why not just choose a different time of the year to run your program? You wouldn't have to convince the top companies to choose Shotput in Atlanta over Y Combinator and Techstars (a battle which you'll lose until you develop brand). The reality is that there are enough entrepreneurs who desperately need money at all times of the year. These companies may not want to wait until the summer application process and could be convinced to do shotput instead.
There are some benefits of having a 8-10 week "accelerator" program. As you mentioned, there's the feeling of camaraderie between the startups but also its easier to line up speakers, have a Demo day, and get good office space when its a 10 week program.
Perhaps it wasn't clear what we're doing. Instead of making companies wait to apply (or missing the window to apply), we'll be taking applications year-round. When companies are accepted, they'll have a custom 3-month accelerator program for them setup so that we're not doing a one size fits all approach - that's good for the companies that are beyond just the idea stage as some have been that have applied to the program.
Finally, given the various niches that startups we fund go after, the value of the idea sharing/camaraderie while useful hasn't been something we could point to and say "this will ensure startup success". Same goes for the speaker program. So why subject entrepreneurs to these programs/ideas if it won't help them succeed? For us, it's a clear choice of killing off the things that don't add value so we can do more things that do add value.
Re: office space, we're still likely to have office space for the companies. It's something we're currently working on with one of our partners.
More consumers are using kayak, bing/travel, and other flight aggregators. Airlines are competing on the price of tickets so they tack on extra charges at checkout. Southwest doesn't play in the aggregation game so they can factor the price of storing luggage into the price of the ticket. Southwest doesn't want to commoditize their product by making their flights available to aggregators and part of that is offering a differentiated consumer experience.
This isn't the point that the author makes but could explain Southwest's strategy with luggage....
Great movie about a business subculture... but if your model relies on a bullpen of stressed-out, commissioned salespeople, it might better fit a large mature business, rather than a new venture.
Its ridiculous to assume that a popular newsletter and site which had been running for 15 years would be "left with no alternative but to shut down" because one search engine won't index their content. I don't buy that for a second. Does ALL their traffic comes from organic search?
Also, as someone else pointed out this company's meta tag structure is awful. They've clearly invested no time in trying to optimize their site for search engines.
This is a ploy to get media attention. Why am I contributing to the probelm?
I have read that Google is more and more explicitly ignoring meta tags (with the exception of description). It makes perfect sense. You can game the meta tags, but you can't game real content as easily. What's the point if your content sucks?
Agreed...reminds me of the story of Kayak. Apparently, when Kayak launched the airlines had no affiliate plans and did not plan on paying Kayak (which they viewed as a threat). Eventually, Kayak started dumping serious numbers of users at their door and the airlines woke up and realized that they would have to pay Kayak. Milo is in an even better position because its more difficult for a competitor to establish relationships with mom and pops stores AND gain a customer base.
I find it hardest to be passionate about my work when I'm doing mundane, uninteresting work. No job involves doing something interesting and challenging at all times. If I was 10x better at my job, it wouldn't improve how I felt about doing mundane work. In fact, I might detest it more because I would feel like my time could be spent doing higher-level work.
A couple thoughts
1). I usually love Dustin's work but am acutally underwhelmed by the design. I hate the black on white. It hurts my eyes
2.) Snail mail is meaningful becasue it shows that the person took time to WRITE and then send a letter. Its not nearly as meaningful if its typed up.
In this community, we don't vote based on whether or not we agree. We vote up if we think it is worth reading, regardless of whether we agree or not. We downvote when the message is inappropriate - flames and trolls, cheap humor, that sort of thing. I don't go to the comments to see who agrees with me, I go there to see who disagrees, and why.
People don't bookmark pages because search engines make it so easy to find content. So rather than bookmark the php manual page on date formatting, I'll just type php dates into Google knowing that it will pop up in the first ten results. However, I also notice that I regularly have trouble locating content this way when I go back for it. This is usually when I am looking for something very specific and forget the exact query string that generated that result.
On the other hand, there are times when I'm searching for a datapoint and am frustrated that Google keeps throwing the same links at me. I have to constantly hit "next" to get the results that I want.
I wonder if there is an opportunity for a search engine to heavily invest in either providing people with completely fresh info every time they query for something or provide them just the results they've seen before.
This is probably not relevant to Duck Duck Go but thought I'd throw it out there.
Say you are a programmer, how any opportunities do you have to get rejected 100 times