First off, I wouldn't recommend a high-protein, low carb diet. It's very hard on your internal organs. Kidney problems abound from all the protein waste processing.
There are are some extremely effective substances you can use but they are a bit harder to get.
Clenbuterol will shed pounds like crazy but it's not something to stay on long-term. So plan to maintain your weight after you have help losing it.
Human Growth Hormone is a very effective fat-burner but it's also expensive from a reputable source. Most black market HGH is fake (usually HCG is substituted).
The diet industry doesn't want you to have these products because it would put them out of business. So you need a prescription, and most people are unaware of those options entirely.
Hormones are extremely influential when it comes to fat storage. If your stress level rises, your body will automatically store fat to compensate and burn muscle for fuel.
So getting rid of stress is critical.
If you are already tired but force yourself to work out, it may help your mental stress, but it does add MORE physical stress so your body may break down muscle and store fat. A lot of people have heard about overtraining but don't realize you don't already have to work out a lot in order to overtrain yourself. Simply being stressed/exhausted can cause overtraining with any vigorous exercise you perform in that state.
Avoid processed food. The more fresh whole foods you eat, the harder it is to overeat, and the vitamins and minerals will make your body stop feeling hungry in a way that doesn't happen when you eat something processed and devoid of nutrition..
Any kind of sugary drinks are a big problem. This includes fruit juice, which typically has all the sugar with none of the fiber. You can drink hundreds of calories of fruit juice in seconds, whereas if you eat whole oranges it takes a lot more work!
Exercise is key. You won't lose much weight because your appetite increases commensurately, but all sorts of things go wrong when you don't exercise. Exercise is a body regulation mechanism. If you don't do it you are guaranteed to have problems.
Best recommendations I have seen yet. There are a number of ways to reduce stress level (exercise among them) but keeping stress low was extremely beneficial for me. In fact I suspect if you were to track my stress levels and body fat % over the last 10 years you'd find a pretty strong correlation.
A high-protein, low carb diet isn't necessarily good. However, most people probably do not eat enough protein and eat too many carbs. I would say about a gram of protein per kilogram of bodyweight would be good for most people who are getting in to proper diet and exercise, which may need to be adjusted depending on the individual's goals.
As a side note, this article made me check out the resume of the author of that essay it references. Started college at 12? Graduated at 17 with a double BS in CoSci and Physics? University Medal in CoSci? All sorts of scholarships and awards. And yet rejected by YC.
That's a pretty glaring big data point that says YC's claim about choosing people, not ideas is junk. They probably didn't even read her resume because they don't spend enough time on the applications, which is still an indictment of their selection process. If you habitually make decisions in the absence of vital information you end up screwing the pooch.
If I were an investor I'd bet on that one for sure. Not even an interview?!?
Being a child prodigy, and excelling in school, doesn't necessarily make her a good bet as an entrepreneur, however amazingly talented she might be. Or, YC might have missed the boat big-time on this one, and she's going to go off and found the next Google. No selection process is perfect, people make mistakes, and one data point does not a trend make.
> doesn't necessarily make her a good bet as an entrepreneur, however amazingly talented she might be.
Yes, yes it does make her a good bet. If you are betting, bet on people with immense talent and drive.
Who else are you going to bet on, people with far less talent and drive? I think you're confusing "good bet" with "guaranteed to be more successful".
> No selection process is perfect
Yes, but there's a huge gulf between "almost perfect" and "woefully inadequate" when it comes to not being perfect. YC is closer to the latter just due to the lack of time they spend on the process.
> and one data point does not a trend make.
Correct -- but it's one more data point. There are multiple others from reports here. For example, YC not looking at demos; or asking questions that indicate they didn't bother to read or understand the application. Plus when you see some of the schlock they've funded it's clear something's broken.
No it doesn't. It makes her a good bet to go get another masters or PHD, but being an entrepreneur is a completely different skill set. While her accomplishments are grand in their own right, they're also rather focused.
There's nothing in and of itself on the resume that shows that she's had to work to overcome a default, or has experience building a company, or that she can think on her feet, for example. Although she may in fact possess these skills, I wouldn't take them as a given simply because she has a lot of book smarts.
Means you need people who can actually do shit. If you need people with business experience then a program that connects you with investors makes perfect sense. Investors need people like her. Thus the rejection was a mistake.
