Just wanted to say I actually really appreciate you taking the time to make this thread, and even going into great detail to answer some of the more complicated / lengthy questions.

I tip my hat to you, good sir.

For someone just learning programming but not sure what type of startup he/she will do...Would you recommend learning Ruby on Rails or Python?

I'm interested to know how the partnership amongst the founders was setup (not percentages).

When you were brought on board, let's say you were given 20% equity (as an example). What happens if after 6 months you turned out to be either lazy or incompetent - was the original guy stuck with you at that point?

Or what if you just simply stopped putting in ANY effort once the thing started to move forward and get going? Basically I'm interested in how you guys protected yourself against uneven effort / skill set amongst your team?

How much did you get to work with Ron Conway and, assuming you did, how awesome was it?

Did you really get a 12 month earn-out or is that just the first cliff and you wouldn't need more $$ than that?

Sorry it's rude, but 12 months seems super awesome compared to a lot of the people I know who have sold companies.

What's your opinion on having a technical cofounder vs. using an individual/firm on a freelance basis?

Does it change your answer if they'll be needed on an ongoing basis?

A number of Quora threads including this one http://www.quora.com/Why-do-consumer...al-co-founders talk a lot about how not having a tech cofounder often results in losing the vision of the founders, not caring much about quality, and not being able to fix or improve things on an urgent basis.

Is it best to offer a small % as an incentive for them even if it doesn't bring down their rate much? Suggestions on finding a good developer as well?

Another option may be to have a freelancer build a couple sites and then if they start to do well have an inhouse technical team?

Igas,

How did you develop such great technical talents (born with the skill, ton of time learning)? You said that you could program, network, etc. How did you become so skilled in each technical discipline?

I am also very interested in all of these questions.

As a non-tech founder myself of a side project myself, I am very interested in this line of questioning.

Seems like bootstrapping is the only way to go if it is in fact true VCs/angels won't touch a 1-man startup or a team that has no technical cofounder? Does it matter if concept has been proven and biz is slightly profitable with revenues and all that is needed is to "turn the crank" and grow and iterate?

In my experience, it may be the most important thing when trying to raise money.

Tips for getting a job at a startup? Seems like most of them want programmers or sales people (eg facebook or groupon).

Do you think its best to go work for a big corp like microsoft for a couple years and develop skills before trying to get a job at one? Fwiw I have an engin degree and been playing poker for past 3 years but want to get experience working for a startup so I could start my own one day.

Also, can you give any #s or %s as to when the buyout happened how much went to the investors and how much went to the founders? You sold for 75m, of which x went to the investors which had invested a total of y in you before the buyout.

Thanks.

He almost certainly can't comment on stuff like who got what, but these links may help.

http://www.crunchbase.com/company/milo

http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/02/con...ake-a-killing/

How do you update the prices of products dynamically on your website?

Hopefully OP or someone else can answer this but:

How exactly does Milo make money? I know they have a lot of web traffic, but I see no ad's on the site.

Also, from my very elementary tech knowledge, it seems like Milo is just a big web crawler that crawls for inventory data from big retail chain stores (at least when Milo first started) and relists that information on it's own site. So wouldn't some other company be able to replicate this?

Do you ever get bored with all the work

Let's say I have an idea for a business (an online site). I can't do it on my own, so I'll need some co-founders. I network and talk to some potentials about my idea.

How can I assure that someone who hears about my idea doesn't take it?


Thanks for doing this!

You can't. Anyone worth their salt won't sign an NDA to meet with you about being a partner, neither will any VCs. The best way to ensure your idea doesn't get taken is to do it faster and better. Even if you somehow released your idea, its likely it'll get copied anyway, so what's the difference?

I agree with this 100%.

I've come across literally dozens of people (most are between 18 to 25) that say they've got the next big thing and they need some advice on it but they won't tell me what it is...just that it will be HUGE.

Ideas are worth very little. Execution is worth everything.

Thanks for the thread OP.

Bill Gates signed one, Gary Kildall refused. The former saw a future, the latter only saw the past. As the OP here has posted, the initial concept was tossed in the trash, so the early stages don't really mean much. Not until the team or idea gels, then would be a time for NDA's and non-competes.

That's not really the same situation. That was big established business wanting NDA from a little guy, not a little guy talking to a little (or potentially big) guy

Also I think the bigger problem with DRI/IBM was Kildall not being at the meeting, IIRC

Basically I grew up in the middle of nowhere and got my first real computer in 6th grade. From that moment on I was addicted and spent all my time on it (since there wasn't much else to do)... back then the internet was just a a bunch of college and darpa networks so my first real "online" experiences were on BBS systems. Eventually I started my own.

Through the BBS scene I got into the hacking scene, through that I got onto the internet before it was commercialized and learned about all sorts of computer systems and networks and programming. That led to getting some system administration jobs early on.

I had always wanted to be a programmer but in my head I thought "real" programmers were probably so much more advanced than I was and I couldn't imagine how I'd get to their level... then at one of my early jobs I realized that most of the "professional" programmers were idiots and I was already way better than the majority of them... this resulted in a transition over to doing development and the rest is history...

Did you move into dev professionally at that time and learn that way or did you just teach yourself how to code and then get a job?

Can i have a job? No seriously im in college right now and i dont really want to be an accountant.

Well, to some degree this is always a concern, and as a result usually before you get any angels (and definitely before you get any institutional VC money) you will need to have a solid answer to why your idea is defensible.

Personally I think most of the explanations entrepreneurs come up with for defensibility are usually BS. There are some extreme cases like with Facebook or eBay where there are valid arguments about network effects and there are other (usually non-web) products where there may be patents in play that provide a degree of defensibility but at the end of the day I think the real answer (for most web businesses) is really "there is nothing stopping someone from copying this, but we're going to move fast, we're (already have or our going to) build a great team and we are going to out execute them.

This article gives a quote from Marc Andreessen saying that as a VC when he asks a company "why won't facebook role out this feature and crush you?" that basically the answer he's looking for (but never gets) is "We're going to kick their ass, and here's how..."

http://www.businessinsider.com/marc-...n-quora-2011-2

This is an area I probably can't get into too much since eBay may consider it to be competitive info, but the short answer is that we tried just about everything you could think of and stuck with what worked.

You'd be surprised how far SEO will go if you can really work it. We did some experiments with SEM and display ads and I think that could've found a way to make that work if we needed to, but we never allocated any budget for advertising spend. We got all the way to 1m uniques/month almost entirely from SEO.

Again I can't go too much into our specific strategy but I will say that ultimately with SEO there are two major things I've learned:

1. Find a way to find keywords that are not heavily targeted by everyone under the sun but that will still generate good traffic for you. One trick is to figure how to target a large number of keywords in the long tail and get a little bit of traffic from each of them. In aggregate they can really add up over time.

2. Everything else (on-page SEO) is important but getting a large volume of high quality inbound links is king.

You can probably guess the answer by now, but: SEO.

We did a very small private beta of our initial (pre-local) site to get feedback from friends and family (maybe 30 people) but after we decided on the local angle one of our early investors pushed us very hard to just launch whatever we had and start iterating on it, which is what we did (and this worked out much much better).