I guess I won't be applying this summer.

The fact is, 99% of Internet users don't know they have an identity problem. And no matter how much they do, nothing you can do will convince them of this. Better to wait another five years and then tackle the problem. No one else will have solved it by then, trust me.

http://www.squidoo.com/fredsmusic/

(If you read his blog, you know that it's half music and half venture capital stuff)

I think it is the best strategy provided that A) you are targeting businesses B) your software fills a need of a very specific niche.

Regardless of whether you literally sell the product first though, I think it's good to at least think about the process in that order.

Also, you aren't going to get 250k without at the very least a bunch of informal advisors, so list those people too.

Facebook is a place. Think of it like Manhattan. What creates value isn't the population (the users). Nor is it the buildings (the technology). What creates value is the emergent social interactions and the culture that occur there. To put it in geek terms, it's not the instances of people, but rather what goes on in the interstices between them.

To quote Howard Rheingold, "The 'killer app' of tomorrow won't be software or hardware devices, but the social practices they make possible. The most far-reaching changes will come from the kinds of relationships, enterprises, communities, and markets that this future infrastructure will make possible."

If you looked at a graph of the total dataset, what you'd see is that almost all startups with only one founder fail. So the reason the successful startups you list mostly have two founders may not be because two is the optimum number, but rather because two is the next smallest (and therefore most common) number after one. We can't tell without additional data.

If you don't believe me, ask Sam Altman at Loopt whether he'd still do a startup that depended on partnering with cellphone companies if he had to do it over again.

The only thing worse than pinning your chances on a big company creating the value for your product is pinning your chances on a big company providing distribution. Channels are for meeting demand, not creating it.

update: That is, I work for a big company and you come to me and tell me that you're going to make my company a hundred million dollars. I say, gee, that's great, if this works out then I'll get my name on the wall and maybe a small bonus. And if it doesn't then I'll get fired, I won't be able to pay the mortgage and my wife will divorce me. So whatever your question, the answer is no. To make it work without a huge reputation and network and existing relationships you need to rely on a lot of luck.

My general outlook on this is that if you read Horatio Alger, the general formula is luck, pluck, and virtue. Which is great, but what's even better is if you can minimize luck and make your bread-and-butter off just pluck and virtue. Then whatever luck comes your way is just icing on the cake.

Eliminate the account creation. Don't bother making a prototype right now, just make some mockups in photoshop. It's easier to drag images around than it is to drag code around (at least if you want the code to compile).

Once you get feedback from ten or twenty people on your mockups, THEN code a prototype.

Also, just because smart investors can create value for the business doesn't mean every investor has to be smart :-)

On the other hand, it's also the birthplace of intelligence testing and the American eugenics movement, and played a major role in creating the ideological foundations of the holocaust.

Both traditions are very much alive and kicking around there today, and what the people you talk to believe depends very much on which side of campus you're on.

It seems to be working out for the students though.

The way humans walk is exactly the opposite. The toes are at a different angle from the foot (when walking), so that our feet effectively look something like ___/ , with the underscores being the foot and the / being the toes. We then transition from the ___ part of the foot to the / part of the foot and push forward, and land flat footed with the other foot. For whatever speed you are going, there is a proper ratio between landing on the ___ part of the foot and pushing off the / part of the foot, and that's where balance comes from. That is, the faster the acceleration of the fall, the faster you transition from ___ to / .

So in humans, balance comes from the way one step connects to the next step, whereas Dexter appears to be treating each step as a discrete unit, where it has to attain balance at the end of one step before going on to the next step.

If you actually have to balance yourself after each individual step instead of using the next step for balance, the problem seems in some ways to be much harder.

Also, the balance problem is greatly compounded by the small steps Dexter takes. Compare this to doing lunges. When you do a lunge, you basically take a long stride forward and then sink into it, all while keeping your torso perfectly upright. This gives you a much bigger platform for stability. As terrain gets steeper, the way humans walk becomes more like a lunge for this reason.

So my guess is that taking one tiny step and then balancing is the hardest part of this problem, because you have the least tools at your disposal. For example, you can't use the next step to balance you. However, once you can do the last step of the sequence, all the preceding steps working backward from the last one get progressively easier.

I don't know anything about robotics, but as an athlete and sports physiology geek I find the problem interesting.

