71–80 of 93 posts
Nice story. I'm so tired of hearing all the "get rich without stressing yourself - by using this one simple trick" folks. Not that I encourage going to extremes for no purpose, I just don't see these as extreme at all. Just determined. Sharing a room with a few people for a little while to save the last bit of money? I just call that camping and adventure, which some people actually seem to like. Have the commenters…
How you start a (tech) company in America: * Move to the valley. * Come up with a really good idea. Or at least a gimmick that will be a fad for a time. * Find a generous person from the upper echelons of the wealth distribution (or a club of them) who have enough money to fund your idea or gimmick. * Make a deal with them so that your business becomes part of their diversified portfolio. The risk to them is hedged b…
"the common man never had a real chance to invest in your idea." You may not realize that VCs are investing on behalf of the common man. Most of the LP's in VC funds are entities like pension funds who represent the common man's money.
Nice story. I'm so tired of hearing all the "get rich without stressing yourself - by using this one simple trick" folks. Not that I encourage going to extremes for no purpose, I just don't see these as extreme at all. Just determined. Sharing a room with a few people for a little while to save the last bit of money? I just call that camping and adventure, which some people actually seem to like. Have the commenters…
When most people go camping it's not because they can't afford a flat
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"the common man never had a real chance to invest in your idea." You may not realize that VCs are investing on behalf of the common man. Most of the LP's in VC funds are entities like pension funds who represent the common man's money.
I'm skeptical. Most of these funds disclose at least the categories of assets they invested in - what is this asset class called and can you point me to a prospectus that mentions it?
You'll notice Insight Venture Partners (an investor in Twitter) and Khosla on the list, to highlight a couple.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm a bit more laissez-faire about the messaging behind these stories. Your assumption is that young, naive founders are being suckered and exploited by the perpetuation of these stories, because they don't need to live such extreme lifestyles to be successful. This is partially true. But we already know that we all can't be winners, and most ideas will be losers anyway. In our subgroup of grinders, I don't know that…
Sure; I'm not saying no one should do this - and definitely not saying that people shouldn't be allowed to do this. What I think is a problem is the way that it is memetically emerging into a life narrative. To take an example that is probably not controversial - many people are going to college who really should not be. It isn't advancing their interests and often isn't even intangibly edifying for them. Why are the…
EDIT: I submitted it to the front page as well, for good measure: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8510967
Nice story. I'm so tired of hearing all the "get rich without stressing yourself - by using this one simple trick" folks. Not that I encourage going to extremes for no purpose, I just don't see these as extreme at all. Just determined. Sharing a room with a few people for a little while to save the last bit of money? I just call that camping and adventure, which some people actually seem to like. Have the commenters…
When most people go camping it's not because they can't afford a flat
Can someone explain AnyPerk to me? Is it just a middleman for employee perks? What is the added value? Why couldn't a company look at their landing page and say "thats a good idea, I should buy my employees movie passes", but not sign up for AnyPerk?
I worked in a Japanese megacorp which used the local systems available for doing this. From the corporation's perspective, it costs rat spit to buy a very wide selection of perks for their entire employee base and they don't have to spend any time managing it . I never once took advantage of anything in the booklet, as I was a salaryman and all of my waking hours were spoken for, which is one reason why prevailing ra…
"We started in January 2012, and may still be the only Asian YC founders ever." So that is not true. 9gag is from Hong Kong. Semantics3 is from Singapore. Strikingly is from China. Memebox is from Korea. Cleartax is from India. Those are just off the top of my head, I'm sure there are more. That being said, I actually would love to see more Asian startups applying to Y Combinator. We should be funding one from each c…
In Japan at least, there is a very different mainstream cultural perception of 'startups'. It is basically not OK to try one and fail - you do not get credit for trying, and it can have a significant negative impact on your career if you do not succeed. There is a small, fairly tight-knit community within which this is obviously not the case, but mainstream Japanese culture still takes a conservative, and predominant…
Is it just me or do other people also find the idea of pivoting after three months really troubling ? I've seen two kinds of people creating start ups so far : business school guys and "real job" guys. The first type are really focused to one thing : making money. The second type have a passion for their skills and had an idea on how to improve something in their field. The first type can pivot to about anything, bec…
Sometimes you just have to try something in order to find out whether it's working for you or not.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I worked in a Japanese megacorp which used the local systems available for doing this. From the corporation's perspective, it costs rat spit to buy a very wide selection of perks for their entire employee base and they don't have to spend any time managing it . I never once took advantage of anything in the booklet, as I was a salaryman and all of my waking hours were spoken for, which is one reason why prevailing ra…
From the description you gave it sounds the business model of AnyPerk is based on the fact that HR departments are too lazy to do their job.