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I Am Sam Altman, President of YC Group. AMA

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: I Am Sam Altman, President of YC Group. AMA

#141

Post by r0naa »

sama wrote: post #114
r0naa wrote: post #98

Why are you primarily looking for >billion dollars startups? I would wager that if you take a look at an accurate distribution of markets according to potential you would find a magnitude more small/average markets (that are untapped) than billion dollars ones. And similarly, I suspect that the success rate for those "boring" ventures is much higher than the exciting shiny rising stars. Question: Why not optimize for…

1) This is where effectively all of our returns come from. 2) These companies are the most fun to work with. 3) It turns out that it's harder than it sounds to capture the full value of a smaller market for a bunch of reasons, and so the failure rate is much higher than expected. I think the payoff, at least in our case, is well worth it.

>3) It turns out that it's harder than it sounds to capture the full value of a smaller market for a bunch of reasons, and so the failure rate is much higher than expected.

What kind of reasons? Direct me to some resources if there are too many to enumerate

Re: I Am Sam Altman, President of YC Group. AMA

#144

Post by xzion »

Any tips/examples on trying to sell a product that provides ethical/moral benefits but very little/nothing financially?

Some friends and I were throwing around ideas on how to eliminate scalping, a practice we get bitten by. We came up with some solutions that might work, but they don't provide any financial gain for event organisers so I couldn't see them going for it.

Re: I Am Sam Altman, President of YC Group. AMA

#145

Post by ta11 »

sama wrote: post #132
ta11 wrote: post #123

I have applied many times . I now have a patent for a technology that I believe is a disruptor of enormous proportion. I have asked repeatedly to get a few minutes with someone to discuss this technology, because your application process doesn't seem to work for this.

What doesn't work about our process for this?

I have applied again and again and have been rejected each time. I honestly don't mean to be vague but have found that it is very difficult to convey in words. It's a graphical technology that takes just a very brief chat for people to understand. It's a large horizontal departure with wide possibilities. That makes it difficult to explain as a single targeted product

Re: I Am Sam Altman, President of YC Group. AMA

#146

Post by ikeboy »

xzion wrote: post #144

Any tips/examples on trying to sell a product that provides ethical/moral benefits but very little/nothing financially? Some friends and I were throwing around ideas on how to eliminate scalping, a practice we get bitten by. We came up with some solutions that might work, but they don't provide any financial gain for event organisers so I couldn't see them going for it.

You eliminate scalping by charging market prices, so there's no opportunity. Charging less is just a gift to the middlemen. (If you want to give that gift to the people who actually come, charge more and give a rebate inside the event, so scalpers can't collect it.)

Not sure how you're conceptualizing this that makes scalpers harmful, could you elaborate?

Re: I Am Sam Altman, President of YC Group. AMA

#148

Post by electrum »

xzion wrote: post #144

Any tips/examples on trying to sell a product that provides ethical/moral benefits but very little/nothing financially? Some friends and I were throwing around ideas on how to eliminate scalping, a practice we get bitten by. We came up with some solutions that might work, but they don't provide any financial gain for event organisers so I couldn't see them going for it.

Planet Money had a good episode about this: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/06/25/195641030/episo...

Re: I Am Sam Altman, President of YC Group. AMA

#150

Post by [deleted] »

jseliger wrote: post #89
kinkora wrote: post #8

You (and by extension YC) always seem to mostly focus on the success stories of the alumni/group. Have you or will you consider talking about the failures? If you can't do it, is there a reason why?

I'm obviously not sama but it does seem like the ones who are not successful often do not want to talk about what happened, and HN also does not seem to upvote stories about them. For example, I was intensely curious about a YC smartbike company called Vanhawks and have submitted a couple variants on this story: https://techvibes.com/2016/06/05/vanhawks-2016-06-03 , and none got many upvotes. (That being said I do ag…

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