131–140 of 191 posts
I'd like to hear more failure stories, which could mean startups that imploded spectacularly, but could also mean successes that weren't as big as expected (aquihires, shut downs after an aquisition, etc.) As mentioned elsewhere in the comments, most startup stories have heavy survivorship bias involved, and as a result end up with the same lessons. It'd also be cool to see some more technology focused interviews, sp…
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…
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 sm…
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…
It seems like many people would like some sort of user-submitted Q&A format. In my experience, the Q&A segments of podcast episodes tend to be maybe 1/4 as interesting as the rest of the episode. People being interviewed are more likely to say broadly interesting things when given open space to ideate with the occasional gentle nudge from the interviewer. It's true that some user-submitted questions will be great, bu…
Some ideas that I think are outside of the wheelhouse of typical Silicon Valley thought leaders: 1) Mike Bloomberg: Talk about founding and tech development of Bloomberg Professional Service (don't talk about politics at all) 2) Judy Faulkner: Founder and CEO of EPIC systems, a large privately held Hospital EHR vendor (Epic is one of the largest and most insular tech companies in the world) 3) Jack Ma: Founder of Ali…
I would love it if you interviewed founders that you turned down but who went on to have some level of success. (For me meaning some level of profitability or improving people's lives rather than calling raising a round a success.) I imagine a lot of the podcast audience is those that have been or would be rejected from YC at this point in their journey so there might be more lessons there for us than from the outlie…
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…
There's a lot more out there than just technology. I'd love to hear from the creators of Meow Wolf, for instance.
Big fan of the old Podcast and looking forward to the new ones! As for a suggestion: I wouldn't want this to be every episode, but a themed episode on a specific 'hot' industry could be neat, i.e. interviewing founders of three companies in related fields. e.g. drones, crypto-currencies, bio, etc... Often there's so many promising directions in a new industry that existing founders don't have time to explore all the…