Raise Cache

Comments (Archived):

1. Looks like a fun event and of course a great cause.  Not to take away from the testimonials for HackNY in the video, but the guy at the end steals the show.Too bad this isn’t back-to-back with the meetup on the 9th so that more of us out-of-towners could join in. Someone please take photos of Fred on the runway and POST them!  Please!But, in all seriousness, what a worthwhile program (HackNY) that ties so closely to what many in the AVC community believe in. These types of experiences can be life-changing. An experience is worth a million words.

2. One other thing that NY knows better than Silicon Valley is throw parties like that ! ^10

   1. Shoot. Another one for NYC.Can we hold you to this, William?  Next week?  I know you are Canadian but you are sort of an honorary New Yorker, are you not?

      1. Ha! I already changed the format of the After-AVC meetup to a wine bar gathering instead of sit-in dinner. More fun and casual.

         1. And, um, spirited. How wonderful that NYC has a built in designated driver program called taxis.

            1. In Louisville, we have a company called CityScoot that takes you home, in your own car.

            2. what a great idea

            3. They have scooters that fold up and fit in your trunk. Once you’re home, they unfold and scoot away into the night.Plus, they generally enjoy the DJ Swantastic mix.

            4. that makes all the sense in the world. great service.

            5. And my 16 y.o. son thought he had come up with this novel idea to help pay for college.  Except, he was going to charge extra for driving you home in your own car.  Funny how all his business ideas lately focus on parties.  He has one that I am sure no one has thought of, where he will save floundering parties– for a fee.  That’s all I’ll share.

            6. They do charge extra…well, more than a cab. Usually about 20% more. Well worth it.I like your son’s style. Party Pimp and he’ll get you home…

            7. Just for information – they have that service in Johannesburg South Africa too 🙂

            8. People have tried to create free drive-home services for those intoxicated (it’s really nothing more than booking a friend to pick you up), but taxi lobbies complain and get their way often. 

         2. If you are doing it where i think you are they have nosh food

            1. It is. Great.

      2. How many Torontonians does it take to change a light bulb? Two.  One to go down to NYC and figure how they do it and the other one to answer the phone when he calls.  🙂

         1. There will be 4 actually. You will have to change your joke.

         2. Pretty impressive humor for this time of day, Leigh. See you in NYC. BYOLB.

            1. i have a lot of light bulb jokes.  and @awaldstien:disqus thinks Canadians don’t have a sense of humour (ps. i think you all keep spelling humour incorrectly FYI)

            2. Oh, then I’ll see you in New Yourk.

         3. I visit Toronto regularly… though I’m in Kingston. And the possibility as to whether I’ll be in Kingston, Toronto or NYC in the future is a 33/33/33 split currently.

         4. To your South Park ditty. Thanks…a big fan and know that episode well.And of course, I did my graduate work in Vancouver @ UBC and ran companies in Cal for years so this was very tongue-in-cheek. 

            1. Vancouver? (ok now i’m making stupid Toronto jokes 😉

      3. William as Honorary New Yorker?Good guy. Northern neighbor. Friend. Smart entrepreneur. But that is taking it a bit far.

         1. What do I know, from the oher side of the continent and all. Anyone east of the Mississippi is a New Yorker. Plus William does have an accent. Don’t New Yorkers have accents?

            1. Oy!  Californian’s and Canadian’s need a bit more sense of humor here.

            2. Humor or not..Bar fight. 

            3. need a bit more sleep is more like it…at least for this Californian…but I’m up for a bar fight either way @wmoug:disqus 

            4. http://www.youtube.com/watc…

            5. That’s a funny video.

            6. gah…my long island bred part of me totally disagrees.edit: typo

         2. I’ll remember that Arnold. See you at the bar.

            1. haha

            2. Let me know if you need some backup..

         3. you’re asking for it..

