221–230 of 458 posts
Hi Sam, in interview with Elon Musk, you asked him 'Do you think people that want to be useful today should get PhDs?' Elon: Mostly not. Here are my questions: 1. Do you think people need to get a PhD degree to become useful research scientist in AI industry? 2. Do you think people need to get a PhD degree to become Member of Technical Staff (Machine Learning) in Open AI? Thank you.
2. Definitely not!
If you went back in time and did Loopt again, what would you differently?
Sam, are the odds stacked against us if we have 5 founders? (EE, ME, EE, SW, Sales/Business) Also does a startup that can help reduce carbon emissions/move from something that generates lots of emission classify under the energy section of request for startup?
Slightly against--we're not sure why it is, but 5 or 6 founder companies have (with some notable exceptions) significantly underperformed our average.
I expect it is early burn rate and simply getting too far ahead of your potential income. Half the founders means twice the runway.
Two related questions. It's known YC prefers teams. Do you have a preferred shape or size for the team (2 tech, 1 marketing, or 1 tech, 1 web, 1 marketing and business etc); is any combination shown to be more likely to succeed within YC? How do you view teams too heavy on tech? It's common for a group of tech people to have the idea, but as a team have some gaps on say the marketing side, and probably other areas. A…
If no one on the team is good or is willing to get good at sales and 'business', that's a problem.
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 g…
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 g…
I've been running an east-coast-but-middle-of-nowhere startup, primarily implemented by myself, and self-funded, with the occasional with help of random one-off contractors in the hospitality/IoT space for two years now. Basically during off-hours from a (pretty successful) day job in a non-tech company I started years ago. My choke point has always been finding another technical-minded parter that gets the industry.…
If you are going to run a big company, far, far worse things will come your way than a YC rejection. Try again. And again. And again.
Giving up too early is one of the biggest causes of failure I know.
In terms of the two models--it really depends on your company and market, and what you want to do.
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…