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Monthly Archives: July 2012

Zerys’ Competitive Content Marketplace

Leave a Comment Posted by on July 29, 2012

Steve Lazuka is the President and co-founder at Interact Media, the parent company of Zerys. Based out of Ohio, Zerys is an online content marketplace solution. It sounds like a mouthful, but Steve can explain what that means in our interview below. Steve’s a startup veteran, having been involved with multiple successful companies and exits in the Search Engine Marketing space. For more from Steve, you can find him on Twitter at @SteveLazuka. Enjoy.

Zerys Content Marketplace

Zerys bills itself as the content marketplace. Unless you’re involved in that business, there’s a good chance you don’t know what content marketplace means. Can you explain it?

A Content Marketplace is a web-based platform that allows people to source for freelance writers, identify the ones they like the best, and then purchase content from those writers at negotiated rates.

I know you’re not the only participant in this business. What differentiates Zerys from other competitors, like Contently or TextBroker?

The team at Zerys was the first to introduce this type of content marketing software back in 2003. We’ve been perfecting it ever since. Zerys is much more than just a Content Marketplace. What makes it unique are: 1) the vast scope of advanced features; 2) the unique process to set up and manage different types of content; 3) we’re the only platform with a special version designed specifically for agencies; 4) we’re the only platform that offers three ways to outsource your content (do-it-yourself, hire an expert, or hire a full-service agency); 5) we’re the solution used by the top content marketing gurus today; 6) Zerys was awarded App of the Year by Hubspot and we’re working on many more integration partnerships in upcoming months.

Now that you’re building critical mass in your users and providers (agencies/marketers and writers), what’s next?

We’re planning an exciting new update soon to our Zerys platform that will revolutionize how people think of outsourcing content. When it comes to creating great content, most people understandably focus on finding good writers, but there are many other equally important content-related services that a business needs to create remarkable content that will get clicked, read, and shared, and ranked. Think content and SEO strategy consulting, keyword research to find the page topics to write about, writing compelling page titles/headlines, editorial calendar planning, editing/proofreading, etc. Zerys will be the first one to offer a simple, affordable, market-driven solution that will allow any business to find ALL the talent they need to create awesome content. All in one, simple to manage place.

What’s the number one indicator of success in a company?

Positive ratings and reviews from customers.

You’ve been a successful entrepreneur since before the dot com bubble. From your perspective, how have things changed over time?

It’s the ultimate irony. All these new technologies have offered amazing efficiencies that can help when it comes to starting a business. I can’t imagine how I ever managed without tools like Hubspot, Gotomeeting, and yes, even Zerys (we use it to manage all our own content creation). However, at the same time, everything has become infinitely more complex. Even top gurus out there today are struggling to keep up with all the change that seems to be happening on a daily basis.

When people think about startup communities, I don’t know that Chardon, Ohio, just outside Cleveland, comes to mind first. How does building a company there compare to building one in L.A., like you did with Website Results and Infosearch Media?

I believe more and more entrepreneurs are discovering that places like Chardon, OH can be the best place to build and manage a business. Many people are still stuck in the mindset of thinking that in order to be a real company, you need to have a big office over-looking the big city. I’ve been there and done that. Those office environments have certain benefits, but there are also some downsides (office politics, wasted time commuting, etc). In some industries, you need a central, physical office everyone comes into, but for us, it just doesn’t make sense. We’ve built all our system to make it easy to run the company from anywhere. All our employees and contractors can log-in to our internal Admin each day to get their work done from anywhere. The team likes it because they get flexible schedules without having to commute. Maintaining a sense of community with a virtual company can be challenging, but with the right technology, it can be done.

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?

Follow your heart.

Besides yourself, what’s the best startup you know of out there right now?

Hubspot. Not sure if they can still be considered a start-up, but they are truly revolutionizing internet marketing.

