Gabriel Weinberg

> If you run a web service and would like to provide high-security anonymous access, consider running an Exit Enclave -- a Tor exit configured to exit only to your site. If Tor detects that your exit and your site share an IP address, it will automatically extend the normally 3-hop circuit to your node, and the traffic will exit the Tor network on your machine rather than an arbitrary node (which could be malicious). For what it's worth, DuckDuckGo has done this for the past 4 years[0]. I think StartPage is still the default for the Tor browser bundle, but I'm not sure if they have an exit enclave as well. [0] http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/08/duckduckgo-now-operates-a-…

Chris, it seems like you are a do-er, which is fantastic, as most people have the other problem of having ideas, and not acting on them. but you seem to be approaching this w/o sufficient knowledge/experience in business development aka, "theory stuffs". I highly recommend http://www.mixergy.com to get a well rounded opinions, and anecdotes on startups to get a better feel for the types of things you need to be aware of before/after launching. keep at it, best of luck. p.s) http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/ http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/ http://paulgraham.com/articles.html also fantastic places to checkout

I'm not sure exactly why, but I think you both took this a way other than that I intended. I think it is an amazing accomplishment to get to 1M users, and generally makes a great business, which I've written about countless times, e.g. http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/06/paths-to-5m-for-a-startup-… and http://ye.gg/fan. The depressing part has to do with vision. If you have a truly mass-market consumer app and you believe in it and set out to change the world with it, you should not be satisfied with 1M users. After all, the more users you have the more will experience your vision. It is depressing because what generally got you to 1M, which can happen rather quickly, generally will not work to get you to 10M (http://ye.gg/magnitude). That's why I suggested to double down on engaged users and organic growth because that is the quickest path to realizing the vision.

Gabriel Weinburg already tried to set this up (although more voluntarily) and you can read about it here http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/11/help-me-start-a-foss-tithi… and http://fosstithe.org/ The general idea was to tithe a certain portion of profits/revenue towards open source projects. Only a few accepted it though (myself included). Only two really seem to have made any contributions though (I would love to but not making any money yet).

Yes, and it's why this fantastic post (http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2012/02/the-evolution-of-my-percep… has never had traction on HN (as far as I know).

Agreed, I think the big issue is that not enough people know about the self-serve (and subreddit targeting) options available. Also worth noting, Duck Duck Go had a very positive experience with Reddit Ads: http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/03/my-duck-duck-go-reddit-ad-…

Tangentially related, I think this is an excellent example of capitalizing on "Startup Micro Opportunities" [1] The original article about friends resonated strongly with HN, and GrubWithUs is a natural solution to the problems discussed in the article and thread. Writing an article like this is a great way to capitalize on that momentum. Great job GrubWithUs! =) [1] http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/10/startup-micro-opportunitie…

Edit: there appears to be such a project, at least on the crawling side: http://www.commoncrawl.org/ I'd say there's a combination of factors, the first (and most important) being that Google is good enough for most people. You'd need to coordinate crawling so as not to turn it into a giant DDoS machine; speed will be an issue due to geo distribution, variable hardware and result sets. Validity and reliability of the data would also be issues, and would probably require several peers to "agree" to consistency, but in a way that does not allow easy gaming of results. I suppose they're all solvable, though I think there would have to be a powerful incentive to do so. I imagine it'd be quite pricey too for the individual, though perhaps Gabriel Weinberg* could weigh in there. [*] http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/

Hmmm. I'd just go through all the links here, since Gabe did a great job curating the best stuff online: http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/06/how-to-learn-about-angelvc… I should probably step back from what I said earlier and stress that there's not one canonical set of 'standard terms' - there's just terms that are typical and terms that are rarely or never seen. Unless there's a compelling reason, I'd keep things typical. I'd also Google and read up on convertible debt, which might be a good option. There are pros and cons to convertible debt, but the associated legal costs of doing convertible debt are generally lower, so a big chunk of the money you're investing won't immediately get eaten up by lawyers. You can't avoid legal bills - whatever route you take, the company will need a lawyer with relevant experience. But you can minimize the cost.

Nice point! and I believe is something that the HN community agree in general. It can also be a subject for your research on social network. For example that you may need someone (person/company/site) with greater "social proof" (whatever it means) to leverage your current position. From the promotion point of view I think the getting traction series contains good material: http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/traction/ In my personal experience I achieved relative promotional success attacking the "magic middle", that is: neither the top, neither the bottom blogs/people/etc.

Nice discussion. Remined me of what Github's Founder Tom Preston Werner said last year on Startup School[1]. And remined me of the great article recently mentioned[2] by Duck Duck Go's founder Gabriel Weinberg: How to Increase Your Luck Surface Area [3] [1] http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/b/272178966 [2] http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2011/10/what-i-learned-from-raisin… [3] http://www.codusoperandi.com/posts/increasing-your-luck-surface-area

How about this? http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2008/05/the-dumbest-thing-ive-hear…

There sorta kinda is, unofficially: http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Ask_YC_Archive That said, I am starting to lean towards believing that the best scenario for getting answers to this kind of question, is to post the question on Quora, then link to the Quora question here for the "HN perspective" (substitute StackOverflow or whatever for Quora as appropriate).

Interesting... this was posted a year ago and was also discussed on HN before too. Anyhow, this combined with his post on the startup career path (http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/11/are-you-in-a-startup-caree… are two of the very best pieces of advice you're going to get IMO. @yegg is the man and his posts always deliver.

