Water
Egg
Wooden Toothpick

Directions:

Go straight, turn right, bend down, open the cupboard.

Take a small pot. Put the egg inside first (this is the tricky part, be careful not to crack it). Put the water in the pot, till it covers your egg. Add the toothpick. Don’t laugh – toothpick is important. It will prevent your egg from cracking and spilling. Don’t ask me how.

Put it on the stove. Wait for the water to boil. Give it about 7 more minutes after the water boiled. Take it off the stove. Turn off the stove (this will not affect the flavor of the egg, but is important if you don’t have house insurance). Spill the hot water (careful now). Fill the pot with cool water. Give it a sec to even out the temperature between the egg, the pot and the water. Remove the egg. Peel before eating. Here’s a neat way of doing it:

I was asked for the Humus Recipe I’m using, and generally if you were Hebrew speakers, I’d send you here: http://humus101.com/?p=4 . This is where my recipe started. Nice thing about Humus is that you can make it however you feel like, as long as you and others like the outcome. If you’re American, be warned – there’s a big thing in America about not offending people. If your friend says your Humus was delicious, but then stops returning your calls, you may want to change a few ingredients and make new friends. This here can get you started, and you can tweak it to your taste, culture and what not.

Ingredients (this here serves 4 hungry Israelis):

• 2 cups of Humus beans (aka garbanzo). You want to buy fresh beans, and try to find the smallest kind you can find. In Israel they’re called “Bulgarian”. The beans you’ll use are responsible for how good your Humus is. If you use canned beans or anything of the sort, please go jump in front of a bus now before anyone else gets hurt.
• One onion
• 5 garlic cloves (If you like garlic, you can use more. Up to you)
• 1 Tsp baking soda
• 2/3 cup of Tahini (good brand, something that you like).
• 2 small lemons
• 1/3 tsp cumin (use more if you like. I do. But easy on the seasoning)
• Salt. Easy with that.

1) Get those good Humus beans (aka garbanzo). The smaller the better. In Israel they’re called “Bulgarian type”, but wherever you are, just try to get them small.

2) Clean’em up. Put them on a shallow plate, and take out anything that doesn’t look like Humus – rocks, and even beans that are not as beautiful as their sisters. This ritual is important, make sure you only have good-looking humus beans left.

3) Wash the beans a few times, until the water is crystal clear.

4) Take a bowl, put a few tablespoons of coarse salt in it, fill it up with a lot of water, and put the beans inside. The water level should be well above the beans. Use 2-3 litters (100 oz). Put it in the fridge overnight. Go to sleep, or party till morning. 12 hours rest for the humus at least.

5) Good morning, how’d you sleep… Take the beans, and wash them well (we don’t want them to be salty). Put the humus in fresh clean water for a few more hours, in the fridge. The longer you leave the beans in water, the smoother your humus will be. If you wanna just get going now, you can.

6) Wash the beans, make sure the water is crystal clear again, put the beans in a pot with water that is 2 inch higher than the beans. Put the onion and garlic in there too (no salt yet, please). Cook it. Make it boil, then reduce the heat, so it continues boiling (bubbles and all, don’t let it rest). Cover the pot. Every 5 minutes or so, open the lid, and skim the water (meaning, remove any foam or floating humus shells that you can see). We’ll do this part for 45 minutes at least.

7) We’re going to add the baking soda now. What it does is make the beans go soft quickly. It’s a shortcut and you don’t have to do it if you’d like to just keep the pot on the stove for 3 hours or so. I always do it, ’cause I don’t see the downside. Anyways, you add the baking soda in there, and watch the volcano go. My favorite part as a chemistry-set deprived child. Give it another half hour of boiling, during which continue skimming (it will get ugly after you put the baking soda in there, so skip to the best of your ability).

The beans are ready when you can easily crush them. That is, you take a bean, hold it between your thumb and finger, and when you easily squeeze it becomes paste. If it feels a little bumpy, it’s not ready yet. If your finger got burned, then you were supposed to let the bean cool before holding it in your hand (geez, man…) Anyway – after a total of 75 minutes in the water, 30 of which with the baking soda, it should now be ready to go pasty.

Note: If you use the right kind of beans, meaning those small ones, then the bean shells would be gone by now. They leave the beans and float or disintegrate, and so you skimmed them or they’re simply gone. If, for whatever reason, you can see that most beans still have their shells, you want to remove those somehow. You can peel them off one by one if you like, or there’s a trick to it – remove the beans from the water, cool them under water, massage them with your hands (don’t squash), and then put them in the pot again and let it continue cooking. The shells should now be more willing to leave the beans and go where all shells should go – in the trash can.

