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

Thoughts on Startup School

daemonology.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 125 posts

Re: Thoughts on Startup School

#31

Post by tlb »

Colin: I'm sorry we didn't deliver what you needed.

YC's goal in selecting Startup School participants is to get a mix of deeply technical people and popularizers. The combination of those two skill sets makes a great startup.

When I saw you at Startup School I was like, "Hey, it's cperciva! Maybe he'll find a co-founder who can sell and together they can make Tarsnap take over the backup business!" That would be a good thing for the universe.

Tarsnap is a great example of a better technology that should be backing up most of the world's data. It would, if you teamed up with the right popularizer to get the word out and close deals. It hurts me to see Tarsnap backing up only a tiny fraction of the world's data, while companies with great salespeople back up most of it badly.

Still, I think we delivered for some people who were inspired to bring their better technology out into the wide world.

Also: I hear you about power outlets. My current MBP runs Emacs for 8 hours so I've lost touch with that need, but I'll bring extension cords and power strips to future events.

Re: Thoughts on Startup School

#32

Post by Patrick_Devine »

cperciva wrote: post #25
Patrick_Devine wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought the Office Hours this year were borderline mean spirited. When a team is willing to come and be grilled in front of 1,700 people, it needs to be done with a lot of tact. If you rip someone apart in a public environment like that, it becomes about you, and not about the company that you're critiquing. Sam and PG did a great job last year. They seemed to be able to hit the right balance of probing questions w…

I thought the Office Hours this year were borderline mean spirited. They didn't seem mean spirited to me; but they certainly did rip people apart (especially with the UI critique). At the end of that I left thinking "I'm glad they weren't doing this on Tarsnap, because they would probably have opened patio11's blog post and read the whole thing out in front of everybody".

The UI critique to me was crazy. They were interviewing a B2B company which wasn't using their website as a lead generator. Plus, given the space, the website wasn't really all that bad compared to anyone else. If they had been critiquing a B2C company, I would have agreed more, but really I thought the most insightful feedback was to make the API documentation more prominent.

Re: Thoughts on Startup School

#33

Post by tlb »

cperciva wrote: post #10
yzzxy wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't do this. Daisy chaining power bars is dangerous, especially at high loads such those generated by a pile of laptop power bricks.

A typical power bar can easily handle a 10A load. A typical laptop draws around 1A when charging, or far less if the battery is charged and it's just powering the laptop itself. Obviously you don't want to go crazy, but you can still get a significant socket expansion ratio.

I've daisy-chained plenty of power bars. Occasionally fuses trip, but they don't cause fires.

Re: Thoughts on Startup School

#35

Post by atmosx »

cperciva wrote: post #28
dang wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For me, an even better outcome would be to have Startup School cut down to 100 developers and gaining a technical focus Interesting you should say that. We've tossed around the idea of HN sponsoring a hackery summit a la Startup School but with a purely technical focus. It might complement Startup School well. The YC/HN world has always had both technical and entrepreneurial hemispheres, if you can call them that,…

We've tossed around the idea of HN sponsoring a hackery summit a la Startup School but with a purely technical focus. I wouldn't want to attend a "hackery summit" which simply consists of people writing code; I can do that better at home, since having people around is distracting. On the other hand, a "hackery summit" with technical talks from people who have built cool things would be very interesting.

One of the advices I've heard at the 'Istanbul Startup 2014' event was the following:

    *Design of the app comes first! (don’t lose too much time on engineering on early stage).*
Some people took the advice to the extreme[1].

On the bright side though, the Winner of the Challenge was a startup called 'Connected2Me' (IM mobile app) which was run by 2 guys: A Python developer (seemed to be the hardcore kind) and a DevOps guy who recently jumped up probably to handle the load and sys-admin. The startup had more than 2M users in Turkey alone. They both seemed (dress, talk, etc.) more like pure geeks more than business people.

[1] About a month ago I've seen a bio-informatics startup on HN (can't recall if it was about fighting a disease e.g. HIV or about genetic modification). The team was made by 7 members, 6 business oriented people (CEO, CTO, this and that manager) and ONE biologist with IT background. Seemed extremely ridiculous!

Re: Thoughts on Startup School

#36

Post by nknighthb »

yzzxy wrote: post #21
cperciva wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that's exactly what he meant. And what I mean is that you can plug a power bar into another power bar, as long as you're reasonable about the total load you put on the circuit.

