Congrats guys! That's super exciting...glad to see that it worked out for you and it's very cool that there's more and more focus on Boulder these days!

• 3 weeks ago

Nate, good perspective for sure. We definitely consider this an "early exit" but there's plenty of reasons that an early exit might work well for a team. Sometimes making the "big bucks" isn't always the goal. Of course, making a ton of cash off of something so you barely need to work ever again is pretty awesome, but a lot of times there's a lot of other things that you need to consider.

One is that Ben and I (the founders) are pretty young (just turned 24). By having an early success (and being acquired by a large company, such as AOL) is huge for our careers. Now whenever we start some other company (in the future) we will have an easier time picking up VC funding for that company.

Beyond that, usually you've got three options for running a company...raise tons of cash, get cash flow positive or exit. Unfortunately our business doesn't really easily get to cash flow positive quickly. Because of that, we were stuck raising cash. Now granted, we didn't need a ton of it, but we did need some. The more investment you pull in, the less percentage you have in the company, and the more difficult (more expensive) it is to sell the company.

There's a whole lot of things that you have to weigh in on to really decide what kind of outcome is meaningful to you...in this case it was a really meaningful exit for all of us in the company, and meant that we could keep working on our product without the pressures of raising money or running a business.

Make sense?

• 5 weeks ago

Ah, got it now. There's really not a definite reason that there are no promo badges just yet, but one big one is that we're still in private beta. It's disheartening for a user to come to our site via a badge and not be able to use something immediately...but definitely something we're willing to explore

• 13 weeks ago

Not at all, they're only for your personal consumption...don't go anywhere else, the public can't see them...

• 13 weeks ago

While I'm not belittling your intelligence in this field by any means, I'm just trying to set forth the limitations of our own app to be able to do this. With 1.0 it was impossible because we weren't even collecting user data...with 2.0 we got closer, but now we need to be able to expose the data to the outside, not just our profiles within our walls. Once we are able to do that, we'll be able to build that into a widget no problem...getting to that point just takes time.

• 13 weeks ago