> or has experienced building a company
Neither did Google! That's why you partner with investors who have experience. Duh!
> or that she can think on her feet, for example.
Really bad example in this case.
> I wouldn't take them as a given
A given?!? What is a "given" in a venture?!?
You're making the same mistake with "good bet" when you really mean "guarantee".
freax, I don't know you, but given your responses to this and that other thread, I would highly suggest that if you're looking to be successful, you should put some of that emotional response that you're directing towards me into positive action for your venture.
There are many people on this forum that will be there to help you in the future, but if you catch a name as a person who is a little to sharp to quip with pure emotion, they will have second thoughts.
It's not a big deal, and it's not personal - don't make it so.
run4yourlives - I agree with you. Everyone has a plan until they get into the ring. It is always best to preserve dry powder for the real fight. Being constructive and making allowance for other people's opinion go a long way in this business.
shrug So, YC didn't pick her. It's their loss, because if she's going to succeed, she'll do it even without YC's help. If you have the means, which I certainly don't at present, contact her and offer her funding.
Don't count yourself out. It sounds so trite, but do you realize how often you already do it? Not just in start-ups, but everything: Do you not talk to that girl/boy because you don't want to bother them, or think they'll say no? If you're not convinced you're worthwhile, how will you convince anyone else? Are you so concerned with being right that you won't let yourself become absolutely certain of your own success because "there are no absolutes"? Are you worried that if someone takes a chance on you, you'll let them down? Does that worry stop you?
Most people stop even trying and take themselves out of contention!
Rejections are like points. There's a secret magic number you need to collect, and then you succeed.
F Me. $15 mil for adding tinsel to your MySpace? And "RockYou is lining up a new round of funding to stay sharp.".
Etsy: $31.6 mil for a swapmeet just for handmade crafts.
When people take that much buck for so little bang it doesn't seem like they are interested in ROI or making it big so much as having a jobs program for them and their buddies.
Auctomatic sold for what probably amounts to a few months' burn rate for these suckers and still made their founders millionaires. How are these guys with 20 or 30 mil invested going to find a buyer that makes them a profit?
By the strict definition of entrepreneur (assuming the risk), that title goes to the VCs. When the venture tanks it's not going to be the founder who's out $30 mil.
Not a lot of technical wow in that list. Drupal probably leads by a good margin.
I won't argue against RockYou. That's just silly. But Handmade crafts are a huge segment of the market, especially with women as soon as they graduate college and start nesting. There's a much bigger upside to Etsy.
> especially with women as soon as they graduate college and start nesting
Nesting? What are they, ducks? As a feminist I'd like to say that's some pretty idiotic stereotyping. Female college graduates overwhelmingly enter the workforce, not nests.
'Nesting' is a common term for the set of behaviors that makes a home more compatible with a family than a single person. Are you unfamiliar with it?
Is it really idiotic to suggest that women are more likely to do handmade crafts than men? I know many women who knit as adults, or make small crafts as kids.
However, there's an easy way to settle this. If etsy is going to underserve the vast market for men who knit adorable mittens and hats for their kids, you can certainly be successful with a startup that targets that market. Or we could just bet that the online craft market with a higher fraction of male sellers will be more successful than the one dominated by women.
Or we could concede that -- whether due to biology or the patriarchy -- gender correlates with some behaviors. That shouldn't be hard to admit.
Yeah, I totally thought you were talking about ducks!
> Is it really idiotic to suggest that women are more likely to do handmade crafts than men?
Now you're trying to change the subject.
Your actual idiotic suggestion which I refuted quite specifically is that as soon as women graduate college they start "nesting". In fact women college graduates are pushing back starting families by record amounts.
I know a lot of female professionals and I can't think of any without kids that spend any appreciable amount of time on handmade crafts.
Unless you're addressing an autistic audience, it is acceptable to say "Women do X" when you really mean "Women do X more frequently than non-women, although of course some women do not do X at all, some have never heard of X, some hate X, etc." For example, I am rarely corrected if I say "Five-year-olds are taller than four-year-olds," even though it's trivial to demonstrate that this isn't true. If your argument is that the statement in question is not literally true, you are correct. But if you use that to conclude that the tendency described does not exist, you're stretching things.
The statement was not "Women are nesting more than they used to," but "Women tend to nest." Whether they start nesting immediately or a bit later than they used to distracts from the point that they do it more than men regardless of timing.
