9781422270455

he was never allowed to work on these products directly, since he didn’t have the right background to do it. With his girlfriend’s encouragement, he bid goodbye to Google and said hello to his dream of starting his own company. Getting a startup off the ground, however, is incredibly hard, and he had trouble finding those all-important investment dollars to make his new company, Cold Brew Labs, a success. As it happened, luck found him in the form of Paul Sciarra, a friend from college who was living in New York. TOTE One of the first projects the two worked on was Tote, an iPhone application that allowed users to look up any product they wanted from their phones. At the time, nothing like it existed. Silbermann, however, encountered two major problems while working on Tote. Firstly, he needed to index every single item he could get his hands on, so he had to go to retail stores to catalog everything that could be found in the store individually. There were thousands of items in each location, and he was doing all the hard work alone while Sciarra was on the other side of the country. The second problem was getting his app released to the public. All iPhone applications needed to be reviewed by Apple before they were made available in the application store. Meanwhile, the money he had saved from working with Google was dwindling, and investors were unwilling to put money into a company that hadn’t really accomplished anything yet. After a few months of hard work, it was clear that Tote was not going to work, so they abandoned the idea.

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Story of a Startup