      4. Only if Mayor Wilson hands me the keys.

3. A suggestion for your fashion show costume – Wear a white T shirt – logos of USV portfolio companies in the front. Proud investor and believer etc :)And on the back, photo of Christensen along side Yoda, Carlota alongside Obi Wan.. Proud student of Jedi masters 😉 Also photo of Joanne + Kids – Proud father etcAnd finally, if you have space.. you can put in disqus shots of all AVCers.. haha

   1. I vote for the chicken T created [email protected]:disqus 

      1. Okay. now, I’m not competing with the grimster. There’s only 1 winner there.

   2. No Grimlockian T-shirt quotes? They are the rage in Tech fashion! The Fall 2011 collection was just released. 

      1. Hahahahahaha.I was hoping for a bit of a mash up to be honest – turntable style (though, like you, I have no access to it and haven’t used it!..)

   3. I hope i get to choose what to wear. I fear not.

      1. oh lord. no wonder you apologized to your wife and kids.

      2. haha… nope

      3. I don’t think you get to choose what you wear, but don’t worry, apparently there is a “walking rehearsal” before the event. Yes, a “walking rehearsal”. To practice walking.Regardless, I’m still nervous we’ll have to be up there with @cpaik:twitter – he’s just so pretty.PS I heard @reecepacheco:disqus is not an ambi-turner…

      4. If they stick you in a tie – pictures!!!

4. If you’re walking on the runway, I’ll be up there with you!Practice your runway turn now…

   1. Do you know who chooses what we wear?

      1. I’m not sure. But, I need to go get my measurements today. If you haven’t gotten an email about that, maybe you’re not walking?

         1. remember, stand up straight when they measure.And ask for a copy of the measurements, they are useful to have when you need something tailored.

            1. Absolutely! I plan on holding on to these.

      2. i believe each of us gets matched with a brand and they decide what you’ll weari think i’m rocking Bonobos

5. Just got it.Raise Cache.Ho Ho Ho

   1. Oh yeah.  Ha!

      1. Took me a minute too – not so obvious when you pronounce it KAY-sh!! (We antipodeans are weird like that).

6. Awesome. We need something like that in Paris. 

   1. La mode en tech. Le techno-mode. 🙂 

   2. pret-a-program

   3. it’s not like we have to compete with Silicon Marseille for recruiting CS talent…

      1. No. Instead we just have to compete with Goldman Sachs, McKinsey and the zillions of IT consulting firms engineering school graduates go to after college. Like NY startups.

         1. true !

7. That should be a fun night!!!You may want to use a “stunt double”!!

8. No matter what they dress you in, wear the scooter helmet.

   1. to protect myself from tomatoes being thrown?

      1. LOL I just remember how pissed you got one time when the staff at some uppity hotel in NYC wouldn’t let you come in the lounge with it.

         1. oh yeah. things like that annoy me

      2. Just bring your bouncer up on stage with you

9. I got the scoop of what they will wear:Calvin DroidChristian DiOSRalph LeanYves St-CloudDonnet KaranHacko Chanel

10. HackNY = active learning and traction for meaningful relationshipsConference = passive learning and less traction for relationships with those you meet

11. Wow, those tickets are expensive.  I have to think about that.And Fred, I’ll take over your spot.  I’m sample size, relatively speaking (some shirts are problematic, and some pants, because i’m broader shouldered and have hips…)

    1. Go for it, Shana!!

       1. For the tickets or the modeling?  

          1. If you model, you have a free ride!!

             1. I didn’t get asked to be a model though :(.  Maybe next year someone will like me enough!

12. Everyone benefits from a hackathon.The newbies learn from the techies, and the techies learn from the newbies.Its also a great way to expand your online community. Having active members of the technology community on your side can do wonders for your start-up.I love hacking, im doing it all day & night…hit me up on twitter @therealcrad:twitter

13. Sounds fun! Too bad I’m in Milan and won’t be able to attend. I hope to see some pics!

14. don’t worry, Fred, you’re not alonei, too, will be embarrassing myself on the runwaybut it’s for an awesome cause!