>I know a lot of female professionals and I can't think of any without kids that spend any appreciable amount of time on handmade crafts.
I know female professionals who don't, female professionals who do, full-time parents who don't, and full-time parents who do. Perhaps, given your admittedly limited circle of acquaintances and your previous admission of bias, you should leave this discussion to people who have more data and less of an axe to grind. That is, you should do so if you want to know the facts -- if you want to defend your prejudices, proceed.
>But you actually thought I was talking about ducks. So we're square.
That's a very strange thing to say. You acted shocked that someone would suggest that women tended to 'nest', and then brought up ducks. I have no way of knowing your intended tone. It would be very rude to assume that you were being sarcastic if you were actually a non-native speaker who was legitimately confused about the idiom. Perhaps, whether you are a native speaker or not, it is considered acceptable to make fun of people for using words when the meaning is apparent but another definition could be used where you are from. So one could say "The music was haunting," and someone in your social circle could respond "Ghosts are a silly superstition!" I bet it's a blast.
Did you have a response to the content of the comment, though?
Well, instead of taking offense when none is implied, try to understand what I said.
Of course females in their 20's enter the workforce. They also buy houses. They also decorate those houses, with candles (huge industry), paint (massive), knickknacks (ever heard of pottery barn?) and - wait for it - handmade goods.
Why handmade goods? Because having a family - nesting (it's a very common term, google it) - usually forces one to re-evaluate their world views. A woman with a house full of pottery barn items starts looking for something more authentic, and she usually goes for something handmade. This is why farmer's markets and such are a growth industry.
Of course it's a stereotype, but it's also a very profitable one.
> Because having a family - nesting (it's a very common term, google it)
Female college graduates are pushing back the age when they start families to historical highs, which puts lie to your claim that they start nesting right out of college.
Yes! Nests = ducks! I have never heard it applied to humans before! One might have thought I was comparing your incorrect and oversimplified description of female college graduates to instinctual waterfowl lifecycle behavior!
It's pretty funny you completely missed the sarcasm, focused on that, and then completely missed the point. And then start in with red herrings. Apparently your upmodders like fish.
You're obviously new here, so let me give you some unsolicited advice.
1. The crowd here is very business savvy. If you aren't, that's cool, but understand that many of the terms we use here that you might not be overly familiar with. Here's the first result in google for the keyword "nesting": http://www.parentingweekly.com/pregnancy/pregnancy_informati...
2. Trends and stereotypes are important factors in marketing. Pretty much everyone on this site understands that there are exceptions to every trend and stereotype. They also understand that if you want to make money, you need to understand a trend and focus on it. If you want to focus on social aspects, go into government.
3. "which puts lie to your claim that they start nesting right out of college."
I didn't actually say that, and you can see from my follow up that it's a two step process: First you graduate and get a job, then you settle down and have a family. It's not important that this may take up to 10 years, it's important that the pattern is common enough that it can be banked upon to produce results.
> but understand that many of the terms we use here that you might not be overly familiar with
I was making fun of you. Why do you insist on being enduringly stupid?
> I didn't actually say that
"especially with women as soon as they graduate college and start nesting". There's such a big time gap there it's like saying "as soon as they graduate sixth grade and start college", which, as far as I know, only applies to one person here.
> Etsy: $31.6 mil for a swapmeet just for handmade crafts.
I'm assuming that your italics were meant to indicate that you think this is a silly idea. But what you probably have to consider is the size of the handmade craft market in the US. Then consider the entire world-wide market. It's probably very large. And Breyer @ Accel is no fool.
You have to judge the idea, not appeal to authority. Investors make mistakes most of the time!
> But what you probably have to consider is the size of the handmade craft market in the US. Then consider the entire world-wide market. It's probably very large.
That's every business plan ever. "Look how huge this market is! If we could just get one percent, why..."
It's like Ali G's pitch. "Zen" (Venn) diagram of "People who like ice cream" intersected with "People who has hands". Voila, the Ice Cream Glove.
—Buy $5 million worth of hardware and hosting over the next two years.
—Support more currencies and languages other than the U.S. Dollar and English.
—Fix the checkout system (there is none now, every buyer has to pay every seller on an individual basis. There is no Etsy payment system that works across all sellers).
—Fix search.
—Provide a cushion in case of a recession.
—Offer customer service
—Provide competitive wages and take care of his employees.
