Actually there are plenty of people who would do something like that for their friends. I don't know much about the dating scene but I have a number of friends who do dedicate time and money to arrange dates for their friends. I'd say the benefit you get is the satisfaction you gain from helping out a friend.
It's usually because the ".com" version of the domain is taken and the sites cater to a more tech savvy audience. I'm not sure I've seen examples of medium or large companies/services using .io domains. (Exception would be survey.io, but it's a few years old)
As psycr says, it's also a reference to I/O and could also represent 1 and 0.
Agreed - I made the transition away from explicitly coding just over a year ago, and dealing with people, especially recruiting, was definitely harder than anything I'd done before.
One year later, it's only about as hard as programming, but I'm now on to a new thing that's harder than anything I've done before: managing.
It looks like YC is actually shifting to investing in products that have a real way of generating revenue this time. I'm not sure if this is a trend in the whole VC community though.
There are great VCs that spot trends before they are big trends and then there are VCs that miss the boat because they invest when things are already frothy. So buzzwords like "social" and "mobile" happen and then "enterprise" becomes a hot story in the tech press after people get sick of thinking social will be the end all be all of VC investing. The things is VCs are going for 100X exits, so something that generates revenue that doesn't have the potential to be big is just as bad for a VC as a social product that probably won't make revenue anytime soon.
