Since TalkTech.TV began last May, I’ve had the opportunity to speak with many startup founders & executives who have successfully raised millions in venture capital funding. In each of those interviews, I asked them to share some advice for successful VC negotiations, and have compiled the highlights in this video, showcasing the responses of founders from Pheedo, Engine Yard, Serious Materials, GroundWork, and Untangle. This is particularly relevant in this challenging economy, where funding is less abundant, and only the best innovators and negotiators will succeed in closing rounds.

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In 2007, Disqus received funding from Y Combinator, a prestigious seed-stage startup funding firm. Y Combinator is unique in that they not only provide seed money, but they offer an entire 3-month experience that includes technical, business, and legal advice, as well as introductions to key investors and tech executives.

In Part 2 of this interview, Daniel Ha discusses his experience with YC, sharing his thoughts on what YC looks for in potential candidates, and his secrets for what it takes to get accepted into the program. He covers some of the program highlights, like Demo Day, where YC companies have the opportunity to give presentations in front of investors. He also shares some of the best advice he learned from the program, and emphasizes the incredible value of being a part of the YC alumni community.

Check out a great post by Guy Kawasaki featuring this past summer’s Demo Day at Y Combinator; the post includes lots of pictures that give a feel for the YC culture and showcase the types of companies that they fund.

In addition to covering Y Combinator, Daniel discusses his day-to-day experience as a CEO, and offers his advice on what it takes to succeed as an entrepreneur. He also shares about his background, and his long-time friendship with Disqus Co-Founder Jason Yan, which led them to launch the company together while in college.

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Disqus provides an online service for managing comments and enhancing the discussion on blogs, websites, and applications.  The system provides bloggers and publishers with a threaded conversation and a more defined discussion community, and also provides moderation and spam filtering tools.  On the flip side, readers and commenters can track, manage, and verify their comments across all sites that use Disqus, and can create a profile which includes a “comment blog” with all comments they’ve contributed.  Bloggers and readers can comment and reply on-the-go via email or phone, and since Disqus is hosted separately, comments are unaffected if a website experiences downtime. For more on what Disqus has to offer, check out this list.

In this interview, I had the opportunity to sit down with Daniel Ha, Co-Founder & CEO of Disqus, who shares details on the company’s product, back-end, monetization strategy, and scalability (utilizing Twitter to quantify the impact of downtime!), as well as their techniques for establishing a large user base, which now includes 38,000 websites and 600,000 user profiles.

In addition to the Disqus product, the company is known for their incredible focus on providing support to customers and incorporating their feedback into the product feature set. LouisGray.com has a great post about this.

Tomorrow I’ll be posting Part 2 of this interview, where Daniel talks about his experience as part of the Y Combinator community, and shares his secrets to success with the application process, so be sure to check back for more.

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