WHATT?

RockYou Hack: From Bad To Worse – TechCrunch

It’s absolutely mind-boggling to me that in this day and age, companies are still storing passwords in plain text. It’s also mind-boggling to me that RockYou’s database was pwnt by SQL injection — that’s a basic thing every web developer worth their salt should be protecting against. I just can’t believe that a venture funded company (by Sequoia and Lightspeed, no less) fails so hard.

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session 5!

tuesday was session 5 of FI’s san diego session. we had jon carder again, chris capdevila (with oracle, but he used to be a startup founder) and steve iverson, who’s building a green, energy efficient amazon s3-like service (at least, that’s what i got from flipping through his company’s website). we hit epic traffic on the way to the venue (we spent about 40 minutes going from the 805-5 interchange to genessee, which is the first exit and less than 2 miles away) and we swung by laguna beach to pick up a classmate whose car had died (wow, it was really beautiful), so we were all tired and stressed when we walked in (only 20 minutes late, might i add).

the presentation was meh. the investor session wasn’t terribly constructive, i thought. the presentations were ok, but i was so out of it that i wasn’t really listening. the real highlight of the session was the discussion we had at the bar after — that’s almost more interesting and helpful than the actual in-class session.

anyway, i’m looking forward to my group meeting on saturday and then class again on tuesday!

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FI meeting 4

we had a good meeting on Tuesday (i’m sorry i’m late again). trip adler of scribd, jon carder of mojopages, and neil senturia of sdnn + blackbird ventures gave some presentations, mostly about what’s important to a startup, rather than the posted topic of company roadmaps. some interesting things — trip has a very product-centric approach to starting up, while the other two had some other insights. jon told us to be wary of outsourcing. neil made jokes, as usual, but he had some good notes on what he looks for in a startup (there were 10 points, if i’m not mistaken, and his slides said a startup has to bat 1.000 on all of them. sorry if that doesn’t make sense; i’m no good at baseball metaphors).

we got into new groups. hopefully this one is more interactive than the previous one (i had a good time, but i think we could’ve had more debate). anyway, i’m looking forward to the first group meeting tomorrow. yatta!

we also have an investor pitch session coming up on monday. i was thinking we should pitch, but apparently neither rich nor i had our names tossed into the ring, so we’re just going to pitch the investors informally after. we’ve been working diligently on our slide deck and pitch. if you’re interested in seeing it, please drop me a line!

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whoops, a bit tardy

i completely forgot to update after last week’s meeting. sorry!

we ended up breaking a side skirt on the car. check out my other blog KOF ‘98 for photos. that was the major event. the FI meeting, on the other hand, wasn’t as good as the others have been so far. it seemed like there wasn’t very much energy in the room (energy that is usually supplied by adeo, who wasn’t in attendance this session), and the presenters seemed unprepared.

we had a very interesting chat (rather, i would say we all “shot the shit”) with bryan thatcher after the meeting. he told us crazy stories about his trips to vegas, getting pwnt by a bouncer at a bar, and other shenanigans (some involving dr. werner vogels, who you wouldn’t expect to be involved in such crazy things). he bought us all drinks after. thanks!

we have an investor session coming up on 7 december. hopefully richard and i are prepared (and hopefully we’ll be able to pitch). our fingers are crossed that we get some sort of funding by the end of the program!

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