Startup advice, briefly

1) In general, avoid the kind of stuff that might be in a movie about running a startup—meeting with lawyers and accountants, going to lots of conferences, grabbing coffee with people, sitting in lots of meetings, etc.

then 2) "Don’t underestimate the importance of personal connections"

so make sure you're working and nurturing personal connections but don't do that by grabbing coffee with people or going to conferences. Wait what?!

I'm picking on Sam and that's not really fair because every list of startup advice has these seemingly contradictory bullet points throughout. My advice would be understand whether you're an extrovert or introvert and technically gifted or market understanding gifted. Go work for someone who has that same profile and watch what they do. Then go cofound with someone who is the opposite of your profile (an extroverted market understanding individual if you're an introverted developer) where you know you'll mutually respect each others differences and won't murder each other after 6 months. With the two of you (or 3 possibly) covering those 4 bases you'll build the right product for the market and will build a culture where a broad range of employees feel comfortable and will always have someone to work with investors and customers and someone else making sure you're not taking your eyes off the critical internal stuff.

Work out if you're the Edge or you're Bono and then find your other half. The rest is all gut and while you'll screw some things up you have the building blocks to succeed.

1) someone like sama, president of YC and successful in his own right, shares his experience and everyone starting up is better off for his advice, including whatever subset end up in YC. This is someone people other than himself would call a "thought leader" and we benefit from their perspective.

2) someone like DigitalOcean, years spent creating a vast archive of content for their customers that is going to lure millions of new people searching google etc to their platform. This is like the longterm, aggregate effect of what YC is doing.

3) established companies trying to reach HN cause tons of developers are here and they're hiring. Best case scenario is they teach us something that touches on our own work.

4) someone who turns to HN and hopes to sell us something or hire us or use us for SEO by way of an unrelated blog post they design for us.

There was a recent example - http://blog.desk.pm/viral/ - that turned 50,000 visitors into $1,000. The developer estimates 50,000 ideal customers would generate $25,000 in sales.

If you had to pay for HN traffic it would not be viable for most startups. If you rank #1 on Google for "email etiquette" and you're not selling an email app or an etiquette course ...