Summify: Less Stories, More Funding! -
The last few months at Summify have been really groundbreaking and we wanted to share some of the exciting updates with you!
More Funding
We have raised a seed round from a great group of investors and here is the full list is in no particular order:
- Accel Partners, represented by …
(Source: summify)
After our San Francisco November trip, we went back to Romania, where we were luck enough to be approached by the Romanian press and we got to to talk our story and about Summify!
Here’s an article from Forbes Romania, where we talk about Summify, life in Vancouver and the differences between building a dot-com versus a dot-ro:
Next, we got featured on Pro TV, with the headline “They refused salaries of $100,000. They started their own business.” Here’s the video (in Romanian):
I’m very grateful for the chance to tell our story, and I hope more Romanian entrepreneurs will follow in our footsteps and tackle opportunities in the international market!
Featured in Digerati.ro (Romanian) -
The Romanian version of usesthis.com
How I feel every morning…
Summify: Hold on, Summify is back! -
A lot of people have been asking us what have we been up to here in Vancouver in the past couple of months. Well, we’ve been really busy building our new product - a Social News Reader - and we’re finally ready to share it with the world!
As of today we’re starting to send out invites to people…
Woohoo, the new Summify is here!
Like I promised in my previous post, for the whole month of February I ate only vegetarian (meat-free) food every day. It was a very interesting 30 days trial for me, so I want to share my experience.
I’ve wanted to try vegetarian food for quite some time, mainly out of curiosity. My girlfriend and a bunch of other people I know are vegetarian, so I always wondered what I’m missing on.
There weren’t any ethical reasons behind my trial, I only wanted to find out if there are any health benefits to such a diet.
A decisive factor in finally trying out this experiment was that North America is so vegetarian friendly! I know from many restaurant trips together with my girlfriend that in Romania the only vegetarian food you usually find a is a veggie pizza or maybe a Caesar salad.
Here, the situation is completely different. Every single restaurant I’ve been to has at least a few vegetarian dishes. The range of possible food choices is huge, so this made my trial very easy (I easily get bored eating the same thing).
Some examples of vegetarian foods I ate:
… and the list could go on!
This was far from being a scientific trial, so any personal observations and conclusions should be taken with a grain of salt. With that out of the way, here’s what I noticed:
At the end of the trial, I switched back to my regular diet (with meat). The deal breaker for me was that some meat foods are just more tastier than anything vegetarian I’ve tried. There was a benefit to going back to eating meat - it helped me realize all the differences between the two diets and I am now convinced about the health benefits of eating vegetarian.
Consequently, I’m not giving up on this! In the very near future, I want to do a semi-vegetarian (may include fish and sometimes poultry) 30 days trial, maybe that will stick!
We have great news to share with you: Summify is now officially in private beta, starting today, 23rd March 2010! Woohoo!
After weeks of hard work we finally have something that we can share with more people! It took us a full week of “intimate” beta to detect and squash all the major bugs…
Great news, we finally launched our private beta! Please send us feedback!
It has been 2 weeks since we arrived in Vancouver and I must say, these have been some really intense couple of weeks - in a good way!
This comes after the very nerve-wrecking period before departing to Canada when there was so much stuff to do:
Not a short list for only a few weeks, but I somehow squeezed everything in, or at least I tried. :) Luckily that period has passed and I am now living in the beautiful town of Vancouver and working on turning ReadFu into a very succesful web business.
The first two weeks have been an interesting mix of really cool events: meeting with all the other teams, doing a pitching workshop, meeting with Guy Kawasaki, learning about term sheets and incorporating a company, meeting quite a few Romanians, etc., mixed with a lot of practical stuff: recovering from jetlag, finding a house to live in, buying a bed from Ikea, learning how to use the public transit, finding out the good places to eat, etc.
This is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what happened, more details will soon follow on the ReadFu blog. Regarding what’s next, it looks like it’s going to be a really challenging (and fun) journey, and that I’ll learn tons of stuff along the way (and do a lot of mistakes also). It will take total immersion for us to come out of this successfully in the end!
It goes without saying that I’m very excited about this chance we’ve been given. For all intents and purposes, this feels pretty much like hitting the reset button and stepping into a whole new life with endless opportunities!
One more thing… As part of this new life, I’m doing a trial of eating only vegetarian (no meat, not even fish) for the entire month of February. Really curious how this will turn out. :)
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