Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Wednesday, 13th November 2013

What’s my shot at getting into YC or TechStars NY if I am applying from outside the US, alone with both business experience and technical skills?

I’d say your chances are significantly higher than the average application, for both of those programs. Go apply already!

[... 51 words]

How did The Voice implement Twitter voting?

You don’t need full firehouse access to implement this—you can use the statuses/filter API to get a feed of tweets that match a specific hash tag: https://dev.twitter.com/docs/api...

[... 63 words]

How long does it usually take you to prepare a presentation?

Damian Conway (one of the best technical presenters I’ve ever seen, who also runs amazing tutorials on giving great talks) says “to produce really top-class presentations, budget at least ten to twenty hours per hour of speaking”.

[... 71 words]

How can I invest in pre-IPO companies like Quora, Github, etc?

Get to know the founders and investors and see if you can get involved in a future funding round. If you don’t have at least a few hundred thousand dollars to invest you probably won’t get very far though, an even if you do you’d better have more than just money to bring to the table—these rounds are often over-subscribed which means the company can pick the very best out of a number of investors.

[... 139 words]

2013 » November

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