I really don't understand the negativity. They have an awesome team that's built an awesome product. No, it's not finished (hence the money to hire more engineers) and yes, there are competitors (competition proves market need).
I don't know much about how VCs structure their portfolios, but recognizing a need in the market and betting on a badass team seems like a pretty solid strategy to me.
As for me, I'm happy for them. I hope they succeed. I hope them and their investors make a ton of money and it encourages other teams to build more awesome products.
These past two statements illustrate pretty clearly why very little research has been done on this subject. One mention of LSD, or many drugs for that matter, and you have people jumping to two extremes (that have nothing to do with the original topic of off-label treatment / pain-management.
I have no experience, so I can't say who's right or wrong. I just think it's sad that these type of arguments have given some drugs so much of a stigma that it set back medical research in this area for 40+ years.
I've only known Geoff for a short while now, but this will be a huge benefit to YC. Geoff has a great eye for product development and can really strip an idea down to its core elements.
That's good, I never thought Stanford made sense as a choice for NYC. Don't get me wrong, Stanford is an exceptional school, with great tech credentials, and has spawned a unique startup environment.
But the thing that makes the SF area great for startups is the proximity (and thus density) of startups and tech in general. While long-distance networking has come a long way, it's still no replacement. If NYC's goal is to build a stronger tech community, I think they're better off building their own East Coast tech culture vs. trying to import a culture from SF.
Disclosure: as a Cornell grad, I'm definitely biased and psyched about it getting more involved in supporting a tech community (a $350M donation didn't hurt either)
When I started my very first web business and didn't know any better, I almost blew $1000 on a couple angel groups that I know with the wisdom of hindsight would have been a complete waste of money. For someone who didn't know any better, it seemed like a good deal.
The worse part isn't that it preys on startups, it's that it prays on startups and new entrepreneurs that aren't plugged into the HN/SV scene (I was looking at angel groups in TX).
I don't think that a nominal fee (~$10 - $20) is necessarily a bad thing (but really, why bother?), but anything on the order of $100 or more is too much for a startup to be spending on that type of thing- a definite red flag. What investor would want to invest in a startup that spends all of its money looking for financing rather than creating a great product/service?
Profit margin as the metric for measuring "interesting"? There are lots of reasons fb could be considered interesting, and profit margin is only one and waaay down on the list. How about the fact that fb revolutionized the way people communicate and connect?
On the flip side, SAP revolutionized business software and as a consequence, business organization. That's pretty interesting too. I know which side I would come down on, but simplifying the debate to profit margin misses the point by a wide margin.
I was pretty excited about Google moving sharing to Google+ as I like Google+ and I think making it easy to share will be crucial to success.
That being said, I hate the new Google Reader. I used it primarily as sharing tool, and the new sharing makes that more difficult. I think two fixes would make this better:
1) Being able to share easily with different circles. While I might be okay sharing publicly something interesting, there are plenty of less-than-appropriate funny articles that I only want to share with a few friends. This is one of the strengths of Google+, and it'd be great if Reader could take advantage of this.
2) Being able to see shared articles from other people. I understand they want to increase traffic to Google+, but this was always a great feature of Reader. In effect, each friend that used reader became their own feed. It'd be great to still have this feature and even though you're decreasing traffic to plus.google.com, you'd be increasing the overall use of Google+
I think it depends on the kid. Speaking for myself, I would have loved that as a kid, so much that you don't even realize you're learning important things. There are probably plenty of kids who this would have made miserable and not been worth the trouble.
I'm not saying this would work for every or even most kids, but if you can use the kids natural excitement to teach them important skills (not just cash flow, but money management, value of work, etc) then why wouldn't you? I think this is a great story, and I hope when I'm a parent I can engage my kids with something as creative.
I can understand- at my last job (multi-national CPG manufacturer) the code on all the internal webpages wouldn't even display in Firefox. Between the IT workload and general paranoia / superstition of execs (any change is bad), there was no motivation to upgrade internal software. So we made all of our suppliers comply if they wanted access to any piece of the intranet. Just easier that way.
For companies that don't rely heavily on internet tech, understanding why you don't want to use IE6 is beyond most people.
I'd emphasize more that you can use the service without teachers giving the students their personal numbers- I can see it on the first page, but it doesn't jump out at you.
Another idea (and you may already be doing this) would be to log all communications, and maybe even make them visible to everyone in the "class" via a web login. People are less likely to say something stupid if they know it's being recorded, and it gives teachers an easy resource to fall back on if a "he said/she said" scenario comes up with a student.
That being said, I think it's a great way to mitigate risk for the teacher, but I wouldn't let that overshadow the main benefit, which is ease of use.
I definitely agree with the risks, but I also have a couple friends (mid 20s) that are high school teachers that have many of their students numbers stored in their phones cause they encourage the kids to text them if they have a question or a problem. This has rarely led to some inappropriate texts from students- which could certainly be a risk.
Having an intermediary certainly won't eliminate risk, but it might mitigate some of it. I don't think it's a tool that all teachers will use- it's going to depend a lot of teaching style. My gut instinct says enough will use it to make it an interesting tool, and anything that adds to a teacher's box of tools sounds good to me.