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Y Combinator When No One Cared
51–60 of 122 posts
Re: Y Combinator When No One Cared
#52Reminds 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…
It's great to have for as long as it does not indirectly tie back to your LinkedIn ;)
But when writing that scrubbing script you may as well make it save a local copy.
Re: Y Combinator When No One Cared
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I guess I shouldn't have expected everyone to already know this, or to just take my word for it. [Edit] HN mod DanG has explicitly stated that mods "routinely downweight" meta-HN posts, which I chose to phrase as "they are usually flagged by the moderators".
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13858395
When HN itself is involved it's a little bit different, because the hypnotic power of all things meta causes HN upvoters to go into an upvoting trance.
Re: Y Combinator When No One Cared
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
they are usually flagged by the moderators By users, more likely.
I guess I shouldn't have expected everyone to already know this, or to just take my word for it. [Edit] HN mod DanG has explicitly stated that mods "routinely downweight" meta-HN posts, which I chose to phrase as "they are usually flagged by the moderators". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13858395 When HN itself is involved it's a little bit different, because the hypnotic power of all things meta causes HN upv…
I know this and the story that post is about got flagged right off the front page before moderators as much as looked at it as is the case for pretty much anything that instadrops off the front page.
Re: Y Combinator When No One Cared
#55Earlier 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".
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…
Perhaps it has to do with the parts of life OUTSIDE of work. Family connections "back" where you used to live. Other friends and connections "back" in your hometown.
Re: Y Combinator When No One Cared
#56Back 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
Thanks for posting this!
Re: Y Combinator When No One Cared
#57Earlier 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".
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…
> what are you running away from?
Rent maybe? There are lots of good reasons to run a startup in SV, NYC, etc. Direct access to capital, certain types of talent, and so on. There are also reasons to not run a startup in places like that. Cost of living as it relates to runway length being the biggest one. Some startups simply need a place to sit and a reliable internet connection.
If you've come to the realization that you don't need any of the things big cities have to offer as it relates to your business, moving back to Minnesota or wherever is exactly the right call.
Re: Y Combinator When No One Cared
#58It's useful to think about Jessica's comment under the original message, that YC is "mass production of startups." What it really means, I think, is that YC is comfortable with more failure than other investors. They are spreading their bets wide by making many small investments, and as they have said many times, only a small percentage of those bets need to be right. That's quite different from how most VCs invest at any level. Most VCs are trying very hard to be right while making very few bets that are fairly large relative to their fund. And as the Kaufman report shows, that doesn't work. Most of those VCs are failing to show ROI to their LPs. YC's approach -- making many small bets and tripling down on what works -- is similar to some biological processes. Consider how mammals manufacture antibodies, for example. When an antigen is detected, we start to make tons of different types of antibodies, not knowing which ones will successfully attack the pathogen. Most of those antibodies turn out to be useless, but a few succeed, and their success is reported so that the body makes more. That is, massive, parallel failure is the precondition of success here. YC is like that. But instead of manufacturing antibodies, they're manufacturing startups. Those startups are attacking lots of different problems rather than just one. And it's hard to know in advance which ones will succeed.
Re: Y Combinator When No One Cared
#59OP is now bookmarked next to this one from 2015 under HN > history:
"Looking back at 9 years of Hacker News" | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10535210
Re: Y Combinator When No One Cared
#60"Laboring away in obscurity, as frightening as it feels at the time, is the way a lot of good things happen. Maybe the way most good things happen."
....so there's hope for me!