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Reason #8,013

1 Comment Posted by on July 26, 2012

I’m currently writing from the Sheraton in Boston enjoying a cup of New England Clam Chowder, and here’s reason #8,013 why I’m not perfect (I know, it’s a conservative number, but bear with me). My lovely girlfriend is taking the Massachuesets bar exam today, after having taken the multistate and New York state exams over the previous two days. Let me start off by saying she’s been an absolute saint for taking this and has been pretty good for the whole process. No breakdowns. And the bar process is miserable, no mistake about it. My condolences and congratulations to everyone who had to partake over the last few months.

So, we’ve been preparing for this for a little bit and I knew I was going to be in Boston on Thursday and Friday morning with free time. To stay busy, I reached out to Noam Wasserman, Associate Professor at Harvard Business School and best selling author of “The Founder’s Dilemmas: Anticipating and Avoiding the Pitfalls That Can Sink a Startup .” Noam was very friendly over email and accepted my invitation for an interview. This morning, I showed up on campus at 10:15 AM for a 10:30 meeting, walked around a little bit, went to the 2nd floor of the Rock Center, and knocked on his door. Someone who was not Noam opened the door, I looked in, and saw Noam and some others in the middle of a meeting. After fumbling around for words, Noam asks me to come back later. On a second review of our email exchange, Noam had asked me to stop by on Friday and not Thursday. I was a full 24-hours early. I turned around, got back to my hotel, did some work, and I’m sitting at the bar right now.

This is not the first time this has happened. It’s the 3rd time in the past year. About a year ago I was interviewing for a new role in my firm. The one group I desperately wanted to get into extended me an invitation to interview. Tuesday morning, I showed up 10 minutes early for an 11am meeting, greeted the manager, and she informed me I was twenty minutes late. Wrong time, 10:30 meeting. The manager was annoyed but ultimately understanding and re-scheduled for the next day. The next day, I showed up 10 minutes early, had the secretary call the manager and waited for 15 minutes. The manager finally emerged from from an elevator bank, walked up to me and asked “what the hell are you doing on the wrong floor?” First day, wrong time. Second day, wrong floor. Even more idiotically, I showed up on the correct floor the first day. Don’t ask me how, but yes, I got the job. Third experience? Right place, right time, wrong day.

Those are the instances that stick out in my mind, but I’m sure it’s much more common place than that. In each one, I was thoroughly prepared. I researched my groups or interview subjects and was ready to discuss whatever. There’s just that little detail of the when and where. I’ll figure it out someday.

Anyways, I meet Noam tomorrow. I’m excited to talk about his book, which was on the reading list and is now finished. That will eventually get posted to the Harbor.

If I meet with anyone of you readers in the future, please do me a favor. Can you send me the calendar invite? As my brother frequently tells me, for a smart kid, I’m really dumb sometimes. And as Bill Simmons frequently says, the lesson as always? I’m an idiot.

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NYC Pioneers: Cyrus Massoumi and ZocDoc

1 Comment Posted by on July 22, 2012

Cyrus Massoumi is the CEO & founder of ZocDoc. ZocDoc is a New York-based company that helps you book doctor appointments online. After getting an ear infection on a long flight and not being able to get into a doctor quickly, Cyrus came up with a new solution, ZocDoc. Cyrus was kind enough to take time out of his busy schedule to talk about startup hurdles, hiring, cultural changes, and many other topics. For more from Cyrus and ZocDoc, please visit their blog and find them on Twitter at @Zocdoc.

In a recent TechCrunch article, you talked about how things didn’t go so smoothly when ZocDoc launched. What were the biggest hurdles you faced and what’d you do to overcome them?

There were a few things – first, we launched shortly before the worst economic recession many of us had ever seen, and people thought that companies wouldn’t be able to raise venture capital financing again. The harsh environment forced us to be extremely focused with the few resources that we had at our disposal, which was a blessing in hindsight because it forced us to stay focused. For our first two years, ZocDoc only offered appointments in New York in order to hone our business model and make improvements to our service, ensuring scalability and a great patient experience.