Moving on:

8) Turn off the stove, and let the pot cool. Once it’s cool, put it in the fridge for a few hours. If you’re in a hurry, skip this part I guess, but the best humus I made were done following the regime to the dot.

9) Take the pot out, and pull all the beans, with the garlic WITHOUT the onion in a food processor. Process…. You are now setting the texture of the humus – add the liquids from the pot into the processor, until you’ve reached the liquid state that you like in your humus. I like my Humus quite “concrete”, so I was tempted to not use any liquids once – it is not recommended, because you end up with something that can easily paint a drywall with. Use at least some liquid, but keep the paste firm – you don’t drink Humus with a straw. Grind for about 2 minutes before starting to add the rest of the ingredients.

10) Add a little tahini. Keep processing on low power. Add the rest of the tahini, then the lemon juice, cumin and salt. Be very careful with the seasoning. If the dish becomes too salty, I’m going to make you start over from square 1, so really – be careful. It’s better to have your guest add a little salt to their own dish. You’ve been warned. Cumin is also salty, by the way. I, for one, use a lot of it, but again – it’s a matter of taste. Cumin can also be added on top of the dish after serving. Better a mild taste, then salt coming out of your ears. Right, enough with that.

Oh, you can also add squashed garlic for a stronger taste of garlic. I love it, but some people don’t.

11) Put the thing in a plastic container, sealed, in the fridge. Some people like their humus hot, so you can eat it now if you want. You can also leave some of the unsquashed beans (now you’re telling me?), with the liquid, and add those in the middle of the dish. See here: http://msc.walla.co.il/archive/270869-5.jpg.

Serve it any way you like, but olive oil is really important, sprinkled on the dish. You can add some parsley or other greens, and I personally like to add cumin on top of it as well.

Pita is also important. Most Israelis keep their Pitas in the freezer, and a minute before eating them, take them out, wrap them in a clean kitchen towel, and throw them in the microwave for 60 seconds. It tastes like it just came out of the oven in the bakery this way, so even the best Humus restaurants in the country use this trick. The downside is that you have to eat the pita within 10 minutes, or it becomes a good replacement for a flat tire.

Humus will be good in the fridge for a few days only, because it has no preservatives in it (yey). If you get green stuff on top, it’s not pesto, it’s antibiotics. Don’t eat it without a prescription. Throw it away and start investigating how come your dish was left to rot in the fridge.

Let me know how it went. Good luck and all.

Today I just wanted to share with you an article that I read (Hebrew, sorry. I couldn’t find an English translation. I guess the world doesn’t care enough..), and gave me a fuzzy feeling as soon as read the headline. The feeling got better as I read through it. For those of you who don’t read Hebrew, or don’t feel like reading the usual complaining tone of ynet, I’m going to summarize in my own words:

Basically two guys bought two domains: wikipedia.org.il, and wikipedia.co.il. Both of these guys consider themselves “web professionals”. They were running their own flavor of wikipedia or whatever. One of them apparently did scraping of another site or some other SEO sh*t. God knows. No one cares. I guess they were making a few dozen shekels per month from Adsense on that site, or a few hundred, or none, again – no one cares. Then one morning Wikimedia (the organization behind Wikipedia, owner of the trademark) decided to do some house cleaning, so they wrote a short note to the Israeli registrar (IL-DRP) asking to get their Israeli domains, as owners of the trademark. The registrar carefully considered the request – on the one hand we have the worldwide wikipedia – the non-profit organization which created this amazing tool and is somewhat struggling to survive financially. On the other hand we have two SEO leeches who were taking advantage of the wikipedia brand (luckily for them, wikipedia probably doesn’t posses the attention to sue them for that), and are driving traffic into their sites under false pretenses. I should mention that both sites have a note on them saying that they’re not the official Wikipedia. If you manage to find that note, that is.

5 minutes later, the domains were given back to Wikimedia (YES!!). Reading this brought back memories of home, my childhood, and my father reading me a fairytale where the evil sisters got what they deserved at the end of the story.

I should mention that ynet found it appropriate to twist the story around and make those SEO leeches victims, and wikimedia the big scary giant that steps in and takes whatever they feel like. But that’s just ynet trying to make a sensation.

