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Y Combinator When No One Cared

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Re: Y Combinator When No One Cared

#41

Post by Alex3917 »

bmccormack wrote: post #31

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). https://youtu.be/0NRL7YsXjSg?t=2946

This is amazing. Even as someone who has been vaguely around for a while (e.g. attended the first couple Startup School events), it's easy to forget that this is how it was. It really puts a lot of things in context.

Re: Y Combinator When No One Cared

#42

Post by mseebach »

angersock wrote: post #35
DenisM wrote: post #32

Earlier 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".

"People" may pay lip service to remote work, but YC as far as I can tell were never ambiguous in their belief that being physically in SV is important for success.

Re: Y Combinator When No One Cared

#43

Post by runevault »

bmccormack wrote: post #31

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). https://youtu.be/0NRL7YsXjSg?t=2946

I have the DVD from when they sold it back when, every time I see the thing it feels weird realizing how LONG ago it was.

Re: Y Combinator When No One Cared

#44

Post by monksy »

dmix wrote: post #8

Reminds me of that old Dropbox "ShowHN" post. Looking back at old emails takes some heart, I'm afraid of the idea as I'd probably cringe too hard. My Reddit account just had it's "cakeday" which means I'm in the "9th year club" and the idea I have comments from 9 years ago still publicly available kind of scares me. Too the point where I feel motivated to write a script to delete anything beyond >1-2yrs back. Old com…

There are tools for that and there are tools to shred/remove them.

Just be aware, there are moderators that if they catch you doing that: you will be banned. (It's bad on the sub because it makes seeing your history impossible. [Hard to determine if you're a serial troller/sh*tposter])

Re: Y Combinator When No One Cared

#45

Post by [deleted] »

snerbles wrote: post #23
shubhamjain wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Too the point where I feel motivated to write a script to delete anything beyond >1-2yrs back. Please don't. I used to write a diary with meaningless essays when I was in the second grade. When I rediscovered it as an adult, I found them so embarrassing that I threw it away. It's hard to say how much I wish I hadn't done that. Those idiotic essays could have been my good memories; little reminders of how I thought…

As a personal reminder, I agree. No one else cares, until they do. And when they do, any little thing in your past can and will be used as a social cudgel against you.

[deleted]

Re: Y Combinator When No One Cared

#46

Post by dustingetz »

ploggingdev wrote: post #22
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I miss pg. He was really cool. I understand why he left, I think, but... I miss your comments too! You should write more. Both essays and comments. I think it's easy to care too much about image and whether someone might stir up controversy. But you have genuinely interesting things to say. Even if HN doesn't feel like the kind of place you can say them, it still does a lot of good. I don't know. Sometimes it just fe…

> But the voices that pg once enjoyed talking with are still here. Just to be clear there are still a lot of incredible people who post to HN, but from the signs that I see, a fairly large chunk of early HNers who are well known in hacker circles basically stopped posting. And there are also a large number of people who are very reluctant to take part in the discussions here knowing how a vocal subset of HNers react…

> a fairly large chunk of early HNers who are well known in hacker circles basically stopped posting

is the problem one of diversity? Writing for a diverse audience is hard, especially at internet scale, it's a lot easier to write to people who agree with you. Writing for people who don't agree with you is way harder but also way more valuable. It's a shame that most people just give up. I see this not just on HN but also in other elite communities that over time begin to mainstream. A lot of the clojure discussion forums died once the language grew enough that it wasn't just elites. The people who know the most just don't say anything in public anymore. All the discussion is on slack now which is a shame.

Re: Y Combinator When No One Cared

#47

Post by aswanson »

mseebach wrote: post #42
angersock wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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".

"People" may pay lip service to remote work, but YC as far as I can tell were never ambiguous in their belief that being physically in SV is important for success.

I used to be skeptical of that idea, but the data seems incontrovertible, at least in terms of web startups.

Re: Y Combinator When No One Cared

#48

Post by freehunter »

rexreed wrote: post #11

What's also telling is that the program started in Boston and moved to Silicon Valley pretty quickly. In my own experience, it seems that the Boston startup scene is dying. Unless you're in life sciences. The ecosystem there seems to have given up on supporting early stage non-life sciences companies.

>the startup scene

I feel like this is one of those SV bubble things, that a place has to have a "scene" in order to have startups (and only SV has a "scene"). There are thousands of successful businesses everywhere, even ones that would be considered "startups". The only difference between SV and any other city is people are willing to throw money at ideas with no chance of ever turning a profit which isn't really a sign of a healthy ecosystem.

I wonder how many people who say "you need to be in Silicon Valley to run a successful startup" use MailChimp (Atlanta) or RunKeeper (Boston), or Venmo or Squarespace (NYC) or Duo Security (Ann Arbor, MI) or Dwolla (Des Moines, Iowa).

Whenever I hear "startup scene", I think of Juicero and wonder if that kind of company could ever actually ship a product if they were based anywhere but Silicon Valley. And I wonder how much that actually says about the "startup scene".

Re: Y Combinator When No One Cared

#49

Post by pilsetnieks »

nostrademons wrote: post #40
jondubois wrote: post #37

It'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 enoug…

> 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.

And not necessarily even by hiring anyone - a lot of the stuff that a decade ago you needed a reasonably competent programmer for, have become commoditized in the form of services or even opensource solutions. For example, you needed at least a programmer and a designer to build a website for your company, or had to buy those services from another company. Whereas nowadays you can set up a wordpress site, buy a nice looking template, set up a medium blog, or a shopify store for a few bucks a month. Of course, if you want custom stuff, you have to pay someone to customize it but it no longer requires as much of the knowledge you needed to build a site from scratch.

Re: Y Combinator When No One Cared

#50

Post by magic_beans »

shubhamjain wrote: post #9
dmix wrote: post #8

Reminds me of that old Dropbox "ShowHN" post. Looking back at old emails takes some heart, I'm afraid of the idea as I'd probably cringe too hard. My Reddit account just had it's "cakeday" which means I'm in the "9th year club" and the idea I have comments from 9 years ago still publicly available kind of scares me. Too the point where I feel motivated to write a script to delete anything beyond >1-2yrs back. Old com…

> Too the point where I feel motivated to write a script to delete anything beyond >1-2yrs back. Please don't. I used to write a diary with meaningless essays when I was in the second grade. When I rediscovered it as an adult, I found them so embarrassing that I threw it away. It's hard to say how much I wish I hadn't done that. Those idiotic essays could have been my good memories; little reminders of how I thought…

I have many diary entries from the 2nd grade that I find sweet and charming. My diary entries from 7th grade to 12th grade are utterly cringe-worthy and really ought to be burned.
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