Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What Happens At Y Combinator

ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 144 posts

Re: What Happens At Y Combinator

#41

Post by pg »

robg wrote: post #31
pg wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No others are quite as bad. We'd be dubious about startups building stuff for the government, for example, because there is such a horrible mismatch between startup culture and government culture. But we'd still fund a startup building stuff for the government if they weren't naive about what selling to the government would entail.

Thanks and agreed. I'm surprised I haven't seen many (any?) medical applications from YC companies given the margins available over consumer applications. Do you think it is the uncertainty of the FDA regulations or just a space that Silicon Valley doesn't tend to mine as frequently? Make something patients want is particularly alluring to me.

I would guess the reason is that such applications are foreign to most potential applicants.

Re: What Happens At Y Combinator

#43

Post by cperciva »

It's a bit misleading to call these events "dinners" though, because they last half a day.

People start to show up for dinners around 6 pm.

This seems wrong, unless the YC dinners conclude at 6 AM.

Re: What Happens At Y Combinator

#44

Post by patio11 »

Swizec wrote: post #33
YuriNiyazov wrote: post #29

I found the following sentence to be hard to parse: "The general answer is to pick something where the product of how fast it can be built and how excited users would be about it is high."

x = speed-of-implementation(idea) y = usefulness(idea) rank(x,y) = x*y Something like that I think.

That is accurate parse as written. I think the even more dramatic conclusion suggested by Lean Startup is it is probably max(y1..yN)*C^(90/x), where y1 is the utility of your first idea and x is average number of days it takes you to learn one important thing (a full cycle through the idea, implement, measure, conclude loop).

Scary stuff starts happening in any business when you take the limit as x approaches zero. (This came up in client work today.)

Re: What Happens At Y Combinator

#45

Post by pg »

zzleeper wrote: post #38

Thanks for the insight Paul. As an outsider, it's quite interesting to understand how (successful) startups get formed. It's funny that in my field (economics/finance) we treat startups as black boxes, and we have no clue about how they work. We argue that they are "crucial to the economy and to growth", but yet we haven't made any progress at understanding [1] them. Do you guys think that we (academy) have any chanc…

There are certainly a lot of important and so far mostly unstudied phenomena there. How much of it you could talk about in conventionally publishable economics papers is another question, though.

Re: What Happens At Y Combinator

#46

Post by pg »

cperciva wrote: post #43

It's a bit misleading to call these events "dinners" though, because they last half a day. People start to show up for dinners around 6 pm. This seems wrong, unless the YC dinners conclude at 6 AM.

I meant half a waking day, cperciva. When someone says "I spent half a day trying to find that bug," they don't mean 12 hours.

Re: What Happens At Y Combinator

#47

Post by robg »

cperciva wrote: post #43

It's a bit misleading to call these events "dinners" though, because they last half a day. People start to show up for dinners around 6 pm. This seems wrong, unless the YC dinners conclude at 6 AM.

That's a bit too literal, I think. 12 hour work days are likely typical - ergo, folks stay past midnight.

Re: What Happens At Y Combinator

#48

Post by SkyMarshal »

pg wrote: post #24
davidw wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In order to be self-replicating, you'd have to have alumni with relatively large exits who then participate on more or less equal terms... is that something you foresee, or is it going to just be too messy to add people that way?

I haven't thought too much about it. I usually focus on the bottleneck immediately in front of us. But what we do is pretty parallelizable.

Maybe an eventual next step is creating a YCombinator for YCombinators - a program to help your successful alumni do what you did and become successful incubators/angels/VCs, while keeping them under the overall YC umbrella.

Re: What Happens At Y Combinator

#49

Post by zzleeper »

pg wrote: post #45
zzleeper wrote: post #38

Thanks for the insight Paul. As an outsider, it's quite interesting to understand how (successful) startups get formed. It's funny that in my field (economics/finance) we treat startups as black boxes, and we have no clue about how they work. We argue that they are "crucial to the economy and to growth", but yet we haven't made any progress at understanding [1] them. Do you guys think that we (academy) have any chanc…

There are certainly a lot of important and so far mostly unstudied phenomena there. How much of it you could talk about in conventionally publishable economics papers is another question, though.

I'm actually thinking about doing some work on this. Would you mind if I drop you an email at some point?

Re: What Happens At Y Combinator

#50

Post by StavrosK »

pg wrote: post #46
cperciva wrote: post #43

It's a bit misleading to call these events "dinners" though, because they last half a day. People start to show up for dinners around 6 pm. This seems wrong, unless the YC dinners conclude at 6 AM.

I meant half a waking day, cperciva. When someone says "I spent half a day trying to find that bug," they don't mean 12 hours.

Sometimes we do :(
Post reply on HN