OK... but when you are dealing with a lot of laptops, enough to necessitate more plugs than a single 5-8 port power bar, it's probably going to run up against that limit. I think the danger outside of load would be rare, but IIRC US specs for power cords specifically don't require compliance with daisy chaining (similar to C undefined behaviors?) and I bet most commodity power bars are cost-optimized to all hell. Dis…

Either the wires can handle the load or they can't. "Daisy chaining" is forbidden primarily because people are ignorant and the NFPA and OSHA are very conservative.

Even the $4 things I picked up out of a Fry's bin one day are 14AWG -- in other words, 10a@120v for 75+ feet, even through aluminium(!) wire, is still under 5% voltage drop.

I've bought nothing but the highest-end model of Apple laptop for years. I've never measured more than about 100 watts even under load with charging, the power adapters aren't even rated for more than about 1.5 amps on the input side. You're not going to have 10 people in a row gaming on 15" MBPs at one of these events.

The best reason not to do it has nothing to do with safety. It's that if there's an inspection and/or anyone reports it, you risk an abrupt drop in your bank balance.

(Also, I just tried, I can't even make a charged late 2013 MBP with a bunch of crap plugged in go over ~0.7amps off a 122v supply, the CPU actually throttled below rated speed to prevent it!)

Re: Thoughts on Startup School

#37

Post by dang »

cperciva wrote: post #28
dang wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For me, an even better outcome would be to have Startup School cut down to 100 developers and gaining a technical focus Interesting you should say that. We've tossed around the idea of HN sponsoring a hackery summit a la Startup School but with a purely technical focus. It might complement Startup School well. The YC/HN world has always had both technical and entrepreneurial hemispheres, if you can call them that,…

We've tossed around the idea of HN sponsoring a hackery summit a la Startup School but with a purely technical focus. I wouldn't want to attend a "hackery summit" which simply consists of people writing code; I can do that better at home, since having people around is distracting. On the other hand, a "hackery summit" with technical talks from people who have built cool things would be very interesting.

> technical talks from people who have built cool things would be very interesting

Yes, that's the idea. À la Startup School but with a technical focus.

Re: Thoughts on Startup School

#38

Post by cperciva »

tlb wrote: post #31

Colin: I'm sorry we didn't deliver what you needed. YC's goal in selecting Startup School participants is to get a mix of deeply technical people and popularizers. The combination of those two skill sets makes a great startup. When I saw you at Startup School I was like, "Hey, it's cperciva! Maybe he'll find a co-founder who can sell and together they can make Tarsnap take over the backup business!" That would be a g…

Trevor: Thank you for replying. I hope you (and Jessica, and everybody else involved with Startup School) don't take what I've written personally -- I nearly didn't post it for exactly that reason, but decided in the end that you're all grown-ups who won't be offended by honest criticism. ;-)

And thank you for your comments when we met -- talking to you was the highlight of the weekend for me (I didn't mention it in the blog post simply because I don't like "outing" people, in case they didn't want their presence at an event to be widely known), both because "Hey, it's tlb!" and because of the confidence you showed in Tarsnap's potential. Thirty seconds of talking to you was more inspiring than the rest of the weekend.

As for finding a co-founder... you're not the first person to say that, but after 8 years of writing code I really don't think I could bring in a co-founder at this point.

Re: Thoughts on Startup School

#40

Post by mikeg8 »

cperciva wrote: post #19
scobar wrote: post #18

Startup School was well worth the value of traveling to the Bay Area for myself. I'd read PG's essays and a lot of other startup literature so I didn't learn anything profoundly new, but I was inspired. Interacting with other attendees was also an amazing experience that is not available to me where I live. While I disagree with you, your post is important, and I'm glad you wrote it. Those who are undecided about att…

While I disagree with you, I think your post is important, and I'm glad you wrote it. Thank you for saying that. I hesitated for a long time before writing this -- hence the posting almost a week after the event -- because it felt like I was being rude to criticize an event which, after all, we were all invited into for free. Those who are undecided about attending SuS in the future whose expectations match yours can…

>cut down to 100 developers and gaining a technical focus... mind you, maybe that just means I want "hacker school" more than "startup school"

I think you're absolutely right about you wanting a "hacker" school. I'm involved in a startup from the business, marketing, and front-end side and while I have a very deep and sincere respect for the time and mastery it takes to become a great engineer/developer, in my opinion there is much more to building a great product/company/startup (whichever word you prefer) than amazing tech.

pmarca expressed it well in a talk to Stanford's MBA class in that he thinks the post-dot-com pendulum swung too far to the side of purely technical founders. He believes that when engineers and technical founders realize their efforts can be greatly complimented by inspired and business driven leaders, we will see the greatest innovations. I strongly agree with that sentiment.

Post reply on HN