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Y Combinator When No One Cared

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Re: Y Combinator When No One Cared

#81

Post by abstractbeliefs »

tedsanders wrote: post #80
vonnik wrote: post #58

It'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 a…

I don't see the subtext that connects mass production and comfort with failure. In fact, I see mass production as a way to reduce failure rates. The idea behind mass production is to take a process that's done in a low-volume, idiosyncratic way and replace it with a process that can be reliably repeated at scale. With Y Combinator, that means replacing the rocky solo founder journey with a community full of of adviso…

I guess mostly because you're spending less on them in overheads.

When you can share the same overhead costs over 10 startups and expect 9 of them to fail, that's more palatable than spending the overhead 10 times for each individual company.

And it's not just monetary costs: you can get more done when you have all the companies demo day together, simply by having to arrange fewer meetings individually, and less time travelling/setting up etc.

Re: Y Combinator When No One Cared

#82

Post by bmccormack »

wdr1 wrote: post #61
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

Thanks for sharing this! I remember reading Joel talking about it in his blog, but never knew it was on YouTube!

The entire 6-DVD Making Better Software series, which was produced after Aardvark'd, is now free on YouTube as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXZ75Ds5vOs&list=PLXOSex6PRP...

I remember when Fog Creek first announced that series and it cost a jillion dollars. A Fog Creek sales rep at the Fog Creek World Tour in 2010 in Atlanta gave me an "extra" copy of the DVD set and I felt like I had stolen something.

Re: Y Combinator When No One Cared

#83

Post by freehunter »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #77
freehunter wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

I'd like to see a listing of all the billion dollar IPO's or acquisitions in past decade with location on it. Both where it started and where it spent most of its time. That mighy help settle the question.

I think it might suffer from confirmation bias. Say Dropbox started in Milwaukee, WI, but was convinced they needed to move to San Fransisco to be successful. Maybe they would have been successful in Milwaukee, too, but now we'll never know. So now they're contributing to the startup successes that come from SV, but that doesn't necessarily mean that SF was what made them successful. Maybe the reason the parent thinks Boston's startup scene is dying is because people who create startups are leaving to move to SF because they think they have to.

According to WalletHub, SF rates pretty darn far down the list of best places to start a business: https://wallethub.com/edu/best-cities-to-start-a-business/22...

Maybe the number of success stories coming from SF has more to do with the sheer number of businesses that are started there? If 100 businesses are started in SF and only 5 in Tulsa, even if only 10 of the startups survive in SF while all 5 survive in Tulsa, people would still say "SF has twice the number of successful startups" even though 100% succeeded in Tulsa vs just 10% in SF.

Re: Y Combinator When No One Cared

#84

Post by sillysaurus3 »

rokhayakebe wrote: post #67
edw519 wrote: post #18

I cared. Still do. Been here over 10 years. I'd wager for every person helped by YC, another 1000 were helped by HN. There are lots of us programmers in the diaspora whose closest encounter to Silicon Valley is virtual, in places just like this. Yea, yea, I know. There are lots of founders, investors, and celebrities in SV, but please don't forget about the rest of us, who just keep building and posting...for years.

Been here for almost 10. I think HN is terribly underutilized. It could be used in more practical ways to help the community at large. Currently the most direct way is to do a ASK HN or the monthly Ask Who's Hiring, however I would love for YC to push the same tools they built for their program (to help founders and companies) to HN and its userbase.

They tried. I hope they try again. It was unfortunate how Pinboard took the opportunity to dance around making fun of the whole thing.

Re: Y Combinator When No One Cared

#85

Post by dmix »

dang wrote: post #70
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…

> Plus you can't delete them even if you wanted to Just so people know, although HN doesn't do bulk deletion, we're usually happy to help with deleting or redacting specific comments when you email us links (hn@ycombinator.com).

Oh that's great. Thanks for providing that service. I kinda get why you don't allow future deletes. It really does motivate you to write something decent each time.

Re: Y Combinator When No One Cared

#86

Post by elmar »

rokhayakebe wrote: post #67
edw519 wrote: post #18

I cared. Still do. Been here over 10 years. I'd wager for every person helped by YC, another 1000 were helped by HN. There are lots of us programmers in the diaspora whose closest encounter to Silicon Valley is virtual, in places just like this. Yea, yea, I know. There are lots of founders, investors, and celebrities in SV, but please don't forget about the rest of us, who just keep building and posting...for years.

Been here for almost 10. I think HN is terribly underutilized. It could be used in more practical ways to help the community at large. Currently the most direct way is to do a ASK HN or the monthly Ask Who's Hiring, however I would love for YC to push the same tools they built for their program (to help founders and companies) to HN and its userbase.

I think they are trying to do it with StartupSchool by replicating some of the features of the program on a larger community.

Re: Y Combinator When No One Cared

#87

Post by nl »

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.

PG wrote this about a year before YC gave up doing the Boston program: http://www.paulgraham.com/startuphubs.html

Re: Y Combinator When No One Cared

#88

Post by pm90 »

jl wrote: post #3
colmvp wrote: post #2

On 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.

He does not. He stopped at the same time he announced his retirement from YC. (He'd at this point transitioned the running of HN to dang.)

I remember pg replied to my comment once, and it felt pretty strange, like something I could brag about to future engineers or my (future) kids.

Re: Y Combinator When No One Cared

#89

Post by zeckalpha »

vonnik wrote: post #58

It'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 a…

Investing in stocks : Vanguard :: Investing in companies : YC

Re: Y Combinator When No One Cared

#90

Post by mbesto »

vonnik wrote: post #58

It'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 a…

> 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.

Sequioa, Accel, Kleiner, and NEA for example have all made a similar amount of (or more) investments in startups than YC. I think it's a bit of a stretch to say that YC is more comfortable than most VC firms. You just don't hear about the other ones' failures because they're less publicized.

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