I just took this photo. I’ll tell you about it later.

–Noah Kalina, referring to the iconic wedding photo he took of Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan

With a wedding ring on his finger and his company public, is Mark Zuckerberg ready to make Facebook produce more profits, not just more social connections?

His fanfare-less marriage to long-time girlfriend Priscilla Chan this weekend would seem to indicate he won’t be getting too distracted by family life. But just before Facebook IPO’d on Friday, he announced on stage that “Our mission isn’t to be a public company.”

As the young CEO enters this next phase of his life, he faces perhaps his greatest challenge yet: building something that betters our lives while still bringing home the bacon.

The business of social networking has never been Zuckerberg’s strongest suit. In fact, beyond his backyard wedding ceremony and a townhall discussion with President Barack Obama, you’re unlikely to see the CEO in a suit. That’s partly why one of his smartest moves was bringing on Google biz wiz Sheryl Sandberg as his COO.

But no one understands the future of social quite like Zuckerberg. His uncanny ability to figure out what we want from Facebook before we do has spawned the news feed and other features critical to the site’s enduring success. What Facebook the public company needs now is for Zuckerberg to aim that foresight towards making money.

Honestly, that’s the saddest part of Facebook’s IPO — that such a pioneer of human connection would have to fracture his attention to pore over profit-loss statements.

This is the man who brought us ambient intimacy, the feeling of being closer to everyone we know thanks to indirect communication. Facebook and its promising new auto-translation features, is fostering friendships between countries with deep cultural divides. These are the kinds of things the world needs Mark Zuckerberg working on.

But now Facebook has shareholders it’s responsible to. They’ll want him looking for aggressive new ways to monetize that come to fruition fast. Don’t expect Zuckerberg to strangle users with ads, though.

With any luck, you’ll hardly be able to tell what he’s up to when it comes to increasing revenue. It will be a natural side effect of how Facebook works. Such as that all those news stories, songs, and videos you auto-share to the news feed aren’t just content to show your friends. They’re going to power ad targeting based on what you do, not just what you Like.

Mark and Priscilla have just forged one of the strongest connections of all (congratulations, seriously). They’re starting the Zuckerberg family, a lifelong journey.

And the journey to Facebook’s earnings growing to reflect its valuation will be a long one too. It will take the visionary’s focus, but investors, press, employees, and the rest should be patient. Just because you don’t see the future of Facebook’s business right now doesn’t mean it hasn’t been dreamed up. This is Mr. Zuckerberg we’re talking about, after all.

[Image Credit: AP Photo]

Editor’s note: Dan Scholnick is a General Partner at Trinity Ventures where he invests in early stage cloud computing and consumerized IT companies such as New Relic, dotCloud, StackMob, Cloudscaling, and Loggly. You can read more about Dan at the Trinity Ventures website or follow him on Twitter @dschol. He is not an investor in Facebook, though he wishes he were.

Judging by many of the headlines on Friday, you might think that Facebook’s IPO was a miserable failure.  The Wall Street Journal declared, “Facebook’s IPO Sputters,” and our very own TechCrunch declared that bankers were “struggling” to keep the share price up. Nevermind that it was the highest ever IPO valuation and one of the largest sums of money ever raised by a U.S. company. According to the pundits, what really matters is that the stock price didn’t increase in value–or “pop”–post IPO and is being propped up by banks. Taking bets on whether an IPO will “pop” provides entertaining fodder to help pundits promote their interests, but it misses the point. This view represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose and economics of an IPO. By the correct measures, the Facebook IPO was a resounding success. Let me explain why.

1. The best IPOs maximize capital raised by the company while minimizing dilution for existing shareholders and employees. An IPO is a capital raise for the company in the same way that a seed round or a Series A is a capital raise for an early stage startup. Simply stated, the success case is that the company raises as much money as it can at the highest price the market will bear. Anything less means that the company has less money to invest in itself and existing employees and shareholders are taking more dilution than necessary. No “pop” means finding the market clearing price for the stock, a strong signal that the company got the best deal it possibly could. It’s hard to imagine that Facebook could have raised more money at a higher price.

