In 3 years I will move to US and apply to YC, but that's forever away. I want to start doing now. Is there a checklist, or a blueprint, or a list of topics, or a list of books that you can recommend that will cover the most important/basic/low-level aspects of building a company? What should I be thinking about? I'm looking for the backbone; I can work on figuring out the proper shape of what I'm building along the w…
1) No specific advice--we fund lots of companies whose products target far-away markets and are particularly interested in doing so. The only different question we might ask you is "How will you handle being away from your users for 3 months?" 2) We have funded companies that have raised more than $10 million, and they've said they still got a lot of value out of YC. If anything, it's usually the existing investors t…
Wow, that would be great! Please, let us know if we can help in any way during your visit. Lots of interesting things for you to see in the Brazilian startup ecosystem. We are close to São Paulo (where Embraer, the 3rd largest airplane manufacturer in the world is located). Regards
That is my home town! What do you guys do? I currently live in Campinas but would love to know Startups in SJC!
1. Would / will you ever consider opening an East Coast branch? I understand all the "stuff" about why SV is great for startups, but there will always be people who can't /won't get up and travel completely to the other side of the country for an extended period of time. And while the EC might not be the startup hotbed that SV area is, it's quite clear that there is a LOT of startup activity and some great startups b…
1. Never say never, but no current plans (and honestly, it might make more sense to do something outside the US next). The hardest part would be convincing some of our partners to move out there, or finding new ones we could train out here first. 2. Not ready to talk about specific areas, but I promise they are interesting ones :) It will be super super easy for our researchers to collaborate with outsider researcher…
> it might make more sense to do something outside the US next
I hope it's not UK. Both UK and France, as well as a few Nordic countries are starting to become very anti-privacy/anti-security. I don't think it would be "safe" to start there in the long term.
Hey Sam! A question about your career path. Can you think of a specific point in time when you made the decision to focus more on the business side of things and less on writing code? If so, can you describe why you made that decision?
In the very early days of Loopt, I sat down with @kogir and Alok and said "ok, who is going to do what?" I was definitely not the best coder for large projects on the team, although I can crush either of them in topcoder competitions 10 times out of 10 :D, and I seemed the best at the 'business' stuff, so I focused on that.
Sam, in regards to the YC research, do you actively go out to recruit scientists or do they have to come to YC to apply? Can you give a little bit more details on the recruitment process?
I have a friend who's a physicist working on graphene and he would really like to apply.
Hi Sam, I am from India, do you accept Indian startups? If so do you have the rule of minimum two founders? Do you need the startup to have a product first? Also what do you recommend for a person wanting to start a company, I have an idea which seems good, but right now I do a job and can't sort of jump to YC, I'd like to do it sometime later though. Any thoughts?
I think you mentioned somewhere that you are aiming for early-career researchers, not so much for established group leaders. Being an early-career researcher myself (postdoc), my first thought was that your program could easily turn out to be a trap. At first, it looks like a fantastic opportunity because freedom and independence, etc. However, I'm sure that you are looking for high risk / high reward projects. So there is, by definition, a very real possibility that some of your funded projects will fail. What happens with the PIs of those projects? It will be very hard for them to return to a more traditional career stream in academia because they will lack a strong publication record and teaching experience. Researchers are in this respect different from start-up founders, because a failed start-up is not the end of the world and you can start over again. In contrast to that, there are usually no second chances in academia, at least not at that career stage. So it seems that you are asking people to stake everything on one card. My question is: How are you going to manage the individual career risks associated with this approach to science funding?