There really are no cons. As long as it's an accredited investor and your docs are well written (focus on length of time to repay and amount of discount) Just know the moment you take even $1 from outside investors your clock starts ticking and you must deliver. At http://geekli.st our first investors were on a capped note. If you get offered uncapped... take it.
Would like to recognize Volkan here for volunteering to write this great blog post for us at geekli.st - The time and thought put into it goes beyond what we could have asked for and has stirred great dialogue. From all the Geeklist family, thank you Volkan! - Reuben
Nice post Steve. Assuming anyone even gets to read this 420 posts later... [Proposed solution at the end] For years I got my daily fix of HN too. PG was a legend of the Valley for me and YC an admirable exclusive club of amazing success stories. Many we work with and many friends have had tremendous success. (Disclosure: we never applied to YC nor tried simply because we had two seasoned founders with many successes under our belts and felt respectfully it wasn't our cup of tea, but we admired and loved HN and the people at YC)
As an entrepreneur for 15+ years, I really admired the community support and its relationship to startups and hackers. Something all founders and tech leaders need. From outside of Silicon Valley it was very inspiring to watch.
When we started http://geekli.st about 1 1/2 years ago we broke into the Silicon Valley scene and hustled like nobody's business to get known, get ahead, raise funds and do all those things all entrepreneurs must do to reach their goals. One of the tools we looked towards was HN. We got some initial love in there, but once they invested (YC) in a company that was copying our every step the HN love shut down. Articles we posted/very relevant news even picked up by Huffington post, TNW and other media outlets, was repeatedly removed and shut out. At least with no transparency to voting or the 'karma factor' we had no way to know why. Along with that came the barrage of complaints from many influential developers and tech leaders we knew about the voting system, the mystical 'Karma' system and basically the fact that something once so simple and pure, full of positivity and support, became a place to lambaste, harass, condescend, denigrate and shut down intelligible and news-worthy items, startups and human beings. But like Friendster, MySpace and the ever famous forums and bulletin boards of past... things evolve from what once was innovative and positive, causing new generations of innovators to learn from the mistakes of their elders and build something better. more relevant. more useable. more friendly and more open... Thank you Paul for Hacker News and everything you and YC have always done for startups. You'll always be loved and respected by me... but for the disenchanted tech and startup link absorbers like me and so many of our close (and not so close) friends there is something new.
Welcome to Geeklist Links. Tech news, startup releases and developer links and resources, organized into your own categories, shared in tagged communities, saved, ^5'd, upvoting and down voting, with complete transparency. http://geekli.st/#link - built by developers for developers and the tech world. - Enjoy. Reuben Katz - these views I own.
Clearly they've goofed and don't get their own market. Http://Geekli.st is by developers for developers. Even designed mostly by its co-founders. (I'm one of them: disclosure)It's the only open communication platform for programmers or developers/geeks. A way to share links and resources, achievements, etc... Sitting in the middle of Github, Facebook, Reddit (with links that can be categorized, upboted, high fived and shared) and GeekCred.
anthony, could you screenshot the 'busted in chrome' issue and send to us at [email protected]? Should be working smoothly! Whatever the reason, it was one of europes leading writers on tech who interviewed and did the article. i suppose if someone writes a positive article it's overt marketing. Thanks for being on geeklist and let us know if you find more bugs! cheers!
Once again Hacker New has removed an article about us from the front page as it was gaining up votes and a vibrant stream of comments starting up. Silencing startups in the press is not the way, could it be because there is a YC company trying to copy/compete with us? Nice. Done.
I'm trying to understand why we were number 8 on the home page, Hackers absolutely were interested in the communities and news that Javascript was #1, and then we disappeared.?