shafqat

Good post. Brought me back to HN after a long time. I’m 2007!!!

SEEKING FREELANCER: Must be in NYC. Looking for someone to build a simple Python/Django app for a huge customer of ours. You'll have to come by the NewsCred NYC office (or you can work here). Contact Asif : asif at newscred.com

The following line is not correct: "it has to be a UK co owning a branch in the States, not a US co with a UK office"

It can be either way around. But your general point is true: the L1 visa is great. I moved over on an L1A visa (the US company is the parent, with branch in UK). I just got a 2 year extension after the first year. Now in the process of getting an expedited green card.

100% agree.

It took us 2.5 years to get to product market fit. We raised a seed round and kept burn incredibly low for a long time while we figured things out. There were a couple of product adjustments along to way based on customer demand.

It took us 2.5 years, to reach out first million of recurring sales. It'll take us less than 3 months now to double that. Patience certainly is a virtue.

I find it ridiculous that a significant percentage of the population here equate raising VC money with selling your soul. I know you cite the SvN post, but that is one opinion. Raising VC is good for some businesses, bad for others. So is your hiring plan. So is your product choices. And a hundred other things.

We struggled for a long time, and our business came perilously close to the end a few times. But you know what got us out? Funding. VCs. Amazing investors that were thoughtful, supportive and value accretive. The marketing that we could invest in with our funding. We're doing millions of revenue now, and it is all because we were able to light the rocketship with our VC fuel. And did I say our VCs became great friends and mentors, even through the tough times?

It's not for everyone, and my experience may be an outlier. But let's stop with the snarky ant-VC comments.

I agree with the rest of your points and good luck with the pivot!

There is a decent market.

While its not our core business, we host content APIS for some large publishers. Because we're ingesting their content anyway (content syndication is our main business) and we already have a robust API, we've productized it to provide APIs as a service back to our content providers.

I think content and ecommerce APIs are where you will see the most traction.

If anyone wants licensed Bloomberg financial news content, we have that in our News API and can give to you guys at HN rates. Can be used for commercial use. We worked hard to get this agreement done with Bloomberg since we know a lot of finance startup could use this.

We did an L1 and it was straightforward. You need to be trading for one year in the uk.

Contact me and I'll set you up. We (NewsCred) have fully licensed news and archives from 750+ news sources. All available through an API. You can use it for commercial use but there is a fee. I can give you a HN discount ;-)

FYI - your email address in not (visible) in your profile.

Honestly I don't know. I would guess it's slightly under the average at most companies. Cetainly less than 20 days as an average. But we've had people take a month and work in Thailand which is not counted as vacation. So this is not some scheme to get people to work more. It's simply offering flexibility and empowering our team to make their own choices.

We have always had unlimited vacations at NewsCred and have never had anyone abuse it. We are approx 20 people now. People love it.

What is the underlying tech? Can you talk about your listening and topic modeling algos?