Quite a lot of big ticket items in that list. Add to that any significant amount of consumer marketing and the number doesn't seem that bad.
I'm not sure of the checkout system, but I assume right now that the payments are left for the sellers and buyers to deal with and Etsy would instead like to establish their own system that makes it dead easy to buy and sell with Etsy as the middle man in the transaction.
Search is hard. They have search already, but they want it make it better and more relevant to the user's taste and buying history I imagine.
Customer Service => manpower => salaries => money => funding.
Competitive wages: I'm sure Etsy pays it's employees well, but I doubt it's at market value (although it's probably damn close). But they want to take care of their existing employees and hire new ones and pay them all well, which I think is admirable.
The funding isn't absurd. Etsy can and probably will be huge. I've seen nothing from their execution and growth so far that indicates that they're a mirage or about to tank.
For a company with a revenue model, growth, and a large market to raise a 30 million series B isn't exactly earth shattering.
> Last year when they made offers to groups that had also been invited to interviews with us, they tried to pressure them into accepting before they'd heard from us. I assume they'll do that again. That makes me mad, I admit. It seems such a nasty thing to do to a group of young founders.
Wait a minute, aren't you the guy who gives them 5 minutes to accept once you make your offer?
If they did their interviews/acceptance AFTER you, it would be the same situation with YOU pressuring founders before they'd heard back from anyone else!
Pot. Kettle. If you really care about the founders then you all need to get your schedules together so founders have the option of choosing from multiple offers. Leave the window open longer. It's pretty easy. Give them the forms and have them mail them back once they decide. Like college acceptance; this is a solved problem.
If they did their interviews/acceptance AFTER you, it would be the same situation with YOU pressuring founders before they'd heard back from anyone else!
Sure. And if we stole their wallets we'd be robbers. But we don't, do we?
I'm going to propose to all the clones that in future we all have a common date for startups to make decisions by. But since we currently decide last, we're not pressuring anyone.
I would be surprised if that was the reason for the timing of the decisions, I suspect it was just convenient for them. AlphaLab is going after a decidedly different market than YC: people that live in Pittsburgh. AlphaLab is also consciously an incubator and not something that failed at copying YC and accidentally turned into an incubator.
I've never applied to YC, so maybe I'm not qualified to comment, but I'm not sure your remark fairly characterizes what's going on. It seems to me that if YC gets hundreds and hundreds of applications, and if most founders who are accepted say yes, and if people know the situation going in to the interview (which they clearly do), then it's just not worth YC's time to futz around dealing with the few people who can't decide immediately.
Now, if YC and all their clones could agree to a similar cycle, so that founders could pick between different offers, then I would say that YC were the bad guys. But that's not the case (yet).
> and if people know the situation going in to the interview (which they clearly do)
You do the interview. Then you get a phone call with a percentage mentioned and no negotiation allowed. You say yes or they claim you "failed an IQ test". 5 minutes to decide.
> then it's just not worth YC's time
Yeah, not when you do this stuff in bulk, assembly-line style, with most companies fizzling out if they don't fund them (so very little risk of "being proven wrong").
I'll give you that "failed an IQ test" seems a bit harsh. But when did all this occur? 2005, or later? If later, there's been so much written on the web about this that it seems amazing to me that you would have been shocked by the offer.
To the second point, I agree with you that an assembly line style makes individual negotiations impossible. But I'd say two things: (a) that's a feature, not a bug, and (b) if you're a young founder with no track record, exactly what are your other options?
I think the point of the 5 minute thing is that you know going in what the terms will be if you are accepted, so you have plenty of time to think about it beforehand. Furthermore, YC has a good reputation so you can be sure that you're not going to get screwed over by verbally agreeing to an ambiguous deal.
Except these things can be empirically shown to be harmful. The "value" of playing EverCrack or WoW all day every day can destroy many other valuable things in your life. This is why addiction is considered a problem, not a value -- except to pushers.
I have this wall chart of all sorts of religions, and I move a game piece around it like a boardgame. Then whoever I'm on that day, I pray, like, "O great Yegbabo, deliver unto me a vision of a start-up idea." Then I imbibe the appropriate ceremonial substance, such as hashish, peyote, coca leaves, licking a toad, LSD -- it depends on the culture.
Anyway that's how McCarthy "invented" Lisp (he was at Esalen on vacation with Timothy Leary).
