I Am Sam Altman, President of YC Group. AMA • Hacker News Board

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

#181

Post by wwwdonohue » Wed, Sep 28, 2016, 1:53 AM UTC

wpietri wrote: post #101

sama wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do try to talk about this but should talk about it more. It turns out that most people (and certainly most journalists) want to talk about/write about the success cases. I'll think about how to best do this.

I'd especially like to see this in the form of lessons learned. Some of my favorite startup pieces are where a founder sat down, told their story, and said, "Next time, here's what I'm doing different." In the startup world we have to be comfortable making mistakes, but I really want those to be new, interesting mistakes.

Even better, usually, is the second/third-time founder actually operating differently after making those mistakes the first time around. That way it's less "here's how I messed up" and more "here's how I messed up, and I know because what I'm doing now is working a lot better."

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

#182

Post by meowface » Wed, Sep 28, 2016, 1:56 AM UTC

Jd wrote: post #179

Have you ever invested in a band or music production company or considered doing that?

I'm not sure if he has, but why would he ever do that? Unless it was not only production but also engineering/innovating in some sense.

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

#183

Post by jmcmahon443 » Wed, Sep 28, 2016, 1:57 AM UTC

Can you make the application autosave?

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

#184

Post by Jd » Wed, Sep 28, 2016, 1:58 AM UTC

danieltillett wrote: post #180

Jd wrote: post #171

Do you really think that financially incentivizing voting will create good downstream effects? Almost all ideas of civic duty are historically drawn from non-financial incentives and the idea of attaching some financial incentive to them potentially seems to further exacerbate a "pay to play" atmosphere that is one of the reasons people (like myself) don't find it particularly stimulating to participate in the presen…

Here in Australia we get a fine if we don’t turn up at the polling place and have our name crossed off the list on election day. Of course this creates a pool of voters (5-10%) who really don’t want to participate (these people typically spoil their ballot by doing things like drawing a penis on the ballot), but what this does do is keep a much larger section of the population engaged in the political process. What h…

Do you think the penalty works better than a positive incentive? i.e. if you got $5 to vote or a 1 in 100 chance of $1000? Also, was the penalty introduced in order to increase turnout? Is there any data on how it affected it, including among which demographics?

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

#185

Post by ikeboy » Wed, Sep 28, 2016, 1:59 AM UTC

xzion wrote: post #178

ikeboy wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I understand that this is an economics problem; the ($5b?) market exists because there is significantly more demand than supply and ticket prices are not adjusted to accommodate this imbalance. Why that's the case I'm not sure. Perhaps that's another avenue to investigate for solving the problem but not what I had in mind (partly because I like affordable tickets). Seeing scalpers as harmful is definitely an emotiona…

The scheme I described above leads to affordable tickets, it's basically a way of enforcing nontransferability.

But at its core, disgust with scalpers implies preference for a non Kaldor Hicks optimal world.

If someone is willing to pay $X for a ticket, and you're only willing to pay $YThere's no way around that fundamental fact. At some point, if there are more people who want tickets than tickets, some process needs to determine who gets them, and wishful thinking doesn't help anyone.

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

#186

Post by hkyeti » Wed, Sep 28, 2016, 2:00 AM UTC

sama wrote: post #24

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?

We do try to talk about this but should talk about it more. It turns out that most people (and certainly most journalists) want to talk about/write about the success cases. I'll think about how to best do this.

A homejoy post mortem would be a good place to start given it was used a positive case study in a bunch of talks etc

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

#187

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Sep 28, 2016, 2:00 AM UTC

sama wrote: post #24

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?

We do try to talk about this but should talk about it more. It turns out that most people (and certainly most journalists) want to talk about/write about the success cases. I'll think about how to best do this.

[deleted]

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

#188

Post by tmatthewj » Wed, Sep 28, 2016, 2:00 AM UTC

Most recent startups from India backed by YC seem to be solving problems within the country. Examples - Razorpay - Stripe for India, Kisan Network - Online Agriculture marketplace in India, Innov8 - Co-working spaces for Indian startups. Is that relevant when YC looks at an application that comes from an Indian startup / co-founders? We could generalise the question by replacing India with developing economies with good infrastructural problems to solve.

How would an Indian startup trying to build a global product primarily for the U.S / Europe market fit into the scheme of things?

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

#189

Post by Jd » Wed, Sep 28, 2016, 2:00 AM UTC

meowface wrote: post #182

Jd wrote: post #179

Have you ever invested in a band or music production company or considered doing that?

I'm not sure if he has, but why would he ever do that? Unless it was not only production but also engineering/innovating in some sense.

Yep, well that would be interesting in the sense of how you could disrupt the music business by "manufacturing" beats. We've seen some similar progress around machine generated art (e.g. deep dreaming and the like).

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

#190

Post by EGreg » Wed, Sep 28, 2016, 2:01 AM UTC

We applied many times in the last 5 years, since launching our company (Qbix). Every time we go through the application process, it seems we've grown. Our main app is now about to break 4 million downloads and we've tripled our revenue this year and talking to VCs.

Does it make sense to keep applying to YC, given our size now? From what I understand, we got rejected every time because our equity split is around 80-20, which makes us more like a single-founder company. We would have liked to be part of YC but if YC strongly prefers not to consider single-founder companies then we would save time and not apply.