Secondly, this was a completely new concept at the time to doctors. Initially, it was an uphill battle in selling this service to them. Doctors are constantly bombarded by reps seeking their endorsement or use of a product or service, so we had to break through that noise. There was a time when I was going door to door with a PowerPoint presentation, and I’d be in a doctor’s waiting room for hours before I was able to get in to give my pitch. It took a lot of hustle to get our first doctors to sign on.

Lastly, people thought we were overly ambitious to think we could change the way people access healthcare in this country. In launching ZocDoc, we weren’t David going up against Goliath. Rather, we were looking to change patients’ existing behavior. When we launched, we thought that we’d have this incredible amount of patient demand on our hands. In reality, it took time for us to get our first few appointments. But after we got a few dozen of them, word of mouth kicked in and the growth increased dramatically – and it has been compounding ever since.

ZocDoc spent its first few years conquering New York. Now, you’re going nationwide, seemingly rolling out to a new city every few weeks. What are your plans after that?

We’ve only been able to succeed at ZocDoc through focus, and right now we’re laser focused on offering our service to patients and doctors nationwide as soon as possible. We’re currently live in 19 markets and expanding at a rapid pace, but we still have a lot of work to do on that front. We like to say that it took a thousand 0.01% improvements for ZocDoc to work, and we’re still making those changes every day. So, our plan right now is to continue to make these incremental improvements as we serve more and more patients. Once we’ve made more progress, we can start to explore solving other patient problems within the healthcare system.

What’s it like going from a startup to more established company from a culture perspective? What has changed?

It’s funny, around the office we often ask ourselves – when are we not a startup anymore? Even though we’re now over 300 people, I think we still consider ourselves a startup and we approach our work in that spirit. We try to stay nimble, to be open to new ideas, to be scrappy and agile and able change direction quickly, just as we did back when we were five people. I will say, I am just now reaching the point where it’s getting harder and harder for me to know everyone’s names. I came back to the office after travelling for a few days and there were 50 news faces. But we make it a priority to ensure that everyone is connected, that it’s a fun place to come to work, and that there’s a sense of teamwork and camaraderie. For instance, we cater in lunch every day so we all eat together, and I also make sure to have lunch with our new hires each week. It’s a great way to get to know them and for them to have a chance to ask me anything. Also, something that’s been helpful in maintaining our culture as we grow are these seven core values. They have served as a guidepost to help us preserve all of the things we love about working here.

You constantly talk about how important hiring is. What do you look for in people?

One of our investors, Vinod Khosla, gave us the good advice that the first 20 people we hired would set the tone for the company’s culture, because they’d help attract and hire the next bunch, and so on. We’ve always been really particular about who we hire and we challenge everyone here to hire people who are better than themselves. We tend to attract very curious and intelligent people who like to solve big problems and who are incredibly mission driven. Even more specifically, we want to work with people who speak up, who own it and who make work fun.

With dedicated accelerators like Blueprint Health, Rock Health, and Healthbox, healthcare is a growing field for startups. You’ve transformed how patients get into their doctors. What coming changes should we be excited for?

As a company that felt like we were swimming upstream back in 2007, it’s been exciting to watch health tech become such a hot space. In the first quarter of 2012 alone, health IT companies raised $102 million in 2012 (up 75% over the same period in 2011). That’s amazing growth on the investor side and with recent legislation changes it’s an area that’s increasingly ripe for disruption. At ZocDoc, we solve one patient problem around access to medical care via online scheduling, but I think that’s only one of many interesting pain points that needs to be addressed. I think we can see expect to see improvements in cost transparency, in mobile diagnostics, in products and services for the quantified self movement and it goes on and on.

ZocDoc was started in New York before it was trendy to be here. Why didn’t you go out west?

You know, it didn’t even occur to us to go out West. My co-founders and I had all been in NYC for a while, and it didn’t feel as though geography would be a barrier. Also, in looking at our core business, New York has an incredible volume of doctors so it was an exciting place to start. We also knew that if we could prove this concept in New York, one of the most dynamic and competitive medical markets, we could be successful anywhere. Now, when we see New York dubbed “Silicon Alley,” we’re proud and humbled to have been among the first wave of companies putting down roots here.

