Something I recently realised is this - this is it! Where I live, what I am doing, who my friends are - this is my life! This is not a temporary stop while I figure out how to make millions, after which I will actually start living, no, it already started and I'm a part of it.

Waiting may take longer than I expect, so I better enjoy the wait as much as I well can. That's why I'm not giving up my life to create a startup. Rather, I'll enjoy things as they come every day, and dedicate an appropriate amount of time towards realising my dreams. If the dreams never work out, it really is not that bad, because I enjoyed the time right up until then.

These guys are offering a valuation half what YC offers, and they are proposing a board structure that gives them defacto control over the company board and the company. And they aren't YC.

Your response should be "how about convertible debt?" Convertible debt makes a lot more sense than setting up a board of directors that they control and it works out for everyone in the next round.

I would recommend reading http://venturehacks.com in its entirety along with pmarca's relevant blog posts. http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/06/the_truth_about.html, http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/06/the_truth_about_1.html, http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/06/the_truth_about_2.html, and more. After reading pmarca, you should be able to answer the question if you actually want to raise VC money or not. It only makes sense for a very specific type of company.

Given that the poster is using the system to learn to program, I doubt he needs the MBP. The MB should more than suit that need.

Yes, sometimes.

Or because the stories of scaling have potential lessons?

Yes.

Let me add a few observations of my own:

Are people upvoting because Twitter is a genuinely new and popular service, and hence very fashionable at this moment? Yes.

Are people upvoting because Twitter's design has just been sitting there, right in front of our faces, for years, and yet we plugged away on email and IM and static HTML sites and blogs and Facebook and never even thought of trying something like this, so we're fascinated to discover it in the same way that biologists were fascinated to discover the platypus? Yes.

Are people upvoting because they're still trying to understand what Twitter is, and how to build something like it themselves, but they're confused because it isn't really email, or IM, or a microblog, or Facebook? Yes.

Do half the folks on news.yc look at Twitter and see something that they simultaneously crave (a startup with a viral app) and fear (a startup with a viral app that is pissing off its customers) and envy (because the customers moan, and they complain, but they don't abandon Twitter for the alternatives, at least not yet)? So, try as they might, the entrepreneurs can't possibly look away?

Yes.

Then I tried making up my own music, but that ridiculous. I spent more time figuring out why it sounded bad than I did actually coming up with a melody. My chords didn't work, the rhythm was all off, etc. When it was done, it didn't even sound that good!

I have no idea how Reznor deals with the mind-numbing drudgery of it.

Randall has some thoughts that apply very well in a group like this so his comics appear here often and start interesting discussions. The only thing not interesting to me is that every time one is getting started I have to wade through a boundary layer of "lets blacklist xkcd" comments.

Doc my karma if you will, but I think the silent majority has voted with the upmod arrow on the post. I am one of them.

If you're deploying code, you really should be using Capistrano. Even if it is not a Rails project. It is a world of difference.

I've never heard of a true VC fund doing anything like that before. Usually VCs look upon seed rounds (and for them a seed round means $100k minimum) as just a way to generate series A deal flow. So they don't care about the valuation or the board composition. At most they ask for right of first refusal on future rounds over a certain threshold. So it's weird that they seem to be trying to push so hard about such things so early.

I suppose I'd take the deal if it were a super-duper fund like Sequoia or KP. For most startups it would be worth giving them 10% of your co for nothing just to brag that you had them as investors. On the other hand, they'd never do something like this. And the fact that anyone is is ipso facto evidence that they're a bush league firm.

Obviously you can't mention the name here, but if you want to send me an email (my username at ycombinator) I'll talk to you about it privately. I have to deal a lot with VCs, so wildly novel types of VC behavior are very interesting to me.

Incidentally, this applies to many types of work, not just startups.

If I didn't read things like hacker news I would have no idea what twitter was.