Would be fascinating to hear his take on it seeing as how he also tried to run a database startup. Nobody outside knows what Datomic's profitability actually looked like, but the fact it was aquihired by a banking startup suggests to me Datomic's financial position was less than compelling.
Is it possible that his experience is not representative?
Edit: Digging a bit further, it looks like the startup that he sold was Valet Gourmet which was a food delivery business in North Carolina and he worked on it for ~12 years. That's probably a bit longer than the tech startup timelines we tend to think of here.
Maybe I'm not too informed but who is this? Looking at his linked in he seems to be a sales person/business development person just moving to a new position.
Is he well known in the big data community and/or built any of the big data tools widely used? Just curious for more background than what sounds like a pretty common occurrence at startups.
I think I read that he sold in for something in the range of 20 million. His business model for CDBaby was interesting. I interacted with him via email for a bit when he was starting his recent or current venture, Wood Egg, which was a project to create a series of startup ecosystem guides (books) for many countries in South / East / South East Asia, written mainly by people familiar with or from those countries. Interesting idea.
Totally agreed. It seems he made some interesting choices about how to setup a startup for success before bringing on a technical co-founder, and as a technical co-founder I would be interested to hear 1) what he did and 2) what he thinks would be useful in convincing someone like me to come join him
Perhaps there is something to be said for his intuition, for he spends nearly all of his time evaluating startups. He successfully predicted the success of Mint. Also, Arrington co-founded Achex, sold for 32mm USD, as well as TechCrunch, which is one of the world's premiere news sites for technology.
He went from being basically a failed founder of a YC company to running YC. Then rumors are that he was fired from YC and then somehow went into AI stuff from there.
He's one of those guys like Kevin Rose who seems to be able to fail upward again and again. Like every venture is a failure but the person responsible ends up being given even more responsibility and even more money. They're very common in silicon valley for some reason.
Surprise for me at the end of the article; I went to college with the Chicago guy who sold his startup to IBM. I should be happy for the guy but all I can muster is feeling intensely bad about my own startup failures.
Oddly, it felt good to confess that to strangers on HackerNews. Thanks for reading
Yeah he admits as much, he didn't do any software work. He 'just' a sales guy
Got 150k seed, landed a 40k contract without a product. As for team, he convinced a potential cofounder to sell his house and move across the country and hired his ex-boss, just to start
He raised money for start-ups and was a marketing consultant. Ended up on advisory boards for various start-ups and most recently as a CXO for a prominent start-up (which got tons of traction but ultimately went down in flames). He had his hand in a bunch of different companies and often worked for equity and a small fee.
And as smart as the guy is in many respects (language, social skills, etc), he is a dumb-dumb when it comes to technical anything or analysis of any type of market/business. But holy fuck, that guy can sell anything (most especially himself - was a fascinating person to watch).
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