It's fantastic to see a dividend based model being introduced into early round VC fundraising. It's an alternative to liquidity and something that should/can move upstream. Bravo to Buffer for leading the charge.
The large problem, that's becoming larger, is that a good portion of a representative audience no longer has land line phones, and refuses to answer phones in general. This type of polling is becoming less and less valuable over time, and will need to be transitioned to digital polling in the near future.
Good tidbit in the conclusion:
"Hackathons are an amazing resource for kick-starting new ideas and proving out concepts. However, they should never be used to circumvent due diligence on big business decisions."
This acquisition reminds me a lot of Hunch. It's a similar size in terms of team + cost per team member. $2-3M/employee. And, Hunch's core tech seems to have gone into the eBay homepage, which is what Sarah is proposing Yahoo do with Rockmelt.
It's interesting to me that Facebook is getting called out on this when Twitter does the exact same thing. I know a few folks with +1M Twitter followers that have stopped using the service because they were upset that Twitter was not delivering their Tweets to every one of their followers.
It's funny. Without Twitter and Facebook to distribute Instagram's content they would have never been able to grow to such a size so quickly.
Now that they've reached this large critical mass of users they can afford to go back and pull their content from the networks that made it popular in the first place.
I love seeing your thought process on how you tackled the project. The bonus playback of realtime results and the not preloading county data are two very good examples of problems that need solving when you take on a project like this. Super write up.
It's fantastic to see a dividend based model being introduced into early round VC fundraising. It's an alternative to liquidity and something that should/can move upstream. Bravo to Buffer for leading the charge.