As someone who saw Luke & Heather's Boxouse talk at HOPE conf with some friends, and were inspired to go at it stealth, I've gotta say I'm so so glad they're focussing on the housing project. I just got my rental shipping container dropped off last week, and am working to quickly and non-destructively insulate it for Canadian winter :)
Y Combinator's Hardware Guy Leaves After 14 Months
101–110 of 123 posts
Re: Y Combinator's Hardware Guy Leaves After 14 Months
#102I counted at least 5 factual errors in the photo caption and first 3 paragraphs. We also heard that this reporter was 'encouraged' to write this by someone from a competing accelerator with an obvious agenda. Seems like manufactured controversy otherwise. All that said, we like hardware and we like Luke, and we're excited he's in the new batch! And we're thankful for the work he did to get our hardware program set up…
[deleted]
Re: Y Combinator's Hardware Guy Leaves After 14 Months
#103I counted at least 5 factual errors in the photo caption and first 3 paragraphs. We also heard that this reporter was 'encouraged' to write this by someone from a competing accelerator with an obvious agenda. Seems like manufactured controversy otherwise. All that said, we like hardware and we like Luke, and we're excited he's in the new batch! And we're thankful for the work he did to get our hardware program set up…
Heh, impressive that a lede photo caption as short and simple as, " Sam Altman, president and co-founder of Y Combinator ", has an error.
At least you can use it as a source for his Wikipedia article.
In a few short years everybody will agree that sama co-founded YC. ;-)
Re: Y Combinator's Hardware Guy Leaves After 14 Months
#104I counted at least 5 factual errors in the photo caption and first 3 paragraphs. We also heard that this reporter was 'encouraged' to write this by someone from a competing accelerator with an obvious agenda. Seems like manufactured controversy otherwise. All that said, we like hardware and we like Luke, and we're excited he's in the new batch! And we're thankful for the work he did to get our hardware program set up…
Heh, impressive that a lede photo caption as short and simple as, " Sam Altman, president and co-founder of Y Combinator ", has an error.
I had to google your word "lede" in order to understand what you were saying.
I found this: http://howardowens.com/lede-vs-lead/
Re: Y Combinator's Hardware Guy Leaves After 14 Months
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just this week somebody told me about how a competing accelerator made them accept or turn down their offer before doing their YC interview. Ugh.
That would make me turn down their offer, I don't appreciate anti-competitive business practices. Leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
I agree. I guess the other accelerator likes to imagine that they are the cast of The Shark Tank.
Re: Y Combinator's Hardware Guy Leaves After 14 Months
#106TL;DR -- Luke Iseman, YC's hardware focused Partner founded a hardware startup, which he's now taking through YC as a founder, after having set up a bunch of deals and processes to help hardware startups as a YC Partner. Seems like pretty good evidence YC is now great at helping hardware startups that he's choosing to go through the program himself.
Sounds like dogfooding, to me.
Re: Y Combinator's Hardware Guy Leaves After 14 Months
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
Heh, impressive that a lede photo caption as short and simple as, " Sam Altman, president and co-founder of Y Combinator ", has an error.
I had to google your word "lede" in order to understand what you were saying. I found this: http://howardowens.com/lede-vs-lead/
Ha! That's very interesting. I mean I never knew that people tried to claim that there was some long history about the word lede", but that's just how it was referred to in every journalism class I've taken and in the papers I worked at. I like using it because its distinct spelling makes it obviously different than all the other meanings of "lead", and journalism has all kinds of jargon anyway..."graf" (paragraph), "nutgraf" (summary paragraph of a story), "subhed" (sub heading inside a story), "refer" (pronounced "reefer", an item that references something somewhere else in the paper). And "TK", for "to come", which I still use when writing or coding because it's very easy to grep for.
Reading this made me want to look up `cq`, which is what you jotted into your story as meta-text, next to a weirdly-spelled name or just weird fact to indicate to whomever is going to edit your story, Yes, this thing has been double-checked even if it looks weird, so please don't change it to what you think it is -- an example might be "Katharine Weymouth `cq`", for the former publisher of the Washington Post, whose name is often spelled as "Katherine" mistakenly.
I've heard other journalists shrug and say they've heard that `cq` stands for "correct but queer". But apparently its likely origin is Latin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadit_quaestio
Re: Y Combinator's Hardware Guy Leaves After 14 Months
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
Story time. I build an app and I got interviewed by a local newspaper: "Is the app secure?" "Nope, but it's in my plans to start encrypting user's data at some point" The next week (she didn't ask me for a review or anything) the newspaper printed: "[me] built an app encrypting all of its users' data"
> Story time. I build an app and I got interviewed by a local newspaper: I built a web app and got interviewed by a newspaper too. The article wasn't factually wrong, but it was poorly written and the tone was bizarre at a few points. The journalist chose to take many long quotes directly from my response emails. I didn't know I would be quoted verbatim so heavily, otherwise I would've written more formally. He also…
(Also involved with creation of an app that has received press.)
Assume everything you write to a journalist, unless you specify otherwise, will be used as written in their story. You should go out of your way to write statements that you expect them to fancy and essentially copy and paste.
When emailing them, read back over what you've written and re-write sections to make them punchy sentences that could serve as introductions, headlines, captions, anything for their story.
Re: Y Combinator's Hardware Guy Leaves After 14 Months
#109[deleted]
Re: Y Combinator's Hardware Guy Leaves After 14 Months
#110TL;DR -- Luke Iseman, YC's hardware focused Partner founded a hardware startup, which he's now taking through YC as a founder, after having set up a bunch of deals and processes to help hardware startups as a YC Partner. Seems like pretty good evidence YC is now great at helping hardware startups that he's choosing to go through the program himself.
Luke is a great person, I love the container houses project, and it's a statement to YC quality that he decided to go trough the program.
On the other side, "a full quarter of the current batch are making physical products" and no Hardware focused partners, isn't that a litle strange.