    1. shit. i can’t compete with you reece. youth and good looks and all.

       1. don’t worry about mefocus on out-DJ’ing @dens ;)——————-typed with thumbs

          1. I’m giving a like for your ‘typed with thumbs’ changing my mobile message as we speak 🙂

             1. ha. looks like my mobile signature snuck in thereglad you like it 😉

       2. But you’ve got DJ chops.

15. Why are we raising money to benefit CS students from top programs around the country? Why are we raising money to help companies like Business Insider and bit.ly hire interns?The event looks like fun but I’ve been trying to understand hackNY and don’t understand why it’s a charitable cause.

    1. Because they are likely to make the world a much better place?Because we like to see ambitious, talented people succeed?

       1. But CS students from top programs are probably going to succeed anyway?

          1. Good.  I like the leverage that comes from helping ambitious, smart people do MORE.

             1. Many of the companies listed on the hackNY site are well funded. They have hiring managers and recruiting programs. We’re raising tax-deductible contributions to subsidize their hiring costs.Am I the only one who thinks this is strange?

             2. I doubt you are.

             3. I agree with you.

             4. I agree.

             5. Luke, I think I would see this as strange if I didn’t understand the recruiting challenge involved.  In spite of the fact that we’ve been through a recession and still have record unemployment, there are still some pockets of the job market where there is a war for talent. These CS students are in this category.  Even if a startup has a recruiting department, they are competing with some pretty well-oiled recruiting machines at companies that are better known as entities and are more obvious choices.  Most startups have to appeal to something beyond compensation, perks and defined career ladder in a potential recruit’s thinking.I see HackNY as a way to increase awareness and appetite among these students so that the idea of working for a startup becomes more real and more appealing.  As I said in an earlier comment, an experience is worth a million words.

             6. Okay this is a real question:Would you donate money to Google or Amazon? They have some of the best mentorship programs for young CS grads in the world. Their employees go on to start companies and do great things.

          2. 3 points here, Luke  :)1. Here is a story -For data entry roles, the national average is around 380,000 key punches a month or 19,000 a day. Jean P was a data entry star when she was first measured – she averaged 560,000 a month i.e. 50% above average. Instead on focusing on the rest of the employees who performed at or below average, her boss ‘focused’ on Jean and outlined some goals. Within 6 months, Jean had already soared past 2 million. Today, Jean P does over 3.5 million key punches i.e. work of 10 average employees.It sounds counter intuitive, but focusing on top performance is what helps most because it has the biggest room for further improvement.This week, let’s remember to ‘focus’ sharply on the top performance areas in ourselves and others.Source: First, Break All The Rules by Marcus Buckingham(Coincidentally, this is a story that we just sent today as a part of a ‘Monday Learning’ email we send friends, family affiliated to a not-for-profit called RealAcad that’s reinventing leadership training)2. The top software developers are more productive than average software developers not by a factor of 10X or 100X or even 1000X but by 10,000X. – Nathan Myhrvold, CTO of MicrosoftThere is a lot of benefit in developing the best3. I think this is a way to lure them to choose NYC :). As you’ve rightly pointed out, they probably have lots of choice that comes with their success.

             1. I think it’s a great trade event to lure top grads to NYC. I live here and want to see the NYC tech scene grow.I don’t think it’s a bad business strategy to focus on your top performers, either.But I don’t see how this is charity.

             2. Makes sense, Luke. I understand your point of view. I was passionately defending the working on the ‘best’ bit.  🙂

             3. the charity part comes from the fact that the students need to be recruited and housed for the summer. we hope that eventually we can get the startups to pay for that, and we are making progress towards that. but there are still some super early startups that can’t pay any of their employees anything yet and we want to help CS students work in those environments too

             4. Are the students in these schools there because they are the best or because they are from privileged backgrounds?

             5. Good question. I don’t know. 🙂 

             6.  “top CS students” (as mentioned in my previous comment) not “top schools”.As frequently happens it’s interesting how information is echoed based upon misinterpretation.

