

How We Got Rejected from YC and Moved into the SpeakerCave - MediaSquirrel
http://www.metamorphblog.com/2010/07/the-speakercave.html

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byoung2
I didn't see a link in the post to <http://speakertext.com/>. I checked it
out, and it looks like a really useful app! Best of luck to these guys!

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PaulJoslin
At first I was thinking that youtube's recent sub title mod must of been a bit
of a hit to their idea, but then I saw the functionality of quoting and
sharing hyper linked quotes.

That's quite a cool feature and could be handy for stopping 'mis quoting' /
'quoting out of context' being used in many media's.

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byoung2
And it would eliminate the need to say "skip ahead to 4:25 to hear where he
talks about such and such"

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davi
_With my alumni discount, I had setup a booth at the Columbia Engineering Job
Fair, looking for fresh talent._

Good idea. Has anyone else here ever recruited for a startup or a small
company at a university job fair? How did it go?

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cyen
I helped recruit for a 20-person startup at my alma mater in the fall, and
found:

\- if your brand isn't immediately recognizable as a tech startup, signs like
"Seeking CS / Math majors" are tacky but help immensely with capturing the
interest of students who are browsing and want to know they won't be sucked
into talking to a company totally outside their interests

\- we spent much more time pitching our startup and answering questions about
"what we do" than I imagine the average recruiter at a larger company has to
do

\- because the conversation almost always starts with them asking about us, if
you're interested, you have to remember to turn the conversation on them to
find out more, instead of just being left with a resume

\- (more general) knowing which classes are good / hard / produce interesting
projects helps a lot in evaluating what a particular candidate has done, and
whether it matches with your company's needs.

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tomjen3
>“Your team hasn’t know each other long enough,” he told us––or something like
that. But they’d be happy to talk to us again, later, in the fall, assuming we
hadn’t self-destructed already.

Oh man had that been me, I would properly double my efforts to get the startup
to be the next facebook, just to mail PG and tell him he missed the boat...

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neurotech1
Even though I was also rejected by YC without an interview - Not "ready" or
"prepared", and no co-founder, were the likely reasons, I can accept being
rejected.

I still believe that PG's opinion counts for a lot. I doubt many seed programs
have partners that loose sleep over missed opportunities.

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thaumaturgy
I think it's easy for a lot of people to forget that VC and seed-stage
investors aren't in business to _help you_ ; they're in business primarily to
help themselves, in the form of sexy portfolio companies, talent acquisitions,
and investments that pay back later.

The relationship is at best symbiotic, so as long as they're healthy, I'm
certain that they don't lose any sleep at all over the "opportunities" that
they pass up.

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zackattack
I think pg really regrets not funding smanek. :)

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blueberry
Is there a technical reason preventing the big guys (youtube/yahoo /vimeo
etc.) from developing this kind of thing? I always thought running voice
recognition on user submitted videos would require massive infrastructure. How
are you guys planning to solve that? Congrats & best of luck with the rest!

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MediaSquirrel
We're doing machine-augmented crowdsourcing, not straight voice recognition.
It's different, and allows us to provide consistent high quality at low cost.

Essentially, we've built a crowdsourcing QA system a la Crowdflower, expect
better and more suited to the specific task of video-to-text, and augmented it
with speech recognition.

It's pretty fucking cool, if you ask me, but also very different from how
people have traditionally approached this problem.

Also, the current site and product will be completely replaced in 8 days with
something MUCH much better. So keep you eyes peeled.

-Matt

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camwest
Offtopic: I'd like to see an API for SpeakerText where I can point to my own
video asset on an Amazon S3 bucket along with an API endpoint that I specify
and you would send me a POST with the transcribed text whenever it's finished
processing. I'd purchase that service tomorrow.

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gommm
That'd be very useful for me too...

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brianmwang
Matt,

You're still planning on moving out to Mountain View (based on your Twitter
feed), right? When are you planning on doing that?

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MediaSquirrel
We move in 8 Days.

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siruva07
will we see a post on why you aren't staying in NYC? too expensive? not enough
early stage investors?

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etagwerker
What a great product! Congratulations, guys!

This product makes all of the videos out there indexable by its entire audio
content. You could start crawling, processing videos and indexing them right?

Is that in your roadmap? To become one of the best video search tools out
there?

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kaelswanson
Hi, thanks so much! There are so many areas we want to expand into, for now
our goal is to provide video publishers with the ability to SEO their videos
via transcripts and quotelinks. All that publishers have to do is put one line
of javascript and one line of server side code on their webpages and now they
can get their videos put on google's radar. Video search would also be
interesting long term.

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pclark
what is the speakercave?

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kaelswanson
SpeakerCave is the rawest form of a startup pad. Four dudes, no ac, shirtless
half the time, coding like fiends and having a blast!

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javery
I would love to be able to use this for TekPub - being able to have people
quote our videos and share it would be awesome marketing.

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MediaSquirrel
We've got a major product overhaul coming soon that will be super-friendly for
you. I'll ping you via email.

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dmoney
tl;dr: SpeakerText is their startup, the SpeakerCave is their house or
apartment, and no mention is made of it being cave-shaped or made of speakers
(bummer).

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ndimopoulos
Indeed. This is going to be a really useful app especially to those that have
disabilities (mainly hearing impairments).

Best of luck!