Very well analysed. And I definitely agree about serendipity. That's a huge concern for me, and one reason why I haven't categorised the Founder's Library section yet. Splitting it into categories like the excellent http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Ask_YC_Archive makes a lot of sense, but it almost completely takes away the serendipitous aspect, which is essential for startup advice. The article you really should read is often not the one you're looking for. A system that makes it too easy to find what you think you need might paradoxically make it harder to stumble onto what you actually needed. I also think that almost every great blogger who starts with the first use case ends up posting numerous timeless gems that get lost in the diary format. DaringFireball is, again, the obvious example.

> tens of millions of dollars of revenue we project Paypal's revenues are well over $3 billion/year and growing. They are also known around these parts as a fraud detection company with a payment processing component. Respectfully, I would first suggest you be happy that those millions are still just projected and not sitting in limbo in a frozen PayPal account. Next, check out some other payment processing options. Here is a great place to start: http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Ask_YC_Archive#toc85

If price is not an object, I would recommend Gandi.net - absolutely no nonsense domain hosting ( I even received a free SSL certificate, though I don't know if that offer is still on.) . Another good option is Mediatemple, who are giving away $5 domains as long as you're with them (that's a really great deal). You can find HN archives on domain names here: http://remembersaurus.com/askhn.html#domain-names http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Ask_YC_Archive#toc34 NearlyFreeSpeech an NameCheap are great alternatives as well.

BTW - you can see the widget in action on Gabriel Weinberg's blog (DDG founder): http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/

Liquidation preference is the number one way that founders end up with nothing. Works like this: VC invests $1m with a, say, 5x liquidation preference then if they company sells for, say $6m the VC gets the first $5m and the remaining $1m is split according to equity. http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/ has some really, really good articles on this kind of thing.

I'm hesitant to post this link because I don't have any personal experience in the area, but this interview speaks to those questions and is currently on the front page, so you might benefit from the live discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1671852 http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/09/sean-murphy-on-the-first-1… >I recently did a Traction Book interview with Sean Murphy who runs a boutique cutomer development firm in Silicon Valley. We discussed (for ~1hr) how to approach getting the first set of enterprise customers. What follows is a slightly edited transcript of the full interview. -Gabriel Weinburg

Gabriel's archive is a great starting point I think. Lot's of labour has gone into that already, use it as your base. http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Ask_YC_Archive Take the initiative and people will support you.

I confess http://DuckDuckGo.com seemed to be an admirable but quixotic effort; now I get it. http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/ - remember us when you are rich and famous won't you? ;-)

Gabriel Weinberg (Duck Duck Go founder) wrote a summary of his experience using Reddit Ads, which he found to be effective: http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/03/my-duck-duck-go-reddit-ad-… A couple of key points from the post: "My ad ran for 13 days, from 3/7 to 3/20. It cost $650, and I spent $50 per day. In total it had 1,288,378 impressions (282,732 uniques) and yielded 20,700 clicks (18,420 uniques)." "Redditors actually try out your site. 3c per unique visitor is pretty good in and of itself, but it's all worthless unless they actually try out your site. For example, you can get 5c unique visitors from StumbleUpon (presumably in a similar demographic), but StumbleUpon visitors never would try out my sites. Reddit visitors did try out Duck Duck Go."

It's not perfect yet, but I'd really like to get there: http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/03/hack-hack-go.html Here's what's coming: --Stack Overflow, man pages & programming documentation in 0-click. --More programming !bangs; I've already added a bunch but would love more suggestions: http://duckduckgo.com/bang.html --More goodies; I've added a lot recently (color codes, regexp, more advanced math to wolfram alpha, today unicode); again, suggestions welcome: http://duckduckgo.com/goodies.html

This has been done on the Ask HN front: http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Ask_YC_Archive .. But having a large, tagged groups of HN-posted "must reads"/reference library would be cool.

This "archive of quality Hacker News 'Ask YC' posts grouped by subject" looks worth checking out: http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Ask_YC_Archive (Thanks to jmonegro for posting it to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1126993.)

The page at: http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Hacker_Groups# lists two "groups" in Boston. One of which is http://betahouse.org/ which seems to be a CoWorking space. Co-Working, I would think would be a great way to meet people. It seems to be at least in Philadelphia at http://www.indyhall.org. I'm sure there are lots of programming meetups in the area too, which while not startup related per se, probably are attended by some founders to do the same sorts of things--network.

How are the new folks to know what ideas have been discussed to death? And, sometimes there is a delta of thought that does add value, specifically for frequently/commonly discussed topics. Gabriel maintains an excellent collection of topics on his startup wiki: http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Ask_YC_Archive

I say all of the following at risk of being wrong. Mentally prefix each sentence with "I'm not sure but". The ranking system puts together the number of points a story receives and the recency. Your karma is the total score of your submissions and comments. You get points when other users vote up your stuff, and lose them when they vote you down. 'Saved links' is the collection of stories you've voted up and you've submitted. noprocrast enables maxvisit and minaway. These three parameters are anti-addiction self-protection: maxvisit limits the length of time you can use the site, minaway specifies how long you have to go away before resuming using it. Gabriel Weinberg put together an awesome "best-of" FAQ: http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Ask_YC_Archive Hope this helps.

This is an actually interesting topic (i.e., that Google personalizes search) that is spun in a political context to generate pageviews. In the spin, the interesting element is actually lost, because after introducing the topic, the journalist digs no deeper and gives the audience no greater insight than what they might derive from a better-written headline. The fact that personalized search applies to political topics is unsurprising and probably reflects that Google is data-driven. The fact that Romney doesn't trigger the same personalization as Obama probably reflects that, until recently, his name was virtually never searched for (relatively).[1] By introducing Mr. Weinberg, the author gives us hope that we will learn something about the nature of personalized search and its implications, but I think that HNers would be much more satisfied to re-read his blog entries on the topic.[2] [1] = http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=obama%2C%20romney&geo=US&am… [2] = http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2012/08/how-do-you-completely-de-p…