What does the future hold for startups in New York?

Possibilities for startups in NYC are as endless as they are for startups anywhere. With the democratization of the web, great ideas and great companies can grow from anywhere. I think it certainly helps to be in places like San Francisco or New York where there are rich pockets of talent, investors, etc. but I think it’s an exciting time for startups in general.

During your CNBC interview in April, you mentioned about 20% of MBA grads are going into startups. After a few years at McKinsey, you did too. If you knew you were going to create a startup, would you still have made the decision to go to Columbia? What would you advise other potential founders to do?

I think there are lots of different paths to success, and what may work well for one person may not be effective for the next, but for me, business school was a great experience. I think it can bring tremendous value in expanding your network, opening doors and learning historically from others’ successes and failures. If I had it to do over again, I wouldn’t change a thing.

Who’s been your biggest influence and why?

My father. He was a physician and I saw firsthand how the changes in our healthcare system over the years have made it increasingly difficult for physicians to run a successful business. Given reduced reimbursement rates, physicians have to play a volume game and see more patients than even in order to maintain the same quality of life for their families. Without this insight gained through my father, I don’t think I would have fully understood the need that ZocDoc fills for physicians.

Besides ZocDoc, what’s your favorite startup?

I’m a big fan of Warby Parker (in fact, such a big fan that we gave everyone at ZocDoc a pair for the holidays last year). They’re delivering a quality product in an innovative way, and they’re managing to do a lot of good while they’re at it.

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Summer of Startups Demo Day

Leave a Comment Posted by on July 16, 2012

Before I launch into a review of the Sunday’s demo day (which was my first), I wanted to congratulate Josh and Meg Hinkle on their marriage. The wedding was Saturday night and we had a helluva time. I managed to split my pants while dancing. It was the single worst pants-split I’ve ever seen. I need to stop doing splits at weddings. My knee hurts something fierce and I need new pants.

NYU Stern Entrepreneurs Exchange (@NYUSternEEX) held a demo day at NYU’s Kaufman Center Sunday. I got a ride back into the city and went with my partner in crime at Pilot Mountain Ventures, Steve, to check out nine new companies. Before we got to meet them, Ellie Wheeler at Greycroft and Charlie O’Donnell at Brooklyn Bridge Ventures spoke for a few minutes and took questions from the audience. Ellie talked gave a quick “State of the VC market” and talked about the lack of positive returns over the past ten years. Charlie opined on the current “openness” of the VC world and what that’s meant. The way I understood it, he believes that all of the prominent VC bloggers talking about the process has turned presentations into a constant stream of buzz words and cliches. He also talked about the lack of entrepreneur bloggers and encouraged people who wanted to start a company to go out and sit down with other experienced entrepreneurs to find out how the sausage gets made.

After that, some pizza, and soda, the fun began. For those of you who haven’t gone to something like this before, here’s how it works. We got a piece of paper for each company with a few questions/prompts: do you understand what the product is, did you identify with the presentation, what challenges or threats is this company facing, and any other general feedback. The company runs through a five minute presentation, then does some Q&A with the crowd. I’ll walk through a few in particular.

Rukkus: Founder Manick Bhan and another Rukkus member led off the show. So, Rukkus connects with your different music accounts, like Pandora, Spotify, and Rdio. It syncs with them and pulls in “favorite artists” then goes out to Ticketmaster, Stub Hub, eBay, and every other ticket vendor you can think of to find upcoming shows and and tickets. Kayak for concerts. They’ve also bridged out to sports and arts/theater. Rukkus makes money by getting a referral fee from the different websites. Interesting concept and something that I actually wanted. I would love a centralized place for all upcoming shows in NY instead of going to different band/venue websites. It reminds me a little of an app called Eventster, but more targeted.

