The World According To Rags

YC Demo Day

I went to the Y Combinator Demo Day last Wednesday.  Y Combinator is perhaps the best-known startup 'incubator' (for lack of a better term).  Paul Graham has done a great job in nurturing entrepreneurs and startups and giving them access to ideas and funding.  My brother's startup, Disqus, came out of there. Demo Day is a twice-yearly event where their startups present to potential investors.  TechCrunch has a good run-down of the ones that presented thought it's not comprehensive (there were a few others that were off the record).  My thoughts are:

• Impressed by the quality of the startups.  If I were to generalize, they seemed more mature than what I've seen at SeedCamp (although the quality there continues to get better as well).
• There was a healthy mix of b2c and b2b plays, a couple of which seemed truly disruptive to an industry in their potential.
• The entepreneurs were very well-coached.  There seemed to be a template in how they presented.  They were also clearly coached to be very proactive in introducing themselves during the networking - which can be hard for engineers to do!
• It seems frothy with the amount of angel/super-angel money looking to invest, not to mention VCs, reflected in valuations.  One startup whose idea I liked had already raised mid 6-figures seed round and were contemplating a Series A but with no proven track record and not having launched yet.  I asked why and it's because they can and that they were getting offers of ~ $10 M pre-money(!!!).  Fair enough but seems frothy to me.
• The Y Combinator brand and network can be self-fulfilling.  You immediately get credibility and access to investors that you wouldn't otherwise get + a network of peers that can be your first customers, partners and generally people to bounce ideas off of.

Adam Smith has a nice take on what he saw at Demo Day.

Do The Test

Do the test.  [Hat tip to Kash for sending the link.]

Of Currency Exchange Rates And Squash Racquets

I'm in the market for a squash racquet so I went online and did some research.  I've recently demo'd a couple of racquets by Harrow Sports, and I liked them very much.  First, it seems that Harrow doesn't distribute through a lot of channels.  There are a few sites that sell them but I checked a couple of sports stores in NYC (Paragon and the squash/tennis store near Grand Central, to no avail).  So I went to Harrow's site and put together an order that came to $220.  Except that when I specified my UK shipping address, it automatically put the order into Sterling, which came out to £135.  Now at the current exchange rate, the dollar value of that would be greater than $270, meaning at least a $50 difference.  That's absurd!  Just out of principle, I may have them ship to a US address and then have someone bring it over or ship it to me. 

Kiva.org: Connecting Social Lenders With Small Businesses

I've been intrigued by the idea of microfinance and had heard about Kiva, whose President, Premal Shah, is an old friend of mine from our days at Mercer Management Consulting, for a while but finally got 'round to making my first loans this weekend.  Microfinance is the concept of providing small amounts of capital to individuals and businesses in developing countries at no or low interest rates so that they can gain greater economic security and, ultimately, pull themselves out of poverty.  The best known microfinance insitiution is the Grameen Bank founded by Muhammed Yunus, who won the Nobel peace prize in 2006. 

Back to Kiva: They raise money from 'social lenders' like myself and funnel it to microfinance insitutions around the world that source the businesses and entrepreneurs and manage the loans.  Kiva is a non-profit itself and does not take a cut of the money you lend.  They rightly ask for a donation during the checkout process (though I did have a few issues with their site).  The coolest part is that you get to know a bit about the person or business you're funding and, over time, they provide updates and pictures as they repay their loan. 

For instance, I've made 4 $25 loans: 3 of them are women in the Ivory Coast that manage a general store or are in food production, and the last to a woman in Mexico.  I chose women because I'm a big believer in the societal benefits of economically empowering women, not to mention that I bet women are a safer risk in terms of repayment!  You can view my lender page here. 

I'm excited to finally get my feet wet in the world of microfinance, and I hope Premal and Kiva continue their great work.

Sites I Love: Craigslist

This is the next post in my ongoing Sites I Love series (previous ones were Rotten Tomatoes, Kayak, and Menupages / OpenTable).

Craigslist o Craigslist, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways:

I've been using Craigslist since 1999.  Since then, I've found 4 apartments, 3 roommates, 2 cars, 2 vacation rentals and bought/sold a number of items (furniture, concert tickets, cell phones, electronics).  I even found someone to drive my car across country.  The combination of easy to use navigation and scale results in a great deal of utility.  An added bonus is the ad-free experiences (even though I wouldn't mind some ads).

How It Can Be Improved: Better metadata and search.  For instance, if I'm looking for real estate, I should be able to filter results by things like # of bedrooms or type of unit.  Being able to bookmark posts would also be good - I sometimes find myself in a futile attempt to find a post that I'd stumbled upon.  Also, it could be interesting to have user handles and introduce some sort of reputation system (one knock against the community is that there can be sketchy/random folks that frequent it).  User handles would not prevent this but would help.

Welcome, Dantenna!

My brother-in-law Dan just launched his website, www.danntenna.org.  It's a place for him to publish and chronicle his various artistic, personal and professional endeavors.  He's having a showing of some of his artwork this Saturday in San Francisco (more info on his site).  Dan is one of the most talented, creative people I know and it's great to see him share the fruits of his labors to a wider audience.

                                                                     

Computer Issues

My beloved Powerbook won't close properly so I need to ship it to them for repair.  I'll try to post a bit over the next week but it will be tough on the old windows laptop I dusted off that, for a variety of reasons, may be relegated to dialup, or a spotty wireless connection.  It's a good excuse for me to enjoy spring in NYC.

It'll be weird not having the computer around.

Too Many Choices

Barry Schwartz's The Paradox of Choice is about how sometimes too many choices can often be, paradoxically, restricting.  I had this happen me to my today.  I was at the pharmacy and needed to get some toothpaste.  I stood there surveying the rows of different types of toothpaste -- gel, travel size, regular, minty, original, cavity fighting, whitening...ad nauseum -- and ended up walking out without any toothpaste.  I didn't want to make the wrong choice.

The Airfare Report

Just learned of this site the other day.  It contains the skinny on great (and secret) airfares out of NYC airports to various destinations.  For instance, they list a link to a fare sale by Alaska that is otherwise very hard to find on their site.  What I like about this site is that they actually try to book each airfare before they publish it, or they'll tell you which dates you're likely to get it or other tips on it, instead of the generic "JFK to LAX from $200 RT" you see on other newsletters & sites, only to discover that those fares no longer exist or that the $200 fare means making 2 connections and leaving at 3 am.

Link: The Airfare Report.

Hotmail Offers 1 TB of Storage!

"A new bar has been set.  In a bid to one-up its competitors, once and for all, Microsoft's Hotmail division has decided to give its users 1 Terabyte of storage space.  This vastly overshadows Google's announcement earlier today of giving its users 2 Gigabytes in response to Yahoo's recent move to match Google's 1 Gigabyte.  Said a Microsoft insider, 'We needed to do something to change the game and, besides, we have to do something with our billions of dollars in cash'."

This is huge!!