Braintree is not a great example of a company that "didn't take VC." According to Crunchbase they raised a $34 million series A round and a $35 million series B round. BigCommerce also raised a $15 million series A round and a $20 million series B round.

The article about us was written in March of 2011, before we accepted funding. We were bootstrapped for 4 years.

Yes, correct, people keep making this mistake. 37s only accidentally featured Shopify who took seed money, but they corrected it and removed them from the roll once it was pointed out.

Perhaps she meant ſlashdot.

I realize this is a subtle point but I think the more accurate verb in this case is mandate rather than provide. I.e. countries don't provide maternity/paternity leave; they require employers to provide it.

It depends both the point of view and the country:

* to employees, countries provide parental or paternity leave, that this is through a mandate on the employer is an implementation detail

* a number of countries pay (either in part or in full) for leaves through their social security system, the employer involvement (aside from "normal" social charges and not having the employee during the leave) may well be nil

That list is a bit out of date: http://gigaom.com/2012/07/09/github-finally-raises-funding-1...

The last 2 sound good.

Really? "Nerds?" I think the word you're looking for is "experts."

Do they have a competitor whose angle is customer-powered support? I don't know anything about this business, but this sounds like a response to a competitor.

I think the competitor they're addressing in this case is tossing up a forum and calling that support. A competitor is not always another business.

They are working to create a distinction between their service and a service like GetSatisfaction.

GetSat and UserVoice are seen as competitors (even though they're really not). Also, the submitter is the CEO of UserVoice.

Yes, I am the CEO of UserVoice, I did submit this post and I approve this message. :)

"it's hard to determine which course of study is most infested with cheating. But I'd say education is the worst."

This isn't especially surprising considering that education students have the second lowest GRE scores of any academic field. (The lowest being public administrators.)

I'm not really sure how that follows. Was there some established link between GRE scores and ethics?

I suspect it has as much to do with the following requirements:

1) A degree that is take-home essay heavy. 2) Very vocational -- the goal being the degree, not the learning.

I'd expect business and law schools to be high on the list too, although maybe the dynamic is somewhat different for professional schools.

Suggested link is lack of brains, not lack of scruples - remember the shadow scholar's list of reasons includes 1 group that is simply too stupid to handle the work.

This would imply a large variance of ability in the group, not a lower average GRE score. Although it could be speculated that as the GRE score regresses to the mean (of the general population), the variance likely increases.

No. May I ask, out of ignorance, why that is relevant? I suspect it's not just a "You're not doing anything about it so you have no right to complain," sort of thing and actually something much more relevant to the conversation, like "If you went, you'd see that the deck is stacked against mom-and-pop shops" or something like that. However, I can't guess what you're thinking and would like to know more.

Because bribing politicians to make the zones in your favor is a great business to be in.

Never assume the politicians ever do anything for you, except when it benefit themselfs.

Odd. There are on Yahoo image search:

http://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images;_ylt=A9G_bDiWzT...