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Harjeet: I'm a partner at Y Combinator. Ask me anything.

anyasq.com

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Re: Harjeet: I'm a partner at Y Combinator. Ask me anything.

#31

Post by GraffitiTim »

jdludlow wrote: post #27

There's no way in the world I'm going to sign up for this, regardless of who you have on there. This application will be able to: Read Tweets from your timeline. See who you follow, and follow new people. Update your profile. Post Tweets for you. Access your direct messages until June 30th, 2011.

There's a checkbox to tweet to your followers when you post an AMA or when you ask a question.

I don't know if there's a way to request just the ability to tweet. But we don't use any of those other permissions.

Re: Harjeet: I'm a partner at Y Combinator. Ask me anything.

#32

Post by vaksel »

jdludlow wrote: post #27

There's no way in the world I'm going to sign up for this, regardless of who you have on there. This application will be able to: Read Tweets from your timeline. See who you follow, and follow new people. Update your profile. Post Tweets for you. Access your direct messages until June 30th, 2011.

agreed, who'd be dumb enough to sign up for that...I could see doing that if that was required for actually using some app...but in this case it's just a way for them to spam your followers to promote their site

Re: Harjeet: I'm a partner at Y Combinator. Ask me anything.

#33

Post by jimmyjim »

Sukotto wrote: post #9

I am not willing to grant anyask the ability to modify my twitter profile and post as me so I'll just ask here. 1) Age-wise, what ratio of accepted YC applicants are over 35? 40? 2) What ratio of them fall into the "married with kids" category? My impression of YC is that you strongly (exclusively?) prefer under 30 people who are unattached or, at least, are married with no other obligations. Can you dispel that impr…

I recall seeing a spreadsheet of ycombinator graduates (sorry, can't seem to find it now - will link it when I do) and noticed that a significantly large percentage of its founders were ivy league/1st-tier school graduates. I bring up this point because you seem to think age is a factor that brings you down... but the statistics would have it that even a candidate in his mid-20s from a non-prominent school could not get accepted to yc.

Re: Harjeet: I'm a partner at Y Combinator. Ask me anything.

#34

Post by GraffitiTim »

desigooner wrote: post #26
GraffitiTim wrote: post #6

Apparently we accidentally launched AnyAsq!

A little off the track but do you intend to have a "Follow AMA" style button or A favorites button like StackOverflow to follow the interesting ones? It'd help to keep a track of all the conversations flying around the site.

Yes, I wish we had already built that feature.

Re: Harjeet: I'm a partner at Y Combinator. Ask me anything.

#35

Post by answerly »

Sukotto wrote: post #9

I am not willing to grant anyask the ability to modify my twitter profile and post as me so I'll just ask here. 1) Age-wise, what ratio of accepted YC applicants are over 35? 40? 2) What ratio of them fall into the "married with kids" category? My impression of YC is that you strongly (exclusively?) prefer under 30 people who are unattached or, at least, are married with no other obligations. Can you dispel that impr…

>>2) What ratio of them fall into the "married with kids" category?

There were at least 14 founders from our batch (W2010) that were married or engaged and about 6 of those had kids. I think there were about 65 total founders.

Re: Harjeet: I'm a partner at Y Combinator. Ask me anything.

#36

Post by jedberg »

GraffitiTim wrote: post #17
ZackOfAllTrades wrote: post #7

I am guessing anyasq is a YC company that just launched? Rationale: Harjeet doing an interview at a relatively unknown company/project. Also, how does anyasq beat reddit ama?

Yes, AnyAsq is a YC company. We hadn't asked Harj to do an AMA though. :) And we hadn't really intended to launch quite yet but we're not complaining. Ways we hope AnyAsq beats reddit ama: -The concept should make more sense to people as a standalone site than as a sub-section on another site. (Easier to explain, easier to link to, etc) -As a standalone site we can optimize the interface for this concept, which is re…

Interesting. A couple of points:

> The concept should make more sense to people as a standalone site than as a sub-section on another site. (Easier to explain, easier to link to, etc)

> As a standalone site we can optimize the interface for this concept, which is really a very different idea than reddit.com.

reddit already has the capability of allowing the moderators do a different domain with a different interface -- the mods just have to decide to do it, so be careful here.

Otherwise, you make some interesting points. I'm curious though, what is your advantage over Quora, which is also a clone of Iama, designed to be a standalone Q&A site?

Re: Harjeet: I'm a partner at Y Combinator. Ask me anything.

#37

Post by wheels »

jimmyjim wrote: post #33
Sukotto wrote: post #9

I am not willing to grant anyask the ability to modify my twitter profile and post as me so I'll just ask here. 1) Age-wise, what ratio of accepted YC applicants are over 35? 40? 2) What ratio of them fall into the "married with kids" category? My impression of YC is that you strongly (exclusively?) prefer under 30 people who are unattached or, at least, are married with no other obligations. Can you dispel that impr…

I recall seeing a spreadsheet of ycombinator graduates (sorry, can't seem to find it now - will link it when I do) and noticed that a significantly large percentage of its founders were ivy league/1st-tier school graduates. I bring up this point because you seem to think age is a factor that brings you down... but the statistics would have it that even a candidate in his mid-20s from a non-prominent school could not…

It's a large percentage, but probably less than half (at least in our batch). Also most weren't fresh grads. It seemed like the median age was 25 or so. Most had had jobs post-college.

So, basically a mid-20s candidate from a non-prominent school is closer to the median than a fresh Ivy League grad.

I was 29 and my co-founder 34 when we went through; we both went to good, but non-elite universities and I didn't ever feel out of place.

Note that Paul and Robert were 31 and 30 [1][2] respectively when they founded Viaweb and Paul has written on how elite universities are a bad predictor of success [3], so it's unlikely that what's being seen is causation rather than correlation.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Graham_(computer_programme...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Tappan_Morris

[3] http://www.paulgraham.com/colleges.html

Re: Harjeet: I'm a partner at Y Combinator. Ask me anything.

#40

Post by Zak »

GraffitiTim wrote: post #17
ZackOfAllTrades wrote: post #7

I am guessing anyasq is a YC company that just launched? Rationale: Harjeet doing an interview at a relatively unknown company/project. Also, how does anyasq beat reddit ama?

Yes, AnyAsq is a YC company. We hadn't asked Harj to do an AMA though. :) And we hadn't really intended to launch quite yet but we're not complaining. Ways we hope AnyAsq beats reddit ama: -The concept should make more sense to people as a standalone site than as a sub-section on another site. (Easier to explain, easier to link to, etc) -As a standalone site we can optimize the interface for this concept, which is re…

Feature request: don't force me to sign in with twitter. I understand having the option and even encouraging it, but I don't actually like twitter and don't want to use it as my identity/login. I don't want to use Facebook for that either, though I'm sure it would be wise to offer that as an option.

Please support OpenID and good old non-social username/password logins.

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