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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In this interview, I had the opportunity to sit down with Dirk Morris, Co-Founder & CTO of Untangle. Untangle provides an open source, integrated network gateway solution for small businesses, which includes spam and spyware blocking, web filtering, anti-virus protection, firewall, VPN, and numerous other features. These applications are critical for small businesses, but most other solutions on the market are too complex or too expensive to be implemented by small companies with limited budgets and IT expertise.

Untangle integrates all of these existing open source network gateway applications into a single application, which can be run on a single server with a simple user interface. Their entire core offering is free, making it a great solution for small businesses, but they do have a monetization strategy which includes commercial add-ons, such as tech support and server hardware.

Dirk shares about the tremendous opportunities Untangle has had to reach small businesses, largely due to the fact that their entire product offering is free and open source. He also shares about his personal background and career path, which began on the engineering side, but quickly led him to exciting entrepreneurial and business opportunities. He gives some great advice for aspiring entrepreneurs, including how to find and develop relationships with advisers and mentors, which are crucial when starting a company.

Last month, Untangle announced the addition of a couple of new technologies. First was their Re-Router Technology, which allows their software to run in the background on a standard Windows desktop, protecting all of the computers in the network without the use of a dedicated server. OStatic provides a good overview of the benefits of this new technology. They also announced their new “Silver Bullet,” which is a free USB stick that comes pre-loaded with the Re-Router tech, allowing for a quick demo of its capabilities and an easy way to get started. The VAR Guy gives his take on the Silver Bullet here.

Untangle has also worked on initiatives to utilize Linux and open source software to refurbish old computers for use in schools, helping children and minimizing waste…it’s great to see startups who are active in the community!

Below is a demo of the Untangle software:

To check out more, visit the Untangle demo site.

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