I believe YC accepted them for the idea and not for their strategy for acquihire. Kind of baffles me that just a 2 month old company gets acquired for talent, and that too for a not-an-out-of-the-world product
I assume they weren't able to get any additional funding, and were at the point where they needed to wind down the company. Another company comes along and says "we'll give you good jobs, and make your investors whole." So they take it. It's not like there was a Plan B.
When there are bigger corporate hiring en mass then something like audition project might be unfeasible but serves as a very good measure when hiring in startups.
You spend day and night on building a product, you make sure everything works right and its scaled for traffic. Once you have a beta product ready, you decide to blog about it, you meticulously work on generating some good content, fire up a large instance on AWS, set up a wordpress blog, and the blog is live. Now you decide to post about it on HN, fortunately some people like what you have written, you start getting traffic.
And BOOM, suddenly you find out that the large instance on AWS, cannot handle the traffic, you are befuddled its not like the server is getting million hits/sec. You thought a large server would be enough to handle a single wordpress blog, and you realize that's not the case.
Now you go back and start fixing your self hosted wordpress blog, you feel sad that you missed out on audience because the server crashed, your work gets derailed because now you also have to maintain the blog server.
I agreed I too would have been irritated to see the link not working, but its not that you switch to an x-large instance each time you post a link on HN. Sometimes you just want somethings to work. But alas that's not the case.
I empathize with you, but your experience highlights the flaws in the approach you're advocating.
I'll use myself as an example: I'm a self-taught developer who has built and managed high-profile, high-usage websites/web applications. I probably could not pass one of your algorithm-based FizzBuzz tests, but if I was hiring and you suggested that a site should scale simply because you threw it on a large AWS instance, I would not consider your candidacy further regardless of your ability to pass a FizzBuzz test.
I did not intend to say that the blog should work simply because we threw it on a large instance, we have been running our site on AWS and have successfully handled much larger load. We never needed to move beyond a larger server for the main site, of course with horizontal scaling. What I meant was, when you are swamped with so many things you don't want to spend too much time on things like maintaining your blog.
You want to focus on the product, fix bugs, look after feature request, produce high quality content. And then your blog crashes and things get derailed.
> I did not intend to say that the blog should work simply because we threw it on a large instance...
That's precisely what you said:
"You thought a large server would be enough to handle a single wordpress blog..."
> when you are swamped with so many things you don't want to spend too much time on things like maintaining your blog.
A competent developer should be able to set up a load balanced WordPress blog (with Nginx/PHP-FPM, Varnish and a separate database server) in a day or less. There are a number of well-written tutorials on this.
HN is not the place for parody but I want to rewrite your entire paragraph talking about developers who ship gigantic systems and suddenly find out that a company is rejecting them because they don't code the intricacies of bubble sort on a white board from the get-go.
What you are saying is correct in some sense, yes there are a lot of hurdles and the going is not easy. But there are people who are doing things, there are people who are changing things.
Yes our system is not perfect, yes we are very corrupt, but one tends to forget that India is a very young society. We were liberated only 66 years ago from almost a century of foreign rule. But in just 6 decades we have made remarkable progress.
But having said that we can't just wait for things to become better. There needs to be someone who has to take the first step, who needs to be in the front of the formation, those people may not win the war but they lay the foundation for it. I believe just complaining about the system does not help.
I am relatively new to the open source world, and don't really seem to accept the fact that somebody would be willing to pay for something like this. So will people really pay?
It always depends on your needs and project specifics. For someone this might be very valuable, for someone maybe not. Here in this blog post are many interesting opinions on this subject. "Is there a market for paid Django apps?": http://jacobian.org/writing/paid-django-apps/
India: If you are up for a challenge, where there might not be straight forward solutions, but if you crack the plethora of problems present there, its a dream come true.
