Advice? I bet you $10 she will not say ``No''. You'll even get ``buying signals''. If I were you, and I wanted to learn more than I wanted to sell? Ask ``why would you want to invest in my company'' and pressure her for a real answer.
Sales is mostly about moving a process forward, so your only goal is to get to the next step.
If the VC isn't a full partner, your next step is to get to a meeting with a partner.
If the VC is a full partner, you want to ask, ``what's the process you use to decide on investments''. Usually, there's a dance of customer-validation meetings that precedes a ``partner meeting'', the outcome of which is a term sheet. So you want to chart out the state machine that terminates in a partner meeting, and then transit from state 0 towards that meeting.
(1) Reads like "case-in-point" for Norvig's argument that the GoF patterns are artifacts of less expressive languages. Most of these examples battle clearer, more effective idiomatic alternatives in Ruby.
(2) Yet another misinterpretation of what Chris Alexander meant by "A Pattern Language". The GoF book isn't a cookbook, it's a starting point.
(3) This document didn't benefit at all from being "typeset" in PDF; any Wordpress blog with syntax highlighting plugins would have presented it better.
Wouldn't it be cool to see the "real" design patterns for Ruby?
With an inherently smaller addressable population of users ("all businesspeople", as opposed to "all people, and any cartoon characters they like"), LinkedIn probably needs to be more aggressive about capturing some of the value third-party apps create on their site. I feel like the subtext here is that LinkedIn doesn't want to give this feature away for free.
Too many questions, and why on earth do your users care that you use SIMULATED ANNEALING? I've actually used SIMULATED ANNEALING (for graph layout) and I don't even care.
Again amusing that people disagree, and think that a questionairre which allows for "WhatSpace? WhoBook?" should advertise algorithm selection on a splash page.
Have you ever worked with a PR firm that was actually worth the money? I've worked directly with 4 in the past and got fuck-all from it, but we're handling our own press now and kicking ass.
Schwartz. Perfect example. The government-issued PR firm for Boston companies. Competed with 2 companies simultaneously repped by them. Saw, maybe, 5? trade press hits between the two of them.
We didn't do much better, because we were also repped by a PR company, and playing the same pasteurized process press food strategy as the rest of them.
Which is my point. Wasting money on a jaded middleman to circulate press releases every time you make a dot release isn't something you should aspire to do when you can afford it, and PR isn't something you should avoid doing now.
My current company, a tiny startup, is in Forbes, Wired, EWeek, Network Computing, Inforworld, Baseline, not to mention Slashdot, Digg, and Reddit. Didn't spend a dime to do it. Definitely got lucky, but there's also definitely a trick to doing it.
I agree with the "survey" trick Graham talks about. I've seen that work over and over again.
Sorry, my fault for being incoherent. Look for the word "coup" in "Submarine". Viaweb injected a factoid into the, uh, press-o-sphere. Reporters love new factoids.
What I see work, over and over again, is companies manufacturing surveys or studies that come up with numbers and metrics about the market, like, "20,000 enterprises are deploying technology to stop the Storm worm". Some companies will do annual press releases about an official-sounding report they generate, like, "Weboopia's 5th Annual Twitter Study Concludes 4,897,489,281 Messages Delivered Over Twitter In 2007".
This is really cool, thanks. I had no idea about Windylabs and ChicagoBeta. Unfortunately, it looks like ChicagoBeta has flatlined since early summer. Any other pointers like this?
Isn't this the problem Facebook is supposed to solve? =)
Sales is mostly about moving a process forward, so your only goal is to get to the next step.
If the VC isn't a full partner, your next step is to get to a meeting with a partner.
If the VC is a full partner, you want to ask, ``what's the process you use to decide on investments''. Usually, there's a dance of customer-validation meetings that precedes a ``partner meeting'', the outcome of which is a term sheet. So you want to chart out the state machine that terminates in a partner meeting, and then transit from state 0 towards that meeting.