We were accepted but decided it wasn't the best fit for us. I know most of the companies in their current batch and they're doing some cool stuff. It's great to see accelerators with a cryptocurrency/blockchain focus like PnP and boost.
What's the purpose of articles like this? Sure, you can make a reasoned, persuasive argument that Tesla is overvalued and/or unlikely to succeed spectacularly but this article isn't that. It's simply a spew of vitriol and derisiveness. Was this supposed to be convincing? Musk can't succeed because, well, E.W. Niedermeyer says so?
Hey all, this was a fun little app I built for a hackathon this weekend. It runs a bit slow when not on my local machine but it lets you record silly GIFs of yourself and uploads them to a public gallery you can browse through. Still needs a lot of work but was fun to make!
Hit 'Record GIF' and it will record for 5 seconds (it looks like nothing is happening, be patient!). You can style it and, if you are logged in, save it.
I'm there right now (minus the high-profile accelerator and funded part so I had even less success). It sucks. I'm exhausted. But I'm broke so I need a job. I can hack stuff together but I'm more of a junior level dev so not sure how attractive I am to a Silicon Valley startup.
I thought I knew what it took to be successful, so I quit my wall street job and drove out to San Francisco to JFDI. I even lived in my car for nine months to save money. It would be worth it once the business took off. It never did. So I started another one, which failed too. When you work non-stop, every waking hour for almost two years and fail at everything, you realize you don't have it all figured out. At all.
The scary part of failing is asking yourself, what the heck do I do now? And you don't know the answer.
Probably should have made this a throwaway. Oh well.
“Our co-founders travel a lot between TED talks and angel pitches. You understand.”
I do occasionally wonder how some founders have the time & money to travel to every conference/meetup/event on the circuit. I suppose some of them are simply uber-talented and can balance that with the needs of their business... but between coding and talking to customers it's all I can do to find time to sleep or eat (and occasionally read HN ;)).
It's doable but, as you would expect, it requires an extremely spartan lifestyle. I'm running about $500/month in SF and am no stranger couch surfing, lots of roommates, sleeping in my car, and (intelligently) fasting, etc. I could theoretically go even lower by purchasing lower quality food but I'm not willing to compromise my health.
Once you've seen the worst-scenario first-hand you realize it's not that bad, and you can shoot for the moon without any fear.
You're right about Stripe, however it's just the suggested payment method. If they don't use it, I don't get paid but I'm not going to try to keep people walled in, especially in light of Stripe's limited availability ex. North America.
I'm going to stand by that one, even if just to save a little pride. ;) Technicalities FTW!
Hmm, you should be able to navigate to the project board without signing in. You would be able to see all the jobs that have been posted by students + the broad category buckets. Or did you mean I should highlight the categories on the home page?
Heh, my photoshop skills are sub-par. I've been putting off replacing the banner with a more robust site intro/overview, sounds like I need to make that happen.
Classrooms are created when a bid is accepted so there's no way to navigate to one of the actual classrooms beforehand. I should probably incorporate a screenshot or preview of the classroom on the home page.
I guess I wrote that copy in a fit of optimism! Corrected it so as not to be misleading.
Thanks. I'll add some copy to the front page to clear up some of your questions.
Payments are all done through Stripe Connect. Right now Teachity isn't taking a cut, but if the site ends up getting enough users then I'll start experimenting with pricing... as a comp, I think airbnb is 6-12%, elance is ~9% of each transaction.
Refunds are tricky. Everything is run through Stripe so I can't directly issue refunds above Teachity's cut. If people have a really horrible experience/no-show tutor I can ban the tutor and give refunds out of my own pocket although that wouldn't be sustainable. I'm working on a feedback system, so hopefully that will head off most problems... although you need enough reviews for that to be effective in the first place.
I threw together a matchmaking service based on the OP's premise. http://makermatch.herokuapp.com You sign up as either a 'Maker' or an 'Investor/Co-Founder/Other'. Makers post their idea and investors can click on the maker's name and send them a PM if they would like to start a dialogue. I started to set it up so that Investors can bid on ideas but haven't implemented that yet. If this is of interest to enough people, I'll work on it some more tomorrow and make it a bit more robust. Would be pretty cool if any new products/investments/co-founder teams come out of this.
Shoot me a message if you have any thoughts on what I should build into it.