291–300 of 768 posts
If relationship breakdown between cofounders is the reason for so many company failures, why does YC not proactively solve that by requiring all founders to attend weekly relationship counselling, for which YC pays? Could such a thing prevent more breakups and therefore greatly increase chances of company success? And the cost is pretty small for YC to employ relationship counsellors.
Hey Sam, Any comment regarding Jason Calacanis being banned from YC's upcoming demo day? Jason tweeted[1] his side but didn't know what the YC side of it was and was curious. [1] https://twitter.com/Jason/status/710176806184349696
You've mentioned many times, more so recently, that YC is committed to investing in hard tech problems. When considering companies solving these problems for the next batch, knowing that often times even getting a prototype ready is a massive undertaking, how much chance does one have applying with nothing more than an idea and some research? And the possibility that it won't generate revenue for 5+ years?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In a way we do, in that it's one (of many) examples for someone doing something impressive in the past. We definitely look for founders who have shown some evidence of doing something impressive (and we try to adjust for whatever life circumstances people were born into). But the main reason we don't is that there are important counterexamples in our portfolio, and if we said "we're only going to fund founders from t…
What are some counterexamples? I wasn't suggesting that you should only fund founders from top schools, but that you should select for it (which it sounds like you already do). The pedigrees of some of YC's most successful founders, for anyone who's curious: * Twitch: Yale, MIT * Cruise: MIT, Claremont McKenna * OMGPOP: Princeton * Heroku: UCSD * Airbnb: RISD, Harvard * Dropbox: MIT * Zenefits: Harvard It's interesti…
You mentioned that you are interested in AI. Chris Dixon made an interesting post about how some AI ideas are better suited for bigger companies because of the data and compute needs. http://cdixon.org/2015/02/01/the-ai-startup-idea-maze/amp/ What are your thoughts on what classes of AI problems are better for startups vs. big companies?
Anyway, Chris's article confuses accuracy with capability and is very strictly talking about synchronous AI agents. But I think there is a ton of space for AI related start-ups that don't fall into the trap he describes.
I'm working on a side project that doesn't work in most of the ways he describes (made it at the Launch Hackathon a few weeks ago if you're interested; website should be launched this weekend but this was my submission: http://devpost.com/software/sim).
When YC started, it was so small that PG and Jessica knew everyone's names and could invest a lot of time and effort into making the startups successful. One complaint as YC gets bigger is that there is more "Fast food advice", i.e. there are so many startups that a partner can't hardly remember all of them and we both know that most often than not the devil is in the details. What's YC plan to make sure this doesn't…