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Ask HN: Restarting the YC Podcast – who would be most interesting to listen to?

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Re: Ask HN: Restarting the YC Podcast – who would be most interesting to listen to?

#81

Post by lpolovets »

I'd love to hear interviews about practical topics that early stage technical founders face. Specifically, for a company that has 1 or 3 or 6 engineers, what do people do for QA? How are on-call duties handled? How are sudden catastrophes handled? How do teams decide how much time to allocate toward feature-building vs. improving infrastructure? And so on.

I care less about who the specific guests are and more about specific topics. Origin stories are really fun to hear, but I don't get a lot of practical value out of listening to them.

Re: Ask HN: Restarting the YC Podcast – who would be most interesting to listen to?

#83

Post by etr71115 »

In line with Female Founder Stories & the Employee #1 series, it'd be fascinating to hear (un)successful founders' perspectives on previous failures (potential program title: "Start Overs"?), what they would have done differently, if there's still a market for their idea, and what they learned from it for their future successes.

Ideal speakers:

Travis Kalanick -- Scour

Drew Houston -- Accolade

Justin Kan & Emmett Shear -- Kiko

Jack Dorsey -- Uber Imitator in the early 2000s

Sean Parker -- Napster

Parker Conrad -- SigFig

Ben Silbermann -- Audiobeta

Re: Ask HN: Restarting the YC Podcast – who would be most interesting to listen to?

#84

Post by monk_e_boy »

philip1209 wrote: post #6

I'd love to hear "office hour"-style stuff. Somebody who's having a problem, you work on solving it together, then maybe in a month you do a retro on how it worked. Might be cool to wait enough time that the episode has a "before and after" in the same episode.

A company I worked for hired some expert dude who came in and shaped the company into something that could be purchased. That was very interesting.

That process that takes raw talent and startup chaos and turns it into something that will get acquired.

It'd be great to hear about that process from both sides. There must be some sort of mentor approach, of giving advice that will work for that company.

Re: Ask HN: Restarting the YC Podcast – who would be most interesting to listen to?

#85

Post by wwalser »

etr71115 wrote: post #83

In line with Female Founder Stories & the Employee #1 series, it'd be fascinating to hear (un)successful founders' perspectives on previous failures (potential program title: "Start Overs"?), what they would have done differently, if there's still a market for their idea, and what they learned from it for their future successes. Ideal speakers: Travis Kalanick -- Scour Drew Houston -- Accolade Justin Kan & Emmett She…

Similar to this, I'd love to know how YC feels about it's founders who have an exit big enough to be a personal success but aren't successful from a VC perspective. I know, for example, that most investors are probably not happy about a $5-15MM sell on $1-2MM of raised money.

We also don't hear much about the financial mechanics of those types of acquisitions. I'd like to understand the considerations that go into smaller acquisitions/acquihires like: Sam A.(Loopt) & Kevin H.(Wufoo) or Justin K.(Exec).

Re: Ask HN: Restarting the YC Podcast – who would be most interesting to listen to?

#86

Post by wwalser »

thisone wrote: post #68

Can tell you what I don't want to hear, which is easier for me. Not another tech podcast with hosts who sound bored. Not another tech podcast that can't be arsed to put in the work to get good sound quality. Not another tech podcast where each episode interviews yet another person about 'what they're working on' with no larger story. And please if you have ads, dear god don't fall down the hole of writing or reading…

It's content marketing. The podcast is the heartfelt advertisement.

Re: Ask HN: Restarting the YC Podcast – who would be most interesting to listen to?

#87

Post by rgovind »

Interviews with VCs and Entrepreneurs are dime a dozen nowadays. What I see missing is resources which help technical people think about business aspects. How does one understand/analyze competition, market size, customers etc.

I really liked AMA from YC partners here on hacker news. They answered a few questions about how one should things about early stage starting up. I would like to see more of such things.

Re: Ask HN: Restarting the YC Podcast – who would be most interesting to listen to?

#89

Post by severine »

craigcannon wrote: post #41
wwalser wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the op but: Gimlet is very good at creating well put together and edited stories. That seasons is very human and dives headlong into the painful (and beautiful) parts of slowly grinding and iterating toward failure. Failure from an investor perspective at least, it ends up being a non-scalable, labor intensive lifestyle business that loads of people would be proud to have built. It was the opposite of the YC podc…

Yup. We definitely will cover more than YC companies and success stories. Fwiw, I do like the success stories but prefer a longer interview (90 min+) because you get a real sense of the person vs the PR version of them/their company.

It would be great if you got graycat to spill the beans about his website.

Re: Ask HN: Restarting the YC Podcast – who would be most interesting to listen to?

#90

Post by severine »

davidw wrote: post #75

I don't do podcasts, I vastly prefer the written word: * I can scan quickly. * I can search for things. * It's easier for me to read things than listen. I don't drive much, so don't have dead time when I can only listen.

A good conversation is different from an essay, it would be great if there were transcripts of the podcasts, isn't any YC company working on speech-to-text?
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