MeebleMail: Presented by founder Sharon Troth Gaffney, MeebleMail is essentially a branded email service. You have the ability to rent out email stationary from them branded by some of your favorite teams, movies, or more general themes. Email’s a little utilitarian for me on purpose, so it’s not my cup of tea. But that’s okay.

Studycure: Stan Berkow put on the most entertaining presentation, simply because he didn’t put on the same show as everyone else. His slideshow presentation probably contained sixty slides, but we moved through it in two minutes. His timing was great and his lines were delivered impeccably. Anyways, Studycure is about testing if/then statements through experiments. For instance, “if I get text reminders to quit smoking, then I will quit smoking.” In all experiments that you sign up for, you set a duration and a reminder frequency. They’ll shoot you a text and you respond yes/no or according to some scale. They’ll track it and give you outcomes. Interesting thought.

EchoFriendly: Christian Levis, a Fordham Law School graduate taking the bar next week and president at EchoFriendly, took the stage took the stage to present a chat application. My girlfriend Meg is doing the same thing, and the amount of pity I feel for them is immense. It’s a miserable process and impressive he could even do the presentation. Anyways, this chat app is location-based. Basically, it helps you connect with people you may/may not know and have a conversation about whatever’s happening around you. He gave some entertaining examples of bored students in class. It could be fun.

Delve News: Tom Weingarten presented Delve News, which is a news feed-aggregation that helps organizations disseminate relevant news and host a conversation about it. I’ve talked in the past about how RSS feeds don’t cut it for me, so this is one interesting attempt at a solution. It’s targeted at “organizations,” but I think that’s the wrong target. I’d rather use this as a consumer and share it with my friends. Not sure how that fits in, but that’s promising.

There were a few other companies. There was a really interesting HR solution that standardizes different employment forms and hosts them in the cloud. Google search hasn’t been able to help me find them. There was a company that helped you bring together and share calendars like iCal, Google, Outlook, etc., across an organization. Another company specifically mentioned their compensation structure and it was incredibly strange. I don’t recall their name but they were in data analytics. 10% of their shares were set aside in charitable trust, and every person at the company knew what everyone else was making. I don’t know about anyone else, but I think total transparency in salary/incentive comp would drive me crazy and tear apart my teams. I wish them luck, but I don’t know how that can work.

Those were just a few quick thoughts. Thanks to the folks at NYU for hosting this, the companies for presenting, and Ellie and Charlie for speaking.

Stay cool out there.

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A Preference for Radical Innovation

Leave a Comment Posted by on July 10, 2012

I’ve said in the past that the Peter Thiel class summaries from Blake Masters’ blog are brilliant and indispensable reading material. I wanted to go over something from one of those classes. In class 13, Thiel defines one of his four-quadrant views of the world. First, he says people have a general expectation whether or not things are improving. Optimism vs. pessimism, pretty simple to understand. Second, he asks whether you can predict the future. Do you have ideas on where the world’s headed or are you not really sure? If you have targeted visions, that’s determinate. If you’re not sure, that’s indeterminate.

According to Peter, the United States has fallen into two quadrants over the past 70 years. In the 50′s and 60′s especially, he argues America was both optimistic and determinate. Investors envisioned a future similar to The Jetsons, and other people, like investors,were inclined to listen and believe. The Space Race was waged, Insulin was synthesized, and companies like Fairchild Semiconductor, Intel, and eventually Genentech and Apple were founded.

Thiel argues that sometime during the 1980s and 1990s, our views shifted towards indeterminism. American citizens still believed we were headed in right direction, but we didn’t know what that future would look like. Instead of dreaming up ideas and executing them, entrepreneurs looked at the current environment and made tweaks to improve upon it. It sounds similar to a market-style economy. As opportunities appear, some enterprising person recognizes them and acts. It’s entrepreneurial arbitrage. We don’t need to dig around history to find examples to support this. Here’s what’s on the front page of TechCrunch today: two new cloud document storage services, a “Blizzard of the post-PC era,” and a movie recommendation service. These are all some improvement on a prior idea.

