(I'm the co-founder/CEO.) We're hoping to make the developer experience of Skyliner comparable, and eventually better, than Heroku, because they have done so well on that front. There are plenty of other tools that are essentially automation for API access to AWS; we're trying to do something different, making the operation of infrastructure as easy (or easier than) as the other part of Amazon.
Where I think we really differ from Heroku is in approach. Instead of a fully-enclosed platform that adds a tax for each cloud resource you use, we want to be an abstraction of AWS that allows you to break through that abstraction when needed. There are over 50 AWS products, and we don't support them all yet. If you need to use Redshift or API Gateway or whatever else, we want to make it easy for you to get up to speed in just that one product, and hook it into your Skyliner resources. Your alternatives should not be so stark as "fully managed, no control" versus "a box of Legos, figure it out."
Finally, we're focused on building a resilient architecture for growth. We want it to be easy and obvious how your starting infrastructure can support your company growing to be as successful as you're able to be. If a platform gets you started but then falls over when you have a good day, that's not a big help. Our goal is to provide tools that work as well on your first day as on your best day.
Marco has mentioned before that the bookmarklet is his biggest support headache. If the current bookmarklet is working for you, there's little reason to take that away; but having some other way for people to get a good experience from Instapaper -- something easier that anyone could use without knowing what a bookmarklet is -- makes tons of sense.
He does kill features from time to time, but he always seems to mention that those features were very lightly used. Presumably that's not the case here (since otherwise it has been hard to make the app valuable, before this new feature).
I definitely, and intentionally, left out a lot of the detail about why we decided to turn the site off. My post was already huge and that final decision wasn't what I was writing about; I was writing about the competition between the companies and how people perceived it. Also, some parts of that decision are personal and I didn't want to write about them. Of course, though, we didn't just try one thing and then give up. We tried everything we could think of to keep it going.
That said, I addressed some of the reasons for the decision to shut down in the post announcing our closure:
It was huge for them. My point, though, was that we made our own mistakes. If we had had a better user experience before TC40, they either wouldn't have made such an impression at the event or wouldn't have overtaken us so quickly.
I think people attribute success to a name because that fits the mental model people have for success: You just choose the right name! And then you win!
That's nonsense. Winning is a long series of decisions that have to go right far more often than not. I pulled out the decisions I thought really were critical and irreparable turning points -- hard decisions that required a lot of analysis and a lot of work to fulfill, both for us and for Mint.
You'd like to believe the name is all that matters because then the path to success is so short and so clear. It just isn't so. (And there are counterexamples galore that you're emphatically ignoring -- companies with fantastic names that never got anywhere.)
To be clear: they did have a better name. I say so in the article. But that's not enough to win.
You're right, I both credited and dismissed a very large category with the word "design." In my view some people believe that it was just the visual appeal of Mint's site that did us in. In my view that helped them but not enough to kill us. I do think that we spent our usability effort (as I say in the post) in the wrong place, making editing, for instance, easy, instead of making editing totally optional.
It was designed for a personal finance application, but is generally useful for storing data securely behind a REST-based web service. Think of it as GPG-as-a-service.
Charlie is right, but we aren't really Yodlee competitors. As far as I know Yodlee is the sole commercial provider of the type of services they offer.
If you want to get data from banks you should download our Firefox extension (which is GPL'd), unzip the .xpi file, and use that to get started. Depending on what you want it could take you pretty far.
It's a great test for whether you have helpful investors. If a good conversation comes out of it and you learn something, you have amazing investors. If they say, "You know how to interpret this better than I would, so go to it," that's fine. If neither of those happen, that's a warning sign.
So I would say show them before they invest and see what happens.
We aren't really going after small business accounts (referring to the main article), at least not yet. I do think banking software has a ton of room to change.
I'm one of the speakers at startup camp and I think I'm going to help on judging the submissions.
I think your pitch needs a lot of work and I wouldn't vote for it in its current form. I read your blog post and your PDF slides (I didn't watch the video) and didn't get a clear sense for what your product does, why it's different than other similar products, or why you think it will turn into a larger business. Many of your slides talk about the right topics -- for instance, customer pain -- without saying what you specifically know about that topic in your business -- for instance, exactly what customer pain you're trying to address.
The outline on Sequoia's site is great for what your pitch should address:
I once had the humiliating experience of sending a Sequoia partner a 30-slide pitch, having him say "12 slides exactly," sending him a 20-slide pitch, having him say "12 slides exactly," sending him a 15-slide pitch, having him say "12 slides exactly," and then finally getting it right. Learn from my mistakes! 12 slides, no more than six bullets per slide, no more than one line per bullet. Writing to form makes it easier for people to evaluate you. Make it very easy on your evaluators.
On each of those slides, say why you're different from everyone else. Exactly what makes you better. "We take the sales lead process from 30 minutes to five minutes." Say it succinctly and don't be at all ambiguous. "We allow co-workers to share contact information for their sales leads without data entry by scanning business cards with 99.9% accuracy" or whatever.
As someone who has been funded by O'Reilly AlphaTech (I'm one of the founders of Wesabe), I would recommend them highly. I've known them for many years, and Mark and Tim both worked with me on my last startup (Popular Power).
I can say a lot about why they like them, but when I was talking with a CEO recently I mentioned this Richard Nixon quote: "When you win, you hear from everyone - when you lose, you hear from your friends." I've heard messages of support from these guys in both instances. If you're looking for someone who will understand your idea and back it or not for the right reasons, and then support you all the way if they invest, I think OATV is a fantastic option.