2. The best IPOs minimize the fees paid and value transferred to third parties. Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg did a masterful job orchestrating the IPO so that the value went to the company, not the bankers and their clients. The bankers get a fee for marketing the stock, generally a percentage of the total money raised, which in Facebook’s case was a lot. How hard could that be when investors all over the world are clamoring to “like” Facebook? The banks will make an astonishing $176 million on the IPO for doing arguably not a lot. That said, even though the banks will collect a lot of money, Facebook negotiated them down on fees. Historically, bankers have gotten a 7% fee for tech IPOs. Facebook paid just over 1%.

The lack of a “pop” means that Facebook didn’t needlessly give up value to third parties. When a stock “pops”, the people who profit are the clients of the investment banks, usually large institutional investors and wealthy individuals who were lucky enough to get access to IPO shares. Bankers often underprice IPOs on purpose so that their clients are guaranteed to make money. What did those investors do to deserve an instantaneous profit? While those lucky few laugh all the way to the bank, employees and shareholders end up worse off because they’re taking more dilution or because they have less money to grow the business (or both). In the case of a company as highly valued as Facebook, even a small percentage “pop” would represent an enormous amount of money the company could have otherwise raised.

(While there’s lots of talk of sad bankers having to prop up the stock, don’t feel bad for them; bankers are good at making money. They’re just making use of the greenshoe, a complex mechanism that allows them to buy up the issuer’s stock on the public market without taking any price risk, thereby creating more demand. This means they can prop up the stock without having to spend any money. Rest assured, that support will go away the minute it becomes unprofitable for the banks. In the meantime, they get their $176 million deal fee, not to mention all the commissions they get on stock trades. One analyst estimated that the banks made $8 million in trading fees on Friday alone!)

3. The best investments are determined over months and years, not hours and days. So what about the investors who bought in at the IPO who are at break-even or, heaven forbid, are underwater come next week? Well, presumably they’re investing in the IPO for the same reason that VCs invest in early stage companies–belief in the long term potential of the business. When this is the case, everyone wins. The company has a shareholder base that doesn’t pressure it to make short-sighted decisions and those like minded investors don’t care about short-term share price movements. Anyone investing in an IPO (or a private company for that matter) looking for a “pop” is trying to predict short term market behavior. That’s just fine, but it’s a high class form of gambling. Investing is risky business, particularly when it’s based on factors that are impossible to understand. I’m guessing that many of those IPO investors are bullish on Facebook’s future. Any company that controls online distribution for nine hundred million people and counting has got to be pretty valuable. I’d put my money on that.

The speaker schedule for TechCrunch’s Disrupt NYC conference has been set for a while now, but three brand new presenters were just added to the lineup: The winners announced earlier today at the finale of this past weekend’s 24 hour Disrupt 2012 Hackathon, Thingscription, PoachBase, and PractiKhan.

Since the winning apps were so seriously awesome — and we have a very, very small sadistic bent (most of these people had not slept for at least 24 hours at this point, so a video interview with bright lights was especially fun) — we pulled aside all three winning teams for interviews with TechCrunch TV backstage.

Embedded above you can see our chat with the people who built the Hackathon’s first place winner, ThingScription, a platform to let people get subscriptions for deliveries of potentially any consumer good.

And in the videos below, you’ll first find our interviews with three of the five-person team that built the second-place Hackathon winner PoachBase, a web app for finding the most poach-able potential hires in the tech industry. Below that is the developer behind the third-place winner PractiKhan, an app that lets teachers create online lessons and tests utilizing content from Khan Academy.

Stanford has been a hotbed of startup activity for decades, and it’s not just the engineering department. It’s student-run organizations like the Business Association of Stanford Entrepreneurial Students (BASES) program. And the group, which has been instrumental in promoting startup activity at the university for the last 15 years, will be awarding $150,000 in prizes to participants from four different funding competitions this Tuesday.

It will put on the BASES Finale, which brings together four different funding competitions for one full-day event. From 10:00 am to 7:00 pm at the Arrillaga Alumni Center, groups will present as part of the E-Challenge, Social E-Challenge, Product Showcase, and Forge program.

A total of $150,000 will be up for grabs, with $50,000 in prizes being offered for the E-Challenge, Social E-Challenge, and Product Showcase. (Forge participants will automatically be entered into the Product Showcase.) The BASES Finale is being sponsored by the likes of Sequoia Capital, New Enterprise Associates, Perkins Cole, Accel Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Morgenthaler, and others, with the firms also providing judges for the contests.