Anyways, as the class progresses, Peter suggests we’re heading from an optimistic to pessimistic society. That’s a topic for another discussion.

So which approach is better: constant improvements or radical leaps? Small improvements are safer. One of the biggest operating philosophies right now is the lean startup. You start with an idea, build something as fast as possible to get to market, and let the market decide what it wants. With A/B testing, you’re actually able to prove what works, what doesn’t, and pivot quickly to satisfy that. It’s nimble and works. I believe entrepreneurs look at the same problem, utilize a method like this, and arrive to different solutions. For example, it’s great to get music from the cloud/internet on my iPhone, and now I’ve got tons of apps that can help me do it. Some put together music based on my mood, others I can create my own playlists, and still others learn through experience what I like. It’s truly enjoyable. It also feels ordinary.

What about radical innovation? There are industries like artificial intelligence, or companies like SpaceX and the oft-mocked Planetary Resources. They’re straight out of science fiction. The problems they’re trying to solve are big. These solutions aren’t discovered on the fly. They’re designed elegantly and executed relentlessly. Of course, that takes time, resources, and commitment. If investors believe these innovators can accurately predict, and create, the future, they’ll make the investment. Of course there will be epic failures, but the opposite holds true. It wouldn’t be hyperbole to say if an AI company had a major breakthrough with our power grids, it could revolutionize the world. While these companies can’t pivot on a dime, they could do something life altering.

Look, politicians constantly talk about American exceptionalism. It’s great rhetoric and makes for good press. But I think they’re right. We have lost something. It’s not just our education system, though lord knows it needs improvement. It’s something deeper than that. Having grand visions of the future was practically ingrained in our DNA. Now, it’s crackpot. The smartest people used to go into industry, and for a long time they’ve gone into finance (though that trend could be reversing). It’s so much easier to take something that exists and mold it to something better. That’s why people like Neil deGrasse Tyson so loudly decry things like funding cuts to NASA. He’s an astrophysicist, so of course he cares about the space program.  He laments our future interplanetary missions. More importantly though, he laments the decreasing encouragement for our youth to dream.

That’s why I stand firmly on the side of radical improvement.

To close, I think I’ll leave you with the text to Apple’s “Think Different” campaign from 1997.

“Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

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Happy Independence Day!

Leave a Comment Posted by on July 4, 2012

As my brother is quick to say, “Happy Birthday America!” Today, the United States turns 236 today. So to all, happy 4th of July! I hope your days are filled with fireworks, beer, and barbecuing. I’ll be spending it in hotbox New York City, grilling on my roof, and watching the fireworks display over the Hudson River with people I love. Life’s not bad.

July 4th isn’t all about stuff like 1996 blockbuster ”Independence Day,” the Beastie Boys’ “Paul Revere,” or even Nicholas Cage and the timeless “National Treasure.” Growing up in Pennsylvania, it was pretty cool being so close to the birthplace of America. We had a 5th grade class trip to Philly where we visited Independence Hall and Betsy Ross’s house. Allentown, my home town, even hosted the Liberty Bell at a local church on Church Street and Hamilton during the war.

Most holidays revolve around celebratory drinks, and typically at bars. There’s a bar nearby my apartment with some historical significance called the Ear Inn. I thought it was a secret gem, but evidently a few people had heard of it before. For those who haven’t, it’s located in the South Village (below West Village, west of traditional SoHo) at Washington and Spring Streets. It was originally built as a home for James Brown, George Washington’s personal aide during the Revolutionary War. After Brown passed away, the building was occupied by Thomas Cooke, whose signs for beer you’ll still find inside even though it hasn’t been made in living memory. Since Cook, at different times it’s been a restaurant, boarding house, and speakeasy during Prohibition. It didn’t even have a name, just known as “the green door.”