             7. “or because they are from privileged backgrounds”There are certainly people from privileged  backgrounds.But you might note that at University of Pennsylvania for example, 45.8% of students received needs based financial aid with 100% average percent of need met:http://colleges.usnews.rank…At NYU, while a higher % (54%) received need based financial aid it was with a lower percentage (61%) of need met:http://colleges.usnews.rank…Caveat: This isn’t my area of knowledge. But it certainly seems that a large percentage of students at UofP  *don’t* come from privileged backgrounds.  And that was my experience while at Wharton (and I didn’t come from a privileged background).By the way, many families that don’t qualify for financial aid aren’t privileged, they are just middle class and make enough that they can’t get financial aid. So the number of well off at those schools is much lower.

             8. #3 rohan. this is a civic effort to strengthen NYC as a tech center

             9. Thanks for the context/correction, Fred. 

          3. “…it’s a summer program to bring top CS students from schools all around the country to NYC”So they are bringing “top CS students” not “CS students from top programs”.

             1. Here is the list of schools: http://hackny.org/a/2011/06…There are a couple of schools that wouldn’t be considered “top” but for the most part it’s the usual suspects (Stanford, Yale, Columbia, NYU, Princeton, Penn, etc).I am more interested in what organizations actually do than what they write about themselves in their “About” section.

             2. “for the most part it’s the usual suspects (Stanford, Yale, Columbia, NYU, Princeton, Penn, etc).”NYU is ranked 33 according to US News and not in the same league as what I think is typically considered a “top” school. I’m counting51% – “top” schools37% – Ivy League schools

             3. i’ve committed myself to helping NYU rise in those rankings

             4. Hmmm…33/5758*100 = 0.57Top seems to have taken a new definition.

          4. Yes, but will HackNY make them more likely to consider a NYC startup (or a startup in general) as a career option when students of this caliber may have other compelling options?

       2. So:This Year CUNY – City College outranked Columbia for its engineering program.  A lot more of the students in CUNY come from poorer backgrounds, and a lot less of the professors stick around because it is one of those schools where you steal talent from.I’d much prefer to help them, since it means giving a non-upper middle class student who is ambitious and talented a leg up from those who can afford some of the craziness of the Ivys.Same reason why I’m infuriated that I am now hearing that Cooper Union may start charging tutition.  It nearly breaks their charter, and it definitely breaks the charachter of the school (create great X, primarily engineers)To quote Wikipedia on why the Cooper Union was created “Peter Cooper’s dream was to give talented young people the one privilege he lacked: a good education. He also wished to make possible the development of talent that otherwise would have gone undiscovered.”A lofty goal, and I wonder if we’re not spending enough to make his dream happen….

          1. Kids who are the first generation of success in families — immigrants, born here but rising out of poverty — are under tremendous pressure to choose the high money pathit’s been an issue in the arts and publishing forever

             1. don’t i know. And a good humanities education is helpful…same with a good math education.However, my point more was that these kids could be successful in engineering but we don’t go chasing for them even when they are getting engineering degrees.

             2. maybe we should?

    2. to bring the top CS students from around the country to NYC instead of silicon valley

    3. Let me give you a hint why HackNY is somewhat charitable: Wall Street firms pay between $15-$30k/summer for technical interns in NYC. Most startups — especially early-stage ones — simply can’t compete with that. You may not think startups like bit.ly and Business Insider need any help (and with their $13-15M in capital funding raised, maybe you are right), but in 2010, when Parse.ly sought a summer intern, we had no funding and a <$3K/mo. burn rate. You can read our testimonial about HackNY here: http://hackny.org/a/2011/01…That said, it’d probably be good to have more truly early-stage (pre-funding) companies on the roster — one of the problems with this, though, is that a lot of pre-funding companies are in such a fragile state that the internship might be over a couple weeks into the summer. Also, pre-funding companies aren’t typically “buzzworthy”. The first two years of HackNY has been partially about creating some buzz about NYC tech among university students, something at which it has succeeded spectacularly.Both of our HackNY interns (2010 + 2011) have commented about how one of the interesting parts of the program is that it simply raises awareness of the different stages of companies. Since the HackNY interns all live together in university housing, they share stories — and you’ll have folks working on >100-person teams at places like Gilt Group and folks working on <10-person teams at places like Parse.ly. Also, the program’s lecture series does a good job of encouraging students to consider entrepreneurship or startup work as a post-graduation option. This is a countervailing force to the professional HR/recruiting teams employed by Wall Street and other Fortune 500s to market their positions to top students.

