When I read this I also thought about the differences in the physics of the 'very big' and the 'very small'.
Though, I prefer the cogency of your analogy. Good read.
A New Venture Animal
41–50 of 64 posts
Re: A New Venture Animal
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
What was the idea of an intern? Ads were part of the plan from very early on. Also, AdSense predates the Applied Semantics aquisition.
OK, maybe not exactly an intern, but wasn't it some guy who would work for $.00?
Having been an intern/co-op with both a very large and couple small/medium startups. My experience and interaction with student interns (mostly from public universities), have led me to believe you must pay your interns. Most students in the current economic climate, particularly those attending college for the first time in there family, simply cannot afford an unpaid internship.
Re: A New Venture Animal
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
What was the idea of an intern? Ads were part of the plan from very early on. Also, AdSense predates the Applied Semantics aquisition.
AdSense predates the Applied Semantics acquisition That's not what your press release says: http://www.google.com/press/pressrel/applied.html What was the idea of an intern? The self-service approach to buying AdWords, IIRC. The mail-order lobster nonsense that led to the streamlining of the horribly broken logfile/MySQL system when it became popular. I may be confused -- 'intern' may be the wrong word. But if you wa…
AdSense the product and technology (content targetting) predates the acquisition, which is why the press release is titled, "New Technologies and Engineering Team Complement Google's Content Targeted Advertising Programs". AdSense the trademark may have come from AS, but that's not very relevant.
I'm guessing that the "intern" that you are referring to is Salar: http://www.google.com/corporate/execs.html#salar He was maybe the 10th employee of Google.
Re: A New Venture Animal
#44I launched a start-up two months ago, and I can't agree more with Paul: it has become ridiculously inexpensive to do so. I considered chasing some VC funding, but then realized that all I need is a good idea and some time to focus on it; the VC's wouldn't have helped me with either one. As a matter of fact, even owning your own computing resources is unnecessary: check-out Amazon's cloud computing web services (our b…
How's that related to you costs? The primary expense has always been the cost of talent and "cost of sales". Employees time and marketing/advertising. Paul assumes that programmers will work for free (or for very little) because they're founders, but doesn't address the other big one. Well, he saves a ton of money on free YC-backed PR, but even his model breaks down if you need more than 2-4 programmers to deliver even a prototype, or if your idea/business depend heavily on graphics designers or rely on complex distribution channels (even within the web).
In fact if you way back, there was another time when a couple of guys in a garage could do it all. Gates and Allen did it. Jobs and Woz did it. In history of personal computing there was always one or two guys who did it first without bunch of money: nearly every piece of traditional desktop application has that guy. Equipment and infrastructure costs have never been prohibitive since the invention of a PC.
As web applications grow the history will repeat itself: instead of two guys building it you'll need 20, just like it did with desktop software and games. There are only brief windows of opportunity for a "little guy" and they only come some major breakthrough in technology comes along.
Re: A New Venture Animal
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
OK, maybe not exactly an intern, but wasn't it some guy who would work for $.00?
Having been an intern/co-op with both a very large and couple small/medium startups. My experience and interaction with student interns (mostly from public universities), have led me to believe you must pay your interns. Most students in the current economic climate, particularly those attending college for the first time in there family, simply cannot afford an unpaid internship.
Sorry, inside joke.
http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2007/12/is-there-more-to-li...
(Note this is the same paul who asked for more details on the intern, and who came up with adsense.)
Re: A New Venture Animal
#46Essays like this one make us, YC-rejects, feel like not being part of something cool, something new and exciting and much better, while we're stuck out there dealing with "old kind of animals" and the question "why haven't they picked pikluk?" keeps creeping into my mind, and it's not a nice feeling.
I guess it's a natural state of mind of any hacker: to be at the edge, have the best tools, best equipment, use best operating systems, etc. It applies to your investors as well. I'd hate to take an offer from a rich farmer or an oil guy.
Well... enough of YC for today, back to work.
Re: A New Venture Animal
#47I launched a start-up two months ago, and I can't agree more with Paul: it has become ridiculously inexpensive to do so. I considered chasing some VC funding, but then realized that all I need is a good idea and some time to focus on it; the VC's wouldn't have helped me with either one. As a matter of fact, even owning your own computing resources is unnecessary: check-out Amazon's cloud computing web services (our b…
How's that related to you costs? The primary expense has always been the cost of talent and "cost of sales". Employees time and marketing/advertising. Paul assumes that programmers will work for free (or for very little) because they're founders, but doesn't address the other big one. Well, he saves a ton of money on free YC-backed PR, but even his model breaks down if you need more than 2-4 programmers to deliver ev…
tx: "The primary expense has always been the cost of talent and "cost of sales". Employees time and marketing/advertising."
The point I am making: it is not so any more!
How much dev time or marketing or technology insight went into any of these, for example: digg fbook myspace flickr techcrunch?
And yet they´re worth billions of $.
Re: A New Venture Animal
#48From the article: Google has such momentum now that it would be hard for anyone to stop them.
Within 48 hours of this being published, Google anounces layoffs ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=134967 ) and a new search engine from Sequoia is covered by TechCrunch ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=134291 ). In addition, the share price has fallen from US$747 to US$439 and there has been speculation by television pundits of it falling to US$350 or less ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=133966 ).
Re: A New Venture Animal
#49So, here's a question:
Who's the competition? How did readers who didn't go through Y-Combinator get off of the ground? How'd you first get in contact with angel investors? Or incubators or seed funding or whatever...
As much startup rhetoric as seems to be kicking around this site and others, there seems to be a gap between "Go YC!" and "We just did our A-Round..."
We've been scrambling to get together as many contacts in the ramp up to quitting our jobs and there are some interesting leads, but before we start playing the find-funding-or-die game it seems prudent to have as many leads as possible.
Re: A New Venture Animal
#50I think this sentence doesn't really make sense:
"As you work your way forward in the venture funding process, the ratio of help to money increases, because earlier stage companies have different needs."
Isn't one of the points of the essay the fact that, as a company progresses, the amount of help from a VC decreases relative to the amount of money received?