Doing a bit more digging it seems like they're using several proxies under the name \*.mhgs.co, which looks suspiciously like a whole lot of Linode boxes.
There really are no cons. As long as it's an accredited investor and your docs are well written (focus on length of time to repay and amount of discount) Just know the moment you take even $1 from outside investors your clock starts ticking and you must deliver. At http://geekli.st our first investors were on a capped note. If you get offered uncapped... take it.
Would like to recognize Volkan here for volunteering to write this great blog post for us at geekli.st - The time and thought put into it goes beyond what we could have asked for and has stirred great dialogue. From all the Geeklist family, thank you Volkan! - Reuben
Nice post Steve. Assuming anyone even gets to read this 420 posts later... [Proposed solution at the end] For years I got my daily fix of HN too. PG was a legend of the Valley for me and YC an admirable exclusive club of amazing success stories. Many we work with and many friends have had tremendous success. (Disclosure: we never applied to YC nor tried simply because we had two seasoned founders with many successes under our belts and felt respectfully it wasn't our cup of tea, but we admired and loved HN and the people at YC)
As an entrepreneur for 15+ years, I really admired the community support and its relationship to startups and hackers. Something all founders and tech leaders need. From outside of Silicon Valley it was very inspiring to watch.
When we started http://geekli.st about 1 1/2 years ago we broke into the Silicon Valley scene and hustled like nobody's business to get known, get ahead, raise funds and do all those things all entrepreneurs must do to reach their goals. One of the tools we looked towards was HN. We got some initial love in there, but once they invested (YC) in a company that was copying our every step the HN love shut down. Articles we posted/very relevant news even picked up by Huffington post, TNW and other media outlets, was repeatedly removed and shut out. At least with no transparency to voting or the 'karma factor' we had no way to know why. Along with that came the barrage of complaints from many influential developers and tech leaders we knew about the voting system, the mystical 'Karma' system and basically the fact that something once so simple and pure, full of positivity and support, became a place to lambaste, harass, condescend, denigrate and shut down intelligible and news-worthy items, startups and human beings. But like Friendster, MySpace and the ever famous forums and bulletin boards of past... things evolve from what once was innovative and positive, causing new generations of innovators to learn from the mistakes of their elders and build something better. more relevant. more useable. more friendly and more open... Thank you Paul for Hacker News and everything you and YC have always done for startups. You'll always be loved and respected by me... but for the disenchanted tech and startup link absorbers like me and so many of our close (and not so close) friends there is something new.
Welcome to Geeklist Links. Tech news, startup releases and developer links and resources, organized into your own categories, shared in tagged communities, saved, ^5'd, upvoting and down voting, with complete transparency. http://geekli.st/#link - built by developers for developers and the tech world. - Enjoy. Reuben Katz - these views I own.
Clearly they've goofed and don't get their own market. Http://Geekli.st is by developers for developers. Even designed mostly by its co-founders. (I'm one of them: disclosure)It's the only open communication platform for programmers or developers/geeks. A way to share links and resources, achievements, etc... Sitting in the middle of Github, Facebook, Reddit (with links that can be categorized, upboted, high fived and shared) and GeekCred.
I don't think they are going for the HN type programmer market, but other types of programmers will not see anything wrong with it. I am thinking more hobbyist programmers and enterprise programmers etc. The closest they get to an online community is Facebook and they perhaps discover answers on stack-overflow after googling but have never thought of creating an account. They probably think, facebook is cool, now here is something like facebook for programmers!
Once again Hacker New has removed an article about us from the front page as it was gaining up votes and a vibrant stream of comments starting up. Silencing startups in the press is not the way, could it be because there is a YC company trying to copy/compete with us? Nice. Done.
I had this comment page open in its own tab, and was surprised to check and see that, in fact, the article had abruptly vanished from the front page. Interesting, and even a bit concerning. Around here, you never know how much of an article's success/failure is due to popularity or human intervention.
At this point it's top of page 3. Normally when mods kill it, it just disappears. I suspect in this case the overt marketing and reubenelli's whiny, entitled tone are encouraging people to flag it. It's only at 8 points, so I doubt it takes too many flags to drive it down the stack.
edit: also, geekli.st is busted on chrome; very few of the images on the front page are loading (works fine in Firefox).
anthony, could you screenshot the 'busted in chrome' issue and send to us at info@geekli.st? Should be working smoothly! Whatever the reason, it was one of europes leading writers on tech who interviewed and did the article. i suppose if someone writes a positive article it's overt marketing. Thanks for being on geeklist and let us know if you find more bugs! cheers!
Well, it looks like a standard PR puff piece to me - I'm not sure (from that article plus looking at geekli.st) exactly what the draw is, other than publishing stuff on the web? I can do that on my own site.
Plus your design kinda sucks, usability-wise - massive fonts, huge whitespace and line spacing mean that I can see the cards from my secret moonbase lair. I also have to scroll, even on a 1920x1080 monitor, and squint, because your colors are like, #999 on #EEE.
You also need to figure out a way to get people to fill in details about their cards, or kill the extra info part. Every card says "I did 'X', details: <no info> with: <no contributors>". (That's not a bug in Chrome, I just checked in Firefox too). So if you can't get one of the founding technical guys from Skype to brag a bit more (http://geekli.st/taavet/helped-grow-skype-from-zero-to-first...), what's going on?
I'm trying to understand why we were number 8 on the home page, Hackers absolutely were interested in the communities and news that Javascript was #1, and then we disappeared.?
