SEEKING FREELANCER: Must be in NYC. Looking for someone to build a simple Python/Django app for a huge customer of ours. You'll have to come by the NewsCred NYC office (or you can work here). Contact Asif : asif at newscred.com
The following line is not correct: "it has to be a UK co owning a branch in the States, not a US co with a UK office"
It can be either way around. But your general point is true: the L1 visa is great. I moved over on an L1A visa (the US company is the parent, with branch in UK). I just got a 2 year extension after the first year. Now in the process of getting an expedited green card.
It took us 2.5 years to get to product market fit. We raised a seed round and kept burn incredibly low for a long time while we figured things out. There were a couple of product adjustments along to way based on customer demand.
It took us 2.5 years, to reach out first million of recurring sales. It'll take us less than 3 months now to double that. Patience certainly is a virtue.
Lots of positions, but our main focus is to find engineers who are passionate about information retrieval and big data. So any interest or experience in Solr, Lucene, NLP, Machine Learning, etc would be a great fit for the types of problems we're working on.
We're disrupting the news industry, have amazing investors, real revenues in the millions, growing very fast.
I find it ridiculous that a significant percentage of the population here equate raising VC money with selling your soul. I know you cite the SvN post, but that is one opinion. Raising VC is good for some businesses, bad for others. So is your hiring plan. So is your product choices. And a hundred other things.
We struggled for a long time, and our business came perilously close to the end a few times. But you know what got us out? Funding. VCs. Amazing investors that were thoughtful, supportive and value accretive. The marketing that we could invest in with our funding. We're doing millions of revenue now, and it is all because we were able to light the rocketship with our VC fuel. And did I say our VCs became great friends and mentors, even through the tough times?
It's not for everyone, and my experience may be an outlier. But let's stop with the snarky ant-VC comments.
I agree with the rest of your points and good luck with the pivot!
>"I find it ridiculous that a significant percentage of the population here equate raising VC money with selling your soul."
Really? I find the opposite. Every "we're hiring" thread brags about the company being "VC funded" and people seem to fall all over themselves figuring out the best pitching strategies or slide deck appearances.
I always find it odd, because being VC funded isn't good or bad in and of itself. There we agree.
As said before: The fact that people "celebrate" a funding event is really bass-ackwards when you think about it.
It says that the company couldn't figure out how to grow without bringing in a bunch of financiers, who have a low hit rate (3 go north, 3 go south, 4 turn into the living dead), who provided negative 10 yr returns even with Google in the portfolio, and who take 2-3% + 20% of exit from their own investors.
Definitely an excuse to drink, but not for reasons of celebration.
> And did I say our VCs became great friends and mentors, even through the tough times?
If you consider them among your friends, you have not hit the tough times.
They are your business partners. And when it comes time to sacrifice you in order to make some money you will be sacrificed.
thank you for sharing - certainly, one takes VC money because he thinks he's better with it (and the implications of having heavier profit incentives) than without it.
> ... equate raising VC money with selling your soul... one opinion... Raising VC is good for some businesses, bad for others
one interesting datapoint is that most* YC startups accept the Yuri Milner offer (auto 150k angel round). not that all startups are like YC startups, and that all businesses should take money, and that taking money/aiming for the stars is what defines a startup, but I do feel a bit of a stigma of "if you aren't a startup you and your company suck". As I get better acquainted with Dunning-Kruger I wonder if all those YC founders are mortals after all, just like you and me. or maybe i'm on the wrong end of it again ;)
*no source, read it 6 months ago
edit: this doesn't even make any sense, sorry haha
While its not our core business, we host content APIS for some large publishers. Because we're ingesting their content anyway (content syndication is our main business) and we already have a robust API, we've productized it to provide APIs as a service back to our content providers.
I think content and ecommerce APIs are where you will see the most traction.
If anyone wants licensed Bloomberg financial news content, we have that in our News API and can give to you guys at HN rates. Can be used for commercial use. We worked hard to get this agreement done with Bloomberg since we know a lot of finance startup could use this.
Contact me and I'll set you up. We (NewsCred) have fully licensed news and archives from 750+ news sources. All available through an API. You can use it for commercial use but there is a fee. I can give you a HN discount ;-)
