91–100 of 209 posts
One important factor Paul left out was the ability to terminate bad employees. If an organization can't get rid of poor performers at reasonable cost, due to restrictive labor contracts or tenure for example, the organization will have to put much more effort into screening candidates.
"History suggests that, all other things being equal, a society prospers in proportion to its ability to prevent parents from influencing their children's success directly." Can we assume that pg is in favor of restoring the estate tax?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have to dispute the notion that the "initial seed" is irrelevant. Given a fixed "interest rate", the number of users at any time will be proportional to the initial number of users; and given that the initial number of users can easily vary by an order of magnitude based on external factors, I'd say this is pretty significant. (Of course, it's quite possible that the growth rate is not independent of the initial nu…
I didn't say the size of the initial user base is irrelevant, just that in practice the growth rate matters more. And while growth rate is not in itself visible, what drives it is something that's usually even more visible than the size of the user base: the quality of the product.
I'm not convinced. Most startup founders think that their products are the greatest thing since sliced bread, but they're often also aware that they are biassed. How many startup founders haven't at some point been disappointed by the size of their user base and said to themselves "gee, I think what I'm doing is really cool, but maybe the market for this isn't as big as I thought it was"?
Big clumsy companies still have the advantage in a lot of areas. I'd like to see those areas eroded, but I suspect some of them are growing.
For example, my impression is that fewer doctors are in private practice than there used to be, with more of them belonging to clinics. There are certainly fewer independent pharmacies than there used to be.
I think Paul is treading ideas with some interesting implications for him, personally. He is the head of an organization that funds companies on the basis of a written & oral exam, whose principal selling point is the transmission of "credentials" upon the kids they pick. Part of it is the kids' merit, but part of it is YC's past success. People go to YC for many of the same reasons people went to Stanford -- past se…
Some of what you say is true, but it's not true that the principal value of YC is the brand name. The YC brand has little weight to the customers of a startup, and without those it quickly dies. YC's principal value is the advice we (and the other YC startups) offer. The part you're right about is that "admission" to YC is structurally a lot like college or grad school admissions. The difference, though, is that our…
I checked for an article from the Harvard Crimson about the degree to which the admission office follows up on admitted students after they enroll, although I didn't find the link just now. You've received other replies mentioning various ways, with various degrees of formality, that admission offices can and do check their results. Now that many admission offices are making very fine distinctions among applicants as admission rates plummet below 10 percent, there will probably be growing interest in validating the criteria on which admission decisions are made.
MIT admission office McGreggor Crowley, in one of his admission travel sessions in the last year, said his office has done studies of which students perform best in upper division courses at MIT. Taking really hard classes in high school is a better predictor of upper-division success at MIT than having a spotless G.P.A., for example. He asked a large audience of high school students how many had done baby-sitting, and very few raised their hands. He said if that is one thing that kept you busy in high school, be sure to mention that on your MIT application.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some of what you say is true, but it's not true that the principal value of YC is the brand name. The YC brand has little weight to the customers of a startup, and without those it quickly dies. YC's principal value is the advice we (and the other YC startups) offer. The part you're right about is that "admission" to YC is structurally a lot like college or grad school admissions. The difference, though, is that our…
Nobel Prizes per undergraduate is an interesting measure. More than one in every 1000 Caltech undergrads wins a Nobel Prize, and that number rises substantially if one restricts just to science students, not engineering (which doesn't have a Nobel). This suggests that the admissions office there is doing something right.
"History suggests that, all other things being equal, a society prospers in proportion to its ability to prevent parents from influencing their children's success directly." Can we assume that pg is in favor of restoring the estate tax?
Actually I don't think inherited money is that dangerous. Unless it's coming from more than a generation back, you don't even get it till you're old yourself. And when people inherit money young, if anything it seems to screw them up rather than giving them an advantage.
That's why it's dangerous :)
Buffet has it right: leave them enough so that they can do anything, but not enough so that they can do nothing.
I honestly don't think that 'cram schools' are particularly effective. I taught for the Princeton Review for a while ($20+/hr when I was 18 sounded pretty good). In my experience, the average student would only gain about an extra 50 points the SAT (relative to what they would have gained studying on their own). If memory serves, a standard deviation (on the old 1600 point test) was usually in the neighborhood of a 1…
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-admissions/41382...
but on the other hand, any one applicant with perfect SAT scores can still be rejected by plenty of colleges.
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/377882-how...
Agreed with the point that on a dollar-per-SAT-point basis, there is little rationale for choosing commercial SAT preparation over simply self-studying with the released previous exams. The most decisive thing to do to raise SAT scores is to read widely and avidly in English.