on a web form where the source and intention for the data is unknown.
No worries, happy to help. What I'm working on right now is a manually curated directory for the MVP and hopefully I can get it to ramen profitability during that phase.
Then will spend some time to work out the algorithms to do the automatic curation of the services & tools. Hence my interest into exploring probably & statistics modelling / machine learning further.
Interesting question, techdemic. Just to mention for questions like this on HackerNews it's often common to prepend the post with 'Ask HN:' in the title.
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As for what I'm working on in the summer. If everything goes to plan.
- A directory of startup tools
- Brush up on my probability and statistics with the help of the Khan Academy and some text books.
- Then explore machine learning. Hope to go through the Stanford Machine learning video lectures. Then apply some of the modelling to the project above.
As for goals, I'd like to be ramen profitable with the tool/service directory.
Thanks JoshFraser, I have appended a note to the blog post to check your comment on here. Although the Google Apps team may have altered their policies according to my blog post which I contacted them about 2 months ago. This issue is still a serious matter. I would have still been able to access the person's Amazon account using a wildcard email address. Although it does lessen the blow if a social engineer takes a hold of your domain as they might not be able to get into your GMAIL, but the real lesson here is you shouldn't let your domains expire with any form of identity or online accounts still attached to them.
It's also a cautionary tale of what you leave up on the cloud when you abandon your email account. I could have potentially found a lot more damaging information from gaining access to this persons email.
I accessed the person(s) amazon account to find contact information. They are now fully aware that I accessed the account as I left a voicemail. I offered full access to the GMAIL account and gave the password on the Amazon account so it could be shut it down and alert amazon who could also further do a full audit of what I accessed.
There does not seem to be any alarming distress in the situation. It has been over 2 months since the incident, I made sure that the person(s) involved was fully aware and of the blog post. No issue was raised about me writing it up and posting it. I also waited for a period of time to hear back from the Google Security Team. I believe I have taken the correct response here.
Being able to take criticism, filter and apply it correctly is a definite skill.
If you are getting criticism from a coach, teacher, mentor or customers it's a good thing because if they aren't giving criticism then they've already given up on you.
Having been to a theatre/performing school for a bit as a kid. They would tell like a 10 year old that they sucked and how they could improve. The kid starts breaking down with visible tears, it's then explained that it's professional criticism. You end up building that skin, and you continue to keep progressing.
But there's a flip side to it. Criticism is often affected by a filter or lens that the other person sees through, by their past experiences, pattern recognition and world view. So you have to take that into consideration. You can be driven off path by taking everyones criticism. Here is a good quote from Jeff Bazos:
"Think Long Term - On feedback and being misunderstood: If we think we are right, then we continue.
If we are criticized for something we think we’re wrong on, we change it, we fix it. It’s really important to think about this things, but never to buckle to standard kind of pressure that forces really short term kind of thinking. It’s a competitive advantage to think long term."
- Jeff Bazos
There is not a single way or method to climb a mountain. But you'd be crazy if you didn't take the advise and criticism of others that have gone there in the past or have a deep understanding of the area.
But my personal view is that criticism should never be taken negatively.
This is great and thanks for open sourcing the code.
There is also another chrome plugin called Proxlet http://proxlet.com which does something similar. Seems like there are many tools out there but discovery and marketing is all ways an issue.
I have a question about SeedCamp around the signalling effect by participating.
So with SeedCamp's model that a round of startup get to go through their program but only a few get funded. What happens to the startups that don't get funded, are they negatively signaled? Almost like how if your current investors don't follow on the next round and they have the money, then it signals to the market that something is very wrong.