Back in 2005, Fog Creek produced a documentary called "Aardvark'd: 12 Weeks with Geeks", about their internship program. There are lots of great interviews in there, including Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston from the early days of Y Combinator (as well as interviews with Aaron Schwartz, Alexis Ohanian, and Steve Huffman).
Y Combinator When No One Cared
31–40 of 122 posts
Re: Y Combinator When No One Cared
#32"For example, we thought it would be ok to work on your idea each summer and go back to school in the fall." I'd love to know more about this. Does anyone have insight into why YC changed on this point? Maybe it's just the obvious "people lose focus." But I'd like a confirmation.
[...]
Let me mention some things not to do. The number one thing not to do is other things. If you find yourself saying a sentence that ends with "but we're going to keep working on the startup," you are in big trouble. Bob's going to grad school, but we're going to keep working on the startup. We're moving back to Minnesota, but we're going to keep working on the startup. We're taking on some consulting projects, but we're going to keep working on the startup. You may as well just translate these to "we're giving up on the startup, but we're not willing to admit that to ourselves," because that's what it means most of the time. A startup is so hard that working on it can't be preceded by "but." [...]
Re: Y Combinator When No One Cared
#33And yet it felt completely obvious to many of us that were around since the beginning. YC, reddit, HN, and Dropbox are among the companies I definitely would have invested $1000 into, had the opportunity been available. I predict the next generation of YC will be a scalable crowdfunding company. It will look more like a startup-focused Kickstarter than seed-stage Sequoia.
Why would you want 1000 investors over a single entity. There is a reason many companies aim to stay private.
You can group 1000+ investors into a single entity on the cap table, as one reasonable solution.
It should be possible to make it beneficial for the users and the company. The company gets money and committed users, and the users get $100-$1000 equity.
Almost no one in Silicon Valley believed in Oculus or Tesla, but users did.
Re: Y Combinator When No One Cared
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep and he's got 15000 karma, that's pretty impressive. Just getting my karma to 1000 took me a couple of years. I wonder how many people have > 10k karma in HN.
Here is the top 100; lowest is currently ~22800: https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders There are a few navel-gazing discussions; they are usually flagged by the moderators. Top 100 Users on Hacker News by H-Index | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11512455
they are usually flagged by the moderators
By users, more likely.
Re: Y Combinator When No One Cared
#35"For example, we thought it would be ok to work on your idea each summer and go back to school in the fall." I'd love to know more about this. Does anyone have insight into why YC changed on this point? Maybe it's just the obvious "people lose focus." But I'd like a confirmation.
[...] Let me mention some things not to do. The number one thing not to do is other things. If you find yourself saying a sentence that ends with "but we're going to keep working on the startup," you are in big trouble. Bob's going to grad school, but we're going to keep working on the startup. We're moving back to Minnesota, but we're going to keep working on the startup. We're taking on some consulting projects, bu…
> We're moving back to Minnesota, but we're going to keep working on the startup.
See, it's points like that that irk me. As though somehow leaving SV is abandoning your business!
Amazing how much people will pay lip-service to remote work and to the importance of other startup communities and then balk at people pursuing their ideas in "flyover country".
Re: Y Combinator When No One Cared
#36On the topic of small beginnings, does anyone know if PG still reads HN? I recall when I first joined the site which, wow, was a long time ago, it seemed like he was a lot more active on it.
PG had anonymous alt accounts even before he split. I'd say he still dips in from time to time. You could probably find his current alts by doing stylometric analysis on the corpus of HN comments.
Re: Y Combinator When No One Cared
#37It's still pretty amazing that Y Combinator worked out as well as it did. Like a lot of very successful companies, it seems like the world just fell into perfect alignment with the vision.
It's interesting that acqui-hiring (as alluded to in the email) actually became a trend; even though it was later recognized to be bad idea (E.g. Yahoo's acqui-hiring tactics have failed miserably).
It seems like there was a false idea that tech talent was extremely precious and limited. It wasn't, but that didn't matter; acqui-hiring still became a thing and companies (and some foolish young founders) still profited from it.
Re: Y Combinator When No One Cared
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
[...] Let me mention some things not to do. The number one thing not to do is other things. If you find yourself saying a sentence that ends with "but we're going to keep working on the startup," you are in big trouble. Bob's going to grad school, but we're going to keep working on the startup. We're moving back to Minnesota, but we're going to keep working on the startup. We're taking on some consulting projects, bu…
> We're moving back to Minnesota, but we're going to keep working on the startup. See, it's points like that that irk me. As though somehow leaving SV is abandoning your business! Amazing how much people will pay lip-service to remote work and to the importance of other startup communities and then balk at people pursuing their ideas in "flyover country".
I suspect that the phrasing conveys a lot of the intent here. "We are moving to Minnesota to work on our startup because ..." Or "We are relocating our startup to Minnesota" don't sound bad.
If you are moving back for other reasons and the startup continuing is a secondary thing then it sounds bad. Moving in itself doesn't sound bad.
Re: Y Combinator When No One Cared
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
[...] Let me mention some things not to do. The number one thing not to do is other things. If you find yourself saying a sentence that ends with "but we're going to keep working on the startup," you are in big trouble. Bob's going to grad school, but we're going to keep working on the startup. We're moving back to Minnesota, but we're going to keep working on the startup. We're taking on some consulting projects, bu…
> We're moving back to Minnesota, but we're going to keep working on the startup. See, it's points like that that irk me. As though somehow leaving SV is abandoning your business! Amazing how much people will pay lip-service to remote work and to the importance of other startup communities and then balk at people pursuing their ideas in "flyover country".
I think the problem isn't "Minnesota", it's "back to Minnesota". Back to the place where things were before they started the startup. Where they had other projects going on. Where they don't focus as singularly on their company.
Moving to Minnesota is fine. By if you moved to SV to start a company, what changed that made you realize SV wasn't a good idea? The declaration has "but" in the middle; what are you running away from?
Re: Y Combinator When No One Cared
#40It's still pretty amazing that Y Combinator worked out as well as it did. Like a lot of very successful companies, it seems like the world just fell into perfect alignment with the vision. It's interesting that acqui-hiring (as alluded to in the email) actually became a trend; even though it was later recognized to be bad idea (E.g. Yahoo's acqui-hiring tactics have failed miserably). It seems like there was a false…
Acqui-hiring was a trend long before YC. Companies have been buying startups because the founding team has expertise in a new technology that they want to get into since the MS-DOS days.
I also wouldn't say it's a bad idea, or that tech talent isn't extremely precious & limited. Rather, people with web programming expertise don't get acqui-hired anymore, because those skills have diffused through the population enough that you can get them easily on the open market. Companies will still pay lots of money for, say, deep learning or drone or self-driving car experts.