The cloud hosting that we like the most is rackspace. The new version of Debian came out very recently, and I guess rackspace still haven’t had the chance to create an image for it on their cloud.

I went out to check how to upgrade from Debian 5 to Debian 6, and it was so easy that I thought I’d just spill it out here. Starting with a fresh Lenny install:

apt-get update
apt-get install debian-archive-keyring
apt-get update
vim /etc/apt/sources.list

apt-get update
apt-get install apt dpkg
apt-get dist-upgrade

Click through as you’re being asked question (enter, enter, enter)
That’s it. Amazingly easy.
Run this after you’re done to verify:
more /etc/debian_version

Credits:
http://www.go2linux.org/how-to-upgrade-from-debian-lenny-to-squeeze
http://neozilon.com/linux/find-out-the-version-of-debian

So,

As part of moving the blog to its new location, I was faced with a minor challenge – redirecting users from my old blogger blog to my new wordpress blog.

The task is pretty trivial if you happen to be a programmer – you just add a redirect code in your old blog headers. But I wanted a little more than that – I wanted people to be redirected correctly, so that if they were viewing a specific post, I’d redirect them to that same post on wordpress.

To make a long story short, I found a few posts on the web describing how to do that, but they were either old or were assuming you are hosting your own wordpress. Eventually, being who I am, I decided to crack it myself. I used an old post from laffer.net, that  and was no longer relevant, but provided big help in setting a direction.

Eventually I managed to do it, so I figured I’d share it here. There’s a good chance that this method will cease to work one day, just life the old method laffer.net had is no longer working. But until then perhaps someone will find it useful. Here’s what you do:

1) Go into your blogger’s admin area. Choose the “design” tab, “Page Elements” (where you see the different blocks that your page is made of).

2) Click on “add a gadget” anywhere and choose the html/javascript gadget.

3) In the screen the just opened, paste the code below in the “content” section, and leave “title” empty.

4) Replace the wordpress and blogger urls from my urls to yours (look for etairaz.wordpress.com and itairaz.blogspot.com).

That’s it. You now have a banner on top of your site that tells people they are about to get redirected in 5 secs, then redirects them.

This is *not* SEO friendly, but I couldn’t care less since I’m not one of those SEO crooks (subject for another post). It won’t work on a browser that doesn’t support Javascript, but again – who cares.

Enjoy!

</pre>
<div style="position: fixed; top: <span class='hiddenSpellError' pre=&quot;&quot;>30px</span>; left: 30px; border: solid 2px #333; color: #000; background-color: yellow; padding: 5px; width: 400px; z-index: 5; font-family: verdana, geneva, arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"></div>
<pre>
	<div><strong>My blog has moved!</strong></div></pre>
<div>You should be automatically redirected in 5 seconds. If not, visit
<a class="<span class=">redirectLink" href='http://etairaz.wordpress.com/'> <span class="redirectText" style="font-weight: bold; color: #bb0000;">http://etairaz.wordpress.com</span></a>
 and update your bookmarks.</div>
<pre>
</div>

<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">
function addZero(numberToPad)
{
	return ("0" + numberToPad).slice (-2);
}

var m_wpUrl = 'http://etairaz.wordpress.com/';
var m_published = document.getElementsByClassName('published');
if(m_published.length == 1)
{
	m_published = m_published[0].getAttribute('title');
	var m_pubDate = new Date(m_published);
	var m_url = location.href;
	var m_lastSlash = m_url.lastIndexOf('/');
	var m_lastDot = m_url.lastIndexOf('.');
	var m_postName = m_url.substring(m_lastSlash + 1, m_lastDot);
	if(m_lastDot > 0 && m_postName.indexOf("_archive") < 0) m_wpUrl += m_pubDate.getFullYear() + '/' + addZero(m_pubDate.getMonth() + 1) + '/' + addZero(m_pubDate.getDate()) + '/' + m_postName;

}
//redirect in 5 seconds
window.setTimeout(function(){location.href = m_wpUrl}, 5);

//change text
document.getElementsByClassName('redirectLink')[0].setAttribute('href', m_wpUrl);
document.getElementsByClassName('redirectText')[0].innerText = m_wpUrl;

</script>

Well, I kind of claim that if you have to ask this question, you haven’t tried both blogging platforms. There’s actually no comparison. WordPress is a monster. Blogger is a nice little toy. It’s like comparing a smartphone and an old Nokia. Both support the basic operations of a phone, but the smartphone (WordPress in my example, if you haven’t figured it out yet…) is just loaded with all sorts of advanced options, is much easier to use, etc. etc. etc. Recently I found myself writing blog posts in word and copying them into blogger when I’m done, because the blogger posting interface is terrible. This was the last straw, actually. A  blog’s most trivial feature is the posting feature. If that one is not convenient, it’s kind of a show stopper. I also found myself editing HTML way too often in order to make my posts look like I want them. And I wasn’t asking for much. Something as trivial as opening link in another window, and not chase readers out of my blog is not available through the blogger interface. I’m a software engineer, but hey – I don’t want to write code where I expect the platform to support me.