Also, I agree with the author that it is annoying when you have a good idea and you can't figure out if there is prior art or not. All you can really do is start calling up professors in your rolodex, but it's hard when it's something that is somewhere in between three or four different fields, but not really a part of any of them.

I do, however, predict that this site will have a lot of stories with really awesome headlines.

In the same way IQ tests were used to support white chauvinism by creating an Us vs Them dynamic back then, the Soviet Union was used to create the Us vs Them dynamic during the cold war and Al Qaeda is used to create it today. It's a cheap way of drumming up nationalistic support by creating a common enemy. Whether the common enemy is black people, Jewish people, the Russians, Al Qaeda, Iran, etc., it doesn't matter, they're all used to advance the same governmental policies. The Hoover Institute is today the center of this neocon philosophy.

C.f. The Power of Nightmares: http://www.archive.org/details/ThePowerOfNightmares

Also, they receive a large amount of funding from the Bradley Institute, the same group that funds Charles Murray (author of The Bell Curve) and others who write about using IQ as part of public policy.

http://alexkrupp.com/midterm.html

Also, you're right about the PG essay. I've obviously learned a lot since that experience and will not be making the same mistakes next time.

"Emoticomm is a digital introduction device. Our stick-of-gum sized device uses Bluetooth to connect people with similar desires. We use proven hardware and open source software.

It's a shame how many missed opportunities exist because of difficulty in initial icebreaking.

For example, imagine two strangers in an elevator with only 30 seconds to potentially establish a relationship. Our product will discretely alert them to common interests.

We're targeting venues such as conferences, trade shows, and cruiseships. Our goal is to create a more efficient social experience.

Our product is a digital icebreaker. Digital handshakes will lead to physical ones."

You can see two mockups here, one of the product and one of the GUI:

http://www.alexkrupp.com/picture_library/3Dmodel.png

http://www.alexkrupp.com/picture_library/gui.png

(The idea behind the GUI was that info in green boxes would be public, info in yellow boxes would be viewable by friends of friends, and info in red boxes would be viewable by friends only)

It was a decent idea but I guess I wasn't clued in enough to realize that I have no where near enough skills to pull off a hardware project. At least I learned a thing or two...

http://www.alexkrupp.com/biz_plan.pdf

http://www.alexkrupp.com/marketing_plan.pdf

They actually won a couple of business plan competitions, so they're not completely terrible if you want an example. Plus maybe someone will get a good idea or two.

I also have a provisional patent on the above designs plus some new business methods relating to advertising that is going to expire in a few months... *sigh*

http://notelab.infogami.com/startupschool2006

And here is a zipped file of the 2005 notes:

http://www.alexkrupp.com/startup_school_05_notes.zip

If you go to bat enough times you may never hit a home run, but sooner or later you're bound to get hit by a pitch and walked.

Software startups can run circles around big companies because of their agility and their ability to follow best practices as opposed to standard practices. What are a startup's biggest advantages in the conceptual age?

Is sensemaking purely a service industry, or will there be a thriving product market?

What is the sustainable competitive advantage in a startup that revolves around sensemaking?

I can send you my writing in a couple weeks when I at least have a coherent draft if you want.

http://www.unionsquareventures.com/2007/01/whats_next.html

Rule of thumb: Ask someone what their greatest accomplishment is. If what they say is relative, i.e. "I am better than someone else at ___," then chances are they aren't very good at anything.

Avoid those whose self-worth comes from comparing themselves to others, be it through degrees or GPA or money, etc. They're losers and hanging out with them will keep you from accomplishing anything in life.

The funniest thing is that investment banks hire based on GPA even though there is zero correlation between GPA and alpha, and alpha is 100% of your job performance.

My point about the relative accomplishment thing is just that you can go through your entire life trying to beat other people at stuff, but just because you can beat someone at something doesn't mean you're making the world a better place.

Being an Olympic athlete is certainly an accomplishment, although hopefully one goes on to do stuff that benefits others. And I say that as someone who pulled a 500 meter piece on the rowing machine that was faster than ltwt Olympic standard this afternoon.

Specifically, just because an idea was successful in Japan doesn't mean it will be successful in the US, because the niche it was created in was different and the people had different problems that needed solving. This book goes through each phase in the evolution of mobile wireless, from before pagers all the way through ketai. It explains exactly what problems these technologies were solving for each segment of society and details how each demographic was using them.

There is a pretty good section on dating too. :-)