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YC Annual Letter 2017

blog.samaltman.com

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Re: YC Annual Letter 2017

#51

Post by yawgmoth »

asperous wrote: post #38
yawgmoth wrote: post #34

On the HN front - I would like to see a discussion and then the implementation of measures to encourage meaningful discussion, discourage low-effort comments, but also to discourage "negative lurking". Like other users noticed, there are a lot of lurkers -- some of which downvote and move along. Because frequently I do not understand why a post has been downvoted (my own or otherwise), I am discouraged from contribut…

You're not given the ability to downvote without reaching a certain karma threshold, so there are already some thoughts in place there.

It actually seems worse to me that people who have been around to achieve that threshold (it's 500, right?) don't have exhibit the etiquette I'm asking for. They should know better, right?

Re: YC Annual Letter 2017

#52

Post by _sentient »

blacksmythe wrote: post #30

>> funded over ... 1,470 companies >> more than 50 of our companies are worth more than $100 million each. 3.4% is a remarkable ratio.

Especially given that those numbers are back-loaded, with somewhere around a third of all YC companies having been funded within the last two years.

Re: YC Annual Letter 2017

#53

Post by sama »

danvoell wrote: post #33

Hi sama, great letter. The only thing I would suggest for the next round is to identify some misses. What are some RFPs that you tried to solve and didn't and what are your insights on this? The two annual letters I like the most are Bill Gates and Warren Buffet. From Bill Gates, I don't mind the endless optimism since it is a foundation. From Warren Buffet, I expect the ole hoe hum, we'd be trillionaires if we had s…

Thanks! Will add this in next time. Plenty of misses to write about!

Re: YC Annual Letter 2017

#54

Post by pen2l »

sama wrote: post #21
gregoire wrote: post #8

Is there a reason why this is published on Sam's blog and not on YC's blog? Oh and a remark on the letter's typography: the double spaces after periods should be single spaces.

I had emailed this out to the YC community over the weekend. I got word from a journalist it was about to leak, and I couldn't get in touch with the person that runs the YC blog (I don't yet know how to post on the new one, but I'm sure going to figure it out now). I didn't want to wait, so I just posted it where I could. Also I happen to think documents are easier to read with double spaces after sentences. Surely t…

> Surely there is something more important to complain about than that.

https://plus.google.com/+VicGundotra/posts/gcSStkKxXTw

Sam, it's meant with the love of the art. I was going to make the same complaint. For those of us who work in a particular field, certain things just stick out and it feels very natural to point that out and make the world perfect in a way we are confident it can be perfect if some things are changed (I review grants, I convert double-spaces to single-spaces so much that I can spot one from a mile away and change it right away... sadly, I don't have access to change your writings :)).

Re: YC Annual Letter 2017

#55

Post by aurenh »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #14

Companies like Amazon, Facebook, Google, Apple, and Microsoft have powerful advantages that are still not fully understood by most founders and investors....This trend is unlikely to reverse without antitrust action, and I suggest people carefully consider its implications for startups. I think the "startup community" needs to have a serious conversation about this [2]. If we agree that machine learning is going to b…

agreed Andrew. We we need to democratize access to data. Of course, that does not mean that the underlying data needs to free. It can be expensive. But the data needs to be available.

If you are a self-driving car start-up today with $120MM in funding, you still have no data on how humans drive or how pedestrians walk. That's something that is going to be really important. And Apple and Google (both working also on self-driving cars) have a massive amount of data on drivers.

Put something together here: https://medium.com/safegraph/where-should-machines-go-to-lea...

Re: YC Annual Letter 2017

#56

Post by ridruejo »

kukac wrote: post #10
ridruejo wrote: post #2

"Our mission is to enable the most innovation of any company in the world in order to make the future great for everyone." I know many people will read that and roll their eyes back and believe it is just a marketing gimmick for the gullible and like most investors YC just cares about the money. The thing is that they do deeply care about founders and making things better in the world, as naive as that may sound to o…

Any evidence of this ?

Sorry for not having mentioned this explicit (it is in my profile) but this is from first-hand experience from being a founder and having going through YC with Bitnami

Re: YC Annual Letter 2017

#57

Post by nathcd »

kukac wrote: post #10
ridruejo wrote: post #2

"Our mission is to enable the most innovation of any company in the world in order to make the future great for everyone." I know many people will read that and roll their eyes back and believe it is just a marketing gimmick for the gullible and like most investors YC just cares about the money. The thing is that they do deeply care about founders and making things better in the world, as naive as that may sound to o…

Any evidence of this ?

I'm pretty sceptical that the phrase isn't a bit of marketing to some extent, but one thing (among many) that earns YC a ton of respect in my mind is YC Research. The research projects truly seem geared toward working for a better world as their first goal.

Re: YC Annual Letter 2017

#58

Post by purple-again »

icpmacdo wrote: post #4

"Hacker News has 3.4 million users per month and 350,000 users per day, with 4 million pageviews a day. There are just under 1 million registered accounts, with several hundred added each day. Users post around 1,000 articles and 6,000 comments to the site per day." First time I have seen those numbers, very impressive. I thought there were a lot less users.

I would love to see how many of those are lurkers. I've been reading hacker news for almost 3 years now but made my very first comment less than a month ago (fat thumb logged out on my iPhone and couldn't remember my password so this is account #2).

I have over 8 years of daily Reddit use with 0 comments made as well. Just a personality thing.

Re: YC Annual Letter 2017

#59

Post by ridruejo »

neom wrote: post #3
ridruejo wrote: post #2

"Our mission is to enable the most innovation of any company in the world in order to make the future great for everyone." I know many people will read that and roll their eyes back and believe it is just a marketing gimmick for the gullible and like most investors YC just cares about the money. The thing is that they do deeply care about founders and making things better in the world, as naive as that may sound to o…

Interesting that you chose to post this proactively.

Whenever I talk to other founders about YC, encouraging them to apply they are often asking about "what the catch is", "yeah, yeah, but how are they really?" because they don't believe it is really like that. It has become kind of a joke the phrase "making the world a better place" but YC is one of the few places where they mean it

Re: YC Annual Letter 2017

#60

Post by gregoire »

pen2l wrote: post #54
sama wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had emailed this out to the YC community over the weekend. I got word from a journalist it was about to leak, and I couldn't get in touch with the person that runs the YC blog (I don't yet know how to post on the new one, but I'm sure going to figure it out now). I didn't want to wait, so I just posted it where I could. Also I happen to think documents are easier to read with double spaces after sentences. Surely t…

> Surely there is something more important to complain about than that. https://plus.google.com/+VicGundotra/posts/gcSStkKxXTw Sam, it's meant with the love of the art. I was going to make the same complaint. For those of us who work in a particular field, certain things just stick out and it feels very natural to point that out and make the world perfect in a way we are confident it can be perfect if some things are…

Exactly, typography is a subject that is very dear to my heart.

And while I agree that it may be a personal preference, there is a side effect to using double spaces: layout engines consider single spaces the default for their line breaking algorithm, and sometimes, when using double spacing, new sentences start at a new line with a space before the first letter which, in this very case, looks weird and therefore hinders readability.

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