Not sure why I used blogger to begin with, but the transition is over. There’s a really nice import feature in WP that just “drank” my existing blog almost flawlessly. The only downside I saw is that the theme I had in blogger was nicer.

Welcome to my new home !

Update: I wrote a little script that redirect readers from the old blog to the new one, gracefully. In case anyone needs one.

How can I have someone be sincere with me?

I have a hard time feeling that people are being genuine with me, given my well-renowned position and reputation. When I am surrounded by my closest consorts, I still I tend to have this feeling in the back of my mind that people are only acting the way they do to gain favor even though I know they care for me deeply, and it’s eating me alive.

But I won’t. In Quora, you should either what a person asks, or not answer at all

So my answer to the question is “you can’t”. It’s actually quite simple – YOU can’t have someone be sincere with you. THEY need to be sincere with you, and you have little control over that. Except if you already know what they really think, in which case you don’t really need to talk to them at all
But, trying to help you with what seems to be your struggle, I’m going to say this:

1) I think that your best way to tell if someone is sincere with you is by past experience. If they have always been sincere with you, then there’s a good chance they’ll be sincere this time around.

2) Number 1 brings out the question – so how can I tell if a new person is being sincere with me? Answer: you can’t. Someone once told me that if con people were easy to spot, they’d be out of a job. I tend to keep this in the back of my mind.
I’m a lousy judge of character. I think most people are, especially the ones who think that they are good judges of character. This is, again, due to the fact that good liers are very experienced at misleading people. So the question I have in mind when a person I don’t know tells me something is not “are they sincere”, but more of “what’s at stake here, if, god forbid, this person is not being honest”.
I find this to be an excellent way to deal with people’s sincerity question. It reduces the stress level resulting from this question that keeps popping up in your mind, and it actually creates a learning experience. If there’s not too much at stake, you can assume that you don’t know if the person is being sincere, and just wait to see whether they were or they weren’t, and then learn from it a little.

3) Unless you are Barack Obama, The term “eating me alive” suggests that you may be taking this subject way too seriously. The guy at the store is giving you advice aimed at getting you to buy the product that gives him the best margin. Your dentist may be recommending expensive treatments that will help her redecorate her living room. Your boss may be giving you advice that is not only for your own good, but also for his own good. Your employees are doing good work not only because they love you, but also because they want your job one day.
It’s OK. You have to learn to live with it. Respect everyone and suspect everyone, but don’t be un-trusting. Don’t be naive, but be a sucker sometimes, (knowingly, even). Getting screwed, when the price isn’t too high, is a very valuable learning experience.
Make sure you are bothered by what’s important

I’ve been using an online backup service for many years now. I got introduced to the subject by Mozy, later to be acquired by EMC. They used to give everyone 2Gb of data free (they still do). When it finally became time to back up more than just 2Gb, I wanted to go on Mozy’s paid program, but their software simply didn’t work, and did not manage to back up more than 4Gb of my data. (they probably fixed it by now)

———- Forwarded message ———-

From: Customer Support

Date: Thu, Jan 27, 2011 at 12:58 AM

Subject: User incident report [Incident: 110125-001173]

To:

Response (Leena G.)01/26/2011 05:58 PM

Hello and thank you for contacting Carbonite Customer Support.

We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused to you. At present, Carbonite only backs up local internal hard drives. For more details, please click the link below.

External, Network and USB Drives: http://carbonite.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/1386

Also, please ensure that if you delete/move a file from your computer, Carbonite will schedule the file to be deleted within thirty days. This gives you some time if you realize you deleted the wrong file. For more details, please click the link below.

Retention of Deleted Files: http://carbonite.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/1402

Additionally, we request you to please review our refund policy at: http://carbonite.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/1496

As stated during our purchasing process, when selecting ‘Confirm’ you agreed to Carbonite’s Terms of Use and acknowledged that you were aware of Carbonite’s Refund Policy. We also give users the opportunity to run our free trial to try before they buy.

