81–90 of 165 posts
Can you expand on the "obvious" and "destructive" force? What exactly did Thiel do that is obviously destructive to our whole society? You mean Palantir? Wasn't that there for a while?
"The percentage of women who apply to YC is roughly the same as the percentage of women who get funded. The same is true for Black and Latino founders." I'm guessing what he means to say here is that if x% of the applicant pool is woman/black/latino, then x% of the accepted pool is woman/black/latino, right? The way it's phrased it sounds like every woman/black/latino who applies is accepted
Not to me. percentage of women who apply ~= percentage of women who get funded.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am sure there are many more lurkers than active participants
This is true of pretty much any Internet community, so not that surprising.
Nice writeup sama, but the history is a bit revisionist: > We are only about 30 years into the age of software, about 20 years into the age of the internet, and about 2 years into the age of artificial intelligence. Software has been around--and actively making bank!--for over 40 years. The internet has been around longer in the form of academic institutions, email, and BBS than you mention. And AI has, of course, be…
The periods are subjective, fuzzy things. I think I agree with Sam's definitions although I would probably say age of machine learning rather than age of AI.
> 4) Does this company have a clear and important mission? > Without this, I usually get bored. More importantly, companies that don’t have this usually have a hard time recruiting enough great people to work with them, and thus struggle to become very large. I find this one interesting. When Google started, there were many incumbent search engines. Their mission was to provide better results than what existed, i.e.…
Uber's mission is "Transportation as reliable as running water."
Facebook's mission is "Make the world more open and transparent."
The product is about what the company does today, the mission is about what the company will do in the future. It's usually not a good idea to come up with the mission statement before you have a viable product, but it's critical for bringing on board employees, executives, and investors.
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…
Twenty years or so ago, only Microsoft would have been on that list. It was being hit with lawsuits and Apple was on the other side because it wasn't on the list. The landscape changed and DEC and SUN are gone and Yahoo (hence the 'or so') and IBM don't have the relevance that they once did. What happened is that the landscape shifted out from under many of the incumbents...from hardware to software. The one survivor…
The infinite pie theory is for all practical purposes impossible. Growing pie theory works on beyond lifetime scale, but not for decade level scale. So it does matter because a startup can't last for two decades to try and gain market share against an incumbent.
> 4) Does this company have a clear and important mission? > Without this, I usually get bored. More importantly, companies that don’t have this usually have a hard time recruiting enough great people to work with them, and thus struggle to become very large. I find this one interesting. When Google started, there were many incumbent search engines. Their mission was to provide better results than what existed, i.e.…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 hin…
Which innovations over the last 2 years most indicate a new age of artificial intelligence?
I undertook some research, and noticed:
3 Months Ago: Google Translate AI had a breakthrough
5 Months Ago: Amazon/Facebook/Google/IBM/Microsoft launch an AI Partnership
1 Year Ago: AlphaGo has a big win and OpenAI is founded
2 Years Ago: Google (now Waymo) performs its first public driverless ride
3 Years Ago: Google acquires DeepMind and interest in Deep Learning takes off
6 Years Ago: IBM Watson wins Jeopardy