151–160 of 165 posts
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Actually, the fact that they have not bowed to the pressure to "disavow" Peter Thiel merely for his political views in one of the things that makes me think highly of YC.
You must really love Hugo Boss and IBM as well. It's so great that they were able to ignore politics when they were making uniforms and mainframes for nazis.
> 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.…
The question of "Does it come down to luck or is there a repeatable process?" is critical to YC's success. I think PG and Sam have made great contributions to discovering a repeatable process, but because they're so prestigious now and attract the best startup candidates they can basically just filter for the ones that already have traction.
I'm a huge fan of what Sam's been doing with YC, but this is what I miss the most about PG. PG didn't have any brand to benefit from, so it was critically important that he understand the physics behind successful startups so that he could deterministically understand which ones would be successful or not before they were already obviously successful. YC doesn't have to do that anymore, they can just choose the startups that apply and already have customers and revenue because they get so many applications.
My gut tells me that the next step in developing a repeatable process for successful startups is a better understanding of markets. If you look at all the startups you mentioned (not Google, but Uber, Facebook, Snapchat), they all applied a relatively simple technology to a new market that the founders had a unique perspective on. Uber had unique access to the SF population that's constantly frustrated by transportation options but quickly embraces new tech, Facebook tapped into the market of college students that most VCs and entrepreneurs overlooked because they weren't in college, and Snapchat did the same with an even younger market. I'll add Slack to the list as well: they built an equivalent product to HipChat and Campfire (which were created years before Slack) but targeted the market of non-developers.
1. It's hard to find supporting evidence, but I have never seen or read a mission statement from a company before they were already massively successful.
I'd love to know the 50 companies with >$100mm valuations. Anyone know of a list or can start one? I saw this was 32 companies last year and really curious which were added.
> In future years, we also hope to explore how something like ‘financial aid’ might work for people that need a small amount of capital to help get their startup going. Sounds interesting. I always kinda hated how people fresh out of high school with zero credit can have so much money handed to them for going to school. While if they wanted to get a business loan or buy a house they would be much more scrutinized. I…
>I expect that people will talk about software as one of our secret weapons. can you give a broad overview of what software YC creates? What does it do? is it internal tracking and stats, or exclusive libraries that YC-funded companies get to use to build their products?
Bookface is one thing I know of: https://bookface.ycombinator.com/ I think they developed it in-house.
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Maybe just making the downvote button more like the "report" button on facebook. Force people to either select from a few common reasons, or leave a comment to explain their downvote. This could also gently enforce norms for what the downvote is for, since some people new to HN might not realize it isn't the same as reddit. Obviously there are details to iron out, but I think it would be helpful.
Reddit and many subreddits have rules that downvoting should not be done for disagreement. HN has no such rule.
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Reading between the lines, wasn't Sam complaining about a trend whereby many promising startups get acquired way too early ?
I can't speak for sam but in my mind that is a big piece of it. If you don't sell, then the big companies don't get bigger. Unfortunately in that case if you do get big enough despite that, they will just target you and take a chunk of your market (Instagram Stories vs Snapchat) so that you can't dominate. Look, it's brilliant and exactly what every firm should do. The question is really, if it's a net positive to ha…
It isn't that you can't dominate, but the thing is, you need to have a product that others can't copy.
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 s…
That assertion may be correct regarding purchases, browsing habits (especially for Google) and places you visit via their respective map applications, but it doesn't compare to the staggering amount of raw data [0] that Tesla has on drivers.
[0] https://qz.com/694520/tesla-has-780-million-miles-of-driving...
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So, there's this weird effect where basically every major company has a gigantic fundamental hypocrisy in their mission statement: Google's is "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful", and yet - if you leak anything about them as an employee, you are insta-fired. If you try to figure out any sense of organization about their product portfolio, good luck. If you try to scrape an…
I saw Zuckerberg walking in Palo Alto with wife, child and dog and no security visible just over a year ago. If he has 24/7 security, either they're very discreet or it started recently.
Consider that Steve Jobs famously chided his friend Larry Ellison for having 24/7 bodyguards.