Recommend 3 must-read books.
Checkout http://parrotread.com/yc. It has book recommendations from all YC partners, including Sam.
I Am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator. AMA
81–90 of 768 posts
Re: I Am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator. AMA
#82What's the meaning of life?
Re: I Am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator. AMA
#83Will your firm ever go public and trade on an exchange?
Re: I Am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator. AMA
#84can I apply to YC alone or do I have to have a team?
You can definitely apply alone, though we recommend having a cofounder. Startups are very hard, and very emotionally draining, and so it's really helpful to have someone else to share the workload with. That said, we fund solo founders every batch.
>Startups are very hard, and very emotionally draining...
emotional draining is not that much but since you are alone, you do not know 'how' bad a situation is and you kind of overthink it and think its very bad and breakdown. While it really might not be that bad.
Re: I Am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator. AMA
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
How to communicate well. How to think for yourself (and especially, what problems are worth solving that others are ignoring). How to build stuff (and especially, how to get things done instead of just talking about getting things done). How to learn new things quickly.
What do you think are the right tools to get these skills ? Books ? (Which ones ?) University/Online courses ? (Any recommendation ?) Else ?
You might find http://parrotread.com/yc useful. It has book recommendations from all YC partners, including Sam.
Re: I Am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator. AMA
#86Re: I Am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator. AMA
#87What kind of security companies do you look out for? How much importance do you place on technical certifications when it comes to founders in security?
Security is one of the areas we're most interested in, but we leave it to founders to show us the most promising sub-areas. We don't care about technical certifications. I forget which company it was, but some large tech company found that the only negative predictor of success for its employees was technical certifications...
I don't know who that was but will second it.
Re: I Am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator. AMA
#88It's easier to get into YC fellowship. - can you put it that way?
Re: I Am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator. AMA
#89Hi Sam, when I applied to YC a while back (2014 I think), I noticed that the video I posted was looked at once after 12am, and the landing page on my website was opened at something like 1am for 10 seconds. With the amount of applications you guys receive that seems inevitable, but it also seems that you would miss a lot of stuff if the reviewers are checking things well into the night. Have you made some progress on that front since?
Re: I Am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator. AMA
#90When doing a hard tech startup, how can you show traction/product-market-fit to investors before your product is being sold? The cost of going from crude prototype to sellable product can easily be in the 6-figure range, so how do you break this Catch 22?