The current incarnation at James Brown’s home is the Ear Inn. The bar is a relaxed and easy place to grab food and drink. The tables are close and covered in white clothe. Small jazz bands come in at night and play. The bar is packed with friendly regulars and neighborhood locals. Outside, it has benches and chairs stationed around trees that look like they’re hundreds of years old. I love this place. There’s nothing better than walking in, buying a drink, turning around to walk outside, and watching the sun set over the Hudson under the shade of huge oaks with good friends. Check it out.

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The Price of Anything

Leave a Comment Posted by on July 1, 2012

Priceonomics - The Price Guide for Everything

Michael Flaxman is the CEO & co-founder at Priceonomics, a Y Combinator alum. His goal is to find tell consumers what prices they should look for when they want to buy whatever it is they want to buy. I mean, there are hundreds of things you can research through their website. We got to talk about how it works, the YC experience, chair arbitrage, and what comes next. For more from Michael and the guys at Priceonomics, check out their blog. Their blog has some great articles; I link to two specifically below.

What’s your pitch for Priceonomics ?

We are the price guide for everything. You know how you can figure out what your car is worth on Kelley Bluebook? We can do that and we do it better than them. But it’s not just cars. We’ll also tell you what it costs for bikes, boats, sunglasses, RVs, and planes. Basically anything you sell on eBay or Craigslist or in the real world, we know what it’s worth.

So how does it work?

We price everything algorithmically. There’s no human interaction involved in any specific price guide. The site works by crawling the web. We index all the transactions we see online. We’ve done it for hundreds of millions of them. We’ll take unstructured text from them and determine what it means. A transaction we might find would be an iPhone 4S for $400. From that, we’ll figure out it’s the iPhone made by Apple and it’s the 4S model. We know the price, location, and date. We aggregate that with all our other information, and then we can see a nice bell curve of all Apple iPhone 4S’s. We’ll see what the average price is and how that’s trending over time. That’s always been the core of what we do. What we’re starting to do more of is showing people “Oh hey, would you like to see the iPhone 4S coming up for sale in your area?” Maybe it’s something you want to buy. We can do that for any other product too.

As mentioned, you’re a Y Combinator graduate (YC W12). Their application process is famous. How was your experience getting in?

It’s exactly as advertised. There aren’t any special secrets or advice you’ll hear from me that you can’t find anywhere else. First, there’s the application that you just find online. It’s really long, but it’s quite helpful. It forces you to think through your business. The closest thing we have to a business plan is our YC app. We never made a PowerPoint or wrote a full plan, did market sizing, or anything like that. That app asks you really hard questions. I recommend that people go through it whether or not they’re applying. They’ll be better off for the experience. Anyway, we got past that and we were super excited. We got down to Mountain View for our interview. It was only ten minutes long, so that’s stressful. And, there are now so many people interviewing that you don’t interview with all the partners anymore. We were the first batch that met with a subset. We just interviewed with three partners that I think were randomly assigned.  That was it. We got in and we met the rest of the partners on day one.

On your blog, you put together an awesome post talking about your fund raising experience and I urge readers to visit it. In it, you were labeled “The Closer,” so first off, congrats on that. You closed the post by thanking YC for everything they did. What was your time there like?

Something that’s not totally clear on the outside is how hard those guys work. There are a lot of partners at YC and they all work really hard. They’d literally watch our presentation, film it, and send it back with comments saying you did this right, don’t do this, and change that. One of the things that surprised me most, even though it’s not directly related to funding, was about a new blog post we put out. We didn’t publicize it or anything yet. Ten minutes after it was live, Paul Graham sent out an email pointing out some typo six paragraphs in that was really minor. He’s just really on it. They all are. That just shows how hard they work all the time, for all the companies. At the end, they’re introducing you to investors, helping you on the pitch, but during YC is where the real value is. You say to them “I got this idea, I want to build this.” They’ll say “Show it to me,” then say “That’s the coolest thing ever!” or “That’s not such a good idea, don’t waste your time on it.” They’re really honest but in a helpful way. The direction of where to take the product, what to do about fundraising, I mean, that can take forever and we took almost no time. They did all the legal stuff too.