16. Already have my tickets. Can’t wait!

17. great idea and awesome execution so far!! sounds like an exciting event.

18. Sounds like a great event, too bad I’m not in the city then. Have fun!

19. That is a good feeling … when you know what is coming.You can have all the fun.99.999% don’t know and they are not having fun… they are  living.

20. I’d love to show my support, but I’m already doubtful I can make it to the USV event next week. This month (and last) my schedule is killer and cutting out of work early to make it into Manhattan doesn’t look too likely.I’ll see if there’s some small open source project I can help work on that will promote hackny. They must have a github project repo floating around.*update*Found the repo here hackny. But there’s not much to be done with it based on the documentation. It just covers previous hack events.

21. I’m not seeing USV listed as a sponsor?

    1. we may or may not be a sponsor. but when we do sponsor things, we do it anonymously.

       1. FYI, USV is listed on http://hackny.org/a/ as a supporter. 

          1. you’re like Kalinda from the Good Wife! 🙂

             1. I’ve never watched the show, but after reading the wikipedia description of her, all I can say is… “thank you?!?” 🙂

             2. ultimate compliment 🙂

          2. i think they asked us if they could use our name. 

22. Thanks for “Subconscious Processing” written a while back.  Whenever our team at work is assigned a project, we meet as soon as possible for everyone to start processing.  Whenever we reach some sort of milestone we do the same.The result is always something richer and different than the original idea.#appliedlearningfromAVC

    1. ^2 i like to use time as an ally. two others are spaced repetition and compound innovation.spaced repetition:http://en.wikipedia.org/wik…compound innovation is innovating a bit at a time rather than trying to think of one “big idea”.

       1. Nice follow up.  I will be adding “spaced repetition” and “compound innovation” to things I start using.  Thanks for the adding them to my list.

23. Raise Cache looks fun. The name gave me a big smile when I first read about it too.I’ll even be in NYC during it.. will have to think about attending as it’ll be a decent chunk out of my NYC budget.And I don’t drink, so paying $70 to subsidize and open bar kinda sucks. But I digress..

24. Fred – don’t think we haven’t noticed you rocking those slick Prada sneakers 🙂 Sounds like a good event, and hackNY is very cool – we could definitely use a hackSeattle.

25. paying summer/intern wages that don’t require parental support is key to attracting and keeping talentthe idea that parental support is required blocks a lot of talented kids from many paths

26. I love the real life turntable.fm set, that sounds amazing!  Are we going to get the name of this room?

    1. i will tweet it out

27. I’m curious why the Community Blueshirts, Shana and William, had their blue strip taken away, and now it looks unassumingly gray again?  Is it because people would ask why they had a blue strip, and the explanation that the AVC community now comes with Community Censors made people feel uncomfortable?  Interesting.  I’m sure Wm. the Conqueror will chime in at any moment with his rebuke.

    1. Blue attracts bowerbirds, mosquitos, and trolls. Only one of these things makes agreeable company.

       1. awesome comment cam

    2. people didn’t like it. i assume you are in that group. i took it off.

28. Education is one thing, natural talent is another.Necessity is the mother of invention. Be hungry.

29. Great timing! 17.11. is the anniversary of our Velvet Revolution in Czech :)Very symbolic 🙂

30. I would like to see GRIMLOCK walk the runway and eat people.

31. in full blown robot dinosaurdom