If you are having difficulty using Carbonite, please let us know what the issue is and we will be happy to assist you.

Please let us know if you need additional assistance.

Sincerely,

Leena G.

Carbonite Customer Support

www.carbonite.com

Back it up. Get it back.

Dear Customer,

Go F yourself.

Had you read our full TOS when you signed up with our service, you would have realized that you’re making a mistake because if you decide to buy a USB drive, we would not back it up for you. Further more, we were nice enough to tell you upfront that if you’re stupid enough to sign up to our service even after we told you all this, that you won’t see a dime back. This is why it’s called ann(u)al subscription.

True, you signed up with us 3 years ago, when USB external drives weren’t as popular, and yes, you’ve been extending our service every year since, but hey – there was a checkbox there saying that you agree to everything, so take responsibility for your actions.

Just between you and us, you have about $30 left on your subscription. You’ve been our customer for 3 years now, so what’s $30 among friends? Imagine you took us on a night out, or find some other way to live with the loss.

Bottom line: Carbonite could have allowed me to cancel my service, and could have refunded my 20 or 30 bucks, because who in their right mind would not allow a person to own a USB drive nowadays? They could have saved me the time of writing this post, and save themselves the embarrassment of getting a bad review from an old faithful customer.

SalesForce.com acquired DimDim (online collaboration software) for $31M. First of all, congrats for that. We always love to hear when someone in this business gets rewarded for good work they’ve done. If you work for DimDim, now would be the time to stop reading, because that’s pretty much the last good word you will hear from me during this post.

I was introduced to DimDim a couple of years ago, when I was invited to an online presentation that used their tool. The person who invited me was naturally a founder of a startup (it’s what we do). I was happy and a bit surprised to see that someone offered a free option to run quick presentations, limited by features and number of participants, but good enough for most bootstrap joints to use when they needed to show-off their stuff. I installed it on my machine, of course, and gave it a shot too.
Since then I didn’t actually use it much, since I didn’t find it good enough for my own needs, but I have told many people and startups about it. In our lean & mean startup world, every penny counts, so instead of spending $50/month on other services, DimDim really did seem like a good, free, sane option for the occasional broke presenter.
Not sure how many free users DimDim had, but I believe that the “freeloaders” took their role in making the DimDim platform a very popular online sharing tool. Don’t you?

Enter the ungrateful part of this evening. I read @TechCrunch as much as the next guy, but I got introduced to the fact that salesforce.com acquired DimDim through the following email I got from DimDim:

Dear Customer: 

Dimdim has been acquired by salesforce.com. Your free Dimdim account will remain active until March 15, 2011. After that date, you will no longer be able to access your free Dimdim account.

Please see the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) for additional information.

We appreciate your understanding, and we thank you!

The Dimdim Team
Pursuant to the Dimdim Terms of Use (the “Agreement”) governing the use of Dimdim Inc.’s (“Dimdim”) Site and Services (as defined under the Agreement) by you (“You”), Dimdim is hereby exercising its right to terminate Your Dimdim Account and the Agreement in its entirety. Dimdim will continue to provide Services to you until March 15, 2011. Following March 15, 2011, neither You nor Dimdim shall have any further rights or obligations of any kind under the Agreement, including the right to access the Site, or receive or use any Services. Dimdim thanks you for your business, and wishes you success in the future.

Dimdim, 900 Chelmsford St. Lowell, MA 01851
This email was intended for: | Remove

(Report Abuse) – Only if you feel this email was repeatedly sent to you without your permission.

Now let me tell you my take, or what I actually read between the lines:

Dear FreeLoader and Ex-Customer, 

We just got acquired for $31M. We’re rich. Richer than you will ever be. If anyone tells you that “freemium” models can’t bring happiness, just send them a picture of us, fishing.
We did it all by ourselves, and we are extremely happy to tell all of you so-called “customers”, who made us so wildly popular by using our free service, that you can go F yourself. We do not think you had any contribution to making us popular, and we don’t think you are even remotely related to the fact that we are now filthy rich. As such, while the negotiation with salesforce.com was going on, we didn’t think it was appropriate to demand, as part of our severance packages and all that, that our free service remains free, at least until people forget that the salesforce.com online sharing tool was once DimDim. In fact, you should be grateful that we’re letting you keep the service for another two months. We award you with a valuable lesson – there is no free lunch in this world. We really wish we could see your face as you read this announcement, but we’re a bit drunk from the champagne and generally have better things to do.