We mostly got to focus on building a product, and didn’t have to think fundraising until the very end. We also got this just instant credibility. For most companies, from day one, it’s all about money. You’re just an idea and in a super scary place. In YC, you have a little money from them, and you’re not immediately concerned about having to pay the server bills with your credit card. And I can’t stress enough this credibility. You go to talk to an investor at Demo Day, and you’re all of a sudden this legitimate thing. That means we get to spend all of YC building something cool.

On your About.Me page, you’re a self proclaimed “Econ Dork turned Silicon Valley Entrepreneur.” How did you get into startups and entrepreneurship?

I’ve always had a passing interest in entrepreneurship. I took a bunch of courses during college and it was my first job when I was twelve. I always had that interest, but got a management consulting gig out of college. It was very corporate and wasn’t exactly exciting. I didn’t love my job and just came out to California to build a startup. I was the first employee at Thumbtack.com, the marketplace for local services. I wasn’t really making rational decisions at the time. I didn’t want a corporate job and I was really excited about this company. I took this completely blind leap of faith and had no idea what I’d get into. I totally loved it. I found myself working all the time and not because I was forced. I loved this uncertainty and risk. It was great to just try something out. If it didn’t work, it didn’t matter. You just tried something else out. About three years after that, my co-founder Rohin and I came up with Priceonomics and thought “Let’s go for it.” At the very beginning, we approached Omar and he was into it too, so we launched.

In one post, Rohin talks about arbitraging the price of chairs and turning a small profit on it. While you’ve said that’s not a business model you want to pursue, what is the long term goal?

We found out the chairs were heavy and bulky, and people were flaky. There was a lot of nitty gritty work involved. We made a decent amount of money in a short period of time, so I don’t want to turn my nose up at that. But it wasn’t for us. We’re still figuring out what’s best.

People come to us usually when they want to buy, and sometimes to sell. When they’re looking up prices, it’s usually because they’re about to purchase something. That’s the best user to have, someone with the intent who’s ready to go. In terms of what model’s best for that, we’re not sure yet. We could show users all the products at the underlying sites, like at Craigslist, help them buy it, and collect some affiliate fee. We could offer to connect them with each other. If someone wants to buy and someone else wants to sell, we can connect them, like eBay does. It could be a lead generation thing. If someone wants to buy a car, we can go to a dealership in the area and say “Here’s an active customer.” We could do a data thing. We have really, really great data. We actually just released a Priceonomics API and we’re excited to see what people do with it. It’s early for us though, that’s what the next year for us is about.

Right now you’re hiring some developers and engineers. Hiring is a crucial task for startups, to the point that Fred Wilson is doing a series for MBA Monday about it right now. What’s your philosophy on hiring?

Get the smartest people we possibly can. Engineers are really unique and they replace the roles of so many other people. It used to be you’d hire someone to do the ad buying. Now you hire an engineer to build a system that buys ads on Google using stats and with no human involvement. That’s a small example. Engineers just wear so many hats. Whether it’s some system for email marketing, something to crawl the web, or figure out prices, or send alerts. Engineers are the core. We’re all about really smart and talented engineers. We think we have a cool problem to solve. They like when we tell them we’ve got hundreds of millions of data points and all kinds of scaling issues. Plus, the front end is cool. We need to figure out how to convey our message in a useful and easy way too.

What or who influences you the most?

I mean, Paul Graham is really inspirational, very helpful and accurate. Steve Jobs is amazing for me. No one would have been able to predict how successful Apple would be. He just saw an opportunity and went after it. I’m not these guys obviously, but their approaches are powerful.

What’s your favorite startup that’s not you?

I think Thumbtack is great. It’s a marketplace for local services run by about twenty people in San Francisco. It can help you find anything you need from a plumber to a babysitter, gardener, or handyman. It’s growing super fast. I’m obviously biased because I worked there for three years.

Outside of that, I think Uber is really cool. I’m also a fan of Twilio. I think anything that makes the lives of others easier is really great.

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