BASES is expecting a good mix of students, entrepreneurs, and investors to show up for the event, which will also have a keynote by Alfred Lin, of Sequoia Capital (formerly Chairman and COO/CFO of Zappos). Last year, the BASES Finale drew between 400 and 500 attendees, according to Kevin Xu, Chief Branding Officer (CBO) at BASES.

For more details on the event and to see an agenda, you can click here. And if you’d like to register and attend, go to 150kfinale.eventbrite.com.

[Image via Flickr/Jill Clardy]

Editor’s note: This guest post is written by Derek Andersen, who is the founder of StartupGrindand Vaporware Labs, and is a former entertainment development manager at Electronic Arts.

Paypal created a cost effective way to safely accept payments 10 years ago, but the web has changed dramatically and accepting payments has not. Enter Stripe, a company that in my opinion is going to get very influential over the next few years. At a recent Startup Grind event I interviewed 24-year old Irish co-founder Patrick Collison who has raised $18MM from Sequoia Capital and others. Patrick is leading a company poised to completely disrupt the online payment industry starting with your website.

Background

Patrick has the most valuable of Valley technology skillsets. He’s a technical prodigy having won numerous prestigious awards including Ireland’s 41st Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition in 2005, a national science competition which boasts hundreds of submissions each year from the country’s brightest young scientists. But he also has the personality and presence to be a leader and CEO. His two brothers are equally impressive. John is one of Stripe’s co-founders not to mention a Harvard dropout and one of the first engineers at Auctomatic. His youngest brother, Tommy, is a teenage blogger and writer that probably has more Twitter followers than most of us.

Y Combinator and Paul Graham

Patrick holds the distinction of literally being the face of Y Combinator. He’s the skinny red headed guy you see on the front of their website. While attending MIT at age 18, he and his brother decided to build a better version of eBay. After applying to YC they merged with Kulveer and Harjeet Taggar to build Auctomatic. They moved to an apartment in San Francisco, raised angel funding, and went to work. After launching and getting initial user traction, the company was acquired by Live Current Media and the founders moved to Vancouver to build the product. From start to finish the company’s pre-acquisition life span was just 10-months. Stripe was also eventually funded by YC.

Patrick said that YC’s founder network is one of its most valuable assets. “Having all these other people building startups and having them want to help us because we were a fellow YC company, that was super valuable for us.” He added that perhaps the greatest advantage to YC is that,  “Paul and the (other) partners are just really smart. There is no question that they are very top tier.” Because of the sheer quantity of deals and companies that they interact with combined with those smarts, they’re able to offer both specific and strategic feedback that is second to none.

What makes Paul special? According to Patrick, Paul Graham is able to make surprising ideas and connections that other investors and advisors simply aren’t able to make. What isn’t Paul Graham so good at? Patrick says, “He’s not good at feigning interest.”

Solving Hard Problems

 “The most striking example I know of schlep blindness is Stripe, or rather Stripe’s idea. For over a decade, every hacker who’d ever had to process payments online knew how painful the experience was. Thousands of people must have known about this problem. And yet when they started startups, they decided to build recipe sites, or aggregators for local events. Why? Why work on problems few care much about and no one will pay for, when you could fix one of the most important components of the world’s infrastructure? Because schlep blindness prevented people from even considering the idea of fixing payments.
Probably no one who applied to Y Combinator to work on a recipe site began by asking “should we fix payments, or build a recipe site?” and chose the recipe site. Though the idea of fixing payments was right there in plain sight, they never saw it, because their unconscious mind shrank from the complications involved.”

- Paul Graham, SchlepBlindness.

John and Patrick first started working on Stripe in early 2010.  The inspiration came when Patrick, who was working on a few side projects, kept complaining about how difficult it was to accept payments on the web.  The two quickly developed a simple solution and within 2-weeks they had processed their first transaction.  Over the next 6-months they showed it to friends, watched people interact with it, and iterated as fast as they could.

In the beginning they weren’t sure how big the market was or whether they could accomplish their goal of addressing issues like fraud and non-US payments in a user-friendly way.  They originally partnered with a payments company, but quickly realized that the only way to control the entire experience was to control all aspects of the process. That’s when they brought everything in house.

By the fall of 2010, Stripe had become their full-time jobs.  They thought about bootstrapping it, as they had to that point, but soon realized that as a payment startup they would need the kind of institutional credibility that only a top-notch investor could provide.

“Even Turkeys Can Fly In A High Wind”

Stripe’s most requested feature is to expand beyond the United States, which is something he assured me they’re working on. The team also recently moved from Palo Alto to San Francisco to accommodate their rapid expansion.

To date the company’s growth has been completely organic. Before they publicly launched last fall they had more than 1,000 developers on a waiting list and have grown almost exclusively by positive word of mouth. For those wondering why they haven’t heard of Stripe, it’s because true to Steve Blank’s Customer Development process, they have planned to turn on the marketing as soon as they were sure the product was right. Quoting from a Kleiner Perkins founder Eugene Kleiner saying, “Even turkeys can fly in a high wind.” Watch the full interview here.

As AllThingsD.com reported several days ago they would, Yahoo and Alibaba Group have finally reached an agreement for the Silicon Valley Internet giant to sell back half its stake in the Chinese Web company in a $7 billion deal.

The taxable shares sale agreement, which is now being approved by both boards, is part of a larger and more complex arrangement, which will also include a multibillion-dollar stock buyback by Yahoo and an eventual IPO of Alibaba.

And, perhaps most importantly, it will bring to an end perhaps the longest running global cat fight in Internet history, in which the long-time partners have bickered over the terms of their relationship for years now.

It’s mostly been over how they could get to the transaction they should be announcing later tonight (or morning in Hong Kong, which it is there now). While it could fall apart at the last minute, that is highly unlikely at this point.

[UPDATE: The Yahoo board has approved the deal unanimously, said sources, so it is done done.]

[UPDATE 2: Yahoo and Alibaba both confirmed the deal in a joint press release, which is below.]

Thus, after many failed attempts to strike a tax-free deal — also involving Yahoo’s Japanese partner, SoftBank — collapsed, the pair have finally settled on a taxable deal, which could net Yahoo upwards of $4 billion.

The transaction values Alibaba at $35 billion and is subject to a number of funding issues that could change the value of the deal.

But here is the overall situation, as I previously reported:

Yahoo is set to sell half of its roughly 40 percent stake in Alibaba, in a taxable deal. The transaction is likely to value that portion of Yahoo’s holdings at about $7 billion — or 20 percent of Alibaba’s $35 billion enterprise valuation. Alibaba is in the midst of raising capital to fund the sale.

After taxes of upward of 35 percent are paid on the long-term gains — remember that Yahoo bought the now-lucrative Alibaba stake for just $1 billion in 2005 — the company will use the funds to buy back its own shares. That stock has been caught in the mid-teens doldrums for quite a while, so this could help boost shares significantly.

A shareholder dividend is also being considered by the Yahoo board, but it is unlikely. It’s also not clear if some of the cash will be held back for acquisitions by Yahoo, sources added, but it is also unlikely.

As part of the deal, sources said, medium-term incentives have been put in place for Alibaba to move forward with a public offering, which sources stressed is without the contractual obligation or a time frame. Alibaba execs have already been publicly indicating such a direction recently, but this will put them more firmly on that path.

Although there are no plans to go firm public as yet, the IPO incentive revolves around several terms, including right to buy back half remaining stake, which expires in December of 2015. As I previously reported, Yahoo will be required to sell back half of the 20 percent remaining stake upon IPO and the other half after that if Alibaba goes public in the time frame agreed to.

Lastly, the Alibaba voting rights for both Yahoo and SoftBank are much diminished in the new deal, according to sources, to under 50 percent.

Translation: Alibaba CEO Jack Ma is now in the driver’s seat completely.

Once close, the pair have been wrangling over the large Yahoo ownership, which Ma has been trying to dislodge in a variety of nice and not-so-nice ways. It has resulted in a number of very public disagreements.

That included a nasty back-and-forth over its Alipay unit with now-fired CEO Carol Bartz, threats of takeover of Yahoo with private equity firms and, more recently, making friendly with its just-ousted CEO, Scott Thompson.

Those talks with him in recent weeks, which included a visit to China by Thompson, led to the new deal, which was negotiated primarily between Yahoo’s CFO Tim Morse and legal head Mike Callahan and Ma and Alibaba’s Joe Tsai.

The talks continued even as Thompson was suddenly engulfed in a controversy over a fake computer science degree on his resume that quickly led to his departure from Yahoo on Sunday.

Ironically, the error was first discovered by activist shareholder Daniel Loeb, who is now voting on the deal as a newly named director of Yahoo, after successfully helping to oust Thompson.

