soneill

I run a startup based in New Orleans, and was offered a chance to tag along on a trip to San Francisco for a few days (August 8th-10th) which I jumped on as a chance to look at a far more established start-up community. I've never been to SF, so as an entrepreneurially-minded person, is there anything going on in town that stretch that I could take advantage of? More generally, are there any companies or incubators with an open door sort-of policy that I should check out? This come together rather rapidly for me so I didn't get a chance to do any advance planning, so any advice would be appreciated.

I have a startup (www.couchster.com) approaching its public launch. All our CSS is custom, we're not using a CMS, but as the developer who designed all that CSS is not an expert, there are some design issues that need to be resolved prior to launch. I've been getting quotes from a large number of designers to overhaul the site (adapting it to a responsive design and fixing the various bugs we've run across so far), and the gap between the domestic and foreign options is dramatic. I'm typically loath to use foreign developers, simply out of quality concerns, but given the limited scale of work here and the fact they'll be working off an existing set of code, I'm not sure how great the downside is here. So how about it HN, how risky is it to outsource this kind of project to a foreign developer?