P.S. Aren’t you glad our lawyers made sure we can terminate your account at will ? Oh, don’t bother to get up, here’s the relevant paragraph from our TOS, which you never bothered to read when you signed up to our free service.

Jokes aside for a minute, I would have done it differently. I don’t believe in “exit strategies” per se, and I believe that you should always think about how to make a successful and sustainable product that people need, and hence will want to pay for. An exit is something that happens when another company realizes that you’ve done such a fantastic job, that they want you and your product as part of their offering. DimDim was big on the “freemium” model, and it’s a big part of what made them successful. Dropping the free, and leaving the “mium” before the body of their acquired organization is cold leaves a bad taste in my mouth. DimDim is officially worth $31M – are you telling me that the “free” part has no part in this ? How much money is salesforce.com saving by cancelling the free service? Time will tell if this was the right business decision, but I, for one, think that this was the wrong moral decision.

“So long and thanks for that big fish that just ate us”.

Yesterday was my first time ever in a TechAviv event. I’ve been a registered founder for about two years now. I always wanted to go to one of those gatherings, but somehow, while I’ve RSVPed many times, I never managed make it. There’s always some important fire-fighting going on. Last night involved too many important people from the industry that I claim my company (zx900) is part of. It also had Mike Eisenberg on stage spelling out his Humus Manifesto, and to me that would have been like watching the movie based on a book that I liked. Going there got priority (and my wife OKed).
I have to admit, I’ve never had much chance to hang out in the Israeli startup/angel/VC scene, and so what I heard there caught me off-guard. The place kind of turned into a battle field with the founders on one side and the VCs in the other (and @Roi Carthy in the middle).
I decided to write a few things and offer a my perspective. I’ll most likely give reference to it in a comment on TechAviv’s board, and I’d be happy to hear your thoughts.

1. VCs invest in ventures that they think can make THEM (the VCs) a significant return on their investment. Statistics shows that only 1-2 out of every 10 startups makes it (i.e. doesn’t close shop). If they didn’t invest in your venture, there’s at least an 80% chance they were right. Probably more. No offense – it’s just statistics. Give them a break. You don’t spend your savings on investments you don’t believe in, right?

2. VC money is private. It’s not your tax dollars (shekels, whatever). They don’t owe you anything. They’re not the chief scientist. Just back the f*ck off. I was so lost in that discussion on Wednesday, along with some folks on stage (seemed like). I found myself sympathizing with the VC partners, which is funny, because I actually think most founders should stay away from VC money for as long as they can.

3. People have been burnt by taking an investment from the chief scientist. Remember that. Mike Eisenberg is not making things up. Don’t be caught off guard a year into the process. Having to close shop in a year from now because you’ve raised money in the wrong place wouldn’t be more pleasant than not getting funded at all right this minute. Make sure you know what you’re getting into.

4. Even more people got burnt by taking VC money. Go read the TheFunded (but don’t believe everything you read). Getting an investment from a VC would put you in a spin – make sure you’re ready for that spin, as it will not be what you had planned on when you first thought of starting your venture. Be prepared, you’re not winning the lottery here, you’re acquiring partners who have a different agenda than your own. The fact that you both want a successful exit does not mean you see things eye-to-eye.
A VC pays a million dollar for 25% in your company, let’s say. You paid nothing, and you own a larger share. Do you think both of you translate the word “success” the same way?
Again, know what you’re getting into. VC is definitely a great way to go, but it’s not a one-size-fits-all.

5. If you’re a founder, this is important, so listen up.
In today’s world, you don’t have to have seed money to get started with many ventures ($10K is not seed money, guys).
There is an alternative. You WILL need to put YOUR money where your mouth is, you’ll need to work like a mule for many months, but if your idea is as good as your pitch says that it is, refusing to do these two things means that you’re full of of it. Look yourself in the mirror. Are you willing to risk something here, or do you just want to roll the risk over to some rich guy who you think will sustain less damage if things go south?
If you’ve already done all that, and still can’t get funded, perhaps you’re one of the 80%? Think outside of the box. Maybe that box is your whole venture…. You’re an entrepreneur, you’ll think of some other great idea if you put your mind to it. Don’t get caught up in your own idea. Think, launch, and if it doesn’t work out, think again, and launch something else. Repeat till you retire. Doctor’s orders for sick people who need to constantly create new things.

6. And this is just to try and show that I’m not talking out of my *ss.