He owns almost six percent of Yahoo.

The final decision to approve the deal was in the hands of a very new board of Yahoo, which has been drastically reshaped in recent weeks. It met to decide on the deal this weekend.

While the deal with Alibaba is finally nearing an end, Yahoo’s talks to sell its 33 percent stake in Yahoo! Japan is not part of this agreement. That’s due to what Thompson had called a “valuation gap,” which sources said is still an outstanding issue.

New interim CEO Ross Levinsohn has not been involved in the Alibaba deal in any significant way. But he certainly will benefit from its halo effect, if approved, especially given that it will likely boost Yahoo shares.

It also puts Yahoo in a unique new situation, in which it must sink or swim more largely based on the value of its troubled core business.

That could mean a lot of things, including the eventual sale of the company, whose most lucrative asset recently — its Alibaba holding — will matter much less.

As soon as I get the press release, I will post it here, but no one is commenting, despite the inevitable happy ending to this long-running story.

[And here's the press release finally:

Yahoo! and Alibaba Reach Agreement on Comprehensive Plan for Alibaba Stake Agreement Realizes Significant Value, Immediate Liquidity and Path to Future Monetization

Yahoo! Board Increases Share Repurchase Plan by US$5 Billion

May 20, 2012 -- Sunnyvale, California and Hangzhou, China -- Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) and Alibaba Group Holding Limited today announced they have entered into a definitive agreement for a staged and comprehensive value realization plan for Yahoo!'s stake in Alibaba.

The first step is the repurchase by Alibaba of up to one-half of Yahoo!'s stake, or approximately 20% of Alibaba's fully-diluted shares. The purchase price will be based on a valuation of Alibaba to be established through equity financings that Alibaba intends to undertake to finance the transaction, subject to a floor valuation of approximately US$35 billion. The agreement includes substantial financial incentives for Alibaba to raise the additional equity at a valuation higher than US$35 billion. At the minimum price and assuming the initial repurchase of the full 20% stake, Yahoo! would receive from Alibaba consideration of approximately US$7.1 billion, composed of at least US$6.3 billion in cash proceeds and up to US$800 million in newly-issued Alibaba preferred stock.

The agreement also establishes a framework for Yahoo! to monetize its remaining interest in Alibaba in stages. First, at the time of an initial public offering (IPO) of Alibaba in the future, Alibaba will be required either to repurchase one-quarter of Yahoo!'s current stake at the IPO price or allow Yahoo! to sell those shares in the IPO. Second, following such an IPO, Yahoo! has registration rights and rights to marketing support from Alibaba to enable Yahoo! to dispose of its remaining shares, at times of Yahoo!’s choosing following a customary lock-up period.

This agreement is a result of extensive discussions between the two parties and a comprehensive review of both taxable and tax-efficient alternatives. Yahoo! and Alibaba believe this agreement to be the best path to align incentives and maximize value for shareholders of both companies and it paves the way for Alibaba to achieve future public market liquidity for all of Alibaba's shareholders. For Yahoo!, the agreement provides for a staged exit over time, balancing near-term liquidity and return of cash to shareholders with the opportunity to participate in future value appreciation of Alibaba.

"Today's agreement provides clarity for our shareholders on a substantial component of Yahoo!’s value and reaffirms the significance of our relationship with Alibaba," said Ross Levinsohn, Interim CEO of Yahoo!. "We look forward to continued collaboration with the Alibaba team on business initiatives as we explore joint opportunities for growth and benefit from Alibaba's future. I want to thank Jack Ma, Joe Tsai and the Alibaba team, as well as Tim Morse, Michael Callahan and our Yahoo! team for their dedication in achieving this successful outcome."

"This transaction opens a new chapter in our relationship with Yahoo!," said Jack Ma, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Alibaba Group. "I look forward to working with Ross Levinsohn and the Yahoo! team as Alibaba builds China's leading e-commerce company. Yahoo!'s global audience reach will provide attractive partnership opportunities for Alibaba to explore markets outside of China. The transaction will establish a balanced ownership structure that enables Alibaba to take our business to the next level as a public company in the future."

"We look forward to delivering the proceeds of the near-term transaction to our shareholders, and to the further enhancement of value and the additional monetization in the future that this agreement enables," said Timothy R. Morse, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of Yahoo!.

In addition to the share repurchase, the companies have also agreed to amend their existing technology and intellectual property licensing agreement. Among other things, this amendment will result in Yahoo! granting Alibaba a transitional license to continue to operate Yahoo! China under the Yahoo! brand for up to four years, while restrictions on Yahoo!'s ability to make other investments in China will be terminated. Alibaba will make an upfront lump sum royalty payment of US$550 million to Yahoo! and continuing royalty payments for up to four years. In addition, Alibaba will license certain patents to Yahoo!. Upon closing of the repurchase transaction, the Alibaba shareholders' agreement will be amended so that the parties’ respective rights will be commensurate with the parties’ post-closing level of ownership in Alibaba. Yahoo! will continue to be represented on Alibaba’s board of directors with the right to appoint one of four existing directors.

Yahoo! intends to return substantially all of the after-tax cash proceeds to shareholders following the closing of the transaction. While the form of the return of capital to shareholders has not yet been finalized, Yahoo!'s board has increased Yahoo!'s share buyback authorization by US $5 billion concurrently with this transaction.

The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions. Alibaba will be required to close the repurchase with respect to at least one-quarter of Yahoo!’s current stake in Alibaba regardless of the amount of financing raised, and up to one-half of Yahoo!'s current stake if it obtains the requisite financing. Alibaba intends to finance the repurchase through a combination of its own cash resources, debt, equity and equity-linked financing. The transaction is expected to close within approximately six months.

UBS Investment Bank acted as lead financial advisor to Yahoo! and Allen & Company LLC and Goldman Sachs & Co. also served as financial advisors. Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP acted as lead legal counsel to Yahoo! and Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP also acted as legal counsel. Munger, Tolles, & Olson LLP acted as legal counsel to the Yahoo! Board of Directors. Credit Suisse acted as lead financial advisor to Alibaba and Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz acted as lead legal counsel to Alibaba. Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer LLP acted as counsel to Alibaba on certain financing and Hong Kong legal matters and Fenwick & West LLP acted as counsel to Alibaba on intellectual property matters.

]

This week we recorded live from the show floor at Disrupt NYC. We sat through 24 hours straight of hot-rod hacking at the Hackathon and now we’re preparing for the main show and, most important, the brand new Hardware Alley where we’ll have loads of great hardware start-ups for you guys to check out.

In this episode we talk about Disrupt, the new EVO 4G LTE, and the rumors of the four-inch iPhone. We also talk about the “thumb touches anywhere on the screen” iPhone chestnut, how good the battery life is on some Android phones, the late night Nerf wars at the hackathon, and my horrible sausage fingers.

Tune in today and look for another episode next week from the show floor.

Disrupt NYC 2012 begins in approximately 12 hours (tickets here).

But it’s been two years since Soluto, the software that will make your computer simply run better, took home the Disrupt Cup at the TC Disrupt NYC Battlefield in 2010. The company entered the competition with a total of $7.8 million, and after walking away with the $50,000 round, secured another $10.2 million in Series B from Index Ventures for a total of $18 million in funding under their belts.

It’s been a wild ride, starting with about 400 users as the then-stealth company stepped on stage, and only a few days later they were dealing with hundreds of thousands of users. In fact, CEO and co-founder Tomer Dvir said that the platform almost had trouble dealing with all the data being sent back by the flood of new users.

But, in his own words, “Disrupt is one of the best ways to release.”

Here’s the interview I had with Mr. Dvir in its entirety:

TechCrunch: What was it like to launch your product on stage at Disrupt?

Soluto: The amazing part was that we had about 400 users when we launched. It took a really long time to develop the product because it’s complicated and hardcore. It’s something that sits deep inside the OS. That 400 users was mostly friends and family and people we asked to install the product.

But just one minute after we came off the stage we turned it on, and suddenly were bombarded with quantities of users we couldn’t imagine before that. It was way beyond anything we were prepared for. It’s not just jumping into deep waters, it’s being pulled down into the deep water.

We weren’t really ready for that. We thought we were, but reality struck and we realized we had never learned to scale before. The challenge with our system is that every user’s machine starts sending us data. We were flooded with way more data than we had imagined. We knew that coming to Disrupt would get us some traction, and we expected maybe tens of thousands of users.

It ended up being around 50 times more than that.

It was a pretty awesome experience, launching on stage at Disrupt. We went from being with less than 1,000 users to several hundreds of thousands in a matter of days or maybe a week. We went from being nameless — no one knew what we were doing — to being known. We felt like stars at the show. People got connected to the idea, to the vision.

TechCrunch: You guys obviously won at Disrupt. It’s been two years, so what’s happened since, and how did Disrupt shape the past two years of your company history?

Soluto: I guess we learned what it means to be a company. Without Disrupt, it would have been the same growth but much, much slower. We might have gotten press here or there, but suddenly Disrupt was like a leap. A shortcut. I can’t even estimate how much time and money it would have taken to get to that state as quickly as we did.

Our biggest challenge since then has been scaling. We had to understand how to grow and not gradually, because on Day One it was already crazy.

We wanted to grow the company and get the right people. We got some amazing support, kept developing, and kept progressing and re-writing stuff.

We also had to learn how to answer reporters. We had to accelerate all processes in a company including growing our talent. We were around 20 people at launch, and now we’re at 50 employees.

Outside of the technical part, it was the first touch of the company with the press and blogosphere. The New York Times approached us. Everyone was suddenly approaching us. On Day One we were swimming with the big fish, and dealing with the press was just another thing we had to learn quickly.

TechCrunch: Do you think that winning Disrupt made it easier for you to get funded and/or bring in new talent?

Soluto: Winning or participating won’t get you funded, but it gets you the exposure you need to get there. If you have a good company you can get funded, but Disrupt works as a good foot in the door because you aren’t so nameless. VC’s meet a thousand companies a year, and after launching or winning at Disrupt you become one of the more interesting hundred or fifty, instead of just one of thousands.

TechCrunch: It seems that launching your product on a stage at a huge conference like Disrupt might be a little intimidating. Were you worried or do you think it served the company well?

Soluto: It may not fit everyone, but it was an awesome experience for us. There are several advantages.

The first is that you have a concrete deadline. It’s a good thing for a company to have something you can’t move. You can always move PR and even a TechCrunch post, but Disrupt is a freaking competition which people are trying to get into and people have bought tickets to. It’s going to happen no matter what, so you need to be ready on time.

In terms of timing, we came close to being able to release a product a few months before Disrupt and then we heard about the conference and it all aligned. It was perfect.

I don’t know if I would postpone a release for three months if it wasn’t the perfect opportunity.

Getting an on-stage launch also sends a company into the extreme. It forces you to be ready for an unexpected amount of users.

There’s also the advice you’re getting. Having Marissa Mayer and Michael Arrington see your product and give feedback, and sometimes tear it apart, it only pushes the entire company to get some awesome results on time.

It’s one of the best ways to release, I can’t think of anything to compare.

TechCrunch: I find the Battlefield to be intensely emotional. Obviously a lot of good came out of it for Soluto, but how did you feel up there on stage?

Soluto: All of us are going to remember it as a once-in-a-lifetime experience. It took two and a half years to release the product. Working so long and putting it out into the world in a single day is an amazing experience.

TechCrunch: Care to share any user/download numbers with us?

Soluto: Well, currently we have two products. The original product was a local download, and since launch we’ve hit 3 million downloads. We’re not sharing numbers around our web product right now, but it’s been only four and a half months and we’re definitely impressed with the numbers. We’ve really had no paid marketing, ads, or PR, so we’re certainly pleased.

TechCrunch: What advice would you give to people about to present their products at Disrupt NYC 2012?

Soluto: Acknowledge that you’re sitting in front of senior people that see good and bad companies. You have to be humble. You’re listening to people who have a shallow view of the product, but they have instincts and insights, so you must be in listening mode.

Don’t think you have all the answers. It’s fine if you don’t. Try to give your insight but really, really listen and see if there’s something they might say which is smart. Some of the smartest people around are the ones who listen.

We saw many companies present before us and they were looking for fast answers. We thought about that and felt that it wasn’t the way. Listen, be open, and make sure they understand the service and product that you’ve shown and then it’s up to you to think about the different angles.

Disrupt NYC is set to be one of our biggest shows yet, with returns from Michael Arrington and MG Siegler, along with a variety of big names like Marissa Mayer, Sarah Tavel, Fred Wilson, and David Lee and more. It’s going to be huge.

If you’re interested in checking out Disrupt and/or the Hackathon yourself, tickets are still on sale here and info on the Hackathon can be found here. Companies who want to join the Battleground can apply for the last remaining spots in